If I were to have my MFA show again I think I might consider painting everything in the room very dark brown or black.

I scrapped the Hidden Indians idea because I realized it was super offensive. Rather, instead of scrapping it, I retitled it. Since it’s not anything yet. I am seriously missing my studio, I want to work and all the clay is collecting dust 800 miles to the east.

Trying to set one up here kept getting shot down like “don’t get too comfortable”. I had a huge fight with my dad over the drywall idea (it is subsequently still sitting in the garage).

I explained this whole trip back as hiding out. It’s not all hiding out, I can say that now, on the other side of it. There is and was definitely a reason for me to be here right now. Had I stayed in Philly during this time I wouldn’t be able to look at myself.

She may be belligerent and ornery and hard for anyone else to deal with, but she has been one of my favorite people since forever, and she made me who I am. And this month has been the best.

Everyone in this picture is a badass, and I am posting it specifically because it’s the only time all of us ever got into the same picture without the menfolk, June 1987. I am very proud to be one of these women. I’m the purple baby, and the one next to me is a registered nurse at UW hospital (she’s 6 months younger).

“The task is to balance the tension between imaginary ideal and pragmatic management of a social positivity without lapsing into the totalitarian.”

(Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics)

It was nice to be told what exactly “the task” is.. but at the same time, this is already my approach to my work. So the question remains: NOW WHAT?

I’m quite fond of my candlestick shank. The next big tool purchase I make is a professional camera. The fruit bowl is a white-glazed stoneware soup tureen (haha).

Speaking of which.

Later – Most of the artists I look at are photographers, and that’s been the case for a long time (at least a year or more). When I was doing q&a after my MICA talk, David brought it up, I’m finally processing his question. Thanks David!!!

Now what?

All this time I thought I was all alone!!!!!!!

“It should be widely understood and universally agreed upon that distinctions within the arts are no longer necessary. In the wake (in the funereal sense) of postmodernism, the necessity, desire, or rationale for divisions within the arts has been allowed to putrefy for far too long. Bury it or burn it, but yearn for it no longer. The complete realization of a creative liberation of the “true will to live” demands immediate convolution of all discourses – not simply painting, sculpture, and performance, but biology, history, agriculture, politics and so on. Is this simply interdisciplinarianism? No! It is the elaborate and pragmatic integration of all things related into an associative life/practice that summons the creative and prophetic power of the multitude. In short, it is creative problem-solving and the refusal to dine on the ashes that fuel the commodification of our efforts to explore the wonders of a momentary existence.”

“By art we don’t mean “fine arts.” By art we mean nearly all of the dictionary definitions except those that imply the indulgences of taste and connoisseurship: skill and cunning, artifice and craftiness; the unanalyzable creative power of the imagination used to execute well what one has devised. And in so doing, one might do well to additionally execute the parasitic harbingers of capitalism that so lustily cling to the “fine” arts. A return of the Arts reveals much in the way of study and praxis, as we soon become aware of the manifold arts that cease to inform (or perhaps marginally) the revolutionary practice of living la vida loca.”

EVERYTHING IS AWESOME

Which also brings me to this, and this Spanish theft collective that I’ve lost track of since my 2005 Freshman Sculpture class, but will adore always.

My parents are hosting a family of red foxes this winter. My mother is in nature photography heaven right now.

The first thing they did was wonder about the meaning of this (these people raised me, after all) and dig up the folklore and the cultural reasons for it.

Mostly I just think it’s a wonderful thing and foxes are totally badass and they’re some awesome pictures so I’m posting em’. I think they picked the right yard. No one else in the neighborhood (maybe the city) would be more grateful for their presence.

I guess I’m also thinking about the blurring of the boundaries between wild and domestic, but that’s kind of off in the garage with the drywall while I drink my second cup of coffee.

I got a bread yeast culture from some pals in Madison, it is kind of synonymous with the foxes in my head.