i feel kinda bad that my blog posts are beginning to be diary entries mixed with art desires that arent materializing-- sorry to anyone who reads these more recent posts for the lack of content and artistic fervor. i'm so frusterated with my life right now mainly because i'm not making any art, and don't feel the impulse to make that i had a few months ago. i am totally bored at work and spend most of my off time looking at/stressing about apartments, and preparing for the next working week. i don't want this to continue. i'm thinking of quitting my job and leaving the city. looking for more residency opportunities, working in my parents garage again. i know it would be kind of a regression in the eyes of some cubicle worshipping bar hopping shopper, but in terms of artmaking i think it might be a step forward. i am pretty unhappy how things are going right now.

this weekend i have to go back to santa cruz to house sit yet again. i'm really looking forward to catching my mom before she goes out of town and talking through all these feelings ive been having. im also excited to work on the quilt/map piece that i was writing about a few posts back: 

Wall piece: Maps are sewn into the places on an old quilt where it is coming apart. Brown (hose colored) sheer tulle is layered over about half of the surface, seamed in parts. There are parts where housing insulation is coming out, and parts where plaster is caked on. Panti hose coming off of the bottom, crusted and sad.

i have this old quilt that i got in olympia washington when zoe and i were on tour there perhaps even before i started college, maybe it was after. i got it at this weird big vintage flea market/warehouse thing, and ive slept with it and brought it out on foss hill and ran it through the wash so many times that it looks like it really has been in my family for centuries. there are places where the batting is coming out through holes, it reminds me of housing insulation. at one point last year i tried mending the holes with old clothes i had that were kind of special... never finished doing that but anyway the whole thing feels like a big time map, and i wanted to fill in the holes in places with paper maps, and just kind of keep building onto it with allusions to the body and to landscape and architecture and just get really rauschenbergian with it. i'm interested in the way that with time, and with use, material things (especially cloth) gets broken down and decayed and vulnerable. there is this materiality to things in the world that seems to slowly become fragile and threadbare, yet edit and build, change, as time moves on, as if objects, materials and environments have their own volition. there is also the sentimental connotations of a quilt-- a tradition of using old but memory filled clothing scraps to piece together something that holds you, comforts you, in sleep. in this way, a quilt itself is like a large map of memorys. also: i keep going back to wanting to disclose but simultaneously make foreign the process of making clothes, to highlight our increasing lack of intimacy with our material environment, due to globalized labor and specialized professions.


then, to relate these systematic and age old processes involved in clothing making to the systems that describe the larger landscape-- mapping, building, receding and changing of landscape as time runs its course. i want to make work that speaks to feeling like a tiny speck on the earth but also closely and monumentally acquaints me with the intimacy of objects. like how small you feel, when you are in an airplane and look down sometimes the ground from above looks quiltlike. and when you are in your bed, you can look down at a mini domain of which you are the ruler. and the seams that metaphorically mend fields are roads--arterial, winding, carved out by use.

In just writing this blog post i typed 'map quilt' into google images and i found a textile artist named leah evans who makes quilts after fantasy mappings of land. this is her artists' statement from her site:

"It is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests me most of all. Often people ask me for specifics about the places and symbols in my work. Most of my pieces are not consciously based on specific places. For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes. Through my research and experience I have decided that maps create more questions than they answer."

{photos: 1 & 2 gee's bend quilts from design squish, 3 rauschenberg's bed (1955) from the new york times , 4 google image search for 'farmland aerial perspective' yeilded this pretty baby, 5 leah evans' from dwell.com }

i have been blogging less because i have been making very little in terms of art work in the past few weeks as i settle into my new job (landscape architecture studio admin assistant/ graphic designer/web person) and new house, decorating and making artistic choices more on the domestic level (putting up stuff i find on the walls and replanting little succulents into mini terra cotta pots, drinking beer in my garden and reordering my closet. lately mostly what i've been doing at work (like i wrote in the last post) is digitizing and organizing images for the image library they have here-- some are mundane pictures of benches and lamp posts but often i come across interesting sculptures, walls or earthworky unusual treatments of land. i think this job is rekindling my interest in mapping also-- the architects here all use aerial perspective for their drawings and have pretty intense schematic and symbolic systems for representing different elements of landscape. reminds me that as much as i have read and waxed on and on about globalized labor and the loss of the handmade these past few years, its really the mapping, systematic and imformational aspect of clothing patterns that really drew me to them. they map the body in this weird totally unemotional way. i want to do more stuff that relates to clothing with blue prints and landmaps-- in portland i got kinda into going to home depot as sort of a project runway type exercise -- like running around with a cart looking for things that are ment for landscape/architectural construction and reinvisioning them in processes that are clothing related. like knitting construction mason line. i have this silly yearning to make a garment out of traffic cones. i am actively looking for a studio for this year. tomorrow i am looking at one in the dogpatch. i know i tend to be pretty hard on myself but not making much after having so much momentum for the past 6 months, the residency hopping and constant studio dilegence--- now i feel like most of my time is spent imagining myself as an artist but not really actively being one. oh well, it'll happen soon! also, after talking with ben more about the show in his space that he runs with anohter person here in san fran, it seems like they have too much going on and dont know whether or not they want to continue using their space as a gallery. so its still pretty up in the air/ unlikely i will have a show there. i was sort of releaved (weirdly), and i think its because i realized in portland how different working towards the idea of a show and my studio practice is, and i feel like i really have to address what is more important to me. my thesis was largely an installational idea that used material studies in the studio to become a grand experience, and then portland had a similar rhythm in my mind. it seems like the knowledge that people will come experience the work, thinking of them walking through a space, makes me feel that a show has to be installational or environmental for it to be powerful, which i know isnt true but i think at least right now, is the most exciting type of work that i respond to in shows. but, as an artist i think i enjoy a studio practice that is more material and labor intensive, hands on, exploring processes and inflicting different actions on objects in a systemized whimlike way. so these two things seem in conflict and maybe i'd just like to focus on the latter right now. and also, once i get a studio i can always invite people over to see the work, i'm not too worried about it. anyway i should get back to work... attached are some images i liked from the image bank that i found recently.

