From Philadelphia with LOVE

Frank, my marriage partner of 10 years, is an academic and newbie PhD in English Literature. As such he has been, with nearly every other English Lit academic, at the MLA conference in Philadelphia for the last several days interviewing for tenured faculty positions and presenting one of his articles.

Just thought I’d share this photo of Robert Indiana’s sculpture at LOVE Park that he emailed me from his cell phone:

Remiss in Writing

I’m still here... though busy.

I found an old note that I wrote to myself on an discarded library card that read: Realism doesn't trust memory.

It prompted me to reread Susan Sontag's article, "On Photography," which then prompted me to go to the used book store to find a copy of her 2001 book of the same title. I didn't find On Photography, but did find (and purchase):

Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn

Cold War Pastoral, documenting the photographic work of John Kippin as he explores the Greenham Common transformation from military base to site of protest from the Womens' Peace Movement to common land

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

and some fiction: George Saunders' Pastoralia

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground

Here's part of another piece I've been working on for the Tourism and Tragedy series, which overlaps with The Perfect Fall series. It's called Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta:


I dyed a mottled ground on raw canvas, then applied a beeswax resist through rubbing pebbled pavement and brush painting. I redyed it several times, removed the wax and brought out more definition with fabric paints. I chose fabric paints so the canvas would remain soft and pliable. I wanted the paint to meld with the fibers (as in dyeing processes) rather than just sit on top of them like a traditional painting.

Finally, I drew a chalk outline where the shadow of a figure is suggested and photographed it outside on the ground. Something intrigues me about returning art to a site of inspiration like this and then (re)photographing.

I use the word 'rephotographing' because this piece was inspired by photographs I took in the Smoky Mountains for The Perfect Fall Series.

Ana Mendieta, some links

A Whitney Museum survey of Ana Mendieta's work

Guggenheim art lesson

a Washington Post article by Blake Gopnik

Woven Glass and my absence in December's First Friday

On Friday and Saturday, the Emporium Building, where my studio is located, hosted an event for local artists and artisans to sell their wares. I didn’t make it for Friday’s Events, which was reported to be lovely with members of the Symphony Orchestra playing in the wings.

However, I did make it on Saturday and saw some remarkable fused glass by Paula Mealka. Paula takes pieces of glass, heats them in a kiln and then manipulates the molten glass with long tools she specially designed for this process.

check out this vessel woven from tiny glass rods

and another of her more brilliantly colored and typically massive pieces

more from The Perfect Fall

This weekend was probably the last for photographing The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall as there were only a handful of crumpled leaves left hanging.

Below are two images of the base of the tree. The one on the left was taken midway through the project and the one on the right was taken this weekend. Both are from the same vantage point at slightly different angles and different times of day.


The Perfect Tree, 11-06-06 and 11-18-06

This piece is part of the Tourism and Tragedy series. I've been taking digital photos of one tree as its leaves change color over the course of the season, printing the images on fabric, arranging the fabric images on canvas, and stitching them together to form a composite of the "perfect tree."

studio remodels

Among the things I created last week was this false wall of pegboard for my studio. I got the idea from A1 Lab Arts. Since I can't hang anything directly on the brick and stucco walls, I thought this would be a great solution for securing the corkboards that hold my works-in-progress.

Here's my new wall, as of Wednesday of last week:


Of course, by now I have it covered in bits of work.

Utopian Projects

This busy week has just flown by. And before things get away from me, I should make some notes about how certain local ideas are developing.

I'm still in the planning stages of curating a show about the psychogeography of this place. It's important to me that the work included not just be some sort of illustration of Situationist theories, but nuanced in such a way to include personal or public memory, etc. The work also needs to have been mediated through some sort of representational artifice. I know that sounds vague and wordy, but that's the best language I have for it right now as I imagine the project at this stage. The work and the artists will give the ideas shape, and my critical language will form around that. I don't want to limit the progress of the show by solidifying the criticism before the work has a chance to come into being. This is more of a conversation between my ideas and those of the artists, and as a conversation these things will unfold as conversations do – intuitively.

