Another edit of Carelessness with Carefulness. Can't decide if I like it.

Another edit of Hopeful, I rebuild:



Unrelated but relevant: right now I'm reading Great House by Nicole Krauss. There are a few different threads of stories running through it, all tied together by a desk that exerts power of those who have had it in their possession. I love that a simple object can hold so much meaning for the characters in the book. It brings up interesting questions about objects and where they go, ideas of ownership, memory, permanence. Its really good. Krauss seems to have similar beliefs about objects as I do, namely, that they are keepers of (historical, sentimental, powerful) meaning than they appear sometimes. She writes, 'A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a sightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrive at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away.' (33)

Better editings of documentations for Amending and Unmakings:

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

Documentation of Amending in New Orleans, part of Prospect 2.

I have arrived in New Orleans. Went and saw our site and the crumbling brick walls that we may use. I also visited the one of the last remaining high end fabric stores in the country.

videos/imagery to make for amending :
walls breaking open / tearing down walls
fire, burning, unburning : the veil from the store?
light flickering on and off
cracks and gaps
commercial patterns ?
a needle floating back and forth
repetition in the fabric store -- buttons, thread, ribbons, stackings

Invitation:
Any wall — literal or metaphorical — blocks us from seeing. But we’re always finding those closed borders in each other and in ourselves. What does it look like when a wall is built, broken, and rebuilt? Through projection and sculptural installation, artists Silvie Deutsch and Kira Akerman clothe two brick walls in an empty lot on Oretha Castle with intricate textile structures to reveal the energy of their making.

Amending
Silvie Deutsch & Kira Akerman
October 22, 23 & 24, 8 pm to 10 pm.
Melpomene and Magazine
New Orleans, LA

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}

video thoughts explosion list for amending:
moving shadows

interdependent units
integrated systems
stitch by stitch, brick by brick, frame by frame, pixel by pixel
click click click
a run in a stocking
jenga

quantity, scale, time, size
it can change in shape or form but never change in size
roads without context or scale

change of scales
shifting scales
altered scales

Video Experiment Day Two: Carelessness with Carefulness

ink and water on plastic bag, stop motion animation

humble
plastic
carelessness with carefulness

For the next few weeks, I'm working on projections for my installation in New Orleans, a collaboration with Kira Akerman, called Amending, its for the biennial art festival called Prospect 2.

Our proposal:
Amending is an outdoor animation projected onto the facade of an old building, the former home of Promenade Fabrics in the former Garment District. Amending clothes this facade to reveal its liveliness: an intricate landscape of textile structures and tangled string. Amending is a meditation on our disposable society, and the disconnection of the process of construction from product. Amending is a collaboration by artists Silvie Deutsch and Kira Akerman. It will play on loop for the first week of Prospect 2.

Now we are envisioning sculptural elements as well as projection. The installation will be at an art space called Zeigeist. We are still deciding whether or not to project on an outdoor wall or an indoor wall.

My next 3 weeks leading up to going to New Orleans to do the installation is fairly unstructured, and I'm coming up with a system so I can insure I get a lot of work done. I am going to make a loose video experiment everyday.

More video ideas to try later:
-overlapping 2 different knitting videos
-dipping a woven piece in wax, like a network of wicks, and watching it burn/melt
-unknitting found textiles
-burning/unburning holes in a woven structure
-dripping water onto something-- paper? or some sort of disintegrating substance
-melting / unmelting shaved ice. I was thinking last night about making an animation of something slowly disintegrating as it gets wet, and then reversing the footage. what are other things that melt/disintegrate when they get wet?

-Water--some shots of water, but maybe make it abstracted from itself so you arent so sure its water.

-i want to make a tunnel / ruth asawa inspired tube unravel video. that appears to go into the wall. but i dont really know how i will do this. i wish i knew how to do computer generated animation, but i think i'm relegated to the stop motion and my housemate has a little flip video that makes low definition videos also. there are ruth asawa's pieces at de young where i was the other day. i was struck by the shadows they cast, the fact that they are static but still vibrate with the intricate repetition that went into making them. i imagine the tunnel knitting video to look a bit like one of her pieces but if you were to turn it on its size and look right into it, like a telescope. i dont know how i would make this video but i really hope i can.

Now I'm just jotting down ideas from the various emails and notebooks they have ended up in, so they can be in one place:

-organic forms
-knitting / unraveling
-relating my videos to the cellular / biological / heart. i like when there is more to what you see than what you are seeing. like there are more interpretations people could have depending on their viewpoint /background / interests.
-beauty in flaws, unraveling, breaking, wabi sabi
-highlighting / showcasing the places where things break, are asymmetrical, imperfect.
-recording peoples conversations.
- recording the river
-lace would cast amazing shadows. i think we can dictate the mood by dark lighting, video is conducive to being quiet, as are sound pieces. maybe we dont have drinks and snacks there at all? i dont want it to be a mingling art show in the traditional sense either.

