Archive for the 'Thoughts' Category
You’re IT!
October 19, 2010keep saying kind things.
October 18, 2010
Fateful Dumpster Contents
September 29, 2010
7.21.10 Birthday Playlist (channeled through Portland’s 98.9 wclz)
July 22, 2010Jakob Dylan & Niko Case – Nothin But the Whole Wide World
David Gray – Sail Away With Me
Tori Amos – Crucify
Sister Hazel – Change Your Mind
Ray LaMontagne – Beg, Steal or Borrow
Matchbox Twenty – Push
Jump Little Children – Cathedrals
Collective Soul – Shine
Palace Something – Will Oldham
July 11, 2010Well, I guess the idea is that when you have a name of a group or an artist, then you expect that the next record, if it has the same name, should be the same group of people playing on it. And I just thought we were making a different kind of record each time, with different people, and different themes, and different sounds. So I thought it was important to call it something different so that people would be aware of the differences.[2]
Trying to Direct a Crane to Come Out This Way.
June 24, 2010Starting with a square piece of paper make a triangle (one way) with color/pattern folded inside. Open and make a triangle (the other way) with color/pattern on the folded inside. Open up to a creased X visible and fold into a rectangle with the color/pattern on the outside. Open and fold a rectangle the other way, keeping the color on the outside.
Now you have a square, color/pattern facing up, with 8 triangles between the folds. Grab each side of a rectangle fold and push the middle up and together to make a square diamond. This is tricky to describe. Everything must get folded into itself. The top becomes the body and the bottom stays open. You fold the bottom, one side at a time, into the middle crease. Then you flip it over and fold into the middle crease on the other side. Now it looks like a kite. Fold the top of the kite down over one side to make a crease and then put it back to looking like a kite.
This next part is the most difficult. You must unfold/open one side up, pull it out, and fold it down into a long diamond.
The same with the other side. Now there is a long rhombus/diamond with legs that move and a top that stays still.
Make the legs skinnier by folding them in close to the middle crease. Then tuck the leg up into its side, but not all the way. Line it up with the outside. Do this to both sides.
On one side you fold a tiny portion down to make a head and the other side is the tail. Open the wings up and expand the middle to make it sit up.
It took Elise (an experienced crane maker) making four or five consecutive cranes with me to get it programed into my muscle memory. She is good at directing one to fold, and half of these words she surely said in the process of showing me yesterday. No way is this (post) the appropriate means for directing the becoming of a crane. One needs an actual present teacher and responder to their folding. There is constant correction as one begins to go through the steps. Trying to write out a recipe for others to use sans direct interaction fails! This post intends to fail. There shall be no cranes to come in response.
However, if you come to 157 High St. There is now an assortment of colorful cranes in x to give away with visits and purchases, and there is someone to show you how to make one! Elise left us some paper!
[Last Pages of small dotted sketchbook]
June 2, 2010
Can I Get A Witness?
May 8, 2010Listening to “Someone Else’s Song” makes me want to sing and write a melody. It makes me want to author something similarly enjoyable, but sprung from my own well. Of late, in viewing my work, questions of my authorship have arisen. Sometimes i by-pass or give away authorship to encompass ideas other than my own or to shine light on things that hold my attention. These are things that are not birthed by me, rather stumbled across due to what one might consider good timing and looking. Perhaps, i imagine i have good timing and really i should focus on my own beat, but how hard it is to ignore the rhythms being made — by others — all around!
As i catch myself thinking about these things, imagining my good fortune to be actual and the random beauty i encounter to be real, i begin to wonder how and why i need to differentiate between something that is an influence and something that is “purely” my creation. To separate the question of authorship into my own and others — outside and inside — seems very clear and very opaque at the same time. Yes, my hands made this, i was looking at something outside of myself, but it filtered through my insides. Yes, my hands made this, i was thinking about something inside, and this is how i chose to mediate that thought.
