8 years later: On revisiting old work, finding joy through grief, and growing out of dormancy

[Obama's election] marks the end of such a long period of pain, of indignity and injustice for African-Americans. And for so many others of us, of the trampling and debasing of our most basic ideals, beliefs that we cherished every bit as deeply and passionately as those of the "values voters" around whose sensibilities we've had to tiptoe...

[This marks the end of] an era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off, and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.

...these years shut down, for some of us, the ability to fully imagine another way. The election brought the return of a country we'd lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.

For me, this will be the enduring memory of election night 2008: One generation released its grief.

Judith Warner, Tears to Remember
The New York Times, November 6, 2008

Judith Warner articulates so much of what I've been feeling these last few days since Obama's election. I've been trying to write about it, but just haven't found the words. So thank you, Judith, for giving me opportunity to quote yours.

Culturally and historically, this election is meaningful in ways we don't yet have the hindsight to comprehend fully. As Warner says, this triumph ushers in a new era of the same magnitude that Reagan's election in 1980 ushered in with the previous. I believe that Tuesday's win goes beyond the person of Barack Obama just as Reagan's campaign tapped into the zeitgeist of the previous generation. With a positive message and rationally-based campaign (not to mention the use of technology in information exchange and grass-roots organization), Obama was able to motivate a critical mass toward progressive change and begin the healing of a racial divide. This is no small thing. That there was a critical mass to be motivated in the first place speaks to the changing of the guard of ideas and values rather than change in leadership alone.

Personally, I feel as though I'm beginning anew... as if I picked up where I left off in the year 2000. And somewhere in the muddy middle is this depressive and hopeless blur of the past 8 years of dubious elections, corruption, lies, an ill-founded war, social inequalities, economic disparities and (eventually) financial collapse.

In the weeks leading up to the election, I'd become increasingly anxious about what the outcome might be. Like so many others, I'd begun to expect failure and had lost much hope in the corrupted political and financial institutions and processes. It wasn't easy for me "to risk heartbreak on the chance," to quote Warner again, that anything in this country had or could be changed for the better. But I did risk (even so far as to become a volunteer for the Obama campaign) and things did change.

It's within this context of post-election exhilaration and pre-election hopeful anxiety that I chose to finish archiving my thesis, Fallow, online. The images below are excerpts.

we planted a tree

the first tree died and we planted another one
we're planting a whole forest of trees

For the most part, archiving an artist's book into a blog format is a slow and monotonous process of cutting and pasting text, layering and transferring images, matching images to text, etc. The upside to the drudgery is that it has been affording me plenty of opportunity to sit with the material, to ponder and to take a broad view of the work over time.

So for the last few weeks, I've been archiving, which means I've been pondering Fallow, fretting over the potential outcome of the election and wondering about the dialectic between those two activities. Specifically, I've been wondering: Why now? Why did I choose the weeks preceding and directly after the U.S. presidential election to archive (and essentially "show" in another venue) a piece I wrote and videotaped 8 years ago?

Only through the work of archiving – telling and re-telling, the act of reiteration – have I been able to better understand the motivations and answer those questions for myself. And with that, I should probably offer another re-telling – a concise summary of Fallow – so connections between the emotional charge of the work and my feelings about the political horror that has been these past 8 years and the promise of a more fruitful future might make more sense.

Fallow narrates a series of shared losses that I and my marriage partner, Frank, shared in the Summer of 2000 and about how the nature of human loss is to compound one loss upon another and another... loss of a parent, a pregnancy, a beloved pet. As the text unfolds this personal narrative of repetition, still video images complicate the narrative with both disruptive and sympathetic resonances. The video images walk the viewer step-by-step along a staircased circular path leading through a fallow plot of land in the Franklin Hills of L.A. The views reveal an otherwise overlooked and forgotten location where the lack of cultivation (either in planting or pruning) has spawned an abundance of plant and animal life. The story circles between those spaces of hope and grief where the play of image and text repeat cycles of attachment, suffering, joy, and even outright delight in the wildness of the landscape.

