Individual pictures, titles, explanations when I get the good ones from Jim. I took this full shot with my crappy little pink camera.
I think of the extension cords on the chandeliers as their own little pieces. In fact, that’s a good way to see these in their entirety. Many parts to a whole.
This is my facebook picture right now. The gas company is digging holes outside our building for no reason and yesterday when I was feeling frustrated I went and sat in one of them until I felt a millipede.
(I guess they weren’t for the gas company after all, but for the public art project that my friends designed and built.)
As expected, all plans change when presented with the reality of something. Rather than it being solely in your head anymore. You can sketch and fantasize all you want. But then it happens, and it’s never what you think. In this case, it’s better.
I arrived in the gallery with a sense of all the work I’ve already done, not having a gauge on how much I’ve changed these last few months. So a lot of things went right out the window once I really got rolling. It took me about a day to realize how these were going to grow; it didn’t involve anything I had tried to make ahead of time, so I’m glad I didn’t sit around making assemblages as I had originally planned.
I’m very excited. This is the beginning. No pop song titles, none of that.
Not writing here has been great, and I feel so much better (for non-blog related reasons). Instead of tearing myself apart every time I hit publish in my editor, I just dump all my (increasingly, now that I have that freedom) stupid thoughts for the day into a word document. So I’m going to keep that going, this is just to say that I can’t wait to post the final images. They are going to be incredible; I have an incredible and generous photographer who is going to regret saying yes to helping me again when I start telling him my list of demands. Also, the last one was notoriously hard to light and he fake-complained the whole time. So now there are three! Thanks again, Jim!
I’m pretty proud of this. It didn’t take me very long, but it’s been rolling around in my head for months and showing up in all the drawings I’ve been making of the chandelier it belongs to. I got that bucket from a guy who had just cleaned out his studio (they all know to come see me first).
I learned that I can fire gas kilns like a champ. I had never done it by myself before, usually I just pick up our studio technician’s slack. Also, I’ve never had a reason to learn, as all of my neon colors are fired at much cooler temperatures and don’t require the carbon trapping (so I just fire them in an electric kiln, which is much more low maintenance). Ryan helped me reduce it the first time (cut off all the oxygen in the kiln to produce carbon, which gets into the glazes and changes them usually for the better – reduction is good) and did it really, really well.. we had completely black spy bricks right after (LOTS of carbon).
But the second time I reduced it, right near the end to even everything out, I did it by myself. By the time I was done setting speed records in a 10 hour firing, and figuring out all the rest of it with air and pressure, the thing was completely (almost perfectly) evenly heated on top and bottom despite a very loose top of the stack. When I unloaded it, yes, the reduction was gorgeous and all of our test tiles came out exactly like they were supposed to. Too bad I used every ugly glaze we have and none of the good ones. But ugly fits what I’m doing, so.
It was pretty amazing. Reduction how-to aside, I somehow already knew exactly what I was doing. And I really loved doing it, it was so exciting. Makes me want to make a bunch of pots. Or a bunch more poopy sculptures, anyway. I do know that I’ll be doing it again before my stint in the gallery.
Which brings me to the fact that.. I kind of took a mini-vacation these last two weeks because the studio’s not empty yet and I subsequently haven’t been able to do much (Kim can’t believe how spoiled I am – “why do you need the whole freakin’ space to do anything??”). I don’t care about people who know me and how I work and know not to bother me when I’m doing so.. but when I start pulling out all this interesting garbage and people who are very nice and always around but not usually “part of things” start asking me things about what I’m doing and how to do what they’re doing and getting into my peripheral vision, it’s like GOD GO AWAY. No matter how nice. And because I’m me, I tend to not try and hide that I’m not pleased.. but I really did this time, because like I said, nice guy.
So yeah, vacation. Which I think might end today, I had some good thoughts about how to put things together last night. We had some crazy times. Last night a bunch of us got on our bikes and did some scary shriner formations in the middle of the street before riding straight to the bar to see Ryan off to Washington. As Sophia put it, “it was 12 in the best way possible”.
I just bought my name.com for no reason. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I bought lingergookas when I was ridiculous (though some would say I still am), and I think I might want to be more professional at some point, but that idea might be overrated. Anyway, I have it. So if someday this blog doesn’t work, barring I didn’t get pissed off and delete it as I’ve done in the past, just switch the G and the L.