Getting caught thinking like this, evaluating whether something impacted my results or whether i alone impacted my results makes me cringe. How impossible it is to claim that I ALONE DID THIS. We all aspire to be self reliant and DIY is all the rage, but we never can really get the whole process to be made by our hands alone. Someone else makes our materials, something/one else delivers insight, light shines to present things we never saw before, we are not islands and homogeneous authenticity seems to be a dream.
My attempts to be authentic, to put something of myself out there is questionable, although it is what i am constantly striving to do. What i mean by questionable is that how can ever one really produce something without questioning where it came from? I find things inside i want to hide, and i filter parts of me i want to use out to a distilled form. By no means am i censoring myself, but i am totally watching what comes out closely and removing parts that i don’t want to show.
I find most things inside are constantly touched by whats happening outside of me. I try to claim authenticity and end up whispering uncertainly; does the water not get credit? the light? the atmosphere of where i stood, the direction i looked, the rocks? the people i was with? When is it JUST me? I think about someone like Forrest Bess and how he did not feel responsible for his work, how he felt he was simply a conduit. He painted “ideograms” — visions he saw on the inside of his eyelids — and lived a solitary existence painting on an island off of Texas as a “visionary”, a supposed translator of his unconscious. This kind of artist intrigues me as sometimes i believe i can or i want to create images similarly, but i don’t see things on the inside of my eyelids. Things are too puzzling for me for that type of painting and i question what i remember and what i have seen too much. I feel responsible to what i have witnessed. I may evaluate inaccurately, forget important details or become adamant about inconsequential parts, but I don’t lie, and i do believe new significance is created simply by admission of a view.
Opening up my practice into larger spaces (coming from the smallness of a home, a studio, an island) and trying to retain that smallness is the motivator to expand. Not being able to disentangle things is native to tight spaces. This is how it feels inside me when i think about where what i make comes from — uptight. Surely this is not an individual feeling, getting right back to being in-authentic. We are constantly doing battle with our small spaces and trying to let loose. It’s in attempt to manage these interior spaces and carry on without dragging that i make things, i paint, i take a picture, i look around me, i let something out, or let something in that will loosen me up.
Last week i was fearful and fretting about how i might keep dragging, how i might not be able to pick it up. However, there’s nothing like a good quick phone conversation driving north in the car with an old friend to have them remind me, “Yeah, but you work well under pressure. You’re funny in tight spots” I replied that I’m unpredictable, i mean I don’t even know what i’m going to do next. The simple confidence of a friend, a nudge from the outside, was a calming and helpful affect on my insides. Thank You Mary Anne. How can I not be moved?
Painting To Be Completed:
April 23, 2010*Logo Tapestry
*Kites
*ICE CUBE STUCK
*Consignment Forms email
*WHITE INTERIOR WALLS
Trying To Get To Specifics
March 3, 2010I begin to make something with the part of me that wants to move out (side) and around. In the end — when i stop the thing from changing by removing my will — i hope to be content with its (dis)order.
What is exposed, what is made, is eventually detached from my hopes in (dis)order to becomes itself. It is no longer a part of me, it is a part of the world. It talks for itself, saying things i could never think it would say, louder than i dreamt it might say them.
Meanwhile, i analyze what has come a part — and before — from me. I attempt to understand what i have uncovered — what is being illuminated — through re-playing and re-shaping the matters at hand. Sometimes i come to an understanding and other times i have to tear myself away from a tendency to fall off into an infinite hyper-critical abyss.
I remember a present a friend gave me for my 26th birthday. A message scribbled on a small piece of paper wrapped around a match and placed in a tiny bottle labeled “Love is a feeling like a warm black stone.” The message says: “Why are we bent on measurement? Why do we measure and how? Is yours a milimeter longer? Oh, wow.”