Related to the ideas, last Friday I attended a talk by Jack Neely at The Art Gallery of Knoxville – part of the CUP "Building Communities" exhibit. Neely’s talk, "The Knoxvilles that Never Were," was an interesting walk through the history of many of the failed utopian communities that were started in and around the area. Unfortunately, I didn't pick up a copy of Neely's article on the subject and don't have the factual info in front of me and can't find it on-line, so the details of what groups formed what communities and where they were located have escaped me. I do remember there was a German community that became what is now Wartburg and another area featuring a fountainhead with pure running water and clean living with no visible saloons that became Fountain City.

Alcohol has had an enormous impact on how the city of Knoxville has formed itself. So much of the shape of the city was and continues to be determined by alcohol driven commerce coming up against religiously fueled prohibition laws. If I understand correctly, Knox County is still a dry county as many counties are in this part of the Bible Belt.

The "Splatted Spider" shape of the city shown halfway down in Neely's Metro Pulse article shows that impact. I'm really drawn to this graphic cutout; as a representation, it says what needs to be said very eloquently, I think.

So Neely's slant on nostalgia was an interesting one and I enjoyed the talk. I am ever fascinated by the idea of failed utopias, and just basic over-reaching and falling short... something of a truth of the times and the place, I suppose.

Peter Callesen, the dying swan is dying, poetics, metaphor and hysteria

The Danish artist Peter Callesen says almost everything I've ever wanted to say about loss, beauty, nostalgia, over-reaching and falling short.

So rather than keep these things clutched to my chest, I thought I would share the work of one of my favorite artists. In particular, check out his The Dying Swan is Dying performance and the beautifully poetic papercuts.

Tangentially related to the aforementioned site... Something I've been thinking about... the relationship between metaphors in art and hysteria (in the Freudian / psychosomatic sense).

Maybe this artistic hysteria I'm thinking of is a condition of oppression (like in Freud's Victorian female patients) or a condition of late capitalism / consumer society. The hysteria – where the artist acts out some sort of poetic representation of a cultural malady or personal trauma (because I hardly believe the two can be separated) – seems to be most prevalent in post-modern and contemporary art probably because of the economic, political and theoretical times.

So I'm wondering what a feminized version of Callesen looks like as his work is so much about the subject of the male artist. What are the feminized forms that represent her own particular reaching and falling? How much of the feminine range of motion is kept in check by social forces? ...as opposed to the more physical forces that Callesen comes up against in living and dying and making boats that (don't) float on water or cardboard castles that (don't) withstand rain.

One of the interesting things about Callesen's performances is that they attempt to stand as something of a spectacle outside of cultural forces, while performing the myths of culture. All that might touch him is mockery or shame (the social internalized) rather than actual prohibitions, regulations and checks on his actions. Only physics and weather come to actual bear on his spectacles.

Curiously, with the paper sculptures... the ideas are the same, but when moved into the realm of pure representation (where the artist's body and actions are absent or left only as traces), his attempts are articulated with perfect success... no in the world (body) failing or falling here. All we see are architectural feats of mastery.

November open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am. This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I’m interested in how individual experiences of particular places are mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and nostalgia.

The works-in-progress shown here are a documentation of my search for and attempt to recapture a nostalgic ideal of “A Perfect Fall.” With their reference to the Eden myth, trees and Fall (the season of great beauty and loss, the mythic Fall of Mankind, falling short of an ideal, falling down) – these pieces record a striving for some idealized state, the falling short of that achievement, accepting of loss and delighting in imperfect beauty.

L.A. Trees #2: Topiary (Plato’s Tree), sets the tone for the nostalgia. This video is a sequence of still photos taken of topped and butchered trees in Los Angeles. The images are paired, story-book style, with a personal romantic narrative of my last Fall in East TN before moving to L.A. for nearly a decade. It’s a story of hope tinged with loss.

