i was thinking about writing. when reading someone's writing, you are abandoning your own voice to absorb the voice of another. a writer types their words, from their mind onto paper, that paper is bound into a book, the book is read by another, and then those words are absorbed into their mind.


i am still thinking about string or some filament directing this line, almost like a assembly line of steps, transference.
so there is filament (could be wire, fishing line, colored something). what represents the mind? there is the wire radiating from the brain in a tangle to the keys of the typewriter, there are pages in the typewriter and they flow out, abstract and wavelike into a book, or books, splayed open/ the strings radiate from the pages and to another brain, tangled. its just this fluid transferance, the string is the ideas.


currently reading the history of love by nicole krauss. there is a book within the book-- a chapter from this is called 'the age of string':


So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon'tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglassI'veneverovedanyoneIthinkigmyelfasfunnyForgiveme...
There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bundle of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string.
The practice of attaching cups to the ends of the string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world's first expression. Others say its was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America.
When the world grew bigger, and there wasn't enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented.
Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

{Francis Alÿs, The Collector (1991)}

photo inspies for june

{1 and 2 henrique oliveira, 3 do-ho suh, 4 chiharu shiota, 5 polka dot couple, 6 michael johansson, 7 comme des garcons fw09 asymmetrical coat, jun takahashi dress detail}

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:

performance idea

Piano in center of the room, with piano bench. Hopefully its this piano I found on craiglist (boys i need your help!). http://portland.craigslist.org/wsc/zip/2223448617.html

There is my laptop atop the piano. T-shirt, suspended at height of body (sitting at bench) suspended by millions of strings radiating out from shirt. Shirt is white; strings are many different colors (based on what I have). OR t-shirt is camo and the strings are pale pink? Just an idea. The strings wrap around rafters, stick into the walls. There are strings at finger height with little nooses to put my fingers in—these strings have a pulley system that attaches to bells that tinkle when I move my fingers up and down. Or maybe instead of the noose strings they are gloves from my grandma and I just slip the gloves on and each finger still has a string/ bell pulley. There is a projector projecting onto the back wall. It has either my gmail account up and zoe is trying to chat me, or leanne rymes ‘you light up my life’ on youtube or maybe one of the videos I’ve made while here. Or maybe all 3 going at once. The room is dimly lit except for projector light and maybe one light on the piano. People begin to arrive. I am not in the room. Then, I open the back door and come in sort of sneakily and quietly but sort of as if the audience isn’t there. I’m wearing a bra and my fave jeans and I have fake eyelashes and a mustache on. Otherwise I look like me ( I look good). I might be wearing the neon beanie or the sheer pink bonnet from the bbarn and i painted a small kiss onto the cheek. I have to really navigate to get to the piano because of all the strings—bending, crawling, and lifting legs and arms to part them to make a path. I get to the piano/computer. I maneuver to slip on the suspended shirt over my bra. Its sort of like choreography/kinda ridiculous and difficult but I act like I do it a lot. I see that zoe is chatting me. She has been writing things like ‘hi, babby MAMA’ the things that we write to each other. I write back. Ask if she wants to vid chat. All thru typing that the audience sees. We video chat, she is wearing a mustache and fake eyelashes too. We don’t acknowledge this. She acts like she doesn’t know it’s a performance and she is being broadcasted, she acts like its just a normal chat sesh. She has to actually know though because how could I get her to do this on a Friday night? I ask her if she wants to play a song. She gets out her flute. We play a duet together. Possibly ‘fina’ or ‘pega’ (songs we wrote recently that have overlapping lyrics that really require two people, cannot be performed alone) or a chopin song (one of the ones i have known since i was little by heart). When the song is over, we wave goodbye and sort of say I miss u. and then I get out of the shirt, out of the hand things, and quietly leave the room through the labyrinth of strings.

I've been looking at janet echelman's net sculptures today. i love the forms that the netted structures take and how they interact with their environment BY being transparent, whispy.

here is a piece in process as i develop the work for the show. as it stands now, the show is made up of 4 wall sculptures that extend into space, and 2 videos that depict two of them being distressed and unmade on small wall screens.

today i made the most gorgeous video i have ever made. it depicts the long mohair knit piece being broken down and stretched into topographical landscapes. recalling this (italo calvino, invisible cities-- trading cities 4)

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

i ended up feeling like the concepts i wrote about for titles in my last post no longer FULLY describe what it is i am doing. this work is all still so new, and i feel like i need more time with it to title it. for the press release i wrote new work by silvie deutsch, i can always title it the right thing for my website/documentation, or even for the show itself, but now, just new work feels right. no use putting words i don't fully endorse behind something i've worked so hard on. the write up for the show is really really good:

On Friday, February 25 : Silvie Deutsch at Appendix Project Space

Opening Reception : 7 PM

Appendix presents new work by Silvie Deutsch, produced on-site during the artist's residency at Appendix. Deutsch conceives of manufactured objects as possessed of a life cycle that parallels and interacts with the human, dense with the inherent tensions of their creation, and ripe with the potential for rebirth.