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros??? One of those bands you keep hearing about and then forget as soon as you get to your computer.. but holy crap. I’m in love. I didn’t know Ima Robot was involved.
Wanna see what a 6 foot hexagonal deck looks like? It needs more boards filling it out, but I had cut enough angles for one day.
The only books I read these days are other peoples’ thesis work that all have long titles with colons in them, or theory. From ‘Cinderella Dreams: the Allure of the Lavish Wedding’, which has been sitting on my kitchen table for me to re-read every time I sit down for a snack. Again, more for me. I don’t know why it has to be public. Maybe I’m an exhibitionist and I don’t know it.
“’The bride and her bridegroom are stars at their own show… with the footage, if not the ratings, to prove it.’ A photographer follows the couple’s every move so they can remember the beautiful romantic moments they shared. Prestige is a signal, whereas distinctive and romantic consumption is a fantasy of utopia. The fantasy of the wedding day is what couples (and in most cases, especially the bride) hope they can purchase from the caterer, the florist, the jeweler, and so forth. Perhaps we should think of the couple, and especially the brides, as producers of their own movies. They arrange the financing, secure the location for filming, and cast themselves in the two major roles. More and more, they hire directors to make sure the action goes smoothly and the film will be entertaining and stylish. Wedding professionals, from florists to photographers, help to create the fantasy, some by supplying the flowers and the cake, others by directing the events of the day. But the professionals whom the couples hire tend to impose a script and a schedule on the proceedings. The photographer hands the bride and groom a checklist of shots that serves as a routine for the wedding day.”
So really, I should’ve had a wedding and not a prom.
“In consumer culture, people believe that spending money will buy happiness, self-fulfillment, autonomy, and personal transformation. Moreover, the same mechanisms that support and reproduce consumer culture in Western countries – namely advertising, the media, retailing, and merchandising – now assist global marketers and manufacturers in fostering consumer desire and emulation of elite lifestyles. As a result, there is increasing emphasis on satisfying individual versus collective desires, of pursuing a ‘myself-that-could-be’ through consumption.”
“Given that consumer culture implies an increasing infatuation with goods and services, it is not surprising some scholars have noted a connection between romantic love, which emerged as a desirable basis for marrying in the nineteenth century, and the love of goods, made possible through simultaneous developments in commerce and transportation. In fact, the connection between romance and consumption has grown even closer in postmodern consumer societies, as incomes have grown and romance has become such an important appeal for advertisers. While ‘pure’ romantic love might seem at odds with the crass desire for material goods, sociologist Eva Illouz notes people seek to escape a world laden with bureaucracy and technology for a ‘romantic utopia’, and actively employ goods and services that have been accorded a sacred ‘aura’ in order to fill their lives with romantic overtones. We now inhabit a world where the ‘romanticization of commodities and the commodification of romance’ now go hand in hand.”
“Girls and women consume the goods that support a ‘love culture’: fairy tales, dolls, soap operas, romantic movies, romance novels, and popular magazines.”
“In short, people want lavish weddings because they want to experience magic in their lives.. we continually seek to re-enchant our lives through magic clothes, jewels, and perfumes. We drive magic cars. We reside in magic places and make pilgrimages to even more magical places. We eat magical foods, own magic pets, and envelope ourselves in the magic of film, television, and books.. the rational possessor is a myth that fails because it denies the inescapable and essential mysteriousness of our existence. Ritual scholar Ronald Grimes argues that magic is transformation by ritual and mysterious means, and that the magic has to ‘work’ and achieve an end. In the case of the wedding, the ritual ceremony is laden with artifacts that make people feel truly changed (even if only for a short while), and the empirical end is the creation of a paradise on earth.”
Some people get married, I go to Dig & Save. So I might be insane, but at least I’m not going to get divorced in two years.
I randomly found this on some art blog this morning, and I very much love it. I don’t know which one. My reader is completely out of control.
I was just told that it is completely okay that I feel like the oil spill is my thesis statement directly manifesting itself. I didn’t even have to say it, I sat down on her stool while she was cutting copper and I started unloading about how stressed out I’ve been partly because of this insidious crisis we can’t seem to stop, and Kim brought it up first. I couldn’t stop crying yesterday afternoon. I was reading and people watching in the sun at the co-op and I barely made it home.
