Another edit of Hopeful, I rebuild:



Unrelated but relevant: right now I'm reading Great House by Nicole Krauss. There are a few different threads of stories running through it, all tied together by a desk that exerts power of those who have had it in their possession. I love that a simple object can hold so much meaning for the characters in the book. It brings up interesting questions about objects and where they go, ideas of ownership, memory, permanence. Its really good. Krauss seems to have similar beliefs about objects as I do, namely, that they are keepers of (historical, sentimental, powerful) meaning than they appear sometimes. She writes, 'A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a sightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrive at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away.' (33)

coming up with a new title for tuck your shirt leave it loose video:

decayed
becomes threadbare
own volition
microcosm
macrocosms and microcosms
receding domain

domain's own volition

domain
hopeful, i rebuild

Practicing the install... its a very hard thing to photograph well! I'll need to think of a good way to document this...

ISO: 800, 1600, 1000 try all-- the lower the better, but the higher meant for night, but will be grainy
read centering by MC richards

{Amending, Silvie Deutsch + Kira Akerman}

video thoughts explosion list for amending:
moving shadows

interdependent units
integrated systems
stitch by stitch, brick by brick, frame by frame, pixel by pixel
click click click
a run in a stocking
jenga

quantity, scale, time, size
it can change in shape or form but never change in size
roads without context or scale

change of scales
shifting scales
altered scales

For the next few weeks, I'm working on projections for my installation in New Orleans, a collaboration with Kira Akerman, called Amending, its for the biennial art festival called Prospect 2.

Our proposal:
Amending is an outdoor animation projected onto the facade of an old building, the former home of Promenade Fabrics in the former Garment District. Amending clothes this facade to reveal its liveliness: an intricate landscape of textile structures and tangled string. Amending is a meditation on our disposable society, and the disconnection of the process of construction from product. Amending is a collaboration by artists Silvie Deutsch and Kira Akerman. It will play on loop for the first week of Prospect 2.

Now we are envisioning sculptural elements as well as projection. The installation will be at an art space called Zeigeist. We are still deciding whether or not to project on an outdoor wall or an indoor wall.

My next 3 weeks leading up to going to New Orleans to do the installation is fairly unstructured, and I'm coming up with a system so I can insure I get a lot of work done. I am going to make a loose video experiment everyday.

More video ideas to try later:
-overlapping 2 different knitting videos
-dipping a woven piece in wax, like a network of wicks, and watching it burn/melt
-unknitting found textiles
-burning/unburning holes in a woven structure
-dripping water onto something-- paper? or some sort of disintegrating substance
-melting / unmelting shaved ice. I was thinking last night about making an animation of something slowly disintegrating as it gets wet, and then reversing the footage. what are other things that melt/disintegrate when they get wet?

-Water--some shots of water, but maybe make it abstracted from itself so you arent so sure its water.

-i want to make a tunnel / ruth asawa inspired tube unravel video. that appears to go into the wall. but i dont really know how i will do this. i wish i knew how to do computer generated animation, but i think i'm relegated to the stop motion and my housemate has a little flip video that makes low definition videos also. there are ruth asawa's pieces at de young where i was the other day. i was struck by the shadows they cast, the fact that they are static but still vibrate with the intricate repetition that went into making them. i imagine the tunnel knitting video to look a bit like one of her pieces but if you were to turn it on its size and look right into it, like a telescope. i dont know how i would make this video but i really hope i can.

Now I'm just jotting down ideas from the various emails and notebooks they have ended up in, so they can be in one place:

-organic forms
-knitting / unraveling
-relating my videos to the cellular / biological / heart. i like when there is more to what you see than what you are seeing. like there are more interpretations people could have depending on their viewpoint /background / interests.
-beauty in flaws, unraveling, breaking, wabi sabi
-highlighting / showcasing the places where things break, are asymmetrical, imperfect.
-recording peoples conversations.
- recording the river
-lace would cast amazing shadows. i think we can dictate the mood by dark lighting, video is conducive to being quiet, as are sound pieces. maybe we dont have drinks and snacks there at all? i dont want it to be a mingling art show in the traditional sense either.