For me, Fallow is a pretty grim (though still surprisingly playful) piece of work that ushered forth from a depressed mind. That being acknowledged, it is not an easy piece for me to revisit let alone read daily or sit with and ponder for weeks on end. It nearly always brings me to tears. So with that level of grief embedded in the work, I wondered (as I was cutting and pasting and layering and reading words like "one loss leads to another") if I would not in the days and weeks following the election be writing a blog post that would cast this work as yet another song of grief.

'sokay we say
'sokay we said

we push the furniture to the middle of the room
and paint the walls red
we mop the floor on our hands and knees
we wash our hands
we clean our noses of the smell
we clear our heads of the idea

we're spending this year talking ourselves out of
what we spent last year talking ourselves into

'sokay we say
we're convincing ourselves
we've convinced ourselves

This repetition (and expectation that begins to form with repetition) is built into the content of the piece as well as its structure – how bodies and minds interact with the piece during installation / presentation. Online, the reader can pick up the narrative of Fallow at any point or read in sequence as it appears on the blog (from top to bottom, contrary to the way blogs are usually read). Similarly, with gallery installation, the viewers create the repetition of the narrative by their movement through the space – movement which is led by individual interest or curiosity.

With the gallery installation, I marveled at the consistency with which the visitors viewed the material's content. Despite being fairly diverse (in age, sex, race, status, occupation), each individual walked a slow pace through the gallery and read every single page (all 210) in sequence. I had not expected this at all. And further, that many of them would be moved to tears... though I myself had been, though Frank had been, though friends had been, though colleagues had been... I had not expected this from strangers.

That others might share in the circumambulation of the space as Frank and I had wound full circle again and again in the Franklin Hills – that we might share some common emotion despite individual differences of experience – was surprising to someone as myself so overcome with sadness and so accustomed to disappointment. On election night, the feeling was one of déjà-vu as our house cried tears of joy with friends on the telephone, with email chats and with images of strangers on television during the election speech.

fallow means something else now

Frank recently reminded me, "Fallow does not mean dead, only dormant."

I think I had forgotten this.

Frank and I and so many like us have been dormant for too long in a country where fear and greed have won out over reason and justice. My hope is that this little archive of Fallow becomes a personal marker for the end to hopelessness and the beginning of something better. The people have shown with their vote to a whole world watching that "We are better than these last 8 years."

Fallow continued

110 pages posted with only 100 more to go in the thesis archive.


I used to think fallow spaces were fertile spaces
when I was angry as a girl
I would run away to the fields and pull up by the roots
whatever things were growing wild
I would bring them back to my room to sit in a bucket of water and rot

fresh flowers

archiving the thesis

I've gotten back to archiving my MFA thesis, Fallow, but have yet to finish. 71 posts down. 139 posts to go. This is a slow process indeed.

The future belongs to them: drifts through downtown, equestrian statues, monuments to shade and reversing nostalgia in a cold place

I have a mental image: a 4 miles square grove of shade trees in the desert... lost objects that never were. And I'm thinking about this passage from Guy Debord:

A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

For example, in the preceding issue of this journal Marcel Mariën proposed that when global resources have ceased to be squandered on the irrational enterprises that are imposed on us today, all the equestrian statues of all the cities of the world be assembled in a single desert. This would offer to the passersby — the future belongs to them — the spectacle of an artificial cavalry charge, which could even be dedicated to the memory of the greatest massacrers of history...

Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
Guy Debord
Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955)

As the leaves turn and weather goes cold here in Massachusetts, I'm beginning to change my expectations. I'm no longer that person who lives in a hot climate, but am someone who lives in a cold place... with snow. I have a bit of fear about this unknown thing called 'New England Winter,' but also a child-like curiosity about another way of living and moving about in the landscape that involves things like snowshoe lessons (??) and cross-country skiing and driving with special tires. Compared to my previous experiences, I might as well have moved to a different country.

Not long before moving from Knoxville, TN to Fitchburg, MA, I made an unremarkable walk from my studio to the post office, which is to say I walked from one end of downtown to the other in the heat of the day. As I walked, I became increasingly aware of how much my dread of relentless sunshine (a mental holdover from living in Los Angeles for so long) and the oppressive heat (in which we were to pack up and move house again) was directing my movements through the city.

