you know when people start looking like their pets?

I wonder if they same thing occurs amongst partners?

on a side note, this:

Ted Leo And The Pharmacists cover Tears For Fears

Art 2610

Nice!




they totally said that...

a song for my cat.

Gaga Stigmata

My work has been featured on Gaga Stigmata.

"Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological journal that takes seriously the project of shock pop artist Lady Gaga. Unlike other critical and creative journals, Gaga Stigmata moves at the speed of pop."



I am a big fan of the blog and it is super exciting to be a part of Gaga Stigmata.

SUPPORT SYSTEM

On the occasion of the Women’s Conference visit to Long Beach, curator Jeff Rau and Sixpack Projects present Support System, an exhibition of local, national, and international, contemporary women artists responding to concepts of feminine empowerment through mutual encouragement and community building.

SUPPORT SYSTEM
October 16 – December 4, 2010
curated by Jeff Rau
Sixpack Projects at Phantom Galleries Long Beach
170 N. Promenade, Long Beach
OPENING RECEPTION:
Tuesday, October 26, 7-10pm



ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Support System presents the work of women artists responding to concepts of feminine empowerment through mutual encouragement and community building. The exhibition title is borrowed from a work by Lynn Aldrich constructed from a collection of bras, anonymously donated by women in the art world – curators, dealers, writers, artists, teachers and students. Playing on the actual function of the undergarments, the quilt focuses attention on this community of women in the arts serving as a support system of another kind.
In a day of multiple and occasionally conflicting feminisms, women artists continue to re-interpret their positions in the world. Through diverse materials and methods, the eight artists included here employ humor, beauty, metaphor and mystery in an exchange of tangents and trajectories. From this dialogue a larger concept emerges, one of nurture and development, where individuals and ideas thrive and affect change when they are confident of the support of a shared community.
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Lynn Aldrich
Natalie Anderson
Monica Bock
Jenine Haard
Anna Von Mertens
Cielo Pessione
Susan Porteous
J.R. Uretsky

Sixpack Projects at Phantom Galleries Long Beach is located at 170 N Promenade in downtown Long Beach at the corner of Broadway and Promenade. The exhibition will be on view, October 16 through December 4, 2010. Gallery admission is free. Gallery is open Thursday through Saturday evenings and by special appointment; regular hours are THURSDAY THROUGH SATURDAY 4 – 7pm (there is 24/7 pedestrian viewing). To schedule a viewing contact Sixpack Projects at info@sixpackprojects.com, or for more information visit www.SixpackProjects.com and www.PhantomGalleriesLA.com. Also on Facebook.

Me, me, me...

I haven't written for a while. Writing...well blogging, incestuous blogging, for that is what I do...anyway, the practice of writing for me has a similar effect on me that my performance does. All of my work is about transformation. With sculpture the transformation happens to the object; performance and writing however, transforms me - and I don't like that. Obviously I'm drawn to transformative processes, I surround myself with them from the books I read, the "coming of age" shit I watch on hulu, to the world views I have subscribed to, all of these things are located in a change...a metamorphous where you start off as one thing, you transform, and you finish anew. You are transformed and you are better for it.

Recently I have hit a wall. I don't know what the wall is, we'll call it my 4th or 5th life crisis (if I had continued to call it 'quarter life crisis' I'd be dead by now). So this crisis (whatever its number) would be fine, that is I would be okay with it accepting it for what it is the triennial Jamie-break down, if it wasn't affecting my work so much. This crisis is dripping a cancer into the one thing I pride myself on, the one thing that I can actually admit that I love about myself: my work ethic. Today the UConn sculpture tech, a guy who has traveled the world, built buildings and now obsesses daily over his tiny daughter AND still has time to listen to me squabble about my studio while choking back tears with coffee, threw something at me. A softball sized nugget of hard love. Reality at it's most painful, like when my mother apologizes to me for fucking me up a little as a kid and then tells me that I am an adult now, she's sorry, she loves me and to get over it. Perhaps the way I approach my studio practice, the discipline, the gold stars the puffy-chest feeling after a 12 hour studio day that started at 6 am is not serving me, or worse not serving my art.

