SURREALIST SOAP OPERA POST-APOCOLYPTIC CORPSE’S ROLLERBLADES WITH SPACE-FUTURE-GLAM+VICTORIAN OUTFITS

Yeah, you heard me right.

Just wait ’til you see my costume designing skillz/corpse performance.

(Okay, I was just an extra in my friend’s pilot for a surrealist soap opera series. These are the blades I gave outfits for.)

TRYING TO REACH YOU

This piece was presented to an audience of about 50 people at the March 2010 edition of Flux Factory’s Flux Thursday, a monthly potluck and arts salon.

During the meal, I walk about the crowd, collecting future participants and their phone numbers.

Each participant is assigned a role in a scripted conversation and is provided a partial script to read. Each script distributed only has lines for one person–the corresponding participant’s lines remain a mystery. There are three conversations in total, and there are two participants to each conversation. Each Caller A is given the phone number of a corresponding Caller B who has the other half of the shared script. Each Caller B knows only that later her phone will receive a phone call, and that she will then be held responsible to execute the script that was provided to her. Each Caller A only knows a phone number to dial, and is told to execute the lines in the script accordingly.

At a designated moment in the evening lineup, I take the “stage” and give a brief explanation of the coming orchestration of encounters. I then summon all Callers A (each of which is assigned a Script 1, Script 2, or Script 3) to dial the number to their Callers B. We all press “Send” on our cellular phones at the same moment.

Silence,

followed by myraid ringtones, beeps, alarms, and bell sounds. Then, everyone begins reading their scripts.

Well, not everyone. A small portion of designated participants (1-2) had left; another small portion (1-2) lacked reception in the gallery. Another, apparently, had first read incorrectly the number given, and called a nonparticipant who had no idea what was going on.

Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.

Bewildered Person: Hello?

Participant: I AM TRYING TO REACH YOU.

The phone number, read and dialed “correctly,” reportedly produced similar results.

Additionally, the number I myself dialed had no answer. No answer, and moreover I was told by a recording that “This number is no longer in service.”

I feel like all of the “failures to connect” in this piece actually gave it more weight, contributing to what I set out to make.

Changes for the future: more scripts, more people. Definitive ending/encouraging people to wait silently or else continue talking on their phones until everyone is consensually silent and has ended their connection.

INCREDIBLE DE/FEATS

In January, I inherited a box of twine and cords and wires that I’ve found really appropriate and thematically necessary for a lot of pieces that I have in the works–pieces combining themes of technology, communication, war, identity/identification/recognition, and how knowledge/understanding is claimed.

Playing around with the wire one evening in late January, I created some simple projects. One of which is this:

It is a nonfunctional tin-can telephone. On one side,  reads “incredible feats of communication,” while from the other end is a mirror-image sculpting of the text, “incredible defeats of communication.”

Currently, this piece hangs precariously from thin wire brads on my studio wall, though my intent is for it to hang by fishing line from a ceiling/tree/apparatus  in the center of an open space, thereby inviting viewers to walk around it and see it from different perspectives. This way, the opposing texts shift from being legible and easy to comprehend to appearing garbled and backwards, depending on the relation and perspective of the viewer that engages the piece.

To me, this sculpture is a comment on language as a dominating form of communication–one that is, for better or for worse, relied upon to carry the weight of  interactions between parties which may be great distances apart. In years when technology arguably connects people around the world, I wonder the extent to which it is also keeping people apart (both physically and figuratively), and I wonder the extent to which it affects how its employers understand what they come to know (about each other, about themselves, about anything at all).

The fact that technologies facilitate distance between encounters is frequently lost amid rhetoric about bringing people/ideas/etc together; and in the process, mutual understanding is taken for granted. We walk away satisfied from our dangling tin cans: we said what we knew how to say, and we listened to what we knew how to listen for.

DEATH BY CUBICLE

This past Friday the 19th, some of my latest work was presented in the Flux Factory’s inaugural exhibition, Housebroken.

In January of this year, there was a callout for artists to propose installations for Flux Factory’s new home, a retired 8,000 square foot  greeting card factory. In response to this, I found myself considering Flux’s office. While it is the site of many serious and tedious hours spent doing many serious and tedious things (as  offices are wont to be), it is also a co-working office for a community arts organization that is fun, creative, magical, flexible, cute, and sometimes silly. There is no dress code, no timesheets, no 501k, no interoffice memos, no cubicles, no water coolers, no reception desks or laminating machines. There are, on the other hand, the occasional colleague in pajamas, a funny hat, and/or mismatching socks; artists in pajamas, funny suits, and mismatching socks walking by; artists in towels; the occasional feline; the occasional fiasco; irregular hours; ongoing construction projects; ongoing construction debris.

I’d always found this space a little comical, juxtaposing it with the place of my employment from 2007-2009. If that place was bleak and lifeless, Flux’s office is a palm full of confetti in my mind.

While it wasn’t an overt objective at the onset, my goal evolved to make pieces that remind the office’s occupants of what it tragically could be: drab, lifeless, suffocating, inescapable fluorescence, windowless, typical. Invoking memories of my previous office-based jobs and internships, I created an audiopiece/soundscape with my talented friend and music production guru, Jesse Novak. Our collaboration is entitled “This is not working.” I hope you love it. I hope it drives you crazy. I hope it reminds you of 3pm on a Tuesday.

