I was re-reading my Vice dos/don’ts book for the umpteenth time and there was one about prom being great because everyone looks “all fresh and so clean” and how you just know they’re all going to get laid that night. I tried to find it on their site but I couldn’t.

A friend I haven’t talked to in years keeps posting pictures of our junior prom on facebook. I was head of the mural committee and there’s this awful picture of us all together, and my stomach is hanging out and my hair is awful and I’m making a face because I knew I was chubby and tall and awkward and unphotgenic and god I hated high school. My friends had to drag me to prom. I spent like 20 bucks on my dress. I just wanted to paint the murals and decorate, leave me alone.

My date (I was an inch taller than him) was my best friend and collaborator (we made a bunch of short animations our senior year) who I spent the summer after high school “dating” (..) and then when I went off to my hot shit art school and got a lame excuse for a boyfriend I ended up treating him like crap and now he’s bald and we haven’t talked since like 2006. His baby sister just had her first kid.

But this picture kind of sums up what we were like in contrast with the group we went with……… we’re the couple on the far right (as if you needed help with that one). The rest of the people in that picture are cheerleaders except for Amber and Gabby, in white (which is pretty funny in itself), who were the bridge between the pretty, popular girls and the goth art kids. There weren’t really any boundaries in my high school, everybody hung out with everybody for the most part, but we in the art department refused to be anything but freaky.

Today at Savers I found two really amazing prom dresses. Both expensive because it was Savers (no joke), so I passed. But the wheels started turning.

The official date for my qualifiers is April 23rd. Qualifiers being the gateway to my first Master’s degree (MA). I have to pass an oral part and submit a written thing and then they say “YES, go get your MFA!” and it’s a big hullabaloo. I basically defend everything I’ve done to this point to my committee, which is comprised of the three toughest/most intimidating professors I could find and the head of my department. I approached selecting mine with a ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’ kind of mindset.

April 23rd is right in the middle of prom season. All the dollar stores will be popping with party goods. Kind of how installing the chandelier at Thanksgiving was perfect timing because all the Christmas light stuff was out, and I could buy 20 of those fake candles and keep going back for more. I make seasonally appropriate work.

I am actually already a subscriber to the Stumps catalog because of this past summer (I thought I’d buy some fake lamp posts maybe), and because I said I was affiliated with UW-Madison they keep sending me a new one like every month.

I think this is definitely my next move. Prom. I keep getting all these weird little nudges from all sorts of places. I’m not sure what form it’s going to take.

I have this memory of being like 9 years old and my hometown rec. department had this Saturday morning acting class at the high school and my mom made me take it, and one of the meetings was helping the theater crew light this HUGE tree that the prom committee had made out of cardboard and tulle and gossamer and balloons (for leaves). It covered almost the entire dance floor, the canopy they had made. And we had to help position the gel stage lights and make everything glow all prettily for the big event that night. Last week, LB mentioned some gels that were lying around in the video department not being used and the possibility of making them available for graduate student use.

I have no conceptual basis for this yet, but you don’t have to sit too long with it before it becomes totally obvious to my work so far. Actually it’s pretty much a big ol’ duh. Actually I think I pretty much know exactly why this is perfect, but I don’t want to type it out yet.

Gonna keep thinking about it. The last time I said “gonna keep thinking about it”, out came a gorgeous chandelier that I have yet to top. It was only two months ago, but three pieces ago.. that’s crazy.

I made 40 glaze tests last night, in hot pursuit of the perfect orange and the perfect mint green. I am UNABLE to stop working. I actually had a dream a few weeks ago about finding the perfect orange. So pathetic.

I am on self-imposed exile from my studio (which didn’t stop me from coming in today to tweak this piece that didn’t need it) because I haven’t left it for a breather in months. I’ve been telling people I’m on winter break, finally. But now I’m realizing that I have no other reason to be alive or living in Madison, Wisconsin than to be in my studio puttering. Because it’s the end of day one and I am already very, very bored. It’s easier to have a meltdown when school is not in session.

I don’t know if I am actually having a meltdown or not, but I do know that if I sit there in my messy studio and try to make anything right now, my brain is going to make a tiny yet permanent popping noise and then I will have to drop out. I don’t necessarily even feel that stressed out or anything; I want to keep working but I know I shouldn’t. There’s nothing to think about right now, I am a mushy void at the moment. My belly keeps telling me no, go home and wear the same shirt for two days and watch shitty movies on Netflix.

So here’s this thing I made for the review show we have up. As with most things I make, I am undecided. One minute I’m cool with it, might even like it, the next I am all “ew, what is this, this is awful”. The usual. The show kicks total ass by the way. Really, it does. We got lots of great compliments for last year’s show, and tons more this year. It’s because we’re the smallest class of the three years and therefore all the cream rose to the top of the admissions pile.. yep.