I guess it’s not that I’m all that mad at BP or the government or anything, or stressed about the thing of the spill itself. All of those things are huge, incomprehensible (inherently corrupt) entities, and extra energy spent being mad at them would fry anyone’s brain. I feel that something terrible would’ve happened sooner or later, and BP was the unlucky scapegoat. It’s that the terrible something has happened; it’s here, right now. Of course it hit us where we’re the most sensitive, and of course it is of epic, global, unthinkable proportions. It feels completely terminal. And sitting in the sun yesterday, thinking about all of the people in the co-op parking lot at that exact moment in time, all of them just like me with educational backgrounds and best friends and families and goals and reasons to not sleep at night.. not necessarily unique or original, but each important. It was completely overwhelming.
“No one ever wanted to deal with any of this stuff. At the end of the day, we all just want to raise our families right and have a little fun doing it.”
(Later – Wanna know how big a dork I am?)
My work is about the failure of the human race to escape itself. Just to restate that one for my benefit. That simple sentence has already opened many doors.
So what happens after chandeliers? What else can you do with that? It should be infinite, right? (I’m not having a wedding, sorry Ash.)
Half of the work of making things the way I do is sitting around staring at stuff until it makes sense. This ever-enlarging pile of crap I’ve got in here is starting to weave itself together. But really, I need to pull everything out and see it and start to organize it into layers. Installing the first one while we were building the ceramics show around it, everyone was kind of like “..what are you doing just sitting there?” in the middle of all the crap I had pulled out of my studio and thrown all over that half of the room. But that’s how it goes, and that’s why it takes a few days. I think if I had to reinstall the one from December I could do it really fast, but the maiden voyage makes sense to take longer with. Maybe it will be a lot faster now that there’s no steel to work around.
Things need to be much denser than they’ve ever been before. I’ve been kind of light with how much stuff makes it into each one, but this time, since there’s no real superstructure, the thing itself becomes the superstructure. So every piece involved in each of the three of these needs to work like the system it’s supposed to be anyway to keep the thing intact. I very much love that and hope I can really do it right; it’s hard to envision. I’m trying to keep everything in mind when I make ceramic pieces, but it’s hard to know how to fit what where when there’s nothing else to go on, and I don’t want to make everything really blatant, i.e. punching holes in everything so I can tie it all together. So it’s a whole new ball game and I’m trying to make lots of small things in order to use them accordingly to make bigger patterns. Most of the ceramic stuff starts as one mundane object, abstracted and repeated a bunch of times. I made lots of very oversized popcorn kernels last week.
Standing at the store yesterday looking at stickers I realized I’m not making fun of anything. I’ve been trying to say that I am for a while now, scathingly (but mmmnope, never), or then that I wasn’t (and that I was actively participating so it’s cool), and that’s been what I thought my big dilemma was, that flip-flop. I was looking for flower stickers to cover this big PVC tube I found in a dumpster last week. But then I also ended up buying stickers for me to use in my sketchbook and it was like “Wait, what?”. Aren’t I here to get stuff for making things that critique the use and very existence of stickers? Now I’m buying them because they’re cute and glittery? Where’s the line?
So, this week, with this experience and Morrissey’s help, I’ve realized that my inner argument was in completely the wrong place, and that I’m the sticker equivalent to all those evangelical homophobes who are then found with the 12 year old Filipino boy in their hotel room. Thank you Target scrapbook aisle.
I’m afraid it’s coming across like I’m kind of holding myself apart from the culture I’m targeting when I think about these things, but no, not at all, despite how much I’ll tell you I hate Glee then turn around and willingly let them manipulate my heartstrings with show tunes. I’m completely and consensually mired in all of it, and I like to think that’s in there somehow, or at least that it will be now that I kind of know what I’m about. Despite what might have been pegged as condescending or bravado in recent posts, every time (not too often) I make that late night french fry run with the top 40 station cranked, I am reminded that being a hypocrite about all of this is not allowed.
This is my favorite thing to read and look at. Multiple amazing posts a week. Feeds my Gilded Age building boner like no other. I’m plugging it because the Beekman Palace post is absolutely incredible and I gaped at it open-mouthed for awhile. I’m never going to live in New York, I think I know that, but it’s nice to pretend I’d be able to stand it for the sake of places like this.