Reading this i am still at the beginning of forming answers to these questions. The only thing i know for sure is that the tone in which i imagine, “Is yours a milimeter longer? Oh, wow” to be read in is somewhat cavalier. How i might begin to answer this friendly and beautifully packaged birthday question is to comment that (currently) I wear a size 6 in GAP jeans, a size 4 in Banana Republic, and can squeeze myself into a pair of 28 Sevens. Very meaningful stuff.
Measurement is for fitting in. I am all for being in and out and together and apart already. How this came about, i don’t know, there’s probably some documentation around, but — things disappear — maybe I just don’t want those parts to be seen. Anyway, what’s the matter with hanging out, re-generating everything, and dieing to bring perspective to re-forming standards of measurement?
Getting Prepared
February 11, 2010
Jessica Townes George Griffin couldn’t find typical landmark references. Now has changed over infiltrating tactics to use an open playing field for direct access to desired destination. Nothing heavy. Must get job done. More cocktails?! I love you(in sign language). NOTHING HEAvY.
Cole Caswell It seems as though geography was critical. Should have gone for a walk in the meadowlands…
February 4 at 11:19am
New Logo: The Sphinx
January 17, 2010
Oedipus and the Sphinx - Gustave Moreau
Sitting at Ozzie’s, a coffee shop on 5th ave and Garfield in Brooklyn’s Park Slope area, i came across an astrology book printed in the 70’s, but first published in 1943. Its writing described an aspect of astrology that i began to understand a few years ago, yet had found little other writing to support a way of thinking about the zodiac. Simply, it is an analogy of the cycle of the development of human life (from young to old, infant to elderly) to that of the sky’s cyclical system of rotating zodiacal signs. The western astrological cycle does not correspond to our sense of time in years with say, January being the beginning. Instead it begins at the end of March in Aries. In this way of understanding the zodiac, Aries is the beginning, the infant, the blank slate, the state of wonder of the world. Pisces (which comes right before Aries) is the end, has seen it all, tried everything and understands through experience, or from innate empathy for it encompasses what has come before.
This book at Ozzie’s, Astrological Signs – The Pulse of Life by Dane Rudhyar, illustrated a striking state of the transformation of time between Leo and Virgo. This point in the zodiac interests me as my love, partner and collaborator, Cole Caswell is a sun in the cancer-leo cusp and i am a virgo-libra. We live together on the bridge from Leo to Virgo. Here Rudhyar describes is where:
Productive activity on the basis of strict individualism and emotional self-expression presents to man a riddle. How can physical and nervous exhaustion, emotional tragedy and disillusionment be avoided? In essence this is the question which man everlastingly asks of the Sphinx; and there is a fitting tradition which says that the point of the zodiac which ends the sign Leo and begins the sign Virgo carries the symbol of the Sphinx. This mythical creature which still faces today the sands of Egypt has the body of a lion and the head of a virgin — this is indeed the meeting point of Leo and Virgo. It symbolizes the answer to the eternal query we have just stated. What is this answer?
The answer is two-fold; yet the two sides of it should be integrated and that integration, difficult in practice though simple in theory is the very secret of the Sphinx, which is two being in one. One side of the answer refers to the wear and tear produced by the impulsive and stressful type of activity and its dramatic gestures. The answer can be summed up in one word: Technique. The other side of the picture deals with a repolarization of the emotional nature itself. Technique and emotional repolarization are the two keys to the secret of the Sphinx. p.70-71
I found it fitting that the symbol of the Sphinx is one that presents us with riddles and answers to the meaning of being alive. Life, here, is composed of both animal and human parts, two perspectives Cole and I often consider in our work. As artists, Cole and I collectively rack our brains and trudge onward wondering how to avoid and cope with “physical and nervous exhaustion, emotional tragedy and disillusionment” coming up with methods for coping and staying conscious become the crossbeams that allow our learned techniques in the visual arts to build a larger and more secure and sustainable structure where we can continue to produce work under. With the head of the virgin and the body of a lion, i imagine an accurate representation, a well organized example of curiosity, emotion, and integration of what leo-virgos do in the time between each other.