Being on the academic calendar, Frank and I always move in the hottest months. Three summers ago, we packed up and moved across country from Los Angeles, CA to Knoxville, TN in record heat through multiple desserts. It was a wretched and cursed event involving a car break down in the Mojave Desert and the heat exhaustion of one of our cats, Salvador. Salvador was so traumatized by the heat and sunshine that he, for several weeks after the move, cried and ran away whenever a patch of sunlight came through the house windows.

Like Salvador, I'd become over-sensitized (if not outright traumatized) by years and years of relentless heat and baking sunshine. To survive, I covered with hats and long, lightweight sleeves and searched out pockets of zigzagging shade that I would cross streets to follow. My shade-finding skills had become so naturalized and reflexive that I hardly even thought about them anymore, which is why this unremarkable walk across Knoxville's downtown is still something I'm thinking about.

As I made my way through the streets, my goal of getting to the post office became secondary, and at times contradictory and back-tracking, to the shade-searching desire. Becoming more aware of the impulses that were driving my walk, I started to see how I was always walking ahead of myself, scouting and calculating... the buildings on one side of the street, the overhang on the other, the trees by the sidewalk, the two-block alley, the park with more trees, the archways and courtyard. My search for shade had become an almost obsessive-compulsive kid's game akin to not stepping on cracks.

From this awareness, I began to sketch out mental "shade maps" and "sun maps" of different cities that change with the seasons and times of day. I wondered what it might be like to use one shade map to refer to pathways in another city. I thought about the Guy Debord quote. I thought about taking the Thomas Guide from L.A. and using it to map my way through Boston. The act could be my own "feeble beginning" and play on Nostalgia in that I'd be making visible what I'm already practicing: imposing the past on the future, learning about what is unfamiliar through what is known, designating categories where before there were none.

It would be near impossible for me to drift through any city free of all categories without some severe mental impairment (intentional or not). I mean, I'll continue to know what a subway is, what east and west are, which side the ocean is on... though that one may be easier to upset than other categories since my whole west coast sense of direction was based on my orientation to the ocean and the mountains.

So from this cold place with the ocean on the east, I'm wondering which features of the landscape will consistently navigate me and what role snow will play in directing my drifts through New England.

Setting up the new studio in New England

We made it to Massachusetts last Friday without any major moving difficulties. We arrived to find the place beautiful! ...and the weather cool. We're both excited and happy to be here. Even the cats love it here; they have plenty of windows and a sunporch (which I've already set up with an easel, a work-in-progress and some painting supplies).

I'm still working on arranging the shelving and stash in the fiber studio. Will post more as things progress.

Moving Update

Frank and I found a great place to live in Massachusetts! I'll have a home studio for at least the first year or two, but I won't have it set up until August. In the mean time, I'll continue to pack... and then the move...

See you again in August.

Studio clearout and traveling to New England to find a new place

I cleared out my Knoxville studio this week and have been packing things up for my and Frank's move to the Boston area where he'll be starting his new job as a tenure-track professor. This has been a long road for us (8 years in Los Angeles for our respective graduate programs and then a three year appointment in Knoxville), but worth it to be finally headed where we want to be.

Of course, we'll both miss all of our friends, family, fellow artists and colleagues, but we're absolutely thrilled to be settling into a new life in an exciting new location.

I'm writing this from a hotel room in Newark, Delaware making my way up to New England where I'll look for housing. I'm on the road as a pit crew member of an ultra-cycling record attempt. My mother-in-law's husband, Gerry Eddlemon holds the national first place record in state crossings and the world's second place record. On this trip, he'll be attempting two more state crossings in New Jersey and Vermont. In exchange for my help as a crew member, we'll be stopping in Massachusetts between rides so I can look at housing.

Here are Mikki and Gerry together in the Connecticut crossing. And though the article doesn't mention it, Mikki is an extreme athlete as well having won several marathons and long distance runs in her age category and placed first in several races in the Senior Olympic Games... hence the big banner in the first picture welcoming "ULTRA EDDLEMONS."

Frank will be flying into Boston in a few days to meet us there. Exciting stuff!

Walking and Remembering

I just uploaded some work from 2004 to the gallery. Here’s the first in the series:


Memory Walk #1, 2004
10” x 12” drawing stitched with hand-dyed cotton yarn on raw canvas

Every evening for years my partner, Frank, and I would take the same walk around the Los Feliz neighborhood in Los Angeles. The walk took about an hour or hour and a half, depending on whether we added an extra loop. We would begin at the edge of the neighborhood where Silverlake and Los Feliz meet at the Rowena reservoir and head straight up the steep end of St. George to the nunnery at the top of the hill, arc back down to Rowena and into Los Feliz where we would wind around until we made our way back to the point where we started.

Most walks included wildlife spotting, usually skunks, but also coyotes and raccoons and the occasional owl. The ritual was playful and heady, a time for us to process our day and figure out problems we might be having with our respective projects.

I miss the walks. I miss the neighborhood. I miss the ritual and the meaning and structuring it gave both of us. But for everything there is an exchange; and now we have bike rides in the morning (as we live right off a shady greenway). And the bike rides have their own delight and meaningfulness and wildlife: blue herons, geese with their goslings and turtles. Still, I miss the walks.

So in thinking on these things, I pulled out these stitched drawings and have been sewing them together to form one large piece.

Here’s the last piece in the initial series and part of the statement posted in the gallery:

Memory Walk #9, 2004

Xs mark the beginning and ending point, which never quite match up because I’m re-walking the route in my mind as I stitch. Each memory is different with stretches of road being a bit longer or shorter and with every twist and turn being at a slightly different angle.

Sometimes the actual walks included an extra loop depending on the evening and my and my walking partner’s energy level. So some memories have the loop and some don’t.

In doing this mapping project, I was drawing a connection between sequential activities (walking, stitching, remembering, narrating) and was bringing a time-based element and the body back into the 2-D map, which is usually static. I was also marking evidence of how repetition or re-telling of a story, even in stitches, engrains a pattern and molds the map to a more ideal (or nostalgic) likeness to the "original" territory.

Bas Jan Ader, poetry, presence, the body and risk

This weekend Frank and I had one of our customary coffee-fueled conversations about art and literature. This conversation was specifically about poetry and poetic forms. I told Frank that I used to enjoy poetry (both the reading and the writing) more than I do now. Though I wasn't quite sure why, poetry no longer satisfied expectations I've grown to crave in an art experience. Anymore I tend to seek out metaphor in other forms, mostly visual...

And that prompted me to think about the work of Bas Jan Ader, whom I hadn't thought about in some time. And then I searched around and found these documentations of Bas Jan Ader's Falling performances on you tube.

To me, Ader's work is satisfying in the way Peter Callesen's Dying Swan is satisfying. Here are some of my thoughts on Callesen's work. The performances have a quiet intelligence, humor and an emotional punch without sappiness. He can laugh at himself and his frail but aspiring human efforts without being self-deprecating or narcissistically spiteful. And while the pieces are concise and clearly articulated, they are also open-ended.

The work has qualities similar to other conceptual / performance-based work that resonates with the sensibilities in some of my own modest performances (example 1, example 2). Other artists that came to mind during our conversation were Vik Muniz's Pictures of Clouds, Yoko Ono's Painting to See the Skies and her Smoke Painting and Ana Mendieta's Siluetas.

Because Frank teaches poetry and other literature and has a personal stake in poetry and in me being friendly toward the form, he wanted to find out what it was that I was or wasn't responding to in the written poetic forms.

So what I was able to tease out that I'm not responding to in poetry is the formalism. It's both the formal and expressionistic mark – the literal mark of language or the expressive line – that doesn't hold my attention as it used to. On the other hand, an imprint, a surface or even Pollock's drips are, to me, far more interesting as a trace of absence than the expressive line of other abstract expressionists.

As we talked more, Frank figured that it was the presence and the body that had such resonance with me. And I think he's right. What remains important to me is that there is something always at risk with the body, and any attempts to get around that risk, whether they be willful aspirations for artistic immortality or claims of some promise of spiritual immortality, feels horribly deluded and false to me. It's the impermanence and the flailings that are relevant... at least in my mind.

That being said, I still have a high regard for prose poetry and for fiction that reads like poetry and for work written in present tense (as Frank remarked I often write in present tense myself). My favorite novel is still Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. Curiously, even the title... It seems so obvious now.

The body is always at risk and carries with it the obvious social markers of race and sex... even class. Bodies with and bodies without medical or dental care carry very different evidence that becomes increasingly visible over time. Lack of education or proper nutrition leave their mark on the body as well.

All this is on my mind because today we had a meeting at the museum about an upcoming exhibit of Tim Davis' photographs of canonical paintings, Permanent Collection. I was struck looking at the catalog images of just how bodily and material Davis' photos of art historical "masterpieces" are. The history of each painting becomes embedded in Davis' photos – not just in the way the artist positions himself in a relationship between the museum lighting and the painting itself, but in the age and surface that is exposed with that relationship to the artist-as-viewer. Remarkable. I was really struck by these images and can hardly wait to see them in one of our galleries next week.

Lest we forget the reasons we left Los Angeles…

…David Maisel will show us our immersion, remind us of our experiences and invoke our readings, i.e. Mike Davis.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got on the internet and began searching for more aerials of Los Angeles and happened upon the work of David Maisel – specifically the Oblivion series (Los Angeles) and Terminal Mirage series (Great Salt Lake in Utah).

I feel terribly ignorant not knowing this work, but glad I found it at this time when it's so relevant to my own work. I must have come across it before now… and even have vague memories of reading something in Art in America (5 or 6 years ago?) about someone’s exquisite aerial photography of toxic sites. Something must have lodged in my subconscious… though I can recall no names or specific details about the work.

Maisel’s photos of Los Angeles are haunting. When I look at them I’m both mesmerized and simultaneously sinking inside. I loved so many things about living in L.A. (the diversity, the people, the food), but there were other things that deeply disturbed me and contributed to my misery.

I don’t remember a day of living in L.A. when I didn’t feel trapped and implicated, when I wasn’t engulfed in noise, pollution and over-consumption. I was weighted with an enormous guilt for the near decade I was there – always thinking of the environmental destruction: the driving, the water consumption where there is none, the city sucking the life and resources from elsewhere to support its overgrowth.

This is why Frank and I were so eager to leave. So whenever we begin to feel nostalgic for L.A., we have these images to remind us of why we left… which makes me think that, as cultural and historical documents, they’re already embedded with a future potentiality for viewers to feel both loss for the great project, regret for even pursuing it and resignation that it could have been no other way.

But of course, the consumption and environmental destruction are not limited to L.A., and a lot of what I associate with L.A., SUVs in particular, were less to do with place than time. What was happening on a grand scale in L.A. was happening in sprawling suburbs across the country. There seems to have been a consumption explosion that just happened to coincide with our years in L.A. It’s not just L.A. – the entire U.S. is caught up in the all-consuming destruction. We are all implicated.

I wonder about those North Americans who haven’t had their consciousness raised through lived experience in a place like L.A. where the reality is visible and undeniable – will they continue to ignore the seriousness of the problems because it’s not in their face every day? Does the whole landscape and climate have to transform into versions of Los Angeles before we stop and take notice? And if we can’t even take notice, what has to happen before we take action? I say this because at least in a place like L.A., there is a discourse about the problems (because they are so obvious and difficult to ignore) and activism on a grand scale to meet the grand scale of the destruction. At the same time, many Angelenos adopt a complicit resignation because of the enormity of the situation and recognize their individual powerlessness to effect change on the scale necessary. The problems are deep and structural and bigger than any one of us.

Below are some quotes from David Maisel that I pulled from this interview where he discusses the Salt Lake images and sublime beauty:

…I think there’s also a twinned process of seduction and betrayal involved- a viewer might be seduced by the colors and forms of these images, and then, in a sense, betrayed once knowledge of the subject becomes clear. It parallels the way we are seduced, and ultimately betrayed, by a certain level of consumerism that exacts such tolls on the environment. Yes, I want my SUV and my wide-screen TV and… oops! There goes the ozone layer! Imagine that!

…I’m motivated by the notion of discovering and revealing sites that might otherwise remain unknown or unseen- be they clear-cut logging sites, strip mines, cyanide leaching fields, etc. My photographs of these sites are intended to be reflective of some sort of internal, psychological state as much as they are documents of a particular site. And, I consider myself a visual artist first and foremost- as opposed, perhaps, to a photojournalist or a documentarian. I'm most interested in making images that have a kind of depth-charge, that have a certain poetic or metaphoric impact visually.

…Beauty has been seen as problematic for the visual arts in general because we no longer trust beauty as a serious means of investigation. But it can be. Beauty wedges into artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not yet know or understand. For an object or an image to possess beauty does not mean that it is empty of meaning or shallow. In fact, beauty can be incendiary. It can be subversive. It can make us cringe.

Downtown Fire

I was startled out of bed with an early morning phone call from a family member, "I don't mean to alarm you, but some historic buildings are on fire in downtown Knoxville and it looks like the building your studio is in could be one of them... and if not your building, then one very close by."

I had this instant moment of panic and then a horrible sinking feeling. My first formed thought was of Freida, my dressform... funny the things you want to save from a burning building.

I told Frank what was up, and we turned on the TV news and watched another of Knoxville's beautiful historic buildings being gutted by fire. So many buildings on the historic register are burned out or crumbling vacant.

The best we could make out from the TV was that the buildings on fire were on Jackson Ave, catty corner to my studio, which is on the corner of Jackson and Gay.

I had to leave by 9:30 for a museum tour, but went down to the studio after that – around 11:30. I had the crazy idea that I was going to work this afternoon, but big signs in huge letters had been posted on all the doors: Artists please go home! We are concerned that asbestos toxins are in the air.

I didn’t go in the building, but stayed in the area for about 30 minutes to take the pictures below. The fire was already under control (just smoldering) and the streets had been reopened. I was able to confirm that the damage was limited to the group of abandoned buildings I'd seen on TV. Scary thing was that cinders had flown off the fire and landed on the rooftop of the building directly across the street from us, but fortunately they were able to put that fire out before it ever got started.

I also saw cinders lining our building on the Jackson Ave side.
here's a view of the damage looking out from in front of our building... the building in the left edge of the picture is the one that had fiery cinders land on its roof

here's some debris on Gay St just across the street from our building

looking down on what's left from the Gay St bridge

our building, safe and secure

the buildings across the street, safe as well

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:

When Pigs Fly

I started collecting sky images when we were still living in Los Angeles. These first two photos were taken on one of our many trips out to Joshua Tree. It might have even been our last trip before we moved. We had lots of rain in 2005, which made for a gorgeous Spring and skies full of clouds where there are usually none.



And these two were taken in the backyard last night after our walk:

The sky is beginning to bruise...

night must fall and we shall be forced to camp!

Frank and I just got back from a walk around the neighborhood and a swing in the park. I must be out of swinging practice... I got butterflies! What a joy! I don't remember butterflies while swinging.

Came home and sat outside in the dark and watched the fast moving clouds over the ridge. Took some photos for my Pieces of Sky project.

Sky images are imprinted in my retina... I've been spending this week stitching the discharged denim that will be the pieces of sky. All I can see right now are skies, even when I sleep.

The Garden Plot 03: A story about that chick who wanted a tomato or something

I started what I called "farming" when we were still in Los Angeles. By the dictionary, the work was more like gardening. Gardening is usually framed as a hobby; farming is a profession. A garden is consumable. A farm can be turned into cash.

I’ve been rethinking that word choice. Maybe what I want is a garden. An Eden. You pick, you eat. Or post-Eden. You toil, you pick, you eat.