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.

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.

Mapping My Los Angeles by Reconstructing the Thomas Guide

Three years ago, I moved from LA after almost a decade there. Life in LA entailed long, traffic-heavy, and intense drives, but also many opportunities to walk for pleasure or errands. I was fortunate to live in Silverlake, a neighborhood where I could walk to most of the shops: Trader Joe's and Mayfair, a health food store, a post pack and ship, hardware and art supply, Video Journeys, movie theaters, boutiques, restaurants, bars and even a yoga studio. Most weekends I could usually park my car and not drive at all, unless to visit far-flung friends. Most friends were far-flung because we were all driving long distances to get to our school or work or other places where we might have originally met. On average, most people I know in LA drive 40 or 50 miles a day, which was true for me as well. However, it's not uncommon for people to drive much longer distances throughout greater LA County.

In the days before GPS technology was as mainstream as now, everyone I knew found her or his way around the city with the
Thomas Guide, a several hundred page, spiral-bound, street-by-street map of LA. The Thomas Guide opens with a page-size image of LA County with grids and numbers corresponding to the hundreds of close-up maps that follow. I so often used my first 1997 Thomas Guide that the worn and highlighted pages started falling out. I eventually replaced it with a 2002 edition that stayed pretty much intact because, in those 5 years, I'd committed to memory so much of the city that I rarely needed to check for specific streets. When I left LA, I had one very worn and one relatively new book map of Los Angeles.

While living in LA, I began to have the notion of deconstructing and then reconstructing that map of the sprawl. Shortly after leaving, I took apart both Guides and began to stitch them together as a single flat map. My relationship to driving with the Thomas Guide had been page by page, single snapshots of LA streets. I felt curious to see the pages of the book become a single image.

When I stitched together an entire map of LA out of Thomas Guide pages, the end result measured over 8 x 12 feet. Onto that massive map, I began to hand-stitch over roads where I'd walked or driven, using the stitching to represent my footprint and tire-print on the environment. The stitches would record my complicit impact on the landscape. I'd already been stitching walks from memory and knew that I wanted to do something similar with driving, but wasn’t sure exactly what or how. Would I use the sewing machine – trading one machine for another? Hand-embroidery? I wasn't sure.

I paused on the project due to my uncertainty about how to continue, the complications of another move and a new studio with limited wall space. So, I packed the map up in a project box with the intention of picking it up again later when I had sufficient wall space.

Fortunately, that time has arrived! I'll be moving into a new public studio next week (more details later) which will afford me the space and viewing distance to hang the work and complete it. Here's what I have so far:


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
paper map, machine stitching, hand stitching, cotton muslin backing
8' x 12'


Walking and Driving in LA (Work in Progress)
detail

This (still unfinished) detail is only 2" by 4" and represents just a few miles. I'm hand-stitching each of the walks (as I remember them) in shades of green embroidery floss. The darker the shade, the more frequently I walked that particular route. Similarly, I'm hand-stitching the drives in red with the darker shades representing the streets and free-ways I traveled most frequently. I'll continue with this process over the entire map.

Unsurprisingly, I'm finding this piece quite a memory exercise. In remembering how much of LA I covered, I'm overwhelmed by the realization that I was only one person in over 10 million – the environmental footprint each person makes in that (or any) city is tremendous. The enormity of the impact is staggering... and I've only just begun the project.

All Streets, Visual Data and a Narrative Atlas: Tracing my tracks on a short derive through the internet

I belong to an online cartography community where someone posted this compelling image of all streets in the lower 48 U.S.states. The topographical features of the landscape are created by the cross-contour effects of the roads alone. No geographical features were added to this map, and yet, look how clearly defined the Appalachian Mountains are due to the routing of roads that either avoid or hug the ridges. This map was created by Ben Fry, a programmer who transfers data into visual form.

Fry's work made me think of a link that an artist friend recently emailed me: the website of Nathalie Miebach, a sculptor / basket weaver who transforms data (in this case weather and environmental changes) into visual (more specifically aesthetic) form.

And a funny little map from an excellent cartography blog by John Krygier who collaborated with Denis Wood to write Making Maps. The Narrative Atlas from Denis Wood looks fascinating.

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.

February First Friday and attachments to place

This weekend was First Friday and though we didn't have much in the way of new exhibits, I did get a chance to talk to Amanda Sparks, one of the artists in the Crave exhibit, which opened last month at UT's Downtown Gallery. I wrote about Amanda's exquisite pop-up book in the January First Friday post in which I lamented not being able to meet and talk to her about the work. But as the calendar fell, we were fortunate enough to have the show run through two First Fridays and I spoke with her about the piece, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. Here's an image from one of the pages.

Amanda told me that she learned "on the job" how to build each page by studying children's pop-up books and adapting those construction methods to her more complex and multi-faceted designs. Many of her pages included composites of (I'm guessing here) 50 or more images montaged together. It was quite the thing of beauty and delight and eloquently articulated a version of childhood in which place and possessive attachment took precedent.

And by intuitive association I'd like to add (for personal reasons which have to do with detachment from place) a link to Roni Horn's Library of Water in which the artist thoughtfully considers the geography, climate and culture of Iceland.

The City Without Clothes and the 4-year process

For the New Year, I've been doing a major de-stashing -- donating and giving away to fellow artists many fabrics and materials for which I no longer have use. In the process, I've been clearing out some older work as well. Some pieces I'm re-working or mining for materials, others I'm destroying, but many I'm bringing back out into the light of the studio as that's often my process.

I've heard other artists say similar things about their own work -- that from its conception to the final completion, a piece or series often undergoes about a 4-year process. Some ideas are born fully formed, but many need to ferment in a notebook or project box or even sit partially-formed until mature enough to make their way into the world.

Below is one of those works-in-progress that I started while I was still in Los Angeles. It's another in the aerial / psychogeography series. Forgive the dimly lit image.

City Without Clothes (potentials of paradise) work in progress

The materials are velvet, velour and fleece. The colors may be a bit difficult to read in this dim studio image, but they are very vibrant, yet fleshy: reds, golds, purples, browns, pinks and tan.

In the de-stashing, I also brought out small buckets of velvet buttons in some of these colors that I'd like to add to the piece once I get it stitched together on the machine.

A couple of links in reference to the title:

"The Naked City" is Guy Debord's 1957 psychogeographic map of Paris. Here's an interesting English language article with an image of Debord's map (mid-article). The paper proposes contemporary collaborative and digital mapping of usage (rather than the geometry) of urban spaces.

The "Body without Organs" is a deterratorialzing term from Deleuze and Guattari. This Wikipedia entry offers one explanation that's pretty easy to understand.

My work-in-progress is a sort of map to nowhere (as in utopia). It's bodily, bold, joyful and full of hope. It's personal, in that it's potentially everywhere I may have imagined living, but have yet to even visit. It articulates possibilities and parallel lives that have yet to be lived.

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.

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.