Ok, I didn’t do anything for Halloween. But I have been sick the past 24 hours or so, and that kind of blew my planning. Not that I was going to get up to much anyway, but I was supposed to carve a pumpkin and possibly dress up for a contest at work. Here is a pumpkin test I did this weekend, trying to make an 8-bit pumpkin. A bit shoddy and labor intensive, I think that the idea needs CNC action to execute properly.
I am pretty bad at Halloween for some reason, and usually don’t really get into it. I have thrown a couple of costumes together in the past, but nothing spectacular.
I think this eviscerated Teddy Bear (Michele had a matching one) was the best in recent years:
Once I was a Werewolf Mechanic, because I had a werewolf mask, coveralls, and a tool box. That was OK. Kind of funny even.
So today I was thinking, if I did have the energy, and had though of this a few days ago, what would I wear? Here are some ideas I will store for next year.
Bez, dancer from the Happy Mondays. The best part about this one is that no one will get it, its like a private joke with myself. Even explaining it will not help in most cases. Also, its easy. Baggy pants, big striped shirt. Maracas. Lunatic eyes, dance like a crazy person. Bez might be my #1 choice.
The corn, from Children of the Corn. Unexpected, and self explanatory. Also easy, if you can find whole corn stalks, just tie a bunch to you. You can also whisper evil things in there.
Captain Bligh. This one is topical, as he can be wondering around looking for his ship, The Bounty. Which just sunk (too soon?). Also awesome because my dad’s CB radio handle was Cptn Bligh. Therefore mine is Son of Bligh. Any time-period appropriate nautical get up will do the job. Also, the movie The Bounty rules. Go see it.
Ernest Hemingway. No one does writers, plus he is bad ass. Can do the roll neck sweater thing and carry a Swordfish and Margarita, or go shirtless with shotgun. Talk in terse sentences. Reek of rum and the sea.
Alternately, do James Joyce and blather on in nonsense words.
For some reason I also though about going as Al Stewart, also because no one would get it. Dress kind of 70s foppy, long hair wig, carry a guitar, and respond to people only in lyrics to Year of the Cat. A surefire hit!
I have been taking photos of this storage building in Hollywood just about every weeknight lately. I park in a lot that gets this 3/4 view of it, and there is just something about this tall, vaguely classic building that fascinates me. The thin ribs that catch the setting sun and cast vertical shadows, the percentage of window to blank wall (making it obvious it’s storage, but still a bit visually jarring). The way the finish changes with the color of the setting sun. I love the detail of the American flag up on top – letting you know the relative wind speed and direction in each photo. Everyone once in a while some mundane, background building in LA catches my attention for awhile…
Anyway, I will keep shooting it. These are all with my cell phone but I shoot a few with film now and again too. Here is what I have shot so far:
A few months back (yes I am really slow with posting these days) we caught the closing reception of Constructing Fantasy at the Beacon Arts Building curated by the BAB director, Renée Fox – a really fantastic local sculpture show, in a space which has been doing a lot of fantastic things. Sadly, Renée told us that the gallery will be closing (by the time I got around to posting this it has closed) – though the studios throughout the rest of the building will of course remain. Perhaps another art space will move in there, and I hope Renée and the team behind the shows will continue to put on shows at some other venue. I only made it to a handful of the shows over there at Beacon Arts, but always found something I liked. This one in particular had a lot to like.
Vesuvius, Travis Novak (in background)
The Spirit, The Breath, The Flesh, Larissa James (foreground)
The Spirit, The Breath, The Flesh, Larissa James
Vesuvius, Travis Novak
Untitled #14, Jefferey Hastings (in background)
Go Hard, Eric Johnson
Go Hard, Eric Johnson
Go Hard, Eric Johnson
Untitled #14, Jefferey Hastings
Wind Blowing… Ripples Running, Snezana Petrovic
Just a Secular Babe, Catherine Fairbanks
Just a Secular Babe, Catherine Fairbanks
Slab 1, Pontus Willfors
Untitled, Catherine Fairbanks
Metrophonix, Winter Jenssen
Untitled, Sophie Lee
Untitled, Sophie Lee
Hatching, Rachel Kaster
Hatching, Rachel Kaster
Metrophonix, Winter Jenssen
I May Be Getting Tired of This Arrangement, Michelle Carla Handel
Okay, So I Do Need You, Michelle Carla Handel
Okay, So I Do Need You, Michelle Carla Handel
No Name, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
No Name, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
No Name, Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor
Metrophonix, Winter Jenssen
Feeling Your Love, Michelle Carla Handel
Transference is Tough Row to Hoe, Catherine Fairbanks (video)
Transference is Tough Row to Hoe, Catherine Fairbanks (video)
Welcome to the Jungle, Larissa James
several works by Michelle Carla Handel
The Universe is Inside of You, Larissa James
Last Saturday was the annual performance art extravaganza, Perform Chinatown. It was a long evening, 4pm-midnight. We stayed most of the time, but didn’t see everything, and was I disappointed to miss Karen Finley at Coagula Curatorial, but here’s some highlights of what we did see…
It all started with the amazing one-man band, Keith Walsh Experience. He played for close to two hours, non-stop. Such energy and stamina.
