Wow I am sitting on the bed in the room maddie and I are sharing and listening to the washing machine churn. We will find out midweek next week if we get to sign the lease on the live workspace we’ve been after for so long—a studio in the mission area where we’ll be living and working, its super beautiful and light filled, reasonably priced and awesome. We spent today having a garage sale of some of our clothes with this great new friend named Pati, and it was nice to sit in the sun and feel productive even though we didn’t make very much money. At one point I had to use the bathroom and went to a coffee shop nearby, and there was a magic 8 ball on the counter. I shook it and asked if maddie and I would get the studio, and it said ‘try again.’ So I shook it again and asked one more time, and it said ‘I can’t answer at this time.’
It seems like mystic pleas and witchy séances should be adequate and productive actions to make sure we get this amazing new space, but its toyed with my ideas of fate. 

Part of me feels like I am more special and strange than most people in the world and therefore should get everything I ask for, that wanting something badly enough is all it takes to bring it to me. But being thrust into adulthood, into a city where I feel often when I am biking like there are transparent membranes blockading me from entering buildings, that things are harder to come by. Ask and you shall receive, it is said, but I’m learning to believe that is this is truer in a falafel place than in real estate. I hope in the next couple of days I’ll be posting news of delight and happiness, lots of exclamation points and such, but there isn’t anything concrete but hope. Somehow I feel very little anxiety. The process of signing a lease, getting a job, impressing landlords and bosses feels ridiculous and silly, like a charade where you just have to pick the right outfit and be slightly less yourself. Summer is coming, and I begin to process life’s details more like a game, as sobering and dismal as they are in reality.

That being said, I am ready to start making. I am eager to move my studio at my parents’ house to the city, my big table made out of sawhorses and a door, my dress form, my sewing machine. Its amazing how as a sculptor or material maker (I can’t be sure if writers feel this way) that the physical expanse of space represents a lack of clutter that I desire so much to feel again in my mind.

Lately I’ve been taking better advantage of being in a place with a lot of art. Last weekend I went and saw the Gertrude Stein show at SFMOMA, and on Friday I went and saw Song Dong’s installation at yerba Buena and the other Gertrude Stein show and Charlotte Salomon show at the Jewish Museum. I also saw a dress rehearsal staged reading of a play Wylie was in, and a dance performance at ODC, called ledoh in salt farm’s suicide barrier, secure in our illusion. I have a lot of notes that I took during both the Stein show and the dance performance, mostly pertaining to my own ideas for my next series. Seeing all this work made me inspired about creating my own again, even if I had moments of feeling critical. The dance performance had really amazing sets, and the costumes inspired small ideas as well.

Though I don’t know how I got there, during the performance I started thinking about hat forms as beautiful objects (my dad has a few), and I was imagining using them as heads for some of the more body-related forms. The dancers at one point all had big white daisies in their mouths and it reminded me of those surgical masks that Japanese people wear to protect them from disease or radiation, which seems like a conceptual idea to me, as they don’t really create more than a visual barrier or illusion of protection.

I went back to my idea of pantyhose sewn together, making flatter forms that through seams create drawings of things that remind you of bodies. In the performance there was a lot of projection of civic things like street cleaning and cars onto a sheer diaphanous backdrop, and I was struck with how simple and powerful a tool projection is. The simple act of projecting modernist architectural forms onto a soft clothing related surface could be a poetic little statement.

Song Dong also used projection in a moving way in his show at the Yerba Buena . He has a pretty heartfelt philosophy on a video projection of a person being analogous with their spirit, and he projected his father’s face onto his daughter’s, his own hand onto his father’s face, and people grown up onto their younger selves. His Waste Not installation was also incredibly moving, where his depression era Chinese mother saved everything, even used soap slivers and Styrofoam packaging, believing that each item incased a wisp of spirit. He laid out all of her objects in extreme order and preciousness, all around a structure that represented their small compound home.

I am writing more ideas about the new series and have been continuing to knit with the construction trail marking tape. Also have this pretty disorganized Microsoft word file that has a lot of ideas that I’m trying to cohere and play with and make a new and improved artist statement. I have a feeling that spending more time doing this will make the work for the next series more coherent as well. It feels good to write right now, and be alone with my head. Maddie and I have been living on top of each other. Its cheap but I can’t wait for space to hang pieces on walls, set up my sewing machine again, put on my smart person glasses and get down to business. If this blog post is a plea, all I ask for is space. 

{photos: 1 charlotte salomon from 'life? or theatre?' (1940-42), 2 japanese people wearing surgical maskson the street to protect from flu, 3 photo from ledoh in salt farm's suicide barrier: secure in our illusion, 4 antique hat form, 4 - 6 song dong's dad and mom, don't worry about us, we are all well}

oh the amazing things you can find when you google
image search 'nests'.

{1. flamingo nests, 2. White-browed Sparrow-weaver Nests,
3. villiage weaver bird nest, 4. oropendola nest,
5. cliff swallow nests }

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.}