ideas i had while reading eva hesse, october files (nixon, editor):

- art = desire for chaos, opens up unknown

- artist tries to give order to the unknown but first must find the chaos, make people aware of it and feel alive
- makes reference to something viewer is not aware

- exaggeration in repetition

- layers in material (ie. layering fiber glass or rubber) corresponding to dressing layers or more conceptual idea of layers. lately i've been interested in sheer layered over something else so you can see whats inside.

- idea for panti hose piece: panti hose stuffed with different materials knotted in a mathematical knot, or knitted (?) dipped in epoxy, then plaster.

- materials to try: wire mesh, wire (sewing with wire?), rubber, wax, cheesecloth dipped in rubber (painted with rubber cement?), glue followed by plaster . wire to make flat things 3d, like in corset boning (womens' sex suit, handmade, feminism?)

{eva hesse, contingent (1969)}

-matter, material -- dense coagulations, snarls, unmediated self (feelings)

-architecture -- scaffolding, lattices, grids

-fiber glass skeins!

-repetition as absurditiy -- recast from arithmetic

{jasper johns, memory of my feelings (1961)}

-Deleuze / Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
'All this happens and is all recorded on the surface of the body without organs: even the copulations of the agents, even the divisions of God, even the genealogies making it off into squares like a grid, and their permutations. The surface of this uncreated body swarms with them, as a lion's mane swarms with fleas.'

- machines make products in the world of mechanical production

- no distinction between production and product with the body 'part objects'

1. repetition

2. process
3. desire or labor that drives producing / product.

{eva hesse, right after (1969)}

{eva hesse, expanded expansion (1969)}

{jasper johns, no (1961)}

While reading i was also listening to NPR thing about someone talking about twitter and this new eyeball-covering virtual contact lens thing that techies are developing.
- twitter / facebook = microcosm of culture
- eye = door to the body
{(unrelated): sandy denny's no end is a really good song.}

lately i've been having a hard time getting myself to work on the sculptures that i intend to bring to portland. i remember getting this way when i was working on my thesis-- finding myself becoming bored with a labor-heavy task i set out for myself. wracking my brain on ways to keep it interesting. feeling down on myself for procrastinating. i know that making art isn't always fun, but i wish i felt like what i was doing was more meaningful to me. i find it interesting that right now i am more interested in thrift shopping, looking at fashion blogs, working on etsy stuff... i think i am using clothes to distract me from sculpture, which is weird because my sculptures are essentially garments, just mutated and unfinished. after two largely unproductive days, last night i was brainstorming on ways i can keep this process fresh, keep myself excited, incorporate these 'distractions' into my work in some way, not be bored. thinking of what gets me really excited about being in the studio.
1. working towards a deadline shabang. (portland! i don't know what my problem is, i have a show coming up! hopefully when i get up there and am in the space, the excitement will return.)
2. getting feedback and talking about my work with people that are into it and into ME. (cara commented a few posts back, really fodderous and excited, my fave unofficial professor. and portland, well, that will be just crit central.)
3. clothes, stories, music (singing/piano), sunshine. bingo.

so i've got all these epoxied printed doppleganger (thanks cameron for title idea) sculptures lying and hanging around here. i have little interest in working on them right now, especially because the stiffer they get i am afraid about how much i can fit into my car on the drive up. (ps. anyone in the bay area wanna come to portland?) so i've been stiffening soft things to make them hard. mutating old clothes to be material, handcrafted, sloppy beings. i do want to stiffen some seam drawings but i sort of want to wait until i get to portland to do this because again, after the epoxy goes on, fabric can actually break and i think it will just be easier to bring them as seams. i am excited by this body of work at times, its hollowness, materiality-- i feel like this stuff is more bulky and solid than any work ive done before. cara mentioned in her comment about how she liked my using the hangers to 'bookend' the pieces, tying them back to their origin as clothing and highlighting the tension between clothing and sculpture. thats what it has become in my life, a real tension. my goal is to make it more fluid. she suggested a hanger at both ends of the dopplegangers to relate two ends to each other. she's right, when ever i see the camo one i laugh a little, it does look like a creepy caterpillar. she also pointed out all the layers of process i am enacting on these things, which is something i am trying to be more explicit about.