...and just so i don't forget:

-i find this women's apartment inspiring for domestic purposes: http://freundevonfreunden.com/jenna-brinning/?sessionId=s3dlbvo84lu4sd6f88ang0hot4

-someone emailed me this link for this show in philly of fibers/found objects artist sheila hicks' work http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/hicks.php and i love the images included in the online write-up. i'm including the images here.

I remember while I was in portland someone there was telling me i should look at tensile structures for inspiration, as my pulled/stretched cloth that i used in tuck your shirt leave it loose recalled the tension in the 'membrane structures'. now im cataloguing images in their digitized photo collection at work, and i just came across a whole folder of images of tensile structures. its really a crazy collision of clothing and architecture, and it already exists!

heres the definition from wikipedia: A tensile structure is a construction of elements carrying only tension and no compression or bending. The term tensile should not be confused with tensegrity, which is a structural form with both tension and compression elements. Most tensile structures are supported by some form of compression or bending elements, such as masts (as in The O2, formerly the Millennium Dome), compression rings or beams. Tensile membrane structures are most often used as roofs as they can economically and attractively span large distances.

I got a library card and have been trying to read before bed to quell my cold self (fighting at times with my impulse to watch a law and order internet episode). I just read Gertrude Stein’s Writings 1932 – 1946, a nice intellectual ramble after the over the top sexy apocalyptic sci fi of Gary shteyngart’s super sad true love story. There is one passage that I need to transcribe here before I return the book to the library:

‘one must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on the earth, it goes quicker but essentially the landscapes seen from an automobile are the same as the landscapes seen from a carriage, a train, a wagon, or in walking. But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the 20^th century is not the same as the 19^th century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane that being of the 20^th century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as the 19^th century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably he made it different, and what he made is a thing that now all the world can see. When I was in America, I for the first time traveled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth, I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there, on the earth, the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves…I knew that a creator is contemporary and as the 20^th century is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it has never had, and as everything destroys itself in the 20^th century and nothing continues, so then the 20^th century has a splendor which is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has that strange quality of an earth that one has never seen and of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed.’ (Gertrude Stein, p. 532 – 533)

so I’ve been getting apocalyptic vibes lately, from everything. i loved so much how gertrude writes of artists’ existing and responding to their time and also the unknown that is the future, and how even though Picasso never saw the earth from high above, his work almost predicted the way it might look. And I also loved her comparison of the way the ground looks from an airplane to drawing. It reminded me of this very stupid critique I had with dennis oppenheim when he came to Wesleyan. I guess I say it was very stupid because he seemed so listless and dispassionate when he spoke about his own work, discouraging to me that the art world could take someone who’s early work was very ‘70s earth-worky conceptual, and churn them out into someone so clearly apathetic about art. But anyway, during his crit with me (about my abstract commercial pattern unmakings), all he really said was that my work reminded him of the topographical quilt that is the earth seen from the window of an airplane. And like the seams running through my pieces, roads bisect farms, lines mingle and ‘[come and go, develop and destroy themselves…]’ (stein).

it was also stein’s hinting at the fact that different eras destroy the ones that came before them, that really struck me, I guess I’ve thought about that before but never dared admit it. Just with all the contingency I think everyone feels right now but may not always acknowledge, I want to grasp this thing that is so remarkable to me, that things get destroyed, and leave a trace, and there’s just this push and pull as time passes. and for me, I derive comfort from inventing and engaging in processes of making and knowing and gathering, comfort in clothing, clothing that is a cocoon that could work to protect me from the harshness of the world. I think this is something I’m trying to get at for my portland show (I’m doing a show next month at Appendix project space), finding this place where time, everyday ritual, and interaction with materials can be in dialogue with what goes on outside my studio, where things are confusing and there is hardship and destroying and rebuilding, constantly. There is fragility and beauty, but there is also utility, convertibility, mappings, systems, some sort of master plan.

{photos, from top to bottom: glynis chaffin-tinglof's native, google image search for 'aerial view from airplane window', my own unmakings, and a photo swiped from this blog.}