-gentrification of objects, trash-to-spectacle, history of space/objects of labor
-Cusp of change: feeling of contingency. the fragility of the threads being broken, Thread, pitter patter, build up, recede.
gentrification-- something attaining more value. This reminds me of those bails of clothes sent to Africa, the losing team t-shirts for the super bowl or whatever... a sweater from barney's in a thrift store (thats the opposite of gentrification), finding something that is trash and making it spectacle-- that is the gentrification of objects.
-Blown apart / simultaneously contained world.
-we begin gathering things from the streets, from people, friends. imagine them hung from transparent wires from the ceiling, all at different intervals, giving the appearance of a rauschenberg piece or dumpster or shit-shack that has exploded into lots of little pieces. objects, material, some organic, some commercial, some whole, some broken. there is an unraveling video / water video on the brick wall, the wall looks alive, maybe this wall is a tunnel of fibers penetrating the wall, going through it. there is also a projection on the floor, textile energy, that will hit both the floor, the people in the space, their clothes, the objects that we suspend in the air. the space is only lit by the projections. the objects-- some are fabric but also just chards of wood, trash, anything we find in the 2 weeks. in my head this stuff is swaying a bit in the air, the air is thick with this blown apart world. and, some of the objects can be very specific to the area, things people would recognize? maybe we use a fan to get it really moving? or maybe the projection itself with its movement and the people in the space will create the movement.

what if there could be projection lapping at the contained detritus like water? like an ebb and flow of magic, the light comes and goes as if it were a whirring lapping shore? a world being blown apart, this is the artist's work i saw the other day that i was excited by: her name is cornelia parker, the piece i saw was called 'anti mass'. parker's work got me thinking about burnt relics of the past, and the history of a specific space. burnt fabric? still interested in playing with burning and wetting fabric.
i also saw this guy bruce conner's work.
i like his aesthetic -- that dirty, stretched, decaying, organic ...

we don't want the installation to look like wall-e's home; im not going for making our own shit shack hoarders episode, but why cant this be a set, like a fabricated environment that people interact with? i also like the idea of participation -- people engaging in the act of the unraveling they see around them. how we make them engage without disturbing the peaceful, quiet, contemplative space?

Just discovered this guy Josh Blackwell.
interesting use of found trash / textile techniques / carelessness with carefulness
- bed sheet windows on the wall being burned/ unburned. or what about real windows? I think using imagery of domesticity is appropriate for this project...
-there is the sound of water, the river, maybe overlayed with found recordings we could make of people in the city as we collect things. violin strings? Environment / sense engage / experience: idea-to-visual image. water sounds. These sounds could be mixed with something else. I keep thinking about violins, possibly just the stringy-ness of them. We could do some found sound recording of the Mississippi river, maybe even people talking on the street. something about recording sound making it possible to freeze/preserve a moment in time and space is really relevant to whats going on here.
-I like the idea of 2 projections, one on the ground/peoples' bodies/clothing, and one on the brick wall. the 2 videos can be in dialogue with each other. we should just fantasize about this environment and then figure out the technical details of how to make it happen, and then we can scale back if necessary. reflection in mirror, found chards, reflection in water? projecting onto people/ clothes. intimacy with textiles, memory of space, history of labor.

- How can we integrate the whole community? It is definitely out of a white box, and maybe if this event were more everyone friendly, less obtuse and art-speaky; non-academic, definitely. how can we make this experience more interactive? i immediately thought of felix gonzalez torres, that guy who put a big pile of candy in a corner and asks you to take from it, or, this flaming lips show i went to once where they had little kids dressed up in animal costumes handing out fudgsicles to the crowd. something about being able to take something small and sweet and free makes things more accessible. and hey, maybe taste could be a sense we activate as well? or we advertise something about the show in our flyer that makes all kinds of people eager to come? a clothing swap? some sort of raffle? sending out kid/everyone friendly invites. bring an object to place in an alter... would people do it? maybe if they got something in exchange... i am imagining a corner of the room as a cascade of forgotten objects like stuffed animals and stuff, kind of piled like felix gonzalez torres candy pile, and there is projection on it of the knitting... kids rolling around in it....

- commercial patterns, im still obsessed.. i do think of them as a map, a map of the body, a map of the labor/directions that go into clothing... you can see why i spent a year just focusing on them. one issue with them is the are so fragile, they need to be backed with something (i used sheer fabric and glue to stiffen them in my thesis.)
-- definitely need to project onto brick wall, so special, but also project onto another surface as well?
-- how high is the ceiling? strings / ropes hanging?
- lights / flickering / candles... projection need darkness, projection creates its own strange light
WATER-have you ever noticed how rarely water looks like water? (abstracted water shots, that maybe dont look like water at first.)

