these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts

Mar 13, 2013

regardless of the weather...

.




...i come equipped with clouds of my very own.  force of fucking nature.  ;)


the fracturing of The Sublime.


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Oct 19, 2010

crutch. cross.

the boxes we've been given.

the boxes we've accepted.

the boxes we've constructed.


i have constructed more than a few horrible boxes for myself, that's for sure. horrible rooms of horrible silence, horrible stillness- the evil twin of what i'm experiencing now. the hateful flip-side of solitude and graciousness. maybe the word would be "abjection"?

in my mind now i can see those horrible boxes i constructed for myself. i can see them with the label ABJECT stencilled across the front in spray-paint and Jasper Johns lettering. though that description makes it seem almost romantic. and maybe there are moments when abjection rubs shoulders with romance? maybe sometimes our pain would be too great, our loneliness too hard to bear, if we did not romanticize it a little. romance provides strength. it makes the world tolerable in intolerable moments.


but i will not climb back in to particular boxes.

i will not accept particular boxes.

i will not construct particular boxes.


i do not want to contain so much pain that i must romanticize my self, my life, my pain, in order to bear it. in order to move even the shortest of distances. i have lived too many years that way.

i am tired of bullshit pain and want the pain that finds me to be real and necessary. not made-up, not unnecessary. and in the in between times, a soft joy. pencil scratches and ink dripping and words to rummage around in. i am learning to appreciate the open air now. feathers and leaves falling. the wind cracking through tall trees. angry squirrels clawing the roots. and such a luscious moon.

Feb 9, 2009

weeding...

for the past two days, i've been cleaning, sorting, and discarding things from my home... and i'm still nowhere near being finished. after quitting my day-job, i started really thinking about what kind of life i'm trying to build and i took a good, hard, honest look at myself and decided it was high time to take charge of my surroundings in a more personal, meaningful way.

there is definitely more than a small amount of truth to the cliche that the things you own begin owning you after awhile. there's no way around that fact. and it isn't necessarily something to feel bad about until you apply that truth to specifics. i have absolutely no problem with living a life ruled by books and art or even my collection of broken porcelain dolls, but i've got a big problem with letting my life be ruled by junk: the accumulation of rough years, tough times, and broken hearts...

until two days ago, my bookcase was overrun by more than just my massive collection of books. it was the home/storage unit for old nic-naks that i've been carrying around with me since i was 15 years old. i looked at them all, one by one, and realized that the majority of them were only with me because i didn't question their belonging with me. in other words, these things are with me because i didn't ask myself "do i even like this object anymore?", and overwhelmingly, when i did ask myself this question, the answer was a firm, unapologetic, cold NO. soon, the bookcase had been cleared of all my past baggage and i found myself weeding through my closet, tossing clothes all around the bedroom. i pulled out sweaters and dresses that i haven't actually worn in at least two years, holding on to them only because i think they're cool and that maybe i'll wear them again someday. this attitude needed to be scrapped along with the clutter.

soon, this project of weeding through became about much more than just creating space in my home, it became about an unpacking and unloading of the past. it became about finding my real self amid the chaos, clearing out the damage and trauma, and letting myself really become the new girl i need to be... the person i've become but can't see through all the objects and clutter and baggage. i am cleaning house in more ways than one and it feels wonderful. it feels amazing actually. getting to the point where i can let go of objects, realizing that they can have a better home elsewhere, or simply that i am no longer in need of whatever romantic, nostalgic fascination that brought the item in to my life is very freeing.

having grown up poor, it's always been very hard for me to get rid of things but the time has come to get over it, get over the past and move forward. the time has come to make choices based in ethics (like quitting the job) so that my outer life more closely resembles my inner life. i am matching things up and getting rid of the things that bog me down.

Feb 6, 2009

thoughts on paper...

humble, common, mundane - we all have a daily relationship with paper. we cringe at the junk mail we receive, we peel it back from sticks of gum, we turn page after page of magazines. we're used to it. it occupies a space in our daily lives that is so rampant, so huge, that we don't notice it. we take its presence for granted. and as far as art substrates go, it isn't hard to acquire.

there are plenty of artists in the world that draw on backs of envelopes or crumpled receipts. and these artists, for however much flack they take before gaining some sort of critical recognition, are doing something so fundamentally human that it flies well below the radar of ART and challenges our perceptions of what art is. the fact that a scribble on a stained napkin can be validated as a fine drawing is such a wonderful thing and i enjoy the big emotional response that type of art generates.

it is this extreme level of familiarity and banality that makes work on paper seem so much more intimate than work on canvas or linen or wood. i think using common, easily acquired materials is one of the big reasons why works on paper have become so important. there's even a magazine dedicated to it: art on paper. and the enormous volume Vitamin D is a testament to the importance of drawing itself... drawing for it's own sake and in it's own right, in no way connected to painting or planning.

drawing has been received as being something much more than a preliminary action, a way to jot down ideas or work out the kinks of a different piece. it stands on its own as a completely valid art form and i love that.

drawing is an action that we've all taken part in. we doodle when bored and scribble in the dirt. our coffee mugs leave little abstract drawings ringed across the kitchen table and we find animals hidden in cloud formations. we are all drawing all the time.

the commonality of drawing paired with the banal readiness of paper is largely responsible for why i've gravitated so strongly toward exploring its potentiality for making endearing, emotional, thoughtful, honest work. it's just so immediate and seems to showcase the passage of the human hand in a more observable,tangible way than oil on canvas. oil paintings always achieve a level of refinement but a drawing, no matter how refined, always seems to carry a quality of rawness (in my opinion, anyway) and a level of humility. i'm attracted to this occuance and need to explore it.