The Perfect Tree for the Perfect Fall, is a mixed-media piece that answers the L.A. Trees video and the nostalgia that grew out of living in a place without Fall color for so many years. In this piece, I paint, stitch and photograph images to build a “perfect” Fall tree. The photos are taken of one tree from multiple perspectives over the course of the season as the tree peaks into color, fades and loses its leaves. The end product will be a multi-perspectival composite of an idealized form – a flat representation where only traces and suggestions of three-dimensional space and time remain.

Leaf Angels in the manner of Ana Mendieta, similarly records the human body as an object of loss. Here, objects of beauty are photographed after their peak – their remains preserved as printed images stitched to a painted and dyed representation of the pavement on which they’ve fallen. All that survives are their representations and the traced / stitched outlines and shadow of the artist / tourist arriving too late and missing her opportunity to photograph the “perfect” scene.

November First Friday

This weekend was First Friday, and though we had fewer than the 1000 visitors of last month, the many who did turn out seemed more directly engaged with the art. In our building, we had a show downstairs of the remarkably prolific Ryan Blair. And a group show upstairs in the Three Flights Up Gallery.

Of particular notice from the group show, was Chase Adams, a young artist who's appropriating and modifying Thomas Kincaid puzzles to create "apocalyptic landscapes" with "phantom monuments and dead-end wormholes." I hope to have some images of his work that I can link to and talk about soon.

Also, of note, was the work of Liz Nixon, whom I know as the manager of Reruns, that great little shop on Market Square Mall (where I consign most of my clothing). Liz is another Knoxville by way of Los Angeles and back to Knoxville transplant. She was exhibiting mostly photos of some of the work she did while in the video production department of Shanghai University. Her brightly colored photos were evocative of film stills and were taken mostly of street scenes as she wandered through Shanghai.

Of course, there were other art openings downtown that evening that unfortunately I wasn't able to attend because of my own open studio. I do plan to take in the shows this week when the galleries reopen. Tomorrow, I look forward to seeing the new show from the Center for Urban Pedagogy exploring our local urban design and development at The Art Gallery of Knoxville.

I've been very fortunate to find that much of the work and many of the ideas buzzing around the city right now are resonating with my own interests and ideas about human interactions with place and environment. I look forward to my adventures through the city this week.

Situationists, psychogeography and the derive

another concise explanation of these ideas

The text on this page is taken from The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age by Sadie Plant:

"...to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed."

For further reading, nothingness.org has the most extensive library on the SI.

deterritorialization concise

"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world."

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

here's a link to a course description which might be helpful in explaining deterritorialization

cat help for The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall

I was working at home this morning on some printed images for constructing The Perfect Tree for The Perfect Fall (still part of the Tourism and Tragedy series), when Babette volunteered her most excellent cat help.

again with the aerials

NASA satellite images

Of particular interest is this image of deforestation in Bolivia.

Curiously, and only an intuitive and visual association, the deforestation images remind me of some of the patterns found in Bauhaus textiles. This is probably because my friend Krissa just gave me a book, Bauhaus Textiles: Women artists and the weaving workshop, that I've been looking through. On that topic, here's a great little blog entry about Anni Albers and Bauhaus Textiles.

Revisiting the painted fiber aerials of 2005

Below are details of aerials made of painted and dyed canvas:

instances of resistance (with a bit of assistance)

A few years ago, I started a photo project, "instances of resistance," in which I searched out things growing wild in the city streets. It was sort of an extension of my thesis project Fallow where I exhibited a series of narrated still video shots of my walk through an untamed and overgrown space in Los Angeles.

here's the first image of the instances of resistance project taken in 2002

I bring this up because I just happened across the work of the artist Helen Nodding aka Ladybird, and wanted to share...

her weed enclosure

and her moss graffiti with recipe

Situationists meet Wearables

Net_Dérive, by Atau Tanaka and Petra Gemeinboeck with the collaboration of Ali Momeni

And for the upcoming season...