Jeremy J Quinn and Jerri Allyn with Erich Wise and his hand made flag pole, borrowed by McLean Fahnestock for their Flag Raising.
Allie Pohl traced participants bodies onto a large scroll as an index of “The Ideal Woman.”
After being shaved and fit into a straight jacket, Kent Anderson Butler was dragged by his barber up and down Chung King Road in a little red wagon. I’m often intrigued by what Kent will put his body through for the sake of art.
While inside Happy Lion/Mirror Gallery, Jocelyn Foyce led participants in a meditation over rice and black and white images inspired by her travels in Tibet.
As darkness fell, Tiffany Trenda walked through the growing crowd wearing a skin tight suit that compelled onlookers to pull out their smart phones to scan her with their QR Readers. I’ve never gotten those apps to work properly, so didn’t try it, but according to her website the scanned codes link to “information on the effect of man-made materials have on the human body.”
Jeremy enjoyed being greeted by Miggie Wong as part of the gentle beings benevolent association presents Perform Wow!
And we both enjoyed listening to tones resonate through our forearms, as James Kennard of the Elbow Orchestra held tuning forks to our elbows, also at Perform Wow!
But the most compelling and moving piece was Elizabeth Leister‘s Disapeared. Jeremy and I walked into POVevolving just as she was setting up for her second drawing in an ongoing performance in which she traces the video projection of previously drawn portraits, played in reverse motion so that it appears as if the pencil is erasing the image of a woman. She did this three times, each with a different drawn portrait based on Los Angeles County missing person photos. You’d only know this if you stuck around long enough to hear the video’s voice over recite the missing person’s “vital statistics,” or if you read her project description. Haunting to say the least.
To see more we’ll all have to keep a look out for the video commentary by Dave Burns and Paige Wery, of Artillery.
I am excited to announce the final edit of my 2009-12 project, i dream in your language, will premiere in MIA: Strange Loop, curated by Alanna Simone, at the Armory Center for the Arts, Friday July 27 at 7pm. Here’s the press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MIA SCREENING, STRANGE LOOP
New Series Screens Video Art & Experimental Films
Please join us for the July screening of MIA at the Armory!
This month’s event takes place on July 27th at 7PM and features five projects each dealing with communication and misunderstanding.
Orgasmatique, Dramatique, Horror (2009) is a short performance questioning the portrayal of women and emotion in pornography, melodrama and horror films from Washinton D.C. artist Melissa Bruno.
Los Angeles artist Michele Jaquis envies people who speak multiple languages. Her series, i dream in your language (2009-2012) investigates the experience of seven such people, revealing the complex negotiations they undertake to translate and interpret words and meaning.
San Francisco based Whitney Lynn asks a rabbit (repeatedly) to ‘sit’ for a portrait in Commissioned (After W.W.) (2010).
The Complect Voice (Suite for Birds and Mammals) (2012) attempts to include a variety of animals in a musical collaboration with the artist Julie Rooney and composer Jonathan Sokol, both based in Boulder, CO.
The Foreignness of Language (2011) by Nina Ross explores the disruption of personal identity the artist experienced as she incorporated a second language after leaving Melbourne, Australia to live in Norway.
The MIA series began in June of 2012, founded by video artist Alanna Simone to promote the work of artists who use the moving image. Every 4th Friday the MIA series screens video art, experimental films, performance art, essay films and animation from local and international artists at the Armory Center for the Arts, 145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103 (map). Each program is organized around a theme and lasts a little over an hour. A donation of $5 is suggested.
Its been a busy art making summer so far for all the Rise members, including me. Since mid May I’ve been enjoying my two day a week schedule at Otis (as opposed to four during the school year) and I’ve been putting in a lot of time at the studio preparing exhibition proposals for work that’s been completed over the last three years and digging into a project I began last fall…
In 2004 when my family and I cleaned out my grandparent’s home after their deaths we found a bundle of letters written from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother. The plan was that I would take them all home, scan them and distribute CDs of the files to our immediate family members. I started scanning some in 2005, then several other projects took over my time and I didn’t get back to it until this past October. My grandmother’s sister has since died (back in December 2009), and we’ll be spreading her ashes in Central Park this summer. She would’ve loved to have read the letters, as Zaydie Bernett (Ben) Kahn and Bubbie Pauline (Zuckerberg) Kahn were her parents. What I find fascinating about the letters is not only the great love affair between Ben and Pauline, but also the descriptions of turn of the (20th) century New York City, Long Island and parts of Europe while Ben was traveling with the US Army – a great example of immigrants serving their new country before their citizenship was earned, but that’s another story… The letters are written mostly in English (which I believe was not a first language for either of them Ben being from Russia and Pauline being from Latvia) with bits of French and Yiddish, although I think my sister and I are the only ones in our family who referred to them in Yiddish, and I recall my grandfather yelling his corrections, “NO! ONLY MY MOTHER IS BUBBIE!” But whatever, to me any woman from the old world with grandkids and great-grandkids is “Bubbie.”