-white water (like in a river, rushing, that could be interesting looking)
-how water sometimes obscures whats in it, like maybe we submerge little objects or things under a little water and that makes it hard to figure out what they are. i like the reveal/conceal thing both in the textile unraveling/raveling and in water submerge/emerge
-both textiles and water have delicate texture, ephemeral structure
-rivers and seams -- converging, attaching, dividing, ripping,
-never seeing the same water twice (in the case of a river, you dont move your eyes yet the water is constantly changing in one spot)

{photos/videos: my own video experiment; ruth asawa's wire sculptures at the de young, cornelia parker's anti mass (2005); bruce connor's snore (1960); one of josh blackwell's plastic baskets; felix gonzales torres' portrait of ross (1991); roni horn's still water (the river thames, for example) - image c (1999)}

new video experiments for my installation for prospect 2 in new orleans:

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}

lots of new ideas and the organization of old ones.

today working on editing the video I made in Portland—adding music. I’m handing it into ATA which is that video collective that I went to a show at when I first got to the city. When I saw that show I was interested in becoming more involved with that video meets music meets installation world—I guess this is a good opportunity. I guess applying to juried shows feels important and good when it supplies me with an external and real deadline to work towards. The outcome of whether or not I get selected is sort of irrelevant to me. But I think I’ve chosen to revisit this Portland footage because I believe it is good and never really had the affirmative response from the folks there … perhaps ATA will see it differently?

My description of the video:
I am interested in the disconnect between an object and the process of its construction; I see my material world as teeming with labor, history and potential. This video depicts both literal and metaphorical tangled and interconnecting systems that continually reorganize, expand, and ebb; I have used knitted structures to allude to environmental landscapes, biological cell structure, and textile based handwork. Through unmaking and then remaking, I destroy a microcosm of our world, and then, hopeful, I rebuild it.

I’ve been trying to revisit my artist statement and make it more relevant to the work I’ve done since college. Seeing these little bodies of work I’ve done (thesis installation, costume work, individual objects, Portland installation) as related but separate… how can I better link them with words?

Right now the big themes are :
- disclosing/making foreign the process of making clothes & the material traces of making, processes disconnect from product - mapping, systems and information
- destruction, rebuilding, and traces, decay with time
-the material environment abounds with an anarchic energy of making -- objects, materials and environments have their own volition
-value & trash-to-treasure, preciousness, clothes are portals into the past/stories. the bargain barn & the idea that manufactured objects possess a life cycle of their own
- process is a combination of whim and system
-closet rituals and the curation of one's personal things.

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}

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}

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:

I made a flikr and uploaded the current documentation of the wall sculptures here. Tonight we are going to skype with josh pavlacky and he is going to give me a little webcam crit. I sent him the links to the two new videos (here and here.) Today I've been experimenting with putting music I made to the videos. It doesn't seem to be working. I had a video chat with kira this morning and she said like she felt they needed MORE-- that just the imagery wasn't captivating enough. I don't know if I agree. Today I am feeling cold and uninspired. I started to work on the random object experiments and I think I will continue to do this today. The one material that is exciting me the most is a sort of fibrous straw boat-like shape (i don't really know what this is used for in life, but its a very compelling object.) I have hung it from the ceiling and i am figuring out what best to do with it, but I am having trouble getting in the zone...

Here are some images of the wall sculptures still in process.

Here is a video i made last night as i worked (read destroyed) the knotted acrylic 'jesus' tapestry.
Still reading Invisible Cities, I found this passage that really resonated with this piece-- the burning, melting of the plastic fibers that were once precious to someone, something sad and reverent, a sweet mexican grandma. the work and unwork i've put into it, the 'charring of burned lives' sits like 'scabs over the city.'

'Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement; this is what you would find at the end of your journey.'

Also still listening to joanna newsom and i've started really listening to the lyrics and am finding that a lot of them (especially on Ys) overlap with the sculptural imagery in my head:

'The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness'

HOUSEKEEPING: I've updated these sections of my website with new work from this summer, fall and winter: seam drawings, pattern combines, and cocoons and vacancies.

Today travis and zack are repainting the walls of the gallery white... so I had to heavily document the pieces as they were so i can put them up again later. but in the interim while the paint dries, tonight and tomorrow i am performing a little experiment: the boys bought me (without my choosing) some random objects that ARENT textile related and i am going to try to extend my unmaking process to my material environment beyond the cloth realm... we'll see what happens...

{photos/video: 1 my own scabby metropolis, 2 my own pattern combine, 3 my own hanging seam, and 4 is my own vacant cocoon}

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}