coming up with a new title for tuck your shirt leave it loose video:

decayed
becomes threadbare
own volition
microcosm
macrocosms and microcosms
receding domain

domain's own volition

domain
hopeful, i rebuild

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

I spent today revamping my website. i added the pictures from my portland show, now titled tuck your shirt, leave it loose. i also cleaned up other sections so that there are only the most descriptive pictures. i think i'm getting better at self-editing my work and not needing a second opinion. i feel this sense if something is amazing and i can also feel it when its not. ive been thinking a lot about this inner sense relating to the way i choose my outfit in the morning or how i decorate my room. there is certainty and reason behind each charm on a necklace or placement of furniture, its just more of an intuitive thing. i think sometimes art can just be a feeling.








still checking out pippiloti rist a bunch on the internet. her use of projection is really purposeful; her means of harnessing the ability to create a contemplated atmosphere with projection is so clean and poetic, yet sort of loud.

{photos: my own tuck your shirt, leave it loose, 2011; pippiloti rist, Herbstzeitlose (Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less), 2004}

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}

last night I was remembering when janine Antoni came to wes, the piece she talked about that I still think about is her piece Slumber (1993) where she slept in a gallery with an EEG machine which read her rapid eye movements, and then she wove these ‘dream mappings’ into her blanket in the morning with a loom positioned at the foot of the bed. In the lecture she talked about the story of the three fates—to her the spinning of thread was like birth, the weaving, life; and the cutting, (ultimately finishing the piece) was death. I have been thinking about this a lot in relation to Antoni said that the only time she really felt ‘in her body, in relation to the world is when she is making,’ and I remember getting this sense from anne Wilson too when I worked with her, she talked about ‘life affirming practice,’ a lot and I think this has been a basis for me in engaging in repetitive actions and and feeling remorseful when I don’t. I always feel this profound sense of life affirmation when i go to the bargain barn, just seeing all the stuff that is forgotten and piled in the world, the possibilities of second lives for all this abandoned material... and then choosing what stuff will come home with me, processing it and then, imbuing it with new life.

I haven’t been updating the blog for a few days because I have been really trying to sort out what is going on in this show.

create these drawings with shadows and trying to imbue ‘life’ into these thngs. Here are some title ideas-- I have to come up with a title and press release tomorrow. Please contact me with feed back as to title ideas!

reanimate objects
kinetic
hummings
ebbings
oscillations
waverings
clambering
crawling

awake

{photos: 1 & 2, janine antoni's slumber (1993), 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 my own work in progress}

I've noticed a funny cycle that I go through as I go in and out of being inspired. sometimes i feel void of all inspiration and all i want to do is numbly look at fashion collections on style.com or in magazines, but then it backfires and i see something that really throws a wrench in my numbness and makes me so excited and angry at the same time because i wish that i made it so badly and i can't handle it. I was especially inspired this fall ‘10 by the ‘09 fall/winter’s comme des garcons collection. that is to say that i think it is one of the only things that i thought about for an entire 3 months. One thing kawakubo (the designer) did that inspired me to the point of wanting to copy were these ghostlike coats of flesh colored tulle, where all the seams were made visible by the sheerness of the fabric. Brought to my attention one of the reasons I love sheer fabrics so much, is because when the light shines through it’s the seams that really become the focus.
I also love kawakubos sense of utility/fragility that screams survival in this collection—there's the sheer ghostly flesh colored tulle but then there's also military nods of army/navy type fabrics, even ethnic blankets, jacket facades, all collaged together, and I love how she uses what looks like twill tape (that you use to draw on dress forms normally) but she uses them to draw on her garments—completely brilliant! also there are toes painted on the oxfords...

When I was working at Berkeley rep, I learned from the tailor kathy that there are so many innards inside a men’s jacket, and I have been thinking for a while about making a coat where all these 'guts' (interfacing, padding, stitching, etc.) are visible. Or what if there were commercial patterns encased inside? I’ve always thought of the patterns/instructions as being just under the surface of clothes, as if you go back a step and they are revealed. I wonder if I could play with this idea, make the metaphor literal. There is something about sheer fabric covering things, like a haze, or veil, that really gets me; there is a little suggestion of time, or presence, without full disclosure.

[etymological side note again--the word apocalypse comes from Calypso from the Odyssey (there is the Odyssey again, should I re-read?). Calypso is the nymph who hides Odysseus away for years, and the ‘calypse’ part of the word means to hide of cover, and apocalypse originally meant revealing, disclosing, uncovering, which I just am so excited by in the context of clothes, or knitting/unraveling, or getting dressed.]

I wrote before about clothing as protection for survival of change, of being uncomfortable, of the harshness of the world. immediately I think of the convertibility of tents, bullet vests, forts, childhood forts. Lucy orta’s costumes. When I was in philly I found these ‘shelter halves’, (these buddy system ponchos), and I was thinking about rei kawakubo, and this fall winter ’09 collection in specific, mostly just about clothes as cocoons to protect people from the harshness of the world. This was when I was screen printing onto fabrics and found objects at the Fabric workshop and museum where I was an apprentice recently. I was focused on refashioning flat patterns, printing on lots of different fabrics ranging in sheerness/thickness from organza to canvas, even printed on army tents and army jackets that I found at the army surplus store. I even printed on an Indian silk sari. But I printed instructions to make a freaky tankini for siamese twins onto these shelter halves, these buddy system tents, that they actually used in world war II, called Zeltbahns. I love the implied convertibility (from poncho to shelter, the fact that there is this buddy-based assembly that needs to happen, that they are so readily garments and also architecture. Plus there is something so astro turfy about camo. something very nature v. culture in a sneaky way that becomes uber deep. Through some handy internet research, I found these diagrams for set up, that are so incredible I keep thinking of replicating them in some way. I am scared of making 2 dimensional work again, but I think i would be able to if it was disguised as instructions. I will post pictures of the shelter ponchos once i finish sewing together the printed clothing that will emerge from the side, but today i just finished this pixelated camo screen printed siamese tankini (that wont be the title don't worry.) i plan to epoxy it so it will be more like a stiff body shell, so i have to make a mold for that. but you can see in the detail how i screen printed directions for its making directly on the fabric itself. the pixelated camo was really exciting to me, especially when i found out that it is harder to detect a person wearing it than regular camo, like on cameras the pixels hide the wearer better. another bonus about the epoxy that i learned from my prototype is that it will actually tone down the brightness of the camo and the screen printing i did just sings out, louder than pictured here. hawt.

On another note, here are some possible show titles for portland:

universe, cloth, map

ordinary vestiges

instructions and extroversions

seams and extroversions

any favorites? or other suggestions?

{photos: 4 comme des garcons fw09 photos from style.com, lucy orta's refuge wear intervention london east end (1998), u.s. 1943 army photo from olive drab, , my own screen printed pixel camo siamese tankini (currently untitled, prototype)}