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

pre-finals in the studio

current obsession:


the state of my studio:








tape, coffee, and everything I could find in the kitchen:


new sculpture:


still from a new video:


video's I wish I made:

MFA art auction

This event was stressful and made me want to die ... however, we raised a shit-ton of money for our MFA thesis show in NYC. Thanks to everyone who came out!

Another perk of the evening....me and my family made out like bandits!


An awesome print by John O'Donnell



Two of my favorite Siobhan Landry photos.


A coveted Ben Piwowar painting


Two sculptures from a Monica Bock installation.

Wonder

“When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and be astonished at it. Since all this may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us, I regard wonder as the first of all passions. It has no opposite, for if the object before us has no characteristics that surprise us, we are not moved by it at all , and we consider it without passion”. -Rene Descartes from ‘The Passions of the Soul’.

Artist as magician

Current obsession: Jamie Isenstein






Changing the viewer's perception of reality... transforming the norm... um.

midterms

almost killed us all...

Open Studios

Party on.

Video art...

Michael Smith


Tony Oursler


Guy Ben-Ner


Gillian Wearing

SNOW DAY!

snowwwwwww day.... expect writing.

Yes and yes.

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.”

-James A Michener

video, video, video...

I made this yesterday...



...not sure what to do with it.

This was cool...

Thanks for pointing this out Dwell OneUnit



Read more here...