-gentrification of objects, trash-to-spectacle, history of space/objects of labor
-Cusp of change: feeling of contingency. the fragility of the threads being broken, Thread, pitter patter, build up, recede.
gentrification-- something attaining more value. This reminds me of those bails of clothes sent to Africa, the losing team t-shirts for the super bowl or whatever... a sweater from barney's in a thrift store (thats the opposite of gentrification), finding something that is trash and making it spectacle-- that is the gentrification of objects.
-Blown apart / simultaneously contained world.
-we begin gathering things from the streets, from people, friends. imagine them hung from transparent wires from the ceiling, all at different intervals, giving the appearance of a rauschenberg piece or dumpster or shit-shack that has exploded into lots of little pieces. objects, material, some organic, some commercial, some whole, some broken. there is an unraveling video / water video on the brick wall, the wall looks alive, maybe this wall is a tunnel of fibers penetrating the wall, going through it. there is also a projection on the floor, textile energy, that will hit both the floor, the people in the space, their clothes, the objects that we suspend in the air. the space is only lit by the projections. the objects-- some are fabric but also just chards of wood, trash, anything we find in the 2 weeks. in my head this stuff is swaying a bit in the air, the air is thick with this blown apart world. and, some of the objects can be very specific to the area, things people would recognize? maybe we use a fan to get it really moving? or maybe the projection itself with its movement and the people in the space will create the movement.

what if there could be projection lapping at the contained detritus like water? like an ebb and flow of magic, the light comes and goes as if it were a whirring lapping shore? a world being blown apart, this is the artist's work i saw the other day that i was excited by: her name is cornelia parker, the piece i saw was called 'anti mass'. parker's work got me thinking about burnt relics of the past, and the history of a specific space. burnt fabric? still interested in playing with burning and wetting fabric.
i also saw this guy bruce conner's work.
i like his aesthetic -- that dirty, stretched, decaying, organic ...

we don't want the installation to look like wall-e's home; im not going for making our own shit shack hoarders episode, but why cant this be a set, like a fabricated environment that people interact with? i also like the idea of participation -- people engaging in the act of the unraveling they see around them. how we make them engage without disturbing the peaceful, quiet, contemplative space?

Just discovered this guy Josh Blackwell.
interesting use of found trash / textile techniques / carelessness with carefulness
- bed sheet windows on the wall being burned/ unburned. or what about real windows? I think using imagery of domesticity is appropriate for this project...
-there is the sound of water, the river, maybe overlayed with found recordings we could make of people in the city as we collect things. violin strings? Environment / sense engage / experience: idea-to-visual image. water sounds. These sounds could be mixed with something else. I keep thinking about violins, possibly just the stringy-ness of them. We could do some found sound recording of the Mississippi river, maybe even people talking on the street. something about recording sound making it possible to freeze/preserve a moment in time and space is really relevant to whats going on here.
-I like the idea of 2 projections, one on the ground/peoples' bodies/clothing, and one on the brick wall. the 2 videos can be in dialogue with each other. we should just fantasize about this environment and then figure out the technical details of how to make it happen, and then we can scale back if necessary. reflection in mirror, found chards, reflection in water? projecting onto people/ clothes. intimacy with textiles, memory of space, history of labor.

- How can we integrate the whole community? It is definitely out of a white box, and maybe if this event were more everyone friendly, less obtuse and art-speaky; non-academic, definitely. how can we make this experience more interactive? i immediately thought of felix gonzalez torres, that guy who put a big pile of candy in a corner and asks you to take from it, or, this flaming lips show i went to once where they had little kids dressed up in animal costumes handing out fudgsicles to the crowd. something about being able to take something small and sweet and free makes things more accessible. and hey, maybe taste could be a sense we activate as well? or we advertise something about the show in our flyer that makes all kinds of people eager to come? a clothing swap? some sort of raffle? sending out kid/everyone friendly invites. bring an object to place in an alter... would people do it? maybe if they got something in exchange... i am imagining a corner of the room as a cascade of forgotten objects like stuffed animals and stuff, kind of piled like felix gonzalez torres candy pile, and there is projection on it of the knitting... kids rolling around in it....