Although memory can play tricks, in most photos that I recall Bubbie Pauline wore a turquoise sweater, shell top and skirt set that she knit herself. I could tell that it was her “dressy-casual” attire. While everyone else seemed to have different clothes on, and many photos are clearly from different time periods, she seemed to wear this same outfit on so many occasions that were not weddings or bar mitzvahs, but still called for family photographs.
While in high school I inherited a matching sweater of a different color, also knit by Bubbie Pauline. My grandmother, who must have gotten it when her mother died, didn’t want it anymore.
It was a perfect puke-green color and I wore it all through high school, college, and graduate school, until a slightly embarrassing moment, when after years of wear and tear, a professor that I knew from undergrad whispered to me while at the 2000 CAA conference, “Its good to see you, but you shouldn’t wear that sweater anymore.” So Bubbie’s sweater went onto a top shelf in the closet and each time my husband and I made thrift store donations, her sweater was spared.
In addition to scanning the letters Bubbie received from her loving boyfriend who later became her husband, I began to unravel her puke-green sweater, with the intention of using the yarn to embroider something inspired by the text in all the letters. I am still not sure what exactly that will be, but for now I’m not worrying about that.
Partially through the first hour of unraveling, I felt a slight sadness. I was destroying one of the few remaining artifacts from that generation of my family on my mother’s side – the others being a set of Shabbat candlesticks and a ton of snap shots. But after a while, and I worked on this for several months, I felt a sense of satisfaction as I realized that my hands were touching every strand of yarn in the opposite way my Bubbie’s hands did.
I’ve rented a studio space in Boston’s SOWA District! My new home is in the 450 Harrison Ave Boston #309b. The space offers me the opportunity to show work the First Friday of each month, and also at SOWA artwalk 2x per year.
In my new studio, I recently finished this 24″x48″ canvas “It is time to race.” This is a distillation of the process I began last summer at the ICI residency. I found this phrase in a grammar textbook, I think of it as a sort of found poetry. I copied the phrase over multiple times, but copied over the reverse of the words, so as to force my eye to only draw the seen shapes, instead of automatically re-writing complete words. This is a transfer of a selection of the copies, to canvas.
More work from my residency at Vermont Studio Center. This video installation was a test for a new, portable projector I got, and a method of projecting on drawings. It is inspired by the transition from laminar flow to turbulence in a waterfall.
I made a new video on Memorial day this week, taking footage from the parade in Johnson, VT. This little parade for me brought up ideas of American identity, loss, memory, and militarized culture (which is nothing new, though maybe taking new forms these days).
Time has been flying by up in Vermont, sort of. It goes by fast, but it goes by slow too. We have made some excursions out to a few great swimming spots, in various rivers, brooks and a reservoir to jump off rocks, swing off rope swings and generally attempt to get accustomed to the cold, cold water. As many know, I have a great love for water, especially entering it at high speed from tall places. And I am very much into rivers, brooks and all that. Luckily Johnson has plenty of that.
As far as the art production goes, I have been simultaneously working on a few projects. A couple of videos, a couple of drawings in preparation for a wood sculpture (maybe with video?), and a little bit of sound editing.
The drawings and potential sculpture revolve around my current fascination with the hexagonal column structures of basalt found in several locations around the world. One example is at Devil’s Postpile at Mammoth Mountain in CA – where I went a couple of summers ago. Another is Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Not sure yet where this project will go, but I have been doing a hand-sketch drawings and a measured drawing of the hexagonal forms so far. I hope to cut out a bunch of wood hexagons this week, if I can get the right wood posts for a reasonable price.
In the video department, I have one small projection on drawings that I have completed, using the nearby waterfall and the transition from laminar flow to turbulent water for inspiration (here is a pic of the set up without the video, video documentation to come).
The other video is a called Still Life (Red Flag), and consists of several long shots of compositions I found interesting around the area my studio is in. I then took the audio from these shots, heavily processed it, and created a soundtrack. I also added in a little Etta James (as one day I was driving around with Harlan from the sculpture dept. and it came on the radio). The mood becomes eerie, and reminds me of hot, bored yet anxious summer evenings. I recommend headphones and full-screen HD when watching it.
To wrap up the post, here is a photo of a newt. We have been seeing a lot of these, some in the orange phase some in the olive green water dwelling phase. I believe its the Eastern Newt, or Red Spotted Newt (Notophthalmus viridescens). They have some sort of compass sensing in their brains, but more about that later.
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