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feel nostalgic for L.A., we have these images to remind us of why we left… which makes me think that, as cultural and historical documents, they’re already embedded with a future potentiality for viewers to feel both loss for the great project, regret for even pursuing it and resignation that it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.

Aerial painting in progress and more about the aerial project

Random Aerial #1 with no city (detail 1)

Random Aerial #1 with no city (detail 2)

Above are some details and below is the 4 1/2' by 5' foot aerial that I mentioned from First Friday. This was the first painted aerial (after I’d started a couple of city aerials in fiber in 2002 and recently recombined them into this piece). I began the painted piece in 2003 while we were still living in Los Angeles.

Each of the aerials has a psychological and somewhat autobiographical component. The city pieces were a mapping of my immersion in a city the size of Ireland that is traversed almost solely by automobile. While in L.A., I drove all the time, every day and over large areas. On average, I drove about 50 miles each day and in multiple directions on side streets and freeways. After 8 years, I had the streets, the restaurants, the getaway drives, the routes to school and work and their many alternate routes memorized. So working with the labor-intensive fiber processes and with cutting and collage fit the psychological experience, if only to relive it to some extent… delays, dead ends, rerouting… all buried in this frenetic, consuming and inescapable energy.

The paintings however were part wish fulfillment and part unveiling – pulling back the skin of the city to uncover an imaginary expanse of unaltered desert ground and fantasized water. In the painting process, I draped fabric and paper over panel, laid it flat and let the paint and water settle into the hollows. Then I rubbed grease stick and oil pastel over the high points and repainted with acrylic. I repeated this process over several months before I set it aside for a couple of years and picked it up again recently with more applications of the same layering process.

With the painting, I was less interested in building representations or images on a ground or in showing my hand (as with the city fiber aerials) than I was in letting the organic processes of draping, pouring, drying and rubbing create a structure of the ground. As such, the painting became more sculptural while the fiber pieces more painterly.

As I mentioned in the First Friday post, this piece is difficult to light because of its multiple planes and hot spots. The viewer must be in constant motion around the piece to see all of it clearly – an effect I may use to other ends some day.

Random Aerial #1 (water, desert and ocean with no city), 2003-07

Flat Aerials

I've had a flu/cold for the last two weeks and haven't been able to spend much time in the studio. All I've been able to muster the energy for is my work at the museum and a couple of hours here and there before and after the museum work. Mostly, I've been working at home on some smaller pieces and sorting out what's left of my home studio.

Today I moved several things that had been piling up at home to the downtown studio, worked for a few hours there and took the photos below. They're a couple of the painted aerials I moved today. I started these in the fall of 2005 right after we moved to Knoxville from Los Angeles. That these were the first new pieces I started within a couple of months of moving to the new location is personally significant considering their pastoral, even agricultural, quality. At this point, they're still works-in-progress.

Note:I filled the unpainted parts digitally with pale blue to experiment with alternatives to the white of the unpainted gesso.


Random Aerial #3 (vertical pastoral sketch) and Random Aerial #4 (horizontal pastoral sketch)

These paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint on the landscape. As most of my other work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. These pieces would be the mapped view. All this is nuanced by my personal experience of moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles and the loss of the imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This part of the process was very deliberate and opened the work up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.

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

February First Friday and fiber aerial in progress

Last night was the First Friday art walk. The weather was cold and lousy, but lots of people showed up nonetheless. Met some great new folks and visited with old friends.

I’m still working on the big fiber aerial from last month and an aerial painting I started back in L.A. I also showed a new piece that uses the free-weaving process I’m inventing and hopefully perfecting.

Here’s the fiber aerial:
Los Angeles Aerial #3: Psychogeography of the crazy quilt (in the fashion of Jackson Pollock)

The 3' x 4' piece is a collage of vintage fabrics, men's neckties and painted / dyed fabrics, machine and hand stitching.

yarn p0rn, free-weaving, dyeing and painting

I have an aunt who has been thinning her fiber / fabric stash, which made me the lucky recipient of these colorful yarns:


and some white ones for dyeing:

Similar to what I've done here (though this is a much smaller scale), I'll be "free-weaving," as I call it, these yarns into 3' x 4' aerials. Right now I'm dyeing strips of canvas and stretching them onto canvas stretchers to create the main structures of the weaving. Dendridic forms in leaves, trees and aerials really lend themselves to this process.