i have been thinking a lot about that video idea i had a few posts back, about making an 'album' amount of instrumental songs/videos that are tied together. i really want a reason to be composing music seriously. and i do find making videos quite rewarding and meaningful. i had a revelation about the connection between playing repetitive music on the piano and knitting. its almost the same sort of repetitive meditative hand to object process, yet with knitting you are left with a material trace and unless you record the piano, you are left with nothing. in this album of songs/vids, what comes first, what births the thing, a song, or an image?should there be video in my portland show? or should i set boundaries and wait until my san francisco show when i'll have more time to do the full album? i don't really 

like setting boundaries as to medium, and i still have about a month until my actually opening in portland (i could make a few videos if i decided to, but that takes deciding). one thing that i am really interested in is writing stories from the perspective of a garment, in its journey into becoming (making) and through its life, for example hanging in barneys new york and then ending up in a thrift store in california and then being made into paper pulp or something. i thought maybe i could read the stories over the videos. i also had the idea while i was swimming today that it would be neat to project onto garments themselves as if i was imbuing them with anarchic making energy. maybe they are on a clothes line?(i found this picture awhile back of giraffes projected onto a clothes line and i think about it a lot) . i want to make something that is at once familiar to people in form and also strange and thought provoking. Knitting is strange yet familiar. We are estranged from the simple process. We don’t know the real story of how an object comes into being. Maybe we don’t think about it when it presents itself to us. we can only make it up. i need to incorporate my bargain barning more (i have been going to the bargain barn and then selling things i find to vintage boutiques in the bay area, and this whole value shifting process is very interesting to me)-- the process of gathering, selling, peeking into objects inhering monetary value after having it and then not having it for a while. the idea that clothes are merely material stitched together, yet what store they hang in (or in the case of the b barn, pile in) determines their value, its a phenomenon that is endlessly fascinating. i really like the idea of imaging stories of the lives of these garments, from pristine and fancy to garbage. from trash to spectacle and back. its almost like the clothes are portalsinto these imagined worlds. the imagery in the videos could be portals into their story, into the real truth of happenings. My voice is a narrator. and then there are the making processes of how they come into existence in the first place, maybe in a sweat shop in india in 1993 or someones grandma's singer machine... then there is the question-- when does a garment come to life? is it when the first needle goes in? or are they alive when they are sheered from a sheep and are fibers raw on the spinning room floor? or silk worms cocoons being spun in little green houses in greece? is it the construction of a person that gives them life?so i've got all these ideas. but as for a show, what do we see?

{photos: dress from my etsy, my dopplegangers (in progress), photo from my friend elyse's tumblr, unknown photo source, skirt photo from face hunter}

i am always collecting jpgs (i separate them by month) on my computer sort of like a perpetual virtual mood board like fashion designers have. this month's collection so far has a very distinct Color palette, army greens and muddy wine red, mostly. i am thinking of dying some of my mutant clothes and seam drawings so that my portland show reflects this 'color way.' dye seems like a way to change and bite into the materials and revamp them, take them farther from bargain barn loot and clothing cast offs. but is it important that they retain their old color personalities?

I spent today coating my mutant clothes, sari piece and camo piece in epoxy to stiffen them. they look really good and creepy empty. yesterday my family and i went to the city to look at art and some of the things i was really responding to were work that had a very tangible feeling of the artist's handling the work, like i could very visually imagine their process and it was clear they just loved the hand to material experience. (ei. robert brady, manuel neri)


i know that sort of thing just sort of comes out of art when the artist engages in that hands-on experience with it, but i was thinking of ways that my work could feel more like that to people. i already let threads hang and leave seams raw, but what are other ways to show that trace of making and show my revelatory process to people? through my recent experiences with epoxy, i am realizing that i really feel like i am 'making art' when i am engaging in materials that are messy. i had the idea of further stiffening the mutant clothes with something visibily messy like plaster. What if I covered some of the mutant clothes (after epoxy) in plaster?