Lots of people liked my ceramic swan…. I will say that I fucking love that ceramic swan, so much that when I stupidly shattered the first one I immediately made a second version (that never happens). I actually love that whole stack, but maybe not so much the other. Maybe that is most of why I am divided about this piece. The other one is the one I kept poking at. But anyway, that swan is a ‘my bougie Illinois cousin and I playing Swan Princess on her parents’ glass coffee table circa 1995′ ceramic swan. Upper middle class beige berber carpet. Fake flower arrangements that served as great nooks for plastic swan figurine drama to play out. My bougie Illinois cousins were just like Ash* in that they had ALL the toys I really wanted and never got and I totally resented them for it in that completely pure one-track-mind way that little kids have.

Some of the stuff that’s in that last picture dump is things they had. These were cousins I only saw once a year (if that) because our families didn’t really care enough about one another to make the effort to get together, even though they only live two hours from my parents. When I went off to college it was like they felt they could stop pretending and we haven’t seen them since. I feel like most of that made it in there somehow. Me rolling my eyes, which I do a lot, about a lot of things.

Which isn’t to say that this is a personal piece.. not at all. I have little to no connection to these people, and a lot of people at the time had that same Pottery-Barn-before-Pottery-Barn-was-Pottery-Barn type of living room set up. It’s more about the numbers and that sense of identical decor than my family history, most of which sucks to the point where I can talk about it really clinically.

The head of my degree committee (Paul) said today that he liked it, and I asked if he was just saying that because sometimes I wonder if he would actually tell me if he didn’t like it. But then he said “it just feels right” and I kind of believed him after that because that’s exactly how I felt about it too. I realized when he said it that that had been most of my objective right there, to just make it feel right, to make something click. Parts of it are wrong, we agreed. But I guess something is going on for other people too, it’s not just me. That swan stack. 100% rightness right there. And more people confirmed this at the opening this evening.

That’s my biggest fear about making work like this, this way that is more subtle than anything I’ve done. When does it stop becoming just a pile of crap to other people? What is the tipping point? I’ve always felt this need to make it obvious that this thing I made is art or decorative or something, just in case my work doesn’t get there. And I’ve always kind of hated that about myself, that need to underline it. That is the next thing I want to beat out of my system.

I will say these things:

1. I watched Glee while I was painting benches on the last piece. On hulu. I was blown away that such a show existed. I have the soundtrack.
2. The whole thing reminds me of an overgrown Kids Bop/Kidsongs compilation CD (that is a huge huge huge burn), and I cannot stand how earnest everyone is about every damn thing. It makes me gag. Especially that girl who leads all the big hits.. you can tell she grew up on Broadway in how she handles herself around her main co-star (must maintain eye contact!!!!!) and if not for the lungs on her I would hate her guts for it because it makes me squirm. The whole show is just awkward.
3. But I love how transcendent it is, and I get shivers when they really get going. These people can just go on wailing everyone’s favorite pop songs and I don’t even give a shit if they can act or if there’s a plot or not. (So there’s the usual love/hate relationship I have with most of my favorite pop cultural relics.)
4. This is kind of an unrelated mini-sequel to the piece that’s in Milwaukee in that instead of thinking about suburbs in a systematic way I was thinking about the 9.9 million viewers (or something) who tune in to watch episodes of this show. Most of them live in the suburbs. And have suburban living rooms. And shop at Target. And maybe they are women who buy those 100 calorie packs of snack cookies because they might be a little overweight. And are looking for that perfect relationship and for someone to love them, but are instead sitting at home watching Glee and pinning all their dreams and emotions on a tv show instead of being proactive about it. In some ways this piece is just about lonely, imperfect people connecting on eHarmony.
5. The suburbs feel like a total cliche and I don’t think I’m very happy to keep telling people that I’m working with them, but let’s be honest.. they are so rich in things that I like to think about. I could make work about “the suburbs” for the next ten years and not run out of things to say. But like Glee, that idea makes me gag. Feels like it’s something to cross off of my list, what with that research paper I wrote and all. Maybe that’s premature.

I think that the feeling I want is infinitely more subtle and insidious. I am still trying to figure out how to manipulate objects that are already so loaded with meaning and sign and give them a sense of humor and my own brand of pathetic. But it is encouraging to know that this piece did a little of what I wanted it to (on very short notice too).

* Someday a large box will arrive on my doorstep from Omaha, Nebraska, and in it will be an entire childhood’s worth of Barbie accessories and My Little Ponies and Littlest Pet Shops and that part of me that spent a childhood playing with cardboard and lustfully cutting out sections of the Toys R’ Us catalog will be able to die happily.

1. After this review show goes up no one is allowed to talk to me for a week. Not even kidding. I am going to sleep.

2. My good friend Claire has reached rock star status and has hit the ground running and I am so so so proud of her. And I should probably tell you that we are going to take over the world after I graduate, but we’ll be nice dictators, don’t worry.

3.

Got that from Ryan yesterday after hearing all this internet buzz about this band for the past few months. I had the album playing on my ipod and hadn’t been paying attention to it and all the sudden it was like “where the fuck did this come from? this is awesome!” and now we’re both hooked like it’s crack. Because the whole album is. Crack. She gets a little too Regina-y at points but then she just keeps fucking the microphone anyways and I fall back in love.

4. Meet my fiance. I should probably tell Brody we’re breaking up.

5.