The performance and writing, writing especially, are incredibly vulnerable for me (...as I post on the internet). In a way they are a break from my own authoritative structure, by performing and writing I am protesting, having tiny sit-ins and fiery revolutions against my very structure, led by my own body.

Performance and writing are easy to avoid. I don't have to do those. But my sculptures, my John the beloved, are revolting too. And they are doing it in the worst way possible: they have become safe and they are pretty. Worst of all they are being created outside of me and doing just fine for themselves. They are at college, they have gotten married, they know how to change a tire and I sure as hell didn't teach them that.

As an artist maybe it isn't such a bad thing, producing sculptures that are good looking and self-sufficient. I would love to ride that wave all the way through my thesis and then roll around in the white water like a dumb kid. However, a funny thing has happened. Some other part of me is standing up, waging battle against the hyper producer and all its Stepford spawn. A crippled and suppressed something has pushed it's finger through the dirt of me and said, "stop." Productive me hates this. It writhes in this halted strike, rationalizing it and is cruel about it deeming this gesture, this hand wave, this red flag as retarded. Productive me needs to move, and since my hands have stopped my mind turns in on itself. Name calling: I'm slow...worse I am stupid.

The sun is out and it is fall. Edie, my hyper sexual plant is out-growing her wooden box planter that I just bought for her in August. It was my birthday when I got Edie's new home, I was at Ikea with Lani. We ate crawfish and I walked around Ikea for hours trying to consume but leaving only with Edie's box and some AA batteries. I am not stupid. Really, I'm not. I'm not broken either. My new god Time, like my old god Yahweh, isn't telling me I am stupid or broken either, that's my vernacular. I am tired of telling gods to shut up and leave me alone. Let them come. Let them drip through ceiling, or strut from nature, or dash around the room on the backs of light rays. I'll be here, I'll be quiet, and I'll be working.

images:Joe Sola

Thanks for coming out!

Friends!


My work pleading with Lynn's work, "love me..."

Kris always helpful, sometimes creepy.

exhibition

LAYER CAKE
October 2 – October 24, 2010
curated by Alyssa Cordova and Jeff Rau



FEATURED ARTISTS:
Lynn Aldrich
Sandow Birk & Elyse Pignolet
Joe Davidson
Laurie Hassold
J.R. Uretsky

Grand Central Art Center, Project Room
125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana

OPENING RECEPTION:
Saturday, October 2nd, 7-10pm

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Layer Cake presents a selection of California based artists who all work with the ordinary stuff of our daily lives. From Scotch tape to twist ties, discarded toys to cleaning scrubbers, likely their raw material exists in each of our homes. But here it has become something new. These artists gather material, build upon it layer by layer, and produce surprising works that defy concise description. Though we may easily identify the physical constitution of each work in terms of very familiar objects, to experience it in this new form transcends the sum of its parts and becomes something all together more complex and enticing: the layer cake. Utilizing both figurative and physical layering in their work, the artists challenge us to reconsider the product of our contemporary culture: calling attention to the cost of our consumption, challenging us to learn from the debris of our past, and compelling us to search for a better way forward buried within the striations.

---

Kris and I will be there trying to not be nervous.

yay

www.jruretsky.com

Videos will be up soon.

new work

Cold Feet
2010
6.5 ft x 5 ft
Paper cups, glue, pipe cleaners, faux fur, and water balloons.

Such pleasure as there is, is here, now.

“…there is a love for the marvelous, a belief in the marvelous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men.” –“Frankenstein” Mary Shelley



I was born to an investigator and a magician. My brothers and me the result of chaos and order, giggles and tradition, scatter and shelved. The task for each of us is to negotiate the beautiful contradictions of our everyday.


I didn’t take many pictures this summer while in Monterey and I think it was on purpose.



I miss my little almost-family.



And I am loving my own space.



“It was work that could not be hurried at, a meticulous finding and fitting together, as though reconstructing a previous wall that had been broken up and scattered like puzzle pieces…the pace of it could not be borne by most modern men…those men had to move in closer accord with their own rhythms, and nature’s, than we do…their capacities were only those of flesh and blood. They talked as they worked. They joked and laughed. They sang. The work was exacting and heavy and hard and slow. No opportunity for pleasure was missed or slighted…the work was long. At the end of this job the next would begin. Therefore, be patient. Such pleasure as there is, is here, now. Take pleasure as it comes. Take work as it comes. The end may never come, or when it does it may be the wrong end.” –Wendell Berry



Work has been as long as 3pm. Yesterday I thunk myself into a “justify and defend” hole again. Lani’s food, a slow bike ride and a poet lifted my chin. I am getting better at wiggling back into my own skin and sculpting from there. Finally, an honest starting place.

