This past Friday, June 7, I gave it another shot. I convinced my friend John to come with me to the 319 building before meeting our friend Vy at HyLo Boutique for a beer, coffee, cheese tasting around 7. We stopped for food that I thought was going to be takeout Vietnamese sandwiches, but ended up being a sit-down meal because I directed us to the wrong place. It was fine though because we had a solid prologue conversation about how frustrated I get reading theory due to the inherent hubris involved in any theorist offering an alternative solution to the problematic constructed system they are observing. My central point was something to the effect of: "It's like, I'm with you when you're deconstructing and problematizing and pointing out the wrongness of what's going on and the fact that the rules of what's going on were invented by and are upheld by other humans, but I feel like from there, there is this disconnect where the theorist doesn't acknowledge the fact that they are just another fallible human offering another construct. They end up saying: 'Recognize this problematic construct that misguided, fallible humans have been blindly promoting for centuries; I've got a better one for you.' And they fail to recognize their own subjectivity and the fact that everything they are observing is filtered through their own imperfect perception. They actually think they're better because they are embodying an idea that's more-than-human, because they've discovered a Truth, but instead of it being about the idea, it is inevitably about them and their brilliance and their contribution to history, and I can't get over the fact that the furtherance of that is extremely dependent upon problematic bullshit firmly rooted in the intertwined systems including-but-not-limited-to colonialism, classism, racism, patriarchy, eurocentrism that any decent theorist is supposed to be problematizing." John made a point about the necessity of doing the work of sifting through the annoying dregs of each separate theory to find the nuggets of Truth in order to string together your own collage of Truth that can guide you through your life, and how it's a singularly excellent thing to be able to encounter the Truths that resonate for you and be able to keep that. I agreed, but realized aloud that I've mostly had those kinds of moments when reading fiction—when reading novels. That when I read theory and encounter a Truth, I don't feel impressed by it because I feel like, "Yeah, so? I thought that thought yesterday." I don't respond well to people telling me what to think or what to look at in that kind of direct "look at what I know and you don't yet know" sort of way. I am much more inclined to be engaged by something that leads me to my own conclusions, that asks me to look and think in a more collaborative way because that's so much more empowering and requires a whole lot more skill and finesse and subtlety than having a thought and being like "OH SHIT I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT THOUGHT—EVERYONE, LISTEN TO ME NOW!" It might be a truly brilliant thought worth sharing, but if you can't figure out how to communicate that thought in a way that engages and empowers your audience, then you're just another asshole.
Anyway, it was a good talk, and though we were running unforgivably late afterward, I'm glad we had it because the first thing we saw when walking into Vox Populi was Jess Wheelock's animation How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was maybe my favorite piece of the night. It shows Wheelock trying to read Dale Carnegie's book, but falling asleep, from which point, a drawn animation of herself falls into a dreamy landscape of the book itself and has a surreal encounter with Carnegie himself (also a drawn animation). It is hilarious and absurd and very smart. My favorite moments were the animated Carnegie encouraging her to pretend to be happy so that people will feel more comfortable around her—he tells her to smile; she folds her arms across her chest and frowns skeptically, shaking her head. So he offers her a smile-mask to hold up in front of her face instead. Later, Carnegie rambles about his motivation for writing the book and says something to the effect of, "When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends," which made me laugh out loud and elbow John and affirm that this piece was "so great, and so appropriate to the conversation we were just having."
Wheelock's video was separate from the "Union, Justice, Confidence" exhibition that filled the rest of the gallery. Standout pieces included Dave Grebber's My Stassed (Red Velvet) in Gallery 2, which I would actually like to look at again when there aren't so many people around interfering with my ability to actually hear what the people in the video clips are saying. The gist of the piece seemed to be a statement about the language of commodity-advertising as specifically applied to the virtual space that now defines our lives. Formally, it draws you in with layers of color and moving images, and then it holds you there with campy infomercial-style anecdotes performed in a familiarly composed way (if you're someone who watches a lot of infomercial-type ads), but with the people promoting a thing you've never heard of before. Again, I could not hear the content as much as I'd have liked to, but what I got from what I could discern is that "My Stassed" is some kind of virtual reality space that allows you to organize and keep track of your life to a vaguely terrifying extent (one participant says something about being able to watch his wife and daughter all the time via My Stassed)—it's framed as an ideal, utopic space that you can customize, but superficiality and falseness in the actors' faces makes you feel uneasy about the attractive bells and whistles that so easily drew you in. Good. In Gallery 4, there was a video by Stephanie Patton titled Conquer, in which a woman, presumably Patton, has covered her face and neck/ shoulders in band-aids and is ripping them off one by one. I was queasily reminded of my own Putting My Face On and didn't really want to watch the whole thing, but I feel like I probably should go back in order to do so.
