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: