Eggshell space cadet. The molasses of a disthymic metabolism, a shakey economy in which I compete with corporate managers for serving positions, bare mental focus calling for a zesty creativity just to keep the dream alive. I am hanging most of the day maybe drinking a mint tea for stimulation.
I get too distracted by sudden research into the beauty in the subdued enraged animations of apartied captured in the entrapped elegance of William Kentridges black box, or death and rememberance as a practice in significance with Polly Morgans installations, or reviving the with the thousand year technique of felting modern cocktail dresses as Andrea Zittel so gracefully collaborated. So anti technology sometimes, I’m trying to access what connects this all and can only come up with that reverance for resurrecting old forms that try to connect through incarnate turbulence of the present.
Toy theatres,
taxidermy,
felt clothes…
Sometimes it looks like I should of turned a completely different direction than digital art.
What’s a girl to do.
‘The aesthetics of the image are not to be found in its beauty, density and completeness, but in its transparencies and potentials.’
~lillevan.com
www.bayimproviser.com/rova/rovate_2009.html
These days, free weekends with no obligations become rare and in dreaming, I suddenly relax.
Rova, the local avante sax quartet, is having an “interactive” animation with Lillevan event this Saturday and it looks mesmorizing. Not all animation is 3D yet my interpretation is always a bit more digitized or stop-motion or hand painted than the re-texturized composited videos of the avante. The anti-anti-aesthetic someone once said. So this is an intellectually challenging event musically and visually and thats fine. Lillivan’s videos posted possess an ephimeral ability to be like water and the forest at once.
Exploring the local at printed and digitized landscapes remind me of my former dance experiments in “body weather training”. How to visualize heated metabolism. Connecting blood vibrancy with urban architeture complete with cultural and political sensualities, justices and injustices. That we all experience. It’s not, thoughtless. A moment in contemplation. It’s exhileratingly pregnant and painful body weather.
On my way out of Safeway at night I see egg boxes strewn about open in the aisles and every shelf in dissarray. Insanitary. Suddenly a *smack*. I turn around and the night patrolman, knocked in the eye, helplessly watches a kid runs into the night parking lot. The attendants excitedly chat “he couldnt even stop him!” A major store run by teenagers.
Weeks after New York, I am exhausted and uninspired. Even as I was given the special chore of driving a shuttle for a job at an event, I find no one wants to jump in my van (out of cluelessness than bad intent). However, it’s seriously late at night and I felt abandoned, driving a van exhausted, alone, in the fog and began to cry.
I am slow. There has to be a time to process a fullness. Talking to myself allows me to slew these reenactments of suicidal traumas. It’s pirate play, sailing to better shores.
Down the street I inspect KateEric’s exhibit at the Johanssen Gallery. Detailed, disturbing yet organic collages. I like the wooden ones with eggshells. Just like my psyche.
www.kateeric.com
It’s been some time since writing openly, and I’ve been lost in a search to define the center of my artisan drive. This is as much a survival issue not to lose all that I’ve learnt as to develop a resilient resourcefulness. So achingly voyeuring the “other” I’ve been reminded of my enstranged love of travel. It is really the landscape, exterior expression of an inner spirit which breaks me. I comb the web to find the path of the synthetic traveler.
The American Dollar – Anything You Synthesize (Produced By Onesize)
“Built at phenomenal speeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, have no recognizable center, no single identity.”
-Nicolai Ouroussoff “The New New City” NEW YORK TIMES
Just like the emerging globalizations and mixing of peoples in synthesized creation, the ensuing blurring of boundaries, fractionalized identities and fictionalized blindspots have become the exploration of the urban everyday. Earlier this year, Youmna Chlala’s exhibit “This is a Cake, Not a City” first hanging in the SomARTS Cultural Center then later at the YBCA for the “Location of Identity” exhibit curated by Taraneh Hemami, caught my attention. It focused on the artistic diaspora from the middle east. Her post-cake metropolis spoke of place, or more precisely it’s absence and representation in memory and in the media. her remote connection to the dissected buildings now the icon of her history. Each location materialized as a painting on acetate, a decimated patchwork, bright and abstracted, standing in place of more subtle complexities lesser known to the outside interconnected by a matrix.
Some absurbists recently taught me the formalized game of getting lost, that tossing the dice and gambling which way to turn while walking becomes the adventure. The underlying answer maybe to find pleasure in the heart of certainty that will never be found.
After rushing from place to place, I left my old used car near the BART parking lot. When I arrived back late at night, the car stalled and needed to be jump started. My brother arrived from several cities away to do it. We tagged by cell phone until we spotted each other. However, the car was weak. WIthout skipping a beat, we drove both our cars, same make different models, down the Peninsula main road with brother leading and me following. The cars ramped up speed, then mine would stall once every 5 miles, we’d stop and pop open the hoods hop out of the car to jump start it again and ride down another 5 miles to start the process over again clear until we parked straight into the driveway of his house. Each car emitting heat and ticking next to the other from exhaust in the end. One of those sibling bonding nights, then, where my brother rescues me and we play real life Grand Theft Auto for an hour or so racing down the El Camino at midnight.
The reception is bad with my mp3 player. I play with the keys and examine the white translucent cover. Listening closely through the static I hear the beats of shamanistic Korean drumming. Then I remember, I listen to the same music when awake.
Tripped upon the BAM/PFA 30th Matrix Party quite by accident a few days ago where the ultra-combo of much admired animator Martha Coleburn AND rock combo Deerhoof collaborated. The add to the discovery a link of mine, Scott Snibbe, will be installing his animation “Falling Girl” during the summer.
The party hailed new BAM/PFA Director and independant curator Lawrence Rinder and reminded me of lectures I get about focusing as a leader instead of “just” an artist, or the rockstar status in front vs back of house worlds, recent articles hitting artnet.com about the jobs of artistically knowledged curators vs the added financial cultivation responsabilities of directors. The theatrical, art and cinematic world with necessity for multi-collaborations among producers, administrators, the artists suffering similar growing pains.
Despite the prestige, my hero still turns out to be the likes of those like Faviana Rodrigues who informed to me at her recent speech for the SF Arts Commission, after being mentored by local community arts activists to start her own business, she spends 40 hours weekly at meetings with organizations from all over the country, another 20 shifting up ideas, the actual project, she assures me, just pops right out.