We also checked out the openings at Grizzly Grizzly: "Permanent" featuring Kim Faler and Kristen Kimler [I was unimpressed by the tiny snippet images of hubcaps pinned inside circular frames and equivalent images of columns arranged around the column in the center of the room. The "wallpaper" on the back wall also fell flat for me. I don't know—I just felt myself asking "OK, and?"]; Tiger Stikes Asteroid: "Gillian Pears: Elsewhere" [beautiful images of pieces of cloth draped over clothesline before colored walls. Formally impressive]; and Napoleon: "The Flame and the Flower: New Works By Marc Blumthal" [digitally abstracted images of Reagan...and some kind of manifestoish statement scrawled on the wall. "Adolescent impulses with a pretentious title" is what I numbly wrote in pen on the notecard I took. The downpour of rain soaked this and all other press releases to a bleeding stack of pulp at the bottom of my canvas bag, which seems appropriate to mention.] before heading out.
We got to HyLo at 8:30 instead of 7, but Vy didn't seem to mind. Combining coffee, cheese and beer is a thing I vow to do for the rest of my life. Walking around in the rain to the point that your raincoat ceases to even remotely serve its intended function and your shoes become squishy pools and your dress might as well be a bathing suit because it's suctioned to you like a second skin—also not so bad. The concluding art experience of the night was accepting a feathered mask from a dude under an umbrella who was trying to hand it off to everyone walking past him. "There's a good one" is what he said when I took it from him. I don't know what that meant, but I wore the mask the rest of the way to the L and left it on a bench for someone else to pick up or throw away. There were little wet bits of green feather stuck to my face, apparently. Good.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
Art I've Seen Around Philly So Far
So, my first official week in Philly, my friend Maia convinced me to do First Friday in Old City with her. I found it pretty disappointing--possibly because we kept ending up at places right as their supply of free beer and/or drinks ran out, but also because much of the artworks in Old City seem to be lacking in substance beyond either the craft of how they were made or the final presentation of them as objects. I wasn't really paying attention to the names of the galleries or exhibitions as we strolled through because, frankly, things started to look the same to me. I only remember the show at the Center for Art in Wood because it was full of strikingly beautiful, well-made objects. Not particularly inspiring conceptually, but full of gorgeous things. Similarly memorable was a more design-centric location: lots of futuristic furniture pieces and ornate glass chandeliers and jewel-like objects clearly intended for someone's china cabinet. Shiny pretty things that I remember experiencing because they were so shiny and pretty. If I'm being honest, Fireman's Hall Museum was my favorite venture of the evening because it houses a steam-powered fire engine (!!), which cannot really be beat if we're talking stupendous objects.
A few days later, I wandered over to the Fabric Workshop and Museum and saw "Changing Scenes: Points of View in Contemporary Media Art," which I found much more satisfying. I got to experience Adrian Piper's Cornered in person!! I'd only ever seen Piper's monologue, which I consider powerful enough to stand alone. But the piece exhibited has many more components I hadn't known about. It seems like the way it is displayed and how the installation is titled has evolved or is at least different from how it has been displayed in the past. For this incarnation, you walk in and are confronted with an array of TV monitors arranged in a diamond. Each monitor is sitting on a wooden stand that elevates it to eye level. A chair accompanies each stand--not for sitting: the chairs are all tipped over on the floor so that their metal legs jut out at you. The monitor at the pinnacle of the diamond--the one in nestled where the walls meet--has an entire table tipped against its monitor in this fashion. Arranged on the walls surrounding the monitors are black and white portraits of African American women smiling. I asked a gallery attendant if he knew who the women were--if there was a specific reason their particular portraits were chosen to be displayed/ if the order mattered. He couldn't tell me.
Piper's monologue plays first. About halfway through, after she makes the point about the extreme likelihood of the viewer having at least some black ancestry, the chorus of "We Are Family" begins playing. While credits roll on Piper's monitor and the music continues to play, the sixteen chair-having monitors sequentially play footage of individuals speaking the same phrase, at first one at a time, then in slowly building unison until they are speaking together in a mighty, tumultuous roar of simultaneous voices. They say, " .'