First Friday Art Walk Thrives in December
December 5, 2009First Friday, December 4, 2009 was a lively swarm of artists and art supporters up and down Congress Street on a warm Portland night. It felt like the wondrous season of giving had actually begun (a horse drawn wagon was spotted jingling its way through the Old Port) and the warm air made everyone move easily in and out of all of the galleries and artist studios.
Three spots were of great cheer. Our first stop, Whitney Art Works, showed a group exhibition of their members. It was a first to see Iain Kerr‘s red, black and blue pen diagrams in person. I had been admiring them on Etsy and now could see with greater detail their moleskin paper looking cut out of his journal with a razor blade. Along with this nonchalant quality was their Tetris shaped display re-iterating the puzzling structural elements one sees as they stand there trying to figure out how he fit all of the words and marks together in such perfect sense and harmony. An impossible task with the masses surrounding and wanting to get a look, but i attemepted for a few moments.
The pencil drawings of Clint Fulkerson and small pin buttons of Patrick O’Rorke also got my attention. Simple statements in black on white backgrounds like “Ain’t No Shame in My Game” and “Don’t Thank Me, Pay Me” were being sold for “a dollar or best offer” at the gallery desk. From there, if you turned to the left you would see the entrance to the back room, then a collection of Stephen Benenson‘s small oil painted heads, and then Clint Fulkerson‘s drawings of sinew like cell structures perfectly rendered with the indent of hard pencil slightly outlined with a softer darker pencil. They had the markings of a metalsmith, someone with keen attention to detail. However, the ones I enjoyed the most were the ones with abnormalities, the pauses, a slight change in overall pattern showing that there really was a human hand at work.
We came across Stephen Beneson’s work again as many of the artists represented by the Whitney work from studio’s above SPACE Gallery and were opening their studio doors to the Art Walker’s as well. It seemed like endless floors rising above SPACE as you wove your way in and out of a very many painting, photography, and printmaking studios while trying to say “hi” to friends and make space for fellow Art Walkers trying to see it all as well. Being abel to see the work in The Artist Studios and standing in a small space with the artists themselves made returning back to the gallery scene on the streets below less attractive. How often do you get to stand in someone else’s studio, look at what they’re working on, not being pressed to say anything, but having a comfortable opportunity to do so if you wish!? We withstood the mad house and made our way into as many studios as we could, ending up spending the most time with the beautiful space and drawings of Beneson, and with the intriguing paintings of Annie Godfrey Larmon who shows with Aucosisco and writes for the Portland Phoenix.
Last but not least were the street vendors sitting and standing with their wears on the fringe of the passage between Whitney and SPACE gallery. I asked some MECA students I recognized selling drawings, copper rings, and pottery if the school promoted them doing this and they said: no one says anything, we just do it. SMCC student, Infini-tees designer, and screen printer, Tim Othy Goldkin, stood and helped people find sizes of his designs which are printed on reclaimed shirts and laid right on the sidewalk to peruse. One design displays a non descript figure grounded, but almost floating, traversing a city at night with PORTLAND in a whimsical bold font below. I love that this part of the Art Walk is growing. It gives the event a real traveling artisan feel and re-vivifies the original intent of the founders of the walk to allow the space between 5-8p on every First Friday to be one filled to the brim with what the artists of this city can offer and show us all how they make it diverse and beautiful.
Block Island in November. Getting Re-acclimated
November 23, 2009It has been a while now since i spent any meaningful amount of time on Block Island.
I mean, i can count on my hands the amount of times i have returned home after going off to grad school.
Once to note that who my boyfriend was, really wasn’t — and that the man i really wanted to be my boyfriend would never be. The second was to show someone i love a place that i loved. The third was to show that someone what i used to do in the place i loved. The fourth time i began to question what i truly did love about both the place and the people who lived there. The fifth i defined the parts that could remain lovable and what my new home in Maine offers that BI can not. And the sixth time Cole and I brought Parker to show him that there were many things to love on Block Island and there are many things still to be learned as I continue to re-define this place.
