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):