I also got to see Javier Tellez's video Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007), in which six blind people encounter an elephant. Each person's immedaite reaction to the feel of touching the elephant is integrated with additional voiceover and video of their broader meditations on their experience of being blind. Everything is in rich black and white, and there are exquisite transitional shots of the elephant's skin close up. It was so fascinating and so...I don't like to throw around the word beautiful, but this accessed something transcendent and human and fragile and complicated while remaining simple and straightforward and lighthearted and unpretentious, and that very much fits my standard of beauty. It made me cry. There's a sculpture in the same gallery that is a composite of all of the descriptions of the elephant made by the participants in the video piece--it incorporates the materials to which each of them likened the sensation of the elephant's skin and presence (a wall, tires, a coat, etc.).
For May's First Friday, I hit 319 N. 11th St with my friend Avi. A few years ago, I interned in that building at a gallery that no longer exists, so I knew the vibe of the spaces there would be more experimental, artist-run, collective-oriented than the Old City experience. Vox Populi, Grizzly Grizzly, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Marginal Utility are among the spaces that live in the 4-story walk-up. Very much still the hippest scene. I don't know if I was in a weird mood or what, but I found myself experiencing the opposing spectrum of disillusionment--work that is mostly concept and not enough execution. I mean, I'm obviously a conceptual art fan, and I tend to prefer work that engages me intellectually, but I couldn't manage to connect with anything I was seeing. I felt a similar disconnected blurring effect to what I'd experienced walking around Old City--everything looked and felt the same; it was just work adhering to a different set of ideals and standards (which still didn't quite align with mine, but for different reasons). Avi and I left feeling frustrated, bitching about the annoying cycle of people continuing to iterate ideas that have already been iterated, repeatedly, by people far more talented and capable of communicating. This rant was not a reaction to any specific piece/ artist/ space in particular--nothing was atrocious, nor was anything stellar--it was more a general tantrum about the infuriating pursuit of contributing something creative to the world and inevitably falling short. Feeling like anything could be "good" enough to earn a pass, but like nothing every really should. I'm gonna blame it on a weird mood and try again in June...
A few days later, I wandered over to the Fabric Workshop and Museum and saw "Changing Scenes: Points of View in Contemporary Media Art," which I found much more satisfying. I got to experience Adrian Piper's Cornered in person!! I'd only ever seen Piper's monologue, which I consider powerful enough to stand alone. But the piece exhibited has many more components I hadn't known about. It seems like the way it is displayed and how the installation is titled has evolved or is at least different from how it has been displayed in the past. For this incarnation, you walk in and are confronted with an array of TV monitors arranged in a diamond. Each monitor is sitting on a wooden stand that elevates it to eye level. A chair accompanies each stand--not for sitting: the chairs are all tipped over on the floor so that their metal legs jut out at you. The monitor at the pinnacle of the diamond--the one in nestled where the walls meet--has an entire table tipped against its monitor in this fashion. Arranged on the walls surrounding the monitors are black and white portraits of African American women smiling. I asked a gallery attendant if he knew who the women were--if there was a specific reason their particular portraits were chosen to be displayed/ if the order mattered. He couldn't tell me.
Installation View of Out of the Corner (1990)
I also got to see Javier Tellez's video Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007), in which six blind people encounter an elephant. Each person's immedaite reaction to the feel of touching the elephant is integrated with additional voiceover and video of their broader meditations on their experience of being blind. Everything is in rich black and white, and there are exquisite transitional shots of the elephant's skin close up. It was so fascinating and so...I don't like to throw around the word beautiful, but this accessed something transcendent and human and fragile and complicated while remaining simple and straightforward and lighthearted and unpretentious, and that very much fits my standard of beauty. It made me cry. There's a sculpture in the same gallery that is a composite of all of the descriptions of the elephant made by the participants in the video piece--it incorporates the materials to which each of them likened the sensation of the elephant's skin and presence (a wall, tires, a coat, etc.).
For May's First Friday, I hit 319 N. 11th St with my friend Avi. A few years ago, I interned in that building at a gallery that no longer exists, so I knew the vibe of the spaces there would be more experimental, artist-run, collective-oriented than the Old City experience. Vox Populi, Grizzly Grizzly, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Marginal Utility are among the spaces that live in the 4-story walk-up. Very much still the hippest scene. I don't know if I was in a weird mood or what, but I found myself experiencing the opposing spectrum of disillusionment--work that is mostly concept and not enough execution. I mean, I'm obviously a conceptual art fan, and I tend to prefer work that engages me intellectually, but I couldn't manage to connect with anything I was seeing. I felt a similar disconnected blurring effect to what I'd experienced walking around Old City--everything looked and felt the same; it was just work adhering to a different set of ideals and standards (which still didn't quite align with mine, but for different reasons). Avi and I left feeling frustrated, bitching about the annoying cycle of people continuing to iterate ideas that have already been iterated, repeatedly, by people far more talented and capable of communicating. This rant was not a reaction to any specific piece/ artist/ space in particular--nothing was atrocious, nor was anything stellar--it was more a general tantrum about the infuriating pursuit of contributing something creative to the world and inevitably falling short. Feeling like anything could be "good" enough to earn a pass, but like nothing every really should. I'm gonna blame it on a weird mood and try again in June...
