Tuesday, June 12, 2007

On the Illusion of Separateness in this Lifetime; A project in un differentiating Life and Death:

1. Your Children Will Betray You.

2. Babies Are Born In The Graveyard.

3. Love Is Never So Complete As Dying.




Function: (of the language): using apparent contradictions to point to hidden 'clumped' beliefs and to suggest a non dual reality.

(Of the art): Trying to get at that which might be felt but is not seen- bonds between people, between states of being, between people in different states of being... To get more literal: 'pre-decision' states like ambivalence about being alive; or 'transition' states like mourning a loss; bonds like the unwritten 'contract' between parent and child, or like the connection between myself and my unborn children...


The title, 'by any means possible', reflects my modus operandi for making this work. Truncated pieces of wood were bound together, debarked, wrapped, sanded, rubbed, painted, hung and arranged, with my body as the primary tool and with whatever materials were at hand. Trees bodies were used because they were a readily available shortcut to form; they “felt” right because these limbs were masses of energy in both form and line, had a center, and reflected directional shifts. These 'figures' made up the discrete objects in the show, but the space became a fundamental part of the work as well. Having an area to work with which truly felt like a dirty hallway, I decided I wanted to create “moments” where the work could be encountered. My goal with the space was to have it serve the work. As the work is quiet and unfolds overtime, I tried, then, to make the space feel somehow more 'available'. In order to do this, I took the same approach as with the work: I 'revealed' and 'obscured' surfaces as I felt the need. The walls were touched all over, loved, even, with a skim coat of unpainted soft joint compound. The painted concrete floor was scraped and mopped. I tried to respond to the space with the same sensitivity as the work, and to act or intervene with intention.


I had two goals for this work. I was trying to make work that 'felt' right. It mattered to me that the work evoke emotion, though I knew if it worked correctly, what emotion that was would be hard to put into words. All of the pieces in the show speak in some way to gesture, solitude, longing, and hold a certain silence or muteness. My second goal was that the art and art making serve a utility function in my life. I do not necessarily mean this in the literal sense of making vessels to hold my drinking water, but rather that whatever I make must have its own reason for being, its own purpose in my life beyond the 'rule' that i am an artist and must make 'art'.


'Dynamic of Two', the piece I made over the winter, (pictured on my opening invite), for instance, was designed in the hopes that certain invisible things would occur, that is, with the vague hope that the making of the piece would create a space for me to mourn an ended relationship. The process of meditating on uniting and then 'freeing' the two trees provided that for me, and as usual, surprising things happened. The rope took on both an energetic meaning as well as acting as a sort of 'road' for my journey. While wrapping, my mind automatically traveled memories of our coming together. In the act of unwrapping, there was a sense that i was putting something away (that something being the string in a literal sense, and my heartache and regret in another sense). Things I did not expect to occur, but which verify the meaning of the piece for me: that I chose to take it down in a direct reversal of the way I 'put it up', which required a backwards walk around the center of this spiral, being the point between the center of the trees, and that as a result of that choice, my hand slid over every inch of the 3,000 feet of rope, resulting in the feeling of 'taking stock', indeed, the act of pausing where i was at, and looking backward and looking forward, gave me a deep sense of rootedness and connection to both my past and the possibility of my future. My gesture as the rope came off the trees, was one of widening my arms apart and then bringing them together (collecting the rope then coiling it on the other arm). I had the sense of looking like a bird shaking out its plumage. The bodily effect was a workout between the shoulder blades, right where wings would sprout were I to have wings...


I have been in the habit of working with very dry mediums, resulting in scratchy actions and a sort of barren feeling. I felt a shift in me, a need for the work to be more direct and more fluid. In 'Dynamic of Two', what was seen (the bound trees) and the important gesture of the process (fluttering wings) were too separate for me. In 'Frenzy', (what I think of as the clay room or the cave dance, the piece in the show in the most enclosed space), I wanted the product to reflect the gesture more directly than in 'Dynamic of Two'. I wanted the viewer to have a sense of the impulse to write on cave walls and dance around the fire. I wanted the viewer to see the cluttered constant chatter in my head.


With the thesis show, what I was trying to do varied by the piece, but in the sense that it was also one large piece, what I wanted to do was undermine our collective urge to compartmentalize and separate the inextricable: death from life, sex from birth, me from you. Last fall, near the beginning of my project, marked a new development in my understanding. In the process of trying to write an academic paper, and in my struggle to isolate an idea, I drew a drawing of an idea. I then experienced the violence of the operation I was undertaking in my writing process- the imposition of structure resulting in an almost literal amputation isolating a 'central' part (picture a spider body), thus loosing what i celebrate most (picture its legs, but each leading to other body pods). I think of the idea as an endless web of light beams and intersections -the connective energetic tissue-, and I mourn constantly the ever-present but always denied 'place between points' we are forced to edit out. In some way, all of my work in the show speaks to the following tensions: emerge / retreat, freeze / writhe, truncate (rather than connect); reveal & obscure.

Dynamic of Two


By Any Means Possible