- commercial patterns, im still obsessed.. i do think of them as a map, a map of the body, a map of the labor/directions that go into clothing... you can see why i spent a year just focusing on them. one issue with them is the are so fragile, they need to be backed with something (i used sheer fabric and glue to stiffen them in my thesis.)
-- definitely need to project onto brick wall, so special, but also project onto another surface as well?
-- how high is the ceiling? strings / ropes hanging?
- lights / flickering / candles... projection need darkness, projection creates its own strange light
WATER-have you ever noticed how rarely water looks like water? (abstracted water shots, that maybe dont look like water at first.)

-white water (like in a river, rushing, that could be interesting looking)
-how water sometimes obscures whats in it, like maybe we submerge little objects or things under a little water and that makes it hard to figure out what they are. i like the reveal/conceal thing both in the textile unraveling/raveling and in water submerge/emerge
-both textiles and water have delicate texture, ephemeral structure
-rivers and seams -- converging, attaching, dividing, ripping,
-never seeing the same water twice (in the case of a river, you dont move your eyes yet the water is constantly changing in one spot)

{photos/videos: my own video experiment; ruth asawa's wire sculptures at the de young, cornelia parker's anti mass (2005); bruce connor's snore (1960); one of josh blackwell's plastic baskets; felix gonzales torres' portrait of ross (1991); roni horn's still water (the river thames, for example) - image c (1999)}

new video experiments for my installation for prospect 2 in new orleans:

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.

lots of new ideas and the organization of old ones.

today working on editing the video I made in Portland—adding music. I’m handing it into ATA which is that video collective that I went to a show at when I first got to the city. When I saw that show I was interested in becoming more involved with that video meets music meets installation world—I guess this is a good opportunity. I guess applying to juried shows feels important and good when it supplies me with an external and real deadline to work towards. The outcome of whether or not I get selected is sort of irrelevant to me. But I think I’ve chosen to revisit this Portland footage because I believe it is good and never really had the affirmative response from the folks there … perhaps ATA will see it differently?

My description of the video:
I am interested in the disconnect between an object and the process of its construction; I see my material world as teeming with labor, history and potential. This video depicts both literal and metaphorical tangled and interconnecting systems that continually reorganize, expand, and ebb; I have used knitted structures to allude to environmental landscapes, biological cell structure, and textile based handwork. Through unmaking and then remaking, I destroy a microcosm of our world, and then, hopeful, I rebuild it.

I’ve been trying to revisit my artist statement and make it more relevant to the work I’ve done since college. Seeing these little bodies of work I’ve done (thesis installation, costume work, individual objects, Portland installation) as related but separate… how can I better link them with words?

Right now the big themes are :
- disclosing/making foreign the process of making clothes & the material traces of making, processes disconnect from product - mapping, systems and information
- destruction, rebuilding, and traces, decay with time
-the material environment abounds with an anarchic energy of making -- objects, materials and environments have their own volition
-value & trash-to-treasure, preciousness, clothes are portals into the past/stories. the bargain barn & the idea that manufactured objects possess a life cycle of their own
- process is a combination of whim and system
-closet rituals and the curation of one's personal things.

my show in portland --
a success!

documentation:

After scrapping a lot of ideas, several emotional car rides, some birthday surprises, and a handful of hissy fits, I'm finally solid with my install for friday. Here is the description:

A web of orange strings encases a room that holds me, a piano, and a moving video backdrop. String is a metaphor, it is tied, it restrains, it makes it hard for me to get to the piano which is venue for feelings. The piano it is a heavy, solid, hard to move object that roots me to the ground. The string I am using is fluorescent orange Mason line that is used for marking off construction sites, not meant for textiles or clothing use. The tension in the tying web that binds the architecture and the piano and me together, mirrors the process of tension and stretching in the video. The video almost is a continuation back into space of what is going on in the room, like a landscape backdrop, teeming with change. The florescent string, the color of objects of civic repair/intervention with nature, intervenes on the landscape hill-like expanse of cloth. The piano piece I will play-- . Frédéric CHOPIN: Nocturne in C-sharp Minor (Op. Posth.) is very full of sadness, loneliness, very old, and sincere. This song is a piece I learned when I was young and still remember how to play it. When I was a child I really loved playing this piece and am still very inspired by how potent and sad it is, a minor key, yet how it ends on a happy note as if there is still hope. In this same back and forth between despair and optimism (which mirrors how I’ve felt during my residency in Portland), the knitted video is unmade and then partially re-mended on a loop, where there is a progression of destruction and decay that is followed by a hopeful rebuilding.