Love these Tree Cozys by Carol Hummel

wall of leaves after peak and on to loss

I didn't go to the studio yesterday because I wanted to head up into the mountains (before the local peak tourism season ends) to take more photos for the Tourism and Tragedy series I've been working on.

This is the time of year when people from all over drive up into the Smoky Mountains National Park to witness and photograph the fall colors. Seems everyone is looking for a beautiful view and for ways to preserve the experience.

When I got to the mountains I (and every other driver) found that all routes into the park were closed for some mysterious reason, which I've since found to be because hurricane strength winds knocked a bunch of trees down the day before.

So I had to improvise a strategy that didn't involve me going into the park proper... not that I wasn't already improvising. I just hadn't planned on all the roads being gated closed. The improvisation was more that I wasn't fixed on what kind of photos I was going to take. I only knew that they would be more immersion type images than sweeps of vistas from afar, and that they would be composites of a site (or sites) taken over a period of weeks (or months) as the season progressed and moved into winter... depending on how long I wanted to keep it going and how large I wanted the final piece to be.

The day's photos were so so, but since this particular piece/s is ongoing, that's not too much of a problem. Here are a few of the first images:







I should acknowledge that people are "loving this park to death," so to speak. Unfortunately all the pollution from the motorized vehicles, among other sources, is killing the trees. Here's but one of the many articles.

October open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am.
Image from L.A. Trees #1 and Picture Postcards with Skylines

This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I'm interested in how an individual experience of a particular place is mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and experiences of other places – both real and imagined.

Formally, the work plays with stillness and sequences / place and time. For instance, still photography is paired with written narrative in L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse). Although the video medium affords a more time-based approach, movement through this particular palm-treed space has been frozen with a short sequence of photos at sunset. This stillness allows the narrative captioning to be the driving element that marks time.

In Picture Postcards with Skylines, the medium has been similarly altered. The sequence of digital images marks not only the subtle changes in two different landscapes (CA and TN) over a period of a few minutes, but constructs a fragmented panorama of imaginary place. Powerlines intersecting the skies – accentuated with machine stitching – interrupt and fragment the postcard quality of the photos and draw the two places together.

Green is the Color of my Nostalgia plays with abstraction as a parallel to incomplete memory and the psychological processes that perfect and limit recollection. Here I have created a single representation of two mountain spaces (The Smoky and Santa Monica Mountains) and their details from memory. The choice of materials (cheesecloth, plastic, etc) combined with sparse drawing and machine stitching reinforces the feeling of impossibility that occurs when trying to match physical places to my memories of them.

New Studio and October First Friday

On Monday October 2, I moved my studio to the beautiful Emporium Building downtown that houses the Arts and Culture Alliance and their galleries. It's an exquisite space in a refurbished old building with lots of brick and hardwood. I'm so happy to be in such a location with so many other artists and part of such a great community.

On the first Friday of every month, the Emporium Building is the central host to the city's First Friday art events, the big opening night for all the galleries that spills out into the streets. Hundreds of people come to these events, and on October 6th there were over 1000 guests – pretty amazing for a small university town like Knoxville, TN.

During the opening, I met lots of great people. Of particular note is one of my fellow artists with a studio in the same building, David Habercom. The work he had up for the event was from the series Under The Bridge – really important work in a place like Knoxville at this time. His work and our conversation about the ideas behind it resonated with my own work and thoughts I have about nostalgia and the difficulty of presence in any one place.

So, I moved in on Monday and by Friday was experiencing my first open studio in the new location. I showed a couple of works in progress from the series, Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am, and a related video I made while I was still living in Los Angeles, titled L.A. Trees #1: Palm and Sunset (paradise/apocalypse) and an artist's statement about the series. For an open studio exhibit in a space I'd only had possession of for a few days... it was enough.