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Edit: Red Lipstick Project
So, in organizing applications for residencies etc. I've been going back through older projects and cleaning them up a bit. One of those is The Red Lipstick Project from over a year ago. Despite the really rough execution, I think there's a lot of good stuff worth mining: I have a lot of footage of my friends--some of it usable, some not (lesson learned: in the future, I should probably not ask people to record themselves. I should probably physically be there to direct them, using my own equipment), and all of the ideas and approaches I was trying out are still very much ideas and approaches that I am concerned with and that I consider worth investigating. So, even if this is only a springboard exercise toward future endeavors in collaborative video projects, I think it's worthwhile. That said, I've re-composed some of the footage into a new video, and I think it's a lot cleaner or possibly more straight-forward. Blogger seems suddenly unable to access my YouTube videos, so please just click here to watch it for now. I was also able to upload it to my portfolio site, so feel free to stream it there if you'd prefer.
I'm not sure if slowing them down was the right move, but I really wanted to focus on the gesture.
These have turned out to be my favorite still compositions:
I really like the mirror reflections and the focus on their facial expressions as they perform the gesture. In going back through, I'm discovering that that is what I'm really interested in--getting a sense of what they're thinking/ how they're feeling.
I'm not sure if slowing them down was the right move, but I really wanted to focus on the gesture.
These have turned out to be my favorite still compositions:
I really like the mirror reflections and the focus on their facial expressions as they perform the gesture. In going back through, I'm discovering that that is what I'm really interested in--getting a sense of what they're thinking/ how they're feeling.
Monday, April 15, 2013
It's been a while...
Huge life changes have kept me disconnected from the blogosphere for a while. I recently moved all of my stuff to West Philly, and I just secured a new job at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in their Visitor Services department (wooo, go me!). I'm applying to a bunch of residencies, and went to the blog to reference something to find that I have new followers and a bunch of comments on old posts! I am really excited about this--Hi new followers! Sorry it took me a few months to respond to your comments!! I am thrilled to know that people are actually reading/ looking at this--thanks so much!
Despite the requisite adjustment period, I have a couple new projects in the works, and I've been getting around to some art events in Philly. Updates to come!
Despite the requisite adjustment period, I have a couple new projects in the works, and I've been getting around to some art events in Philly. Updates to come!
Friday, February 15, 2013
Video Screening + Sake Tasting = Saturday Night in Bushwick!
So, back in July, I received an email from a guy who had seen my video installation at the BWAC. He told me how much he had enjoyed the installation, and let me know that he and his friend were in the process of setting up a gallery space in Bushwick. Awesome. There was also someone who left a comment in the feedback notebook I had set up at the BWAC opening who left his email, which I used to express my gratitude for his comment (he quoted a TS Elliot poem. Awesome). Turns out, the guy whom I contacted is the friend of the guy who contacted me! I know this because the guy I contacted responded to my message by inviting me to be the featured artist at their annual Art & Spirits Eve, which has been serving as a sort of teaser event until they get the gallery up and running. They feature an artist in conjunction with a tasting of a particular alcoholic beverage (past examples include scotch and bourbon)--this year's spirit is sake, to be paired with Putting My Face On!!
I am incredibly psyched to officially meet these gentlemen and screen the video for an audience again. I will also have 5 editions of the video for sale as DVDs. Aftermath post to come!
I am incredibly psyched to officially meet these gentlemen and screen the video for an audience again. I will also have 5 editions of the video for sale as DVDs. Aftermath post to come!
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
NEW PORTFOLIO WEBSITE
My friend Lina kindly invited me to join her web providing service (it's free, but you have to be invited?) SO now I have a really snazzy, sleek and professional-looking portfolio website that is way more organized than this thing. I'm still keeping this blog as a space for messy, rambling posts/ thinking out loud kind of jazz, and I do link certain blogposts within the project pages as like an optional context resource...
CHECK IT OUT
CHECK IT OUT
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