Even though I've posted it before, here is the video:

Here are some photos of my install:

I made a flikr and uploaded the current documentation of the wall sculptures here. Tonight we are going to skype with josh pavlacky and he is going to give me a little webcam crit. I sent him the links to the two new videos (here and here.) Today I've been experimenting with putting music I made to the videos. It doesn't seem to be working. I had a video chat with kira this morning and she said like she felt they needed MORE-- that just the imagery wasn't captivating enough. I don't know if I agree. Today I am feeling cold and uninspired. I started to work on the random object experiments and I think I will continue to do this today. The one material that is exciting me the most is a sort of fibrous straw boat-like shape (i don't really know what this is used for in life, but its a very compelling object.) I have hung it from the ceiling and i am figuring out what best to do with it, but I am having trouble getting in the zone...

Here are some images of the wall sculptures still in process.

zack!!!! Today zack and I talked about projecting my video onto the ceiling rafters, and creating a reclining space on the floor for people to lie down on, like I saw at a show in Richmond, a woman named Pipilotti Rist. i have so much to say and think about and make that I don’t really know where to begin. zack had me do a bunch of little diorama drawings of different ways the space could look (he showed me pictures of this show as an example of an effective use of space); I came up with a bunch of iterations—all of these sort of included the tent and a projection, the most interesting ones were having the projection in unexpected places like the ceiling or the floor. I hope my dad will send the projector so I can start testing this stuff asap. Its hard for me to feel like im being productive when I have been working on all these objects all day-- playing, experimenting, constantly re-focusing and moving onto something else to break up the rhythm of my energy —I feel like I need to think of the bigger picture. I am so hard on myself, today felt like it failed me but then the conversation with zack made me feel better—its just hard to understand how I can spend each day in the most efficient way possible without a clear idea of what giant task needs attention. For now I am going to be quick and industrious and make a body of videos to show the appen dicks for Sunday night. And when I get the projector I will experiment projecting on everything I can think of.

Last night I watched planet earth and knit this little baby blue texture; I kept switching between big, small and medium needles at random times. I think I’m going to start by making a video using this in the same way I made my thesis videos, dropping stitches, and this time, I want to try using random number generator to dictate which stitches I drop. And then at this creative reuse center in portland called scrap if found all these little abandoned crocheted doilies and im going to make more object/creature videos playing around with those. They have a bunch of clip on lights here to light the pieces.

i feel like my video work embodies most of the things I am really trying to say conceptually.

religious, rite,

meditation speculation, contemplation, reflection, rumination, study, contemplate, religion, faith, belief

generate productive, produce, make, create, establish, give, yield, generate, bring forth, beget, get, engender, father

mapping function, mathematical, value, represent, transformation, relation

System scheme, arrangement, organization, control, module

{photos: pipilotti rist- pour your body out (2008), and elixir: the video organism (2009)}

new ideas

my work needs to move away from the figurative nad towards the abstract—clothing as a subject already references the body effectively, and the abstraction will move my work in a more conceptual direction. Still very concerned with mapping/systems/rules also. What systems should I employ here and where do I set myself free? In my head the definition of installation is synonymous with a stage set. I can create a world that speaks. I was thinking today—one of my first inclinations on how to make formal work have more meaning is to juxtapose very different bodies of work that center on a few common themes to create a dialogue between the two. Like in my thesis, I employed two opposite abstracted conversations about clothing (knit projected videos and sewn material sculpture) that hung together in the same space and by nature of their nearness, spoke to each other about what they had in common. Zach today called it “unmaking and wrongmaking,” which is really what was going on in both. I was thinking about while I want to move past my thesis and leave those restrictions behind, I want this installation to have a similar power and simultaneous formal and meaningful poetry. I was thinking about making the opposite of my thesis—a sewn video – maybe of a seam drawing, moving, (and then projected onto an actual still version) or a video of backwards sewing? juxtaposed with a material knit installation that wrongmakes? Then I was asking myself, why does this show have to be 2 things at once? Can’t it be just one thing? It could be just a show about knitting. Knitting, purling, knotting, intertwining, tying, tying the knot, knotical, bending, fastening...

{photos: my own work in progress.}