Here are a couple of poorly lit pictures of my space that I took today:

another sky line study

As I was getting off the freeway from one of my Appalachian road trips this weekend, I saw this flock of migrating birds on the power lines, rolled down my window and took a few pictures. Here's one:

Fig Leaf Loincloth and yarn p0rn

Yesterday was the first opportunity I had to get over to Loops (here's the website). I've wanted to go to this yarn store since they opened in the spring, but never seemed to get around to it.

I got this lovely yarn in the picture below to finish off my fig leaf project – part of the Wardrobe for Paradis series. It was supposed to be the strategically placed focal point of the Bird’s Nest Dress, but the fig leaf has separated itself from the dress and morphed into a garment all its own – a loin cloth.


The yellow-green yarn is 100% bamboo. This stuff is luxurious. Silky and almost hemp-like. It's beautiful. The pink stuff in the left background is a silk / wool blend -- extremely soft and silky. Both are imported from Japan and carried by Habu textiles based in NYC. Check them out; they even have a silk covered stainless steel yarn. Wow wee. Both the yarns I bought have just the right amount of sheen for what I need in this piece.

Process notes and photos are in the previous post.

Fig Leaf / free-weaving process

I used my own free-weaving process that I sort of make up as I go along. I've laid out the steps I went through below. (Forgive the poor quality of the pics.)

I first drew a cartoon on cardboard from a composite of found photo images – the cardboard cartoon was both loom and a loose color / value guide

Then I cut around the cartoon

Next, I stitched in the main structures (in this case veining) with strong cotton yarn sewn directly to the cardboard

And then stitched it to another piece of slightly larger cardboard and outlined the whole leaf with heavy wool yarn that I secured with thread

I trimmed the base cardboard and cut notches in the edges to hold loose threads… then began free-weaving

I just kept filling in more areas and changing threads often

At this point, I’ve woven to the density I want. This is weeks worth of work for something not much bigger than my extended hand, but is exactly what I want as far as size and structure

…the back side with all the loose threads tucked in their respective notches… and here you can see the source of cardboard – a pizza box from The Red Onion, a fine mom and pop pizzeria with great pizza.

Then I separated the two cardboards with the seam ripper

The two pieces of cardboard

This is the tricky part: I had to cut away the structural yarns from the original cartoon being careful not to pull them out of the weaving

The freed form… looks like a sea creature

I wove the ends back into the weaving as I would with a tapestry… and again, a very long process… only half-way done at this point

The front side

Studio assistant and Bird’s Nest Dress

I'm making what I call a Bird's Nest Dress, which requires that I search out every string, cord, ribbon and yarn that I have to see if it's worthy to be woven into this piece... Thus I have created the perfect cat opportunity.

Actually the full title of the dress is Bird's Nest with Fig Leaf. Ahem. It's still all about the hair.

Home Studio

I keep my threads in a vintage card catalog indexed with paint chips. Above it, I have an inexpensive piece of metal from the hardware store used as a magnet board to hold images related to current projects.


I put the documentation of shows and projects in these black / gray project boxes, slides for teaching in the smaller boxes... more tools and supplies in the tall vintage filing cabinet. I use the smaller filing cabinet for paper filing. I found this great little filing cabinet (it opens from the top and is on casters!) for $6 at the St. Vincent De Paul thrift store in Los Angeles.


more shelving with wire baskets on lower levels holding projects and Frieda, my dressform, in front of some corkboards... and that'd be Frank in the background making salsa or something in the kitchen


more of the corkboards (which I painted white to reflect light and see work more easily) and my trusted old Singer and my and Lily the cat's favorite piece of furniture – the pressing table. I love my pressing table.


the pressing table again, the Consew industrial machine, and some tools

In the ways "we mock our eyes with air" and more about skies

And one of those near perfect pieces of conceptual work: Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Clouds
...right up there with Yoko Ono’s Painting to See the Skies

"It is one of the first imaginative exercises we perform in the world, looking up to find a horse, a flower, a belching dragon."

more pieces of sky

Garden Plot 19: fallow again