Appendix Project Space is located in the south alley between 26th and 27th Avenues off of NE Alberta Street.

{photos/videos: 1 is janet echelman's target swooping ii (2001), 2 is my own new work, 3 is my newest animation video}

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.}

Went and saw erin turner’s show in san fran last night. I left feeling pretty inspired and fell asleep with my mind buzzing with ideas (love that.) her work had some overlaps to mine, and I was excited by how she used a space that I am going to show at in the future. I think it was essential for me to critique her show in order to help me structure my own, because there were things I really responded to and liked about the show and things I would have done differently if it were my project. 

The show, as I experienced it at least, was about a huge red piece of hairy rubber that had gone on a journey from her hometown in Tulsa, Oklahoma all the way to the gallery in sf. The whole show was pretty dimly lit, and there was a slide show being projected of the red thing’s very visually striking journey cross country... amazing photos.
The red rubber piece was intertwined on the ceiling with a large intricately woven intestinal shape made out of newspaper. There were paintings on plastic drop cloths on the walls and also paper mache’d chicken wire pieces in a corner. At one point the artist asked the people at the art show to lie down on the ground and she played a sound recording that was layered poetry that somehow related to the whole thing but I found pretty abstract.

the most successful things --- i really liked:
-that the red piece had been on a journey—and the slideshow described where it had been. It was autobiographical about her own voyage from her hometown westward, but the piece was there to absorb it. while i was looking at the sculpture, i was very aware that it might be soiled with all the places it had been. the photos were beautiful and they gave the red piece so much history and personality.

- she used the gallery space so dramatically; it was impressive in size and there was so much going on (painting, sculpture, projection, sound, performance)

- Mythic quality. Even though it was hard to decipher, the red piece looked like fire and there was something about it that reminded me of native American ritual and dance. The installation was called ‘the totem and the ocean’ which led me to believe it was about something deep but i kinda liked how vague the references were.

After seeing erin’s show I jotted down ideas for my own show, naturally getting stressed out because I am going to make a similar (although slightly shorter) journey to Portland next week.here's what i wrote down:

-basis for the show: seams document labor as drawing
- must use space dramatically – installation/experience, not just discrete sculptures
-should the drive to Portland be documented like erin's red piece? (i could document scenery, a garment’s journey from santa cruz to Portland? the embedded stories in clothes that i could create myself.) this could be worth doing even if i don't end up using the photos.-video/sound – maybe I shouldn’t think about the san fran show right now... a few posts back i was writing about making videos with music and maybe i should just show a few in portland? even though there might have been too much going on in erin's show, there is something so powerful about orchestrating an entire experience -- and trying to incite all the senses.




-large installational task for 3 weeks… how will I spend my 3 weeks in Portland? i liked how erin used the red piece to make a journey and the newspaper piece to work on when she got there. and like my commercial pattern pieces in my thesis, i love laborious big tasks, masses of one thing. i am imagining a web of cut away seams suspended in the center of the room, as i described in this post, sort of like eva hesse's tangled pieces or marcel duchamp's 16 miles of string.
- use bargain barn clothes/collected materials, references to clothes line/closet, heavily OCD/organized packing – my own wardrobe, materials. Should I bring my keyboard?
-Etsy? Idea of money/value somehow present, sentimental value/stories meets retail
-Plaster/paint – messy art – these can be discrete pieces

to tentatively include in the show:
-camo piece
-sari piece
-jackets
-tent
-videos
-clothesline w/ bbarn/personal clothes
-seam drawing installation
-mutants

to do before i go:
collect knittings/yarn for videos
organize stuff I printed at fabric workshop, bbarn stuff, etsy
cut seam drawings and make mutants – plaster, paint

to bring:
sewing machine, thread, sewing supplies
computer
camera
piano?
Clothesline/pins
Fabric workshop work
Personal clothes, bag of thrifted bbarn clothes
Etsy clothes
Seams/mutants

{photos: 1 & 2 erin turner's poly's gone 3 works in progress from the totem and the ocean (erin turner), 4 eva hesse , 5 marcel duchamp's sixteen miles of string, 6 tony cragg (he had a rope tossed into the sky and took a picture of the resulting 'drawing') ... images 1, 2, 3 are from erin turner's website and images 4, 5, 6 were found in a web piece called 'string theory' written by one of my fave craft theorists's glenn adamson from the victoria and albert museum website}