i also just came across this french artist named emilie faif, who i do find a little too cutesie to be fully inspired by but she uses clothing and fabric in her work and i found this one installation she did involving the pattern pieces to a pair of jeans all laid flat out on the wall.I've been reading one of andrea zittel's diaries, and am very inspired by the way she creates systems and rules that govern her life, and in the diary her life seems so fluidly her art, and all her musings are included, shared with others. i almost feel like blogging is a way to do this, to let people in to what i am thinking (almost) every day even if no one is actually reading. I feel like I am effectively achieving blurring the distinction between my own clothes and clothing i use in my work, but i wonder how i could further embed my systems into my life. or do i even want to?

i have been getting a lot of compliments on the film i did with kira, especially regarding the interaction with my animations and the music i composed. since i have been wanting to do more composing, and have been tinkering a little, i was thinking about making a big goal out of it. i was thinking about the san francisco show at ben's space, and maybe for that show i would do a whole 'album' like series of animations, each with its own customized score. and then it could be a real venue for some sort of performance, music... maybe even some movement... i was really getting excited while i was swimming today thinking about it. i do feel like those films are unique and a good way for me to bridge my music and my art together, and it really feels like 'me' behind it all, i really get that sense of self expression when i show them to people. i think i really need to consider continuing with them.

{photos: from top to bottom, left to right, comme des garcons fw09, jean yves lemoigne, don't know (from tumblr), lisa kehoe a public loo in norway, manuel neri standing figure (1982), robert brady new work (2010), my own dopplegangers and mutants (in progress), emilie faif patron/ vetement isabel marant (2010)}

so last night i stayed up in the wee hours watching marie antoinette and putting together my printed sari piece. it is 4 parts, these double ended swimsuits that will all link together like a chain. while i was at the fabric workshop in philly i printed these flat patterns onto repeat yardage, and towards the end was experimenting with printing on random stuff i found at army surplus and thrift stores. there was a salvation army near the trader joes i went to with some friends, and i remember this specific thrifting trip i was looking for blankets or bedding to print on, sort of inspired by the comme des garcons use of blankets in this collection. didn't find any blankets, but i did find about 9 yards of beautiful indian silk for $10. there was a woman in the store (white, in her 60s, sort of 'new agey') who sort of cornered me trying to get me to give her the fabric-- i love it when this happens in thrift stores, its then that you really know you scored. but anyway, her sob story: she told me (long windedly) that this was was a very special sari and that she knew all about them because she had traveled a lot in india and even had worn something very similar at her wedding 40 years previous. she told me she still remembered the specific way to tie and drape the thing and began to dress me in it, wrapping the fine silk over all my winter clothes so that i looked like a very wide silk burrito. she was taking a very long time, struggling to remember the exact way to pleat and wrap and knot the thing around me, and i could tell she couldn't remember and was very adamant in proving that she deserved to own the thing. and then, and this is the best part, an indian woman intercepts the new-ager's wrapping struggle and is like, 'um, i'm actually indian and i tie these all the time, let me just do it, it will take a second.' and the indian woman re-wraps me and i look puffy and awesome. the whole time she's wrapping me the new-ager is making weird references to her time in india as if it were more legitimate than the actual indian lady's experiences. it was silly and funny to be the prop in such a hissy fit. but anyway, because i'm not very nice, i never gave the sari to the new age lady. as i printed on it at the workshop with permanent black ink, and then as i cut the thing to pieces, i thought sorry, in my head to this lady. sorry, sari.

so i'm making this chain gang of sewn bathing suits out of it, and i hope it will (though not heavy handedly) reference where a lot of globalized labor happens, india. and also i found it interesting that traditionally, indian garments have very little sewing in them and are mostly wrapped and pleated and knotted around the body in various styles. so its interesting to me that i am cutting something that is traditionally whole and wrapped; cutting this yardage up and stitching it together in a way that is more traditionally western. another interesting thing is that most saris are 9 meters long, and i like that there is a system to how many meters i was allowed to print on, dictated by the sari itself. i've become obsessed with inventing rules or there being pre-invented guidelines to abide by. tomorrow i plan to coat the pieces in epoxy and then link them together. i'm not sure if i want this to be a hanging piece or a floor piece, i guess i'll see.

{photos: my own sorry, sari (in process), and photo from wikipedia search 'sari' Illustration of different styles of Sari & clothing worn by women in South Asia.}