I've also been painting again, working mostly on a 4 1/2' by 5' aerial that I started in Los Angeles. This painting has sucked months from my life and I'm still struggling with the way it reflects light and creates hot spots. Lighting this thing evenly is near impossible because the surface has so many different planes. I've draped fabric and paper over wood panel and then dripped and rubbed it with paint. The textures are great and like the free-weaving appropiate to the subject matter, but the viewer has to be in constant motion around the painting to see all of it... curious effect I could use to other ends, I suppose.

Quote On Photography

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been – what people need protection from. Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

First Friday of the New Year

I’ve been feeling a bit low-energy lately, which kind of put a damper on my usual First Friday over-planning, over-prepping and over-working. And oddly, that turned out to be a good thing.

All I did to prep was buy the usual wine and snacks and show up 30 minutes before the event started. I didn't even hang any new work. The only piece that was on the wall was a 3’ x 4’ aerial grid that was pinned to my corkboards. I've been working on this fiber piece, in some form, for years. This thing has been constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed and recombined with other so many other pieces. It's kind of unbelievable the amount of history and labor in this piece, which shows... layers of neckties, dyed and painted fabrics, hand and machine-stitching, over-stitching, etc.

I was surprised to see how many people were blown-away by this piece. They wanted to know how it was done, where it was going, what it was, how I came up with the process...

One woman holding a toddler asked him, "Is this painted or sewn?"

"sewn"

"Did this take a little time or a lot of time?"

"laaadaaaa"

Here I was feeling a bit underachieving for not having any new work up, but exhausted enough not to be too bothered. So… I'm feeling really low-key, and everyone is coming in and getting really excited about this work, and they're leaving and collecting more people and dragging them into my studio because, "You just have to see this."

The conversations ranged from a geographer talking about mapping to a girl from Appalachia who moved to Los Angeles talking about her difficulties adjusting. She said things I'd said myself so many times about not being able to find her grounding through the concrete or solace without more than little glimpses of sky. Like us, she used to get away to Malibu so she could stand in the Santa Monica Mountains and look out over the ocean and experience expanse and the soothing vision of the horizon line.

So often, Frank and I tell ourselves that if we'd had more opportunities to get out of the city, we could have been content in L.A. But as it was, we just felt trapped and surrounded – which is what this particular aerial is about: complete immersion in a place the size of the entire country of Ireland and the density of... well, Los Angeles.

Joanna Staniszkis wearable art: The Linen Project

some beautiful pieces of wearable art

Click through the gallery to see all these great pieces... more interesting things on the rest of her website.

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:

Remiss in Writing

I’m still here... though busy.

I found an old note that I wrote to myself on an discarded library card that read: Realism doesn't trust memory.

It prompted me to reread Susan Sontag's article, "On Photography," which then prompted me to go to the used book store to find a copy of her 2001 book of the same title. I didn't find On Photography, but did find (and purchase):

Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn

Cold War Pastoral, documenting the photographic work of John Kippin as he explores the Greenham Common transformation from military base to site of protest from the Womens' Peace Movement to common land

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art

and some fiction: George Saunders' Pastoralia

Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta: Ground

Here's part of another piece I've been working on for the Tourism and Tragedy series, which overlaps with The Perfect Fall series. It's called Leaf Angels in the Manner of Ana Mendieta:


I dyed a mottled ground on raw canvas, then applied a beeswax resist through rubbing pebbled pavement and brush painting. I redyed it several times, removed the wax and brought out more definition with fabric paints. I chose fabric paints so the canvas would remain soft and pliable. I wanted the paint to meld with the fibers (as in dyeing processes) rather than just sit on top of them like a traditional painting.

Finally, I drew a chalk outline where the shadow of a figure is suggested and photographed it outside on the ground. Something intrigues me about returning art to a site of inspiration like this and then (re)photographing.

I use the word 'rephotographing' because this piece was inspired by photographs I took in the Smoky Mountains for The Perfect Fall Series.

Ana Mendieta, some links

A Whitney Museum survey of Ana Mendieta's work

Guggenheim art lesson

a Washington Post article by Blake Gopnik

Woven Glass and my absence in December's First Friday

On Friday and Saturday, the Emporium Building, where my studio is located, hosted an event for local artists and artisans to sell their wares. I didn’t make it for Friday’s Events, which was reported to be lovely with members of the Symphony Orchestra playing in the wings.

However, I did make it on Saturday and saw some remarkable fused glass by Paula Mealka. Paula takes pieces of glass, heats them in a kiln and then manipulates the molten glass with long tools she specially designed for this process.

check out this vessel woven from tiny glass rods

and another of her more brilliantly colored and typically massive pieces

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.