(I hope you ask me to send it to you, because as of right now I can’t upload music on this blog.)

My other piece is a wall drawing in the office, also inspired by my previous experiences in more usual office environments. Specifically, at one particular internship at a progressive women’s health nonprofit in New York’s financial district, I found myself daydreaming surreal fantasies wherein everything foiled reality: suddenly, the flouresent lights flicker out, and in the center of the office drops a glittering disco ball, followed by slowly flashing colored lights and appropriate peppy dance music to crowd out the drone of laboring printers, faxes and copiers; people stand up from their chairs in their cubicles and climb onto their desks and start dancing in place, smiling, waving and pointing towards one another; anyone walking down the hallway with important files now wears roller skates, and important files are now important party drinks and snacks!

I didn’t draw this (maybe I should have), but I did draw a similarly founded fantasy, one wherein an annoying, despair-inducing equipment malfunction meets fantasy land. Concept and executed versions below.

LINOCUTS

Recently, I made a reduction linocut print to donate to Visual Aids: Post Cards from the Edge. Visual Aids solicits artists to donate a 4×6″ (postcard-sized) piece of two-dimensional artwork of any medium; a show goes up with all of the postcards; there is a big party where people are fancy and look at all of the little artworks (no artists names are shown, though they’re written on the back, because nobodies like yours truly submit stuff alongside other well-known artists); people buy the artworks. Money from party admissions and art sales goes to benefit Visual Aids, an arts organization that, amongst other things, organizes art exhibitions/shows/etcs that seek to keep alive a message that “AIDS is not over.” While the social and political urgency that was propagated by activist and community outreach groups like ACT UP, Gran Fury, and the GMHC in the 1980s and early 1990s seems to have cooled, there are still AIDS-related issues (social, political, medical) that unfairly punish HIV+ individuals for their status.

One issue I wanted to bring up in my piece was that of immigration and HIV status; and, I’ve always been impressed and inspired by the tactics and blunt approach of the aforementioned organizations in regards to HIV/AIDS issues–so, this is what’s guided me in my project.

In 1987, the US initiated a travel ban on individuals with HIV+ status. It’s lasted 22 years, and the US has been one of only seven countries worldwide to hold such a ban. This ban has remained, despite its evident inconsistencies with other US-based HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives, and the general public health practices.

I made seven different proofs; I'll be sending in one of them. Also pictured is the linoleum tile from which I carved. (The whole thing looks better if you click on it.)

A ban like this doesn’t make sense for many reasons, so it’s excellent news that former President Bush and President Obama have made strides to end it (so that, you know, ideally, immigrants wishing to come to the US for political asylum won’t be put in jail based on their HIV status, etc.).  In writing, the ban has been lifted as of the end of October, but this doesn’t go into effect until January or after.

I know that, in some ways, the message in what I made seems like a moot point given these recent events. It’s my intent to argue just the opposite: not everyone’s lives can be put on hold an extra three months.

I CRACK MYSELF UP

UNTITLED

THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO

For those of you who I have yet to tell:

a) I’m coming back to the US on July 29.
b) I’m taking a silkscreening workshop in my hometown for the following three days! yes!
c) I have been accepted into an artist’s residency at the Flux Factory, to begin sometime in or after September.

lyon

lyon. this is what you see if you enter into alleyways leading to outside courtyards and stairwells that lead to homes/apartments: cemented-in wells that are, apparently, from the times when the romans were in charge of things.

"the pink tower", lyon

roman ampitheater

church art

nyon pool, in nyon switzerland. it's right on lac leman/lake geneva. and it is awesome.

i swam in it. super cold, but super novel to be swimming in a lake from which you can see the tallest mountain in europe.

MOUNTAIN AIR IS SO GOOD

I went on a family vacation to Leukerbad, Switzerland last weekend. It’s a small ski resort town high up in the Alps, and in the summer, it’s good for hiking, sightseeing, and swimming in the community thermal baths. I can confidently say I made an excellent choice in opting for this trip. I am really into the mountains.

Pictures!

my hotel

Leukerbad, Switzerland. View from a hike up a closed trail. I was scared of being caught and then yelled at in German.

the place is OLD.

I really liked this flag.

the town.

i know.

These trails are suspended by rods that go into the crumbling cliffs. nice.

walkway on the left.

While not the best picture in the world, I feel obligated to post this because I might have died while trying to take it.

Pretty tough.

town still

On the way back from the vacation, we stopped to visit some family friends at their little rental getaway place in an even more remote mountain town. The drive was scary. The views were worth it. Also there were really cute cows with big big bells. Verbier, Switzerland:

OLD.

on a mountain.

REMARKABLY APPROPRIATE

Watching the final scene of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, SW & PC are riding off to his castle after, literally, no verbal exchange post-kiss and her subsequent awakening. Four-year old J is on my lap.

J: Elizabeth?

Me: Yes J?

J: Snow White… she knows that man?