nina katchadourian's maps

{geographic pathologies (1996)}


{hand held subway (1996); coastal merger (1993)}

Notes transcribed from a chat with vivian that I recorded: (I really should do this more!)

Clothing is an intimate manufactured thing with which we use to communicate, we use to warm ourselves, protect ourselves, almost figurative because its shaped to us. Something about breaking down something that’s cloth, that’s clothing, its more than just figuring out how its made, I’m breaking down the barrier between the person and the world.

Beginning with clothes, how I first started being interested in them, starting with the figure, then clothing, then breaking it down, and then becoming interested in the manufactured element of it, and that moving into broader materiality. How my interest in this “making” which is vague, came from something specific.

Seeing how clothes are made overseas, most people don’t know where their food comes from, using this language to access a much broader conceptual thing: we are torn from being intimate with our immediate world. Globalization and technology has resulted in a loss of intimacy. Today, product is disconnected from process; life is disconnected from life. We are disconnected from the production of our food, our loved ones, wars waged, and the making of our clothes. There is dimmed distinctness of need for all the deep, simple necessities. Real is torn from real, Facebook friends from actual friends; processed food from organically grown food, knowing from knowing. It is impossible to have respect without knowing, that is, without intimacy. (inHere)

My goal with my thesis at first was to get people more intimate with the stuff that they interact with everyday. It morphed this thing that we all know, we are all familiar with patterns, you see an outline of a t-shirt and you know exactly what it is. But its not necessarily something you have interacted with or seen, or even touched yourself. At its most basic, it is a flat shape. You see what a three dimensional shape looks like when its flat. And taking that and morphing it into something entirely different in its essence because it becomes a big consuming environment that you can’t ignore. Taking these objects that are easily dismissed, that are normal things in our culture and drawing attention to them and how they’re unique and strange. There are a lot of strange things that we don’t pay close attention to. Part of my goal was to make them known or teach people, but it was also to make them strange—to highlight how strange it is. In the same way the map piece, Reconstructed Destination, reveals how weird freeways are. Road systems are so strange and interesting. By cutting along each highway and re-stitching them back together, it makes that more apparent, showing where lines, roads bisect farms, lines mingle and come and go, develop and destroy themselves. After embarking on the task of taking apart and reassembling a map along its highways, I had to run my sewing machine, essentially drive, every highway. A lot of art work being done right now that I find interesting is process oriented. Its so fundamental—you look at something and you see the detail, and its done by hand. The process of doing something laborious, tedious, and the energy that goes into making it is apparent which makes it all the more interesting.

new work: reconstructed destination

Statement of purpose toilings / ideas for the section about what are my great problems: memories and ideas made of materials colliding. These becoming more complicated and expanding, trying to join, but being separate. incessant/insatiable need for personal growth.

unknown of the beginning and the unknown of the end. work can find its own way beyond my preconceptions . evolves from being systematic and logical and becomes nonlogical, like its own entity.

Video ideas:
burning:

Aerial views, projection on the ground, maps, quilts, the editing/amending of cities

Submerging into water, under water, as a means of abstraction

Reflection, kaleidoscope effects

New Orleans: Crafting a scene. approaching installation as a stage set or environment. Utilizing my experience with theatrical design and landscape architecture.

some inspirations on a misty sunday with the folsom street fair in its full leathery swing:

{my own scabby metropolis (video), eva hesse, nick cave's soundsuits, jesse dunahoo, rachel harrison's conquest of the useless, peter doig's ravine (this piece as an inspiration for my production design work for tontawald?), janine antoni, susan giles}

map ideas:
mend: reconstruct, rectify reconstructed destinations passing destinations nomadic errant migration reconstructed migration settling

wabi sabi: all formations are imperminent combine flux imperminance passage current hunch a seamed migration
derive

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.

some photo inspirations for may:


{comme des garcons fw'09; comme des garcons fw'11, both from style.com}

{celine fw'11, malene birger dress from the coveteur}

If you could hold up her threadbare
Coat to the light where it's worn translucent in places

You'd see spots where
Almost every night of the year Bear had been mending suspending that baseness

Now her coat drags through the water
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows;

In the magnetic embrace
Balletic and glacial of Bear's insatiable shadow;

{joanna newsom, monkey and bear}

{felice varini installation, wendy gold alternative globes}


{sarah applebaum's afgan installations}


{puenta del inca by sabino demerson, Dispatchwork artist Jan Vormann uses legos to repair broken walls}

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 }

Not to brag, but today was spent sitting in the sun in my garden in my bikini, drinking tangerine juice and drawing. In the absence of having a studio I've been drawing and planning things I want to make. this is the thing i'm most excited about so far:

Addressing a body of sculptural work like a fashion collection. Making like 50 ‘looks’ but questionable as to their function, not necessarily wearable clothes, but conceived as members of a closet. These looks have multiple thematic ideas running through them. Possible themes to be present running through the 'collection':

a. Sheerness (over or under materials), panty hose, beige, like skin, printed commercial patterns (from fwm) onto sheer fabric

{comme des garcons fw 09 from this blog, ernesto neto's while nothing happens 2008}

b. Maps and commercial patterns – paper

{my own pattern combine 2010, map (unknown source)}

c. Housing insulation, stuffed panty hose, suiting innards

{housing insulation, suit innards from fun article in the new york times fashion mag about suits}

d. Drawings indicating planning (or drawing textile design, ie polka dots), on maps, commercial patterns, fabrics—some printed at fwm

{leonardo da vinci studies of embryos circa like 1503, kiki smith lying with the wolf 2001}

e. Crusted over with glue, plaster, materials:

{plaster mask from style rookie's flikr, crusty old bodies from pompeii relics 'ghosts of vesuvius'}

f. Construction (ie. Mason line, florescent orange, traffic cones, treated as fabric/sewn/knit)

{construction site photo from a website curiously called 'erections,' christo and jeanne claude wrapped coast 1968-69}

g. Polka dots

{comme des garcons ss'10, light dots by julie lansom}

h. Old quilts

{gee's bend quilt (see more great ones here, bedroom by james merrell}

Ideas for 'Looks':

· Floor Piece: Sheer camping tent out of sewn flesh/hose colored tule, with tent poles. Panti hose coming off of it in places

· Voluminous sheer coat of same hose color, with housing insulation/suiting innards/interfacing in the front front/lapel, layer of construction nylon mason tape wrapping around that but beneath the tulle. pantihose for sleeves and skirt (sewn together in strips). Sheer tulle bloomers, crusted over with plaster.

· Long map/commercial pattern jacket and wide leg pants crusty with plaster, that buttons asymmetrically with nuts and bolts hardware. With small little sleeves. With commercial pattern front and big pattern pockets, Commercial pattern collar, insulation/interfacing/padding on collar. Drawings indicating planning (or drawing textile design, ie polka dots), on maps & commercial patterns surface. Worn with hose.

· Flat, cut out but unsewn commercial pattern tent jacket, sewed in place onto map. Tent-like structure but with pattern collar and nut and bolt buttons down the front. Little map pants. All crusty with plaster.

· Coat made out knitted fluorescent trail marking tape with pieces dangling. Buttons asymmetrically with nuts and bolts buttons. Half of the front is a commercial pattern jacket front. Pattern full collar and pockets, interfacing and padding. plaster crusted. Tied with little horse trail marking line.

· Coatlike Dress with snow fencing poof skirt and hood, traffic cones?, and bodice, sleeves, and collar made out of pieces of maps and commercial patterns. One side of the commercial pattern coat is longer than the other. Crusty with plaster. Worn with crusty polka dot leggings.

· Little tiny map/pattern jacket with collar and epaulets and nuts and bolts buttons. Big full skirt out of snow fencing and traffic cones. Little construction material leggings (snow fencing or knitting marking tape). All crusty with plaster. Little trail marking tape bow around collar.

· Façade of pattern front on top of snowfencing and traffic cone structure. Little crusty commercial pattern pants with polka dots drawn on them in charcoal.

· Long dress made out of maps and commercial patterns with pockets, collar, nuts/bolts buttons, with a long sheer hose colored dress over it. Housing insulation/padding is sewn between the layers. A pattern skirt protrudes from the front like an absess. Housing insulation and stuffed panti hose trail out of the bottom. Crusty with plaster.

· 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.

· Polka dot pattern coat (half overlayed onto polka dot fabric, half polka dots draw directly onto the paper, pattern pants with polka dots drawn on. A little trail marking tape belt tied through pattern belt loops. Hose.

· padded/wire/interfaced polka dot shirt façade with commercial pattern pockets and collar sewn onto Knitted nylon caution tape/snow fence skirt shape. All crusty with crusty nylon hose coming off of the bottom.

· Totem: 2 old quilts collaged together overlapping over housing insulation, and tulle/hose tube structure wrapped in one or two loops of fluorescent trail marking tape, tied dangling. Housing insulation comes out the bottom. Not crusty.

· Long flat map coat with places that are mostly flat, boxy, not sewn (like a kimono). Commercial pattern collar. Sleeves and front sides made out of quilt. Worn with hose. Crusty.

· housing insulation stuffed inside a nude tulle coat dress form (one sleeve is long, one is short). Tulle is overlayed over shoulder pads (polka dot patterned?) and commercial pattern lapel and collar. With nut bolt buttons, big industrial zipper down the side wear a heart would be. A little unzipped and housing insulation is coming out of the opening. Housing insulation and nylon coming out of the bottom. Excess tulle comes off of the form in places like a trail. Crusty.