some new work:

commercial pattern abstract forms with wire seams

'bulb forms' (not a title, just what i've been calling them)
pantihose, straw, batting, tinsel, plaster, rubber cement, elmers, tulle, doilie

still figuring out the next step for these 'bulbs'. they differ from my other more systematic work because they are more concerned with layered processes and the act of making than creating rule systems. i still feel unclear about these pieces; i found myself saving pantihose, probably for a year now, because i knew they were interesting to me. i wanted to cut them so they were flat and stretch them over things, but i started stuffing them and knitting them up with very big knitting needles, and it all started happening very organically. i had an idea to embed them into the wall ala henrique oliveira-- they are textile-based things, coated in construction materials; its then that what they are made of becomes abstracted and closer to both body/skin bubble-ups, and also could be some sort of weird growth in a plaster wall. sort of goes with what i was thinking about with projecting knitting stop-motion movement onto walls to make the wall appear to crawl or have its own weird agenda. i was also thinking they could be embedded into garments and become more literal body explosions, but they do suggest the body already without garment present.
as for the wire pieces-- the wire travels along the seam lines of the forms. i want to try making some out of maps, using the highways as a system for where the wire 'seams' should go.
in my last post i was reading the eva hesse book from my post 1945 art history class in college, and i really liked how she talked about art being a way for people to make use or reel in the chaos around them. that art is where people (both artists and viewers) funnel their desire FOR chaos, and its the artist's job to figure out how they want to sculpt or hide or order that chaos. its the chaos that helps the artist (and the viewer) feel alive when they are participating in the work. this really touched me: i use maps and patterns and knitting as systems, almost mathematical or rule-based as source material, yet i work in mostly a whim-like way. i use the system driven materials to give some semblance of order, yet my making process can be very chaotic. so the map sculptures: i was thinking about maps as objects. they are made to point you to something-- a house, a treasure, a post office, a city, a country, a field. often the thing they point to is unknown, foreign, undiscovered to the person looking. what lost place to i want to point to in using maps? i like the idea of suggesting something to point to, even if it is just a hunch.

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.}

{from the blog things organized neatly: rotary dial phone disassembled; The famous “Kelly” bag by Hermès for the book Zerlegt ; Derick Melander sculpture; Anouk Kruithof; eduardo hernandez}

{henrique oliveira}

{eva hesse: Repetition Nineteen III (1968) ; Untitled (Seven Poles)}




{charlie trosclair: intra (2010); ernesto neto: bouncy white humanoid blobs; unknown title; edges of the world (2010)}

{comme des garcons}
{charles simonds: unknown title; corner smear (2008)}
{annette messager: À corps perdu (2008-2009); From the series Articulés-Désarticulés (2002)}

I wonder if I started this blog as a way to feel like I am accomplishing something without really getting much done. Perhaps a product of my generation of sitting in front of the computer, it feels just like so right, and clicking ‘post’ just feels so completed and good and… ugh! Although it does seem important to be reflecting and processing and not just numbly cutting and sewing, it’s a different thing. Procrastination or not, blogging is really fun. I keep thinking about something anne wilson told me when I was working for her: She told me that she thinks of her thoughts as being written on a booklet of tracing paper, the words that continue to repeat themselves in her thoughts become bolder as they layer over each other, and some are just faint wisps buried beneath layers of other thoughts. Hopefully this blog if anything can be a place where common themes in my thoughts will reveal themselves, maybe some sort of logic will arise from it all and congeal and I’ll feel better about my brain which feels more and more like that eva hesse piece I posted below and less like a nice little booklet of transparent pages. Now, enough blogging about blogging, and on to the good stuff!

i've been using the pieces that i cut out from the garments that I make the seam drawings from, and sort of roughly sewing them together and making these extroverted/inside out raw little garments.

my next question is: how can this sort of 'fashion line' of forgotten cut outs become sculpture? i photographed the garments hanging against the wall (perhaps the wall is where i'm most comfortable making work, stemming from my painting/drawing days). but i want these things to exist in space, empty dress, where you wonder what kind of person (or creature) would wear them.

Cara emailed me (about my seam drawings):

“I wonder if I would like them better as sculpture; if they were suspended in the air somehow, (string/clear filament, startch, wire?) as if on a form. I guess I am interested in how they still relate to a body, which makes me think of the forgotten pieces as well-- I wonder if the could become some kind of mutant objects, familiar as clothing, but also distorted and strange.”

I really liked Cara’s ‘mutant objects, familiar as clothing’ suggestion, applied both to the seam drawings and also to the extroverted garments. My dad has been telling me about the fun to be had with epoxy resin/ carbon fiber, to make things from cloth, but stiffened, like a surf board. And then, behind new leaf I found a boatload of plastic wrap and I started making a mold of my body to shape the mutant clothes over. Today he helped me coat prototype pieces in epoxy so that I can experiment with making these empty mutant clothes, inside-out so you can see the seams. This is a little experiment, hanging to dry with plastic wrap inside. We'll see how it turns out!

{(interesting etymological side note, Extroversion = condition of being turned inside out, also extroverted in the psychological sense…) I like this idea that an extroverted garment is sort of like an extroverted person-- loud and open about the practical, outside social environment-- and also that you can see the labor when the piece is inside out and raw. Possible title? Extroverted something? seams and extroversions. instructions and extroversions}

And the ‘mutant’-ness of this idea reminds me of my final thesis critique with Schiff and Julia, where the two of them sort of unexpectedly described my work as grotesque (I wish I remembered the critique better because I was so tired…), Schiff brought up Eva Hesse and Julia brought up Annette Messager, an artist I had never looked at before.

The Annette Messager installation excites me because she uses the walls, floor and ceiling, the whole room, and really creates almost a freaky stage set for the visitor to derive an experience. Eva Hesse uses resin in her work in a way that i am interested in exploring, to make things that look soft and maybe even look wet, but are actually hard shells. and even though i’m not really ‘going for’ grotesque or spooky, even my music gets described sometimes as an acknowledgment that there is beauty in ugly, or something. I think as hard as I try I’ll never escape the teen witch inside of me.

(all photos are my own extroversions and prototypes, except bottom left photo is eva hesse's untitled or not yet, 1966, and the bottom right is annette messager's articulés désarticulés, 2001-2002)