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.