Huzzah!

New look.
Not so new Ideas.
Some Links.
Some youtube.

I graduated BIOLA a Liberal and a Feminist.
A facebook group where you don't have to be a BIOLA Alum to say, "huh?"

Current obsession

Eva Kotátková

"The starting point of my work is my nearest environment, the basic -naturally- structured communities like household, family or school with their mechanisms, rituals and schemes of mutual dependencies. Art provides me with an instrument for exploring these units, presenting them in new contexts and reflecting my own position within them. At the same time, I focus on the artistic process itself and its language: this implies permanent revisions of the classical ways of representation, artistic procedures and techniques. I work with everyday stories and situations, re-evaluating them, transforming them, locating them within new coordinates, given by my personal experience and biography. I examine simple actions by making their performance more difficult and extending their duration up to (or beyond) the limits of bearability. In this way I test my own physical dispositions, flexibility and the limits of my ability to experience particular situations, spatial and personal relations. The outputs do not aim at unity in form and style, the drawings, objects and actions interpenetrate and complement one another. I take things out of their natural environments and rearrange them into new wholes. I transform them into functionless mechanisms, hybrids, conglomerates of shapes, materials, things with divergent memories. Particularly important is the installation: it determines the way of looking at things (often by means of an equipment constructed for that purpose), or of moving about in the space, despite various obstacles set up for the body. The urge to involve the spectator into new environment, with its own impenetrable order, to expose him/her to a new perceptual experience, leads me to a permanent, perhaps rambling search for various forms of expression. The measure of their efficiency is the physical intensity and associative force of their impact on the spectator. However, an obsessive recording of things and situations by means of drawing remains for me the most intimate and direct way of expression."

summer reading

I'll be surprised if I actually finish one of these books, it is more likely that I will get half way through most of them. I will try anyway!











To make up for the C.S. Lewis:

thanks.

A Mexican turtle trainer once told me that being a human was expensive. I agree, being human is expensive; it is also mind-numbingly difficult. Most of the time all I am looking for is clarity, or a push in the right direction. Then when all the treading water pays off and clarity comes to you, or a good friend or good book pulls you out of the mess of yourself. You surface but it is just for a moment and maybe just your left eye, which was bent by astigmatism somewhere in your development, and you look and look into a universe of crisp clarity and see that you were being an ass – again. And so you sink to the bottom of your tank like those damned Mexican turtles and wait for the neurosis to pull self-loathing covers up to your chin. But then, a friend (usually the same asshole who handed you the flashlight that originally lit up your mess) knocks on your door and hands you some hope and a few pretty dresses to borrow. This is the sort of friend that finds you milling around the kitchen with an empty cup in one hand and some coffee beans in a the other, watches for a bit as you clap the two together, and then just as you are about to throw the cup across the room and just chew on the coffee beans your friend takes the beans and the cup and puts the kettle on.

Year one of grad school is over.

"Plain speaking about complex matters is not anti-intellectual, it is the achieved result of sustained intellectual labor. Moreover, poetic expression in the service of critical speculation is not the "soft" alternative to "hard" thinking. Rigor is demanded in both, but if you examine the shelves in most studios these days you will find shockingly few books of poetry or fiction." - Robert Storr

Yesterday I was reading the new Daniel Clowes comic and the character Wilson was talking about what it was like to come out of a flu or cold when he was a kid. Wilson likened the feeling to being reborn; when I think of coming off a cold I experience relief rather than rebirth, however my relationship to rebirth has been a bit tainted. Along those lines, the David Bazan show last night at The Space was an excellent example of some of the things I have been thinking about while finishing up this school year.



Before the show a friend asked me what I had been working on. At the moment I was working on my second Long Island and actually considered leaning my forehead against the rim of the glass to see if Long Island could tell me what I had been working on.

“I built a fort, and sat in it.”

Lani added that I had also video taped it. When my friend asked me why I built a fort and sat in it I thought I would spit. Spitting on someone’s french fries is not the answer I had prepared for that question, and neither is “wh-I’ don’t know,” which is how I actually answered. It was a fair question and I was being a douche.

This year has been ridden with successes and failures but mostly grace. The grace part is the most aggravating. To receive grace is to turn down one’s pride a few notches and be willing to say, “I don’t know.” Bazan is gifted at this.

For me, there is an overbearing obligation to know why I make the things I make. Honestly, sometimes I feel embarrassed to admit that the reason that I make sculptures and videos isn’t because I was responding to a traumatizing religious experience, or commenting on consumer culture, or even telling my story -- but rather, I just really like pipe cleaners. There is nothing academic about liking pipe cleaners but there is something kind of awesome about them. Then again, there is nothing academic about liking paint either. Kids like paint. My preoccupation with being academic is enough to drive me to drink, or worse - jog.

It’s summer and I miss looking at people’s faces. I’m shifting my priorities to advice I got from a book: “Don’t be an asshole and make sure everyone eats.” I’ll start by doing the dishes.

Oh and about being academic, I think (after pulling out handfuls of hair and practically drowning my liver) I am more interested in being articulate in my own approach, use of materials, and intensions.

Also, I am working on a blurb book. The book is mainly to show Kris and my folks that I didn't move to Connecticut only to drink myself into a hole.

summer

It is summer and New England is pealing the stickers off of my car.

New video: (may not be working yet)


Here are some awesome(R) things:

The Unicorns- Live at Rhino's 13- "I Was Born (A Unicorn):


David Bazan ... seeing him play tomorrow. Huzzah!


The Mormons:


glee...

There’s a storm coming.

I am insanely jealous of Anne Lamott. Most days I want to put on an Anne Lamott or David Bazan suit, like some kind of fuck - all serial killer and dance around in their doubt, make their art, be their age. I want to exchange my crashing plane for Anne’s, which is still crashing but with a hell of a lot more grace and poetry than my hooptie cargo hanger.

I want to eat her maturity and truly digest, puke up and digest again the retarding notion that I cannot understand everything. I want to shake the feeling that I am completely missing what Christianity has to offer.

Lani just ran by my window waving a messy 2 X 4 frantically screaming, “come out side right now, you’re missing it!” Then she ran off. I left my computer and found her shouting at a New England sunset; the sort of gray and pink that would cause Philip Guston to roll over in his grave and me to shove my hands in my pockets. “You can‘t see that on your computer!” I wanted to beat her with the 2 X 4, but I looked up at the sky and wished, maybe even prayed, that there was a god up there in those salmon clouds.

“There’s a storm coming!” Lani yelled and disappeared behind the side of the building. Looking into the clouds became unbearable the way Kris’s face occasionally does because it’s too beautiful, too kind, too similar to the god I thought I understood. I was also standing outside in just a t-shirt and jeans in the middle of a spring windstorm and realized that I was freezing. I sulked to the front door with all kinds of Christian ghosts on my back chuckling to themselves prodigal hymns that were exquisitely harmonized but ultimately bullshit.

I reached for the front door and it was locked. In a rush to catch Lani I had locked myself out of the building. I sprinted around to the part of the building Lani had disappeared behind and found her giggling by another entrance. Grad school is driving us all insane. John and Frank were watching the sunset smoking cigarettes and talking about boy things, Lani was calling nature out on its gorgeousness and I was all wrapped up in a goblin god-construct.

Later Lani and I, depressed and neurotic, went hunting for cheese. We exchanged insecurities over sugar, beer and mozzarella. Like and angel, Lani let me eat all the toppings off of some of her pizza and I hoped that friendship, love, pizza, good books and really hearing people would eventually fill the Jesus shaped hole in my heart that someone once told me I had.

grace

For as long as I can remember I have always thought my mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. Maybe this is why I relate so often to a character developed by Madeleine L’Engle. L’Engle’s young heroines seem to exist in a space of doubt constantly wondering how the hell they, in their itchy existence, came from such beautiful mothers.

more finals stuff...

new sculpture:



video stills:


new video (not for finals):


future wife:


No words:

Thanks for the video Lani