Here is a video i made last night as i worked (read destroyed) the knotted acrylic 'jesus' tapestry.
Still reading Invisible Cities, I found this passage that really resonated with this piece-- the burning, melting of the plastic fibers that were once precious to someone, something sad and reverent, a sweet mexican grandma. the work and unwork i've put into it, the 'charring of burned lives' sits like 'scabs over the city.'

'Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement; this is what you would find at the end of your journey.'

Also still listening to joanna newsom and i've started really listening to the lyrics and am finding that a lot of them (especially on Ys) overlap with the sculptural imagery in my head:

'The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness'

HOUSEKEEPING: I've updated these sections of my website with new work from this summer, fall and winter: seam drawings, pattern combines, and cocoons and vacancies.

Today travis and zack are repainting the walls of the gallery white... so I had to heavily document the pieces as they were so i can put them up again later. but in the interim while the paint dries, tonight and tomorrow i am performing a little experiment: the boys bought me (without my choosing) some random objects that ARENT textile related and i am going to try to extend my unmaking process to my material environment beyond the cloth realm... we'll see what happens...

{photos/video: 1 my own scabby metropolis, 2 my own pattern combine, 3 my own hanging seam, and 4 is my own vacant cocoon}

I've been looking at janet echelman's net sculptures today. i love the forms that the netted structures take and how they interact with their environment BY being transparent, whispy.

here is a piece in process as i develop the work for the show. as it stands now, the show is made up of 4 wall sculptures that extend into space, and 2 videos that depict two of them being distressed and unmade on small wall screens.

today i made the most gorgeous video i have ever made. it depicts the long mohair knit piece being broken down and stretched into topographical landscapes. recalling this (italo calvino, invisible cities-- trading cities 4)

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

i ended up feeling like the concepts i wrote about for titles in my last post no longer FULLY describe what it is i am doing. this work is all still so new, and i feel like i need more time with it to title it. for the press release i wrote new work by silvie deutsch, i can always title it the right thing for my website/documentation, or even for the show itself, but now, just new work feels right. no use putting words i don't fully endorse behind something i've worked so hard on. the write up for the show is really really good:

On Friday, February 25 : Silvie Deutsch at Appendix Project Space

Opening Reception : 7 PM

Appendix presents new work by Silvie Deutsch, produced on-site during the artist's residency at Appendix. Deutsch conceives of manufactured objects as possessed of a life cycle that parallels and interacts with the human, dense with the inherent tensions of their creation, and ripe with the potential for rebirth.

Appendix Project Space is located in the south alley between 26th and 27th Avenues off of NE Alberta Street.

{photos/videos: 1 is janet echelman's target swooping ii (2001), 2 is my own new work, 3 is my newest animation video}