there's a show im trying to get work into , the theme is 'proof'...i was thinking about mathematical proofs: the act of demonstrating that something 'works', showing your steps... i started another easy stitch this time using 2 base fit patterns for 60s dresses. i guess they are the kind that depending on the build of your body, certain seams tell you they can be let out or taken in. there are funny diagrams that come with the patterns, and they are a lot less nice about body descriptions then we are now. taking this theme as an assignment, i cut chunks out of the patterns with the envelopes unopened. i then am following the patterns, backed with sheer fabric, and combining the dresses into one (as each one only provides half a dress.) the result is deformed and weird, and i am still trying to figure out how i want to display the directions. the rules for the submission state the piece has to be 'ready to install' when you submit it (you submit the actual piece, not a photograph), so i have to think about making something that isn't too complicated to install... and perhaps in this way the directions for making are as much part of the piece as their result; especially as i proove my steps. try to make it clear what i did, maybe i mark things really dark in charcoal...

prompted by a conversation with maddie about her work, i've been thinking about what it means to use 'found materials' and how much an artist should or shouldn't manipulate materials... when something makes the transition from trash to spectacle. with clothing patterns (or maps), the material itself is already potent without any manipulation. then by giving these materials a new form, i can take the existing meanings and layer them with others.

gonna look up and see if there are any good art shows going on in LA right now because i am going there tomorrow. i feel like i haven't been subject to inspiring visual work in a while!

new work:
layered insecurities, seeking a form

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.}

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 }

im already having a GREAT TIME in san Francisco. I am looking for an apartment and studio this week so I can get back into making. I want to keep up the same momentum I had this winter and in Portland—I have a feeling this is going to be great. i am goign to ahve a studio here in san francisco, I have a job and I will just spend all my time working and making. Last night I went to a video show at the ATA (artists’ television access) – there was a series of videos shown by different artists, all combining video with sound (some live and some recorded.) Anyways, highlights of the show: this one girl lana (I lost my program and can’t remember her full name) made this piece where she layered video tapes with an old vcr mixer and played electronic music over it. Such cool images/sounds resulted. There was some other really beautiful footage of space from semiconductor films (here is the video).

These videos got me really inspired about adding sound to my films, and combining footage in a more ‘material’ way like I do in my sculpture. like how in my plaster pieces, each piece goes through a laundry list of processes before it is done—cut, sewn, inked, epoxied, plastered, wet down, painted, dirtied. I was thinking about how I could combine different existing footage with my knit videos and how sound could be a part of it. also-- video could be a good outlet for me while I don’t have a studio or place to live, as it is all contained in my computer.

This weekend I am going to go back to santa cruz and work on more seam drawings because I have some potential buyers! I’m excited to go through them and really address what are the best ones. I also really want to do some more traditional drawings (in charcoal) of some of them, like the polka dot one. Ive been feeling the need to make some drawings after having dinner with Christine Bourdette in Portland. I was inspired by her sculpture but also by the fact that she also makes very beautiful drawings and seems to be quite fluid between mediums. I'd say right now she is one of my biggest inspirations at the moment. That’s all for now.

{photos: 1 & 2 are my own works in process cocoons and seams (2011), 3 is christine bourdette's mistaken identity (2006}

Portland-- right now I feel like there is too much going on with my ideas for this show. Waiting for it all to congeal...i have so many ideas and different pieces, yet I want it to be more installational/experiential. Trying to figure out what to bring and what to leave here. Hoping that the thoughts will jump into position once I get a new change of scenery.

I want to experiment with plastering/painting the mutant sculptures. using gouache or something to paint lines where the seams are on the clothes. My dad gave me some plaster to experiment with—I’m imaging putting more epoxy on the pieces and then just sprinkling the plaster on; even doing some paper mache, covering the pieces in paper pulp/trash and plaster. The lines could be black on white or maybe even blue on white. I wonder if this whole yearning to switch materials up is out of line. Maybe I’ll let myself do this tomorrow.

Today I went to the library and got some books on tape from the library for the road trip ‘grapes of wrath’ and ‘the sound and the fury’. I think I’m going to document a garment somehow moving through the landscape up north. I like the idea of creating backstory for a garment in actual reality (and showing evidence of it through photographs), and juxtaposing that with an invented sentimental fantasy (that I would record as sound). Questions, though:

-would i be wearing this garment or is it lying on the ground? hanging on a tree?

-what garment is it? should it be something iconic (a black dress?) or more quirky?

for some reason i keep thinking about my green cashmere sweater that i got at the barn. i just feel like it must have a crazy old and classy story because it is cashmere and from the '50s but in perfect condition.

{photos: manuel neri kneeling figure (1960), abandoned sweater photo from this flickr)}

i am always collecting jpgs (i separate them by month) on my computer sort of like a perpetual virtual mood board like fashion designers have. this month's collection so far has a very distinct Color palette, army greens and muddy wine red, mostly. i am thinking of dying some of my mutant clothes and seam drawings so that my portland show reflects this 'color way.' dye seems like a way to change and bite into the materials and revamp them, take them farther from bargain barn loot and clothing cast offs. but is it important that they retain their old color personalities?

I spent today coating my mutant clothes, sari piece and camo piece in epoxy to stiffen them. they look really good and creepy empty. yesterday my family and i went to the city to look at art and some of the things i was really responding to were work that had a very tangible feeling of the artist's handling the work, like i could very visually imagine their process and it was clear they just loved the hand to material experience. (ei. robert brady, manuel neri)


i know that sort of thing just sort of comes out of art when the artist engages in that hands-on experience with it, but i was thinking of ways that my work could feel more like that to people. i already let threads hang and leave seams raw, but what are other ways to show that trace of making and show my revelatory process to people? through my recent experiences with epoxy, i am realizing that i really feel like i am 'making art' when i am engaging in materials that are messy. i had the idea of further stiffening the mutant clothes with something visibily messy like plaster. What if I covered some of the mutant clothes (after epoxy) in plaster?

i also just came across this french artist named emilie faif, who i do find a little too cutesie to be fully inspired by but she uses clothing and fabric in her work and i found this one installation she did involving the pattern pieces to a pair of jeans all laid flat out on the wall.I've been reading one of andrea zittel's diaries, and am very inspired by the way she creates systems and rules that govern her life, and in the diary her life seems so fluidly her art, and all her musings are included, shared with others. i almost feel like blogging is a way to do this, to let people in to what i am thinking (almost) every day even if no one is actually reading. I feel like I am effectively achieving blurring the distinction between my own clothes and clothing i use in my work, but i wonder how i could further embed my systems into my life. or do i even want to?

i have been getting a lot of compliments on the film i did with kira, especially regarding the interaction with my animations and the music i composed. since i have been wanting to do more composing, and have been tinkering a little, i was thinking about making a big goal out of it. i was thinking about the san francisco show at ben's space, and maybe for that show i would do a whole 'album' like series of animations, each with its own customized score. and then it could be a real venue for some sort of performance, music... maybe even some movement... i was really getting excited while i was swimming today thinking about it. i do feel like those films are unique and a good way for me to bridge my music and my art together, and it really feels like 'me' behind it all, i really get that sense of self expression when i show them to people. i think i really need to consider continuing with them.

{photos: from top to bottom, left to right, comme des garcons fw09, jean yves lemoigne, don't know (from tumblr), lisa kehoe a public loo in norway, manuel neri standing figure (1982), robert brady new work (2010), my own dopplegangers and mutants (in progress), emilie faif patron/ vetement isabel marant (2010)}