When I moved into my parents’ basement after college, I stopped remembering my dreams at night. When I started grad school that fall, there were unwelcome exceptions, but as someone who loves to sleep strictly because of the depth of their unconscious, it was definitely a low blow. Recently, say Thanksgiving, they have come back full strength. I am still getting used to it.

I think ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ is going to be the indefinite blanket statement for my work. I spent a year and a half fighting my use of the word utopia, but I think I am finally ready to say fuck it, that’s obviously what all of this is about and always has been about, even before I got here. This show was awesome because it wasn’t at school and I could say and do what I wanted in terms of work, and no one knew any better.

After fighting all of my usual inner battles since the opening, I think I can finally say that I think it is a pretty good piece, and I think I will be plenty able to talk about it; things are clearer with this work than they have ever been. I look at the pictures and I get to the point I got to with the chandelier where I stop registering that I made this thing and it becomes someone else’s work, because there is no way that I am good enough at what I’m doing to pull something like this off in three weeks. I hope that does not sound like horn tooting because it is not – I seriously stop connecting to it. It’s like something else takes over my hands and body and gets shit done and knows exactly what everything is and does and should be. Me as Ginger the spazzy, reclusive second year grad student – not capable.

I mean, it’s kind of awkward in places. Not exactly what I would call coherent in how the ceramics fit onto the benches and fill the floor space.. but it just barely makes something that’s decent enough for me to be okay with that.

The lights make it, absolutely. Those lights. They are red light district lights, they are cheesy gaslamp lights at the end of your driveway, they are runway lights and they are carnival lights on the midway (this thing is very much a carousel), and I have no idea where I came up with them but they are absolutely perfecto. And they would not work without my dad, who ended up wiring them for me after all.

I had a really rough installation period after the benches and lights were hooked up and I started pulling ceramics out of their boxes (I was really insecure about them versus the benches, see above), and when I picked up Ash at the airport Thursday night it was pretty much in her hands to pull this thing off, but I didn’t know that until she had done it. She’s turned into a super-anal, pretty minimal graphic designer, but our work and brains have always been really, really similar to the point where we got in trouble our freshman year for collaborating on one of our final pieces for a class we had together (we actually hadn’t). Plus, she knows exactly when to call me out and tell me I’m full of shit. So I picked her up and we went to the gallery and she told me exactly what I needed to do, which was basically what I had already known deep down I needed to do and wasn’t admitting to for various reasons (it’s okay when SHE tells me), and we high-tailed it to the Dollar Tree because I had stubbornly left most of my plastic stuff in my basement in Madison (I brought what I had in my studio but it wasn’t enough). She basically just sat there and said all the right things and kept me sane and I did the rest.

Here are some more pictures (a few stolen from Chinn):

So, as you might know, I had an opening last night..

Pictures here. They reprinted that blog in the print edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and they put the picture of the chandelier on the front page of the arts section, so when we got up on Friday morning my mom was all “go look at the paper” and I started freaking out even though I had a hunch/hope that they would do that.

But yeah here’s the statement I gave them for the wall.

The Pursuit of Happiness

“I’m on the pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold.” (Kid Cudi)

The quest for utopia is the basis of progression. As human beings in general, we are always after the next thing that is going to make us a better, more complete person. In modern society, a lot of the work is done by objects – a new smart phone packed with amazing applications is probably the example of the moment.

Most of my work begins with a basis in ornament and decoration, particularly that of the Gilded Age that occurred just before the turn of the 20th century. For me, this era instantly references a certain kind of lifestyle – that of sprawling mansions and grand parties, and the first instances of obscene amounts of wealth (and the celebrity that followed because of it) that this country had ever experienced. In our own disposable time, where mass media moves at the same speed as our attention span for the fate of the plastic rings on our six-pack, the authentic experience of that high life becomes less and less accessible, yet the desire for personal wealth on that type of scale is the backbone of contemporary popular culture, in which I am firmly entrenched. I feel that there are many parallels to be drawn between the obsession for collecting and displaying objects that stems from this period and the views our culture currently has about mass consumption and the production of goods and objects.

When conceiving this piece, I was thinking about the existence of the somewhat flexible systems in our daily lives that keep us all in check – stereotypes, social constructs, et cetera. This led me to think about the first incarnation of the American suburb directly after the Second World War, the birthplace of the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”, and what sort of space that was initially created to be and do versus how we view the same space now. It was supposed to be a haven and a thank you gift of sorts for the returning G.I.s and their new families, but in the 60 years that followed, the effects of this so-called utopia have influenced almost everything we do as a society, in a lot of ways not for better. In a way, for me, the suburbs of that time period (and the newer developments of the New Urbanist manifesto of recent years) are a perfect representation of everything I want to explore in my work – multiple levels of façade and simulacra, the never-ending quest for utopia and its subsequent failure on an epic scale, pattern and repetition, as well as it being the cradle for everything that I hold dear in contemporary popular culture.

PS I should probably say that there was a girl at the opening who got the Jersey Shore thing without anyone saying anything. I heard her say it and turned around from the conversation I was in all like “YES!!! You got it!!” That made my night.