Flashback to November/11: Creep Along

Back in November of last year, I took over an additional studio and turned it into a site-specific installation.  I'd been making large(ish) paper cutout pieces that came off the wall and had layers, and I wanted to build something that would be like actually standing inside one of those/ that would allow me to be completely surrounded and consumed by that kind of space.  I started by painting the walls grey...

Then painted the shapes left over from the roller a lighter shade of grey...

And some in darker shades...

I spent about a month locked up in this room by myself.  I was listening to Timber Timbre's "Creep On Creepin On"on repeat, and I reread Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" during the course of its construction, the combination of which reinforced some of the creepier overtones to do with solitude, dread, obsession, madness, etc.  I sat with just the walls painted for a little while, not really knowing where to go from that point.  I tried making a web out of duct tape, just to bring the physicality of the space out from the walls, but it didn't really work--the duct tape didn't really transcend itself; it was too legible as duct tape.

So, I decided to build out of the walls with chicken wire and layer over that with a bunch of greyscale photo backdrop paper I had lying around from the paper pieces.  I incorporated the duct tape as an adhesive, and continued the shapes from the walls with enamel paint. 

 

 

 

I obscured the given light sources of the window and the overhead light so that light had to be filtered through the growths. 

 

It was nearing the end of the semester, and I was given a deadline for when I had to clear out of the space because new students would be arriving.  I spent a few nights in the space, working to finish it so that I could show it before I had to dismantle it.

It kind of became like a manifestation of the interior space of my mind while I was working on it.  The grey was oppressive and the formations were increasingly alien and almost hallucinatory.  It was like an interior landscape.

I took so many photos, at different times of day, with the lights on and off.  Here are some:

I also recorded video while I de-installed (which I showed during a crit along with the remains of one of the larger paper formations, and pastel prints I made off of the walls).  Here's some of that:

Flashback to March, 2012: I'll See You In My Dreams

I have extremely vivid dreams, and I started writing them down in 2007 so that I could analyze them.  It's become a daily practice of significance to me, and I'm beginning to realize that it's actually a very complex process of multifaceted translation between subconsciously experienced visual imagery and waking linguistic articulation--the imagery within dream reality is a translation of feelings and events I have accumulated while awake, and my writing it down is an additional layer of re-framing/ re-contextualizing in order to re-experience the same themes and emotions again, hopefully with a revelatory/ prophetic result.  Anyway, many people who know me know that this is a thing that I do, and I've had a lot of people ask me about how I might utilize what I call my dream archive in my work.  I'd never really thought of the dream archive as fodder for artmaking--it's mostly just something I do for me/ definitely not something I'd ever thought about sharing.  But late last February, when I was in a post-grad-school-application place--dissatisfied with what I'd been making, determined to figure out a way to do something else, something more personal, with a different kind of approach--the dream archive came to mind.

So, I started building a dome-like, cocoon-ish structure out of tracing paper and gel medium (using chicken wire to hold the form/ keep it suspended).

My original idea was to transcribe the dreams onto pieces of tracing paper and effectively build the dome out of my dreams (wouldn't it be pretty when all the colors from the pencils I was writing with ran together, thought I), but that was just insane as I had 5+ years worth of dreams to contend with, and I didn't want people crouching down to read inside of it anyway.  And the thing I built was so nice as it was in its pure translucence, especially once I put it in the white box of the installation room.  I took a bunch of photos, from different locations within the room/ in relation to the object, and with different light.  

I decided that a better way to incorporate the dream excerpts would be sound.  The room had a nice echo to it, so I sat inside the tracing paper coccoon inside the white cube, and I recorded myself reading excerpts from the dream archive.  I layered and repeated certain words and the recording picked up the natural echo of the space.

I included the installation in my 3/12/12 critique

Here's a nifty video I made using a selection of the still images combined with the audio that looped around it.

[For some annoying reason, blogger wouldn't let me upload the video directly, so I had to use YouTube as a middle man...Apologies for any resulting quality issues...]