Our plan was to arrive mid day and begin exploring right away. We drove the car from NH to Point Judith, without a car reservation, missed the 11 am ferry and had to kill six hours in southern RI without going too far or missing our car’s stand bye position to get on the 5 pm ferry. It was dark when we finished the hour ferry ride and landed on the island. We were hungry so we met up with the one and only, John Foster, for some dinner at the Albion and Parker’s first lesson: the game of pool.
The next morning Cole and Parker discovered the Mannissee farm animals. A collection of strange and peculiar varieties of camels, sheep, mules, zebras, rams, chickens, goats… my favorite are the fainting sheep. Then we went out into the rainy morning to explore all the nooks and crannies we could get our Outback into.
Beginning at in the southeast at the Mohegan Bluffs, Parker found clay sediments and signs of geological terms like erradic and slump. We walked the steep stairs down and began our rock collecting in the clay sediments at the bottom of the bluffs. Next, we went over to the second bluffs and found the even more beautiful steep and dangerous views down to where the Mannissees supposedly starved out an invading Mohegan tribe.
Then, around the island we went. Fresh Pond, Indian Cemetery, Cooneymus Rd. Beach, West Side Quarry, over Beacon Hill, and into town for a BIG (Block Island Grocery) deli sandwich. There we ran into just who we weren’t looking for, but wanted to see – Donnie Demers!
Donnie has a practice of going every morning, before work (stripping a roof the weekend we were there) to the North Point or the Dump Beach in search of Native American Indian artifacts. He had a truck floor full and a truck bed scattered with remnants of that morning’s outing. Donnie claims his classification of his artifacts are simply “speculation and conjecture” but, theorizing about Native American Indian technologies is what we were ready for. We made a date for Saturday night, after he got done with work, to come over to his place to see and talk about his massive collection of Mannissean Indian clubs, arrow heads, hammers, scraper, and grinding tools. We made plans to visit Donnie — at home after he was done with work the next day — to see his collection and discuss all of his findings in their entirety.
Our day continued, eating our lunch on State Beach, at the sole picnic bench stashed above high tide at the Fred Benson Pavilion. We continued north down Corn Neck Rd. to reach the Dump Beach (Donnie believes this was an area where the tools were being made). It is widely known that the north side of the island is where the most dense settlement of Native Americans (Manisseans) lived. We spent some time here and then went to the very end and trekked out to the North Light. Both of these spots (Dump and North Light) are places i never really hung out at because they are notorious party spots and i never gave them much credit for other things. There was no evidence of any partying in either place except for a beautiful fire pit in between some dunes near the tip of the island. It was windy as hell and we chased seagulls up into a cloud above us and then stood at the very tip of the island looking out at the vastness of the ocean in every direction.
The next day we hiked some of the Greenway trails. We own the “On This Island” guide book — authored by Scott Comings and Adrian Mitchell — and Parker chose to start on the Fresh Pond Greenway trail. This trail lolled its way through some meadows and lots of low shrubs surrounding the pond. We saw a few deer and tried to get a good eye on some birds. After what was a nice bird watching, deer siting walk around the pond, we went down into Rodman’s Hollow, and up onto the bluffs heading towards Black Rock. Here we took longer to get out than we liked and P began to get tired out. We fed him and hit the trails again. This time, our final stop past the Painted Rock and down to Vail Beach.
The sounds of the water running down alongside the trail to the beach with the ocean roaring ahead was my favorite part of the trip. We spent a long while walking Vail Beach looking for things that caught our eye and making our way to a fort i knew of that we found to have been be destroyed. We went back to John Foster’s to relax before our visit with Donnie, which ended up being the highlight of Parker (and i think Cole’s) experience of Block Island in November.
True Blue Island 