Collective Memory Walk

Here are some people at the opening creating their own "Walk from Memory" to add to the collaborative piece, Collective Memory Walk.
The instructions I offered were: choose a ground and thread, retrace your most memorable walk in stitches.




opening photos taken by Reverend BLAMO

The idea behind the piece is to translate experience and thought into a tangible object / narrative. Through the mediation of the material, the stitched memories begin to look more like one another than the original territories or, specifically, the walk each person took through his/her territory.

As new visitors come to the show, the piece continues to grow. The overall effect looks a bit like Tibetan prayer flags.

Show opening at Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery

September 15th was my show opening at FSC's Hammond Gallery. We had a turnout of 135 people, which was excellent. 110 people (thus far) have participated in the collaborative project where everyone stitches a memorable walk.

Over the next few days and weeks, I'll post pictures of the collaborative piece along with my other pieces including the Walking and Driving in Los Angeles: Retracing a decade in a month map being stitched as a performance over the course of the exhibit.

The show runs until October 20th.

Hanging the Show

I (with the help of two student curators) will be hanging the solo exhibit at Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery this weekend. Here's some info about the exhibit:
Fiber Art Kicks off CenterStage Season

The final nesting place

Bird's Nest Dress, 2009
off-loom garment free-woven from shoe strings,fabric scraps, ribbon, wool yarn and felt

Building the Bird's Nest Dress, progress notes 3: What to wear in this particular naked city

I'm working on a solo exhibit for Fitchburg State College's Hammond Gallery (Massachusetts) in September called "What to wear in the Naked City." The show is a psychogeographic exploration that stitches together connections between the psyche and environments – both the body's immediate environment (clothing) and the larger environments of cities. I'm interested in how places imprint themselves on the mind and how this imprint affects (easy or encumbered) movement through those places.

Pieces for the show include clothing built of found objects from 3 places I've lived recently: Los Angeles, CA; Knoxville, TN and Fitchburg, MA.

The Bird's Nest Dress (below) is constructed from shoestrings and other scraps found in Knoxville, TN. Here's what I've built thus far:


For more about the Bird's Nest Dress, click on the label "Bird's Nest Dress" below.

Building the Bird's Nest Dress, progress notes 2: Do, undo, redo

Because the process of the Bird's Nest Dress is free-form, I've had to rework the structure of certain parts several times. Here are some pics of the uninterrupted progress:

Building the Bird’s Nest Dress, progress notes 1: We won’t play your distinctions between nature and culture

Barbara Kruger, We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture

I began the Bird's Nest Dress free-weaving project a few years ago in tandem with the Figleaf Loincloth under the intention of joining the two pieces together into one garment. The Bird's Nest Dress with Figleaf was to be one in an ongoing series called "Wardrobe for Paradise."

In the series, I was playing with nostalgia and the Edenic myth as it relates to the female body, to (what I consider) a misguided notion of "returning to nature," to modesty, suffering, clothing, hair and covering.

In the Bird's Nest and Figleaf pieces in particular, I wanted to make connections between two different processes of free-associative weaving and speak to how organized activities – whether they be the repeated motions of birds or humans – result in binding disparate elements together and in building protective coverings. I was thinking of the nest as a place to lay eggs (not to mention a derogatory term for female pubic hair) and of the fig leaf as this trope in Western painting used to cover female genitalia (and hair).

Though it's customary to associate weaving (or building in general) with the inception of human cultures, I'm interested in the similarities between human weaving and other animal weaving in much the same way I'm interested in similarities between dendritic forms of both trees and freeways. I don't see the two as distinct or oppositional, which I think ultimately unveils my progressive hopefulness in the ultimate outcome of human evolution.

Pictures from stage 1 of the Bird's Nest Dress:

The Psychogeography of Art School, Raphael’s Transfiguration, sequences, stills, what's above and what's below

Some weeks ago I gave an artist's talk. Coincidentally, the week I prepared my talk was the same week I taught Renaissance painting in the Art Appreciation course. As I traced the development of my ideas and looked at the work of Raphael (et al), I was reminded of the originary point of a longstanding conceptual / formal concern that began when I was still an undergrad student.

Undergrad studies in art school typically consist of ½ studio courses and ½ art history courses. So, as a young art student, I spent half my time working with materials and the other half writing / using language to talk about images and ideas. Through the labor itself, a dichotomous structure (shifting between sequential and holistic) was building in my mind that would make me susceptible to ideas and concerns I still pursue.

One of the art history courses I took in those early years was Italian Art. For this class, as with most art histories, we had to write a weekly one page response paper on a work of our choice. One particular week, I wrote about Raphael's Transfiguration because I found something conceptually / structurally compelling about the artist's representation of time in a 2-D medium, which is obviously not time-based.



The Transfiguration depicts a story told in the Christian Bible in which Jesus is transfigured on the mount while the disciples below attempt to heal (unsuccessfully) an epileptic boy. The painting represents what's in the text, but also represents what the text cannot – the simultaneity of two separate events.

In the gospel verses, the events appear one after the other. Through the basic limitations of language, we experience a lag as one short narrative follows the other. However, in the painting, the events appear together as they are in the real time of the story -- coexisting in a single moment. Though the eye still moves around the image creating something of a sequence, the overall impression is holistic and simultaneous. Even the separation of places (the above with Jesus and the below with the disciples) are collapsed into a single place within the space of the painting.

So with this painting and my short response paper to it, I began to wonder not only about the holistic visual representation of narrative sequences, but about turning still images (non time-based media) into sequences – turning Raphael's Transfiguration on its head, so to speak. I wondered: what if the given were the image and not the text? What if the image gets translated into language? What if there were no translation but, instead, the syntax of a collection of isolated images?

Eventually, I began to pull stills from video and arrange them into other narratives. Like The Transfiguration, these "Horizon Line" pieces are about the sequence and the still and about what's above and what's below.

Psychogeography and personality clusters in the U.S.

Here's an interesting link to an article in the Boston Globe dated May 4, 2008 where Richard Florida documents personality clusters within the U.S. He maps the concentrations of neurotics, extroverts, conscientious types, novelty seekers and agreeable folks. I find the concentration of neurotics in New England to be particularly funny... and surprising as well. Could it be the number of graduate degrees per capita? What doesn't surprise me is that both New England and Southern California are full of novelty seekers ("open to experience" people).

Putting the psycho back into psychogeography / ice storms and opportunities

When I moved to central Mass in August, I began almost immediately trying to figure out what it might be like to live in a cold and snowy and icy place. I started a couple of aerial paintings with this sort of "cold place" re-imagining in mind. Not really knowing the lay of the land and still learning how to get around, I didn't have a grounded reference for making work about my new locale. This lack of knowledge and experience led way for paintings that were open-ended, still quite speculative and, I soon found out, imbued with unconscious material – like the image below, which is a photo of one of the paintings in progress taken in October.


The painting has changed since I took this in-progress photo sometime in October, but if you look closely at the center, you can make out this triangular-shaped freezing, teeth-chattering, eye-squinting, nose-dripping "face." I find it both curious (and actually quite hilarious) that this material appeared from what I was intending to be planes and shards of splintering ice, blinding sunlight and confused movement through winding and forking roads. I also find it curious that this work was a bit of foreshadowing.

In mid-December, Fitchburg was the epicenter of a huge ice storm that took out the power grid for much of central Mass. Frank and I were without heat and electricity for a week and intermittently thereafter for the following week. We had friends, and knew of many others throughout the city and countryside, who were without services (some including water) for 2 weeks and even more.

The storm was unbelievable and devastating in ways I can't accurately describe. To understand the full effect of the damage would require an eyewitness view of what a war zone this area had become... roads blocked with debris, power cables stretched across and dangling in the streets, cars destroyed, military and emergency vehicles crawling and flashing lights day and night, bulldozers and chainsaws and work crews in military fatigues, busloads of refugees coming into the city's shelters. For weeks, the streets were a flurry of activity toward cleanup, recovery and repair.

Frank and I and one of our neighbors had two trees fall on our cars. My car took the brunt of the damage and was declared "totaled" by the insurance co. The neighbor's car lost a back window, which was easily replaced. And Frank's car had damage to the moon roof, which is relatively minor. My car is still drivable, but does need to have the roof repaired from what appears to be mostly cosmetic damage. Though I've finally settled up nicely with the insurance company and have the money sitting in the bank and ready to put toward the repair, there remains a waiting list on every local auto body shop... for obvious reasons.

Still... somehow in the midst of all this crazy weather, which also included several snow storms, I've had some exciting professional opportunities open up. First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I moved back into a public studio. I am now part of a local art collective, Rollstone Studios, in downtown Fitchburg and a member of the Fitchburg Cultural Alliance. Secondly, I have been slated for a solo exhibition at Fitchburg State College in the fall. Third, I received a call from an out-of-state client (during the storm, no less, when I had very little cell phone battery left) telling me that her alma mater had gotten the okay and is raising funds to commission a large piece of work from me. That work will begin next fall. And finally, I've picked up a couple of courses to teach at the college. So... all's well that ends well.

The above painting has progressed over the months as have I. I've actually adapted to the cold much more quickly than I thought I would. I've learned to drive and walk in the snow, but it's still quite a lot to contend with. The teeth-chattering face is no longer visible in the painting or a prominent feature of my psyche, but the resonance (and humor) of that image still resides and peeks through in the painting on some level.