April 28: Transfer is Almost Done!
Hey y'all! I'm happy to report that the website transfer is nearly done. Or at least the bulky stuff is done. I'll refresh this within a week or so and add a link to the beta version (still need to find and delete a lot of dummy copy in the CMS before offering a public preview,) but documentation of the last 6 months of work is in there now and I'm also most of the way through adding the content that's currently on this site, as well as some older stuff and video that never made it on here. New site should be 100% live and replacing this one on May 15.
Meanwhile, I've got three things in the works, two of which open this week: An installation at Door 3, a funky gallery integrated into Broadway Bicycle School in Cambridge, MA. This is a collaboration with Liz Nofziger called Feelings and it's super weird. We've been installing it gradually so it won't be in it's peak state until May 8 or 9, but it opens officially tomorrow and we'll have a closing event at the end of May. It's super weird. Pictures to follow.
The other thing opening this week (May 3) is a show at Flux Factory in Queens, NY called YOU MADE IT. This is a group show featuring 2013 and 2014 AIRs from Flux Factory, and is also part of the very cool Open Engagement conference happening mid-May at the Queens Museum. I'll be licking people and writing reviews of them in a performance that happens twice during this show called Taste in Art.
I also have a long term installation project for Art Market Provincetown in the works called Civic Engorgement and just created an almost impromptu performance/installation project as a part of Sandrine Shaefer's Accumulation show at the 808 Gallery called Remnant Sale.
So a busy Spring....
More soon and can't wait to finally show off all of the recent documentation.
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March 28, 2013: Excuses, Excuses, and Works in Progress
I have finally started the transfer to the new website and (I swear!!) was planning to buckle down and do the bulk of it pretty much now. But got zonked with jury duty, and won't really get underway until mid-April. So now we're looking at a completion date of by mid-May (I hope?!?)
Meanwhile I've got 4 (as yet unnamed) works in progress!
One is an ongoing, experimental one that I'll do—am already doing in jury duty (among other places.) This one is a quiet, low key collaboration with the very fabulous Andi Sutton.
Another is an opening-date-to-be-determined, site-specific collaboration with one of my favorite-ever past collaborators, Liz Nofziger.
The third is a performance piece that will be part of a giant wacky show in NYC in May, and also included in a super-cool conference that I'm excited to attend called Open Engagement.
And the fourth is a very dirty solo project slated for this Summer at Art Market Provincetown. It will probably mean my giving up all hope of ever running for public office once its implemented. Not that I was considering that.
More soon, hopefully via a new interface next time!
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January 25, 2014: Acclimation
Hello! This is just a quick note to tell you what you're seeing on the main landing page since I haven't been adding new content to the site related to my most recent work.
You're looking at one of 30 limited edition DVD sleeves, made of a piece of canvas that I sweated on in the rain and the sun, day and night (well one hour per day or night...) on a roof in Long island City, NY as a participant in the SP Weather Station project. Enclosed within it is a DVD of a 23minute video made of 800+/- still images taken of this canvas every day after I lay on it to measure the weather, along with a soundtrack composed of weather data gathered by the weather station, a really weird song about the weather, and some interviews I did with people that month about talking about the weather. The sum total project, inclusive of the 30 day performance, the video and the limited edition custom DVD case is called Acclimation. I'll tell you more about it and show you lots of documentation when I finally get everything moved over to the new website. Ugh. Or I may try to put it in here even though I should really wait until I'm ready to move virtual house... We'll see.
Anyway, Happy New Year ya'll!
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December 20, 2013: Next Year's Almost Here...
Welcome to Winter! I'm going through a heavy alliteration phase. Bear with me. I've been writing for a living a lot this year and it's starting to make me more rhymey than I want to be.
Studio news:
1) The physical part of a piece called An Opportunity that I'm selling at the Flux Factory Auction at Art in General on January 15, 2014 is finished and delivered. If this is the top post on my news feed when you read it, then you will have just looked at a picture of it on the landing page. The physical part of the object is only part of the story. Here's the whole story and a button for bidding if you want to support the incredible work of Flux Factory and drive the price up a bit. It's a huge honor to be invited to participate in this show alongside some really heavy hitting contemporary art makers, and there is no gallery in NYC that I have ever wanted to have my work in more than Art in General's so even though it's only a one day event, I'm kind of over the moon about it.
2) Acclimation, the project that I worked on for SP Weather Station over this past Summer will be a part of a show opening on January 17, 2014 at The Center For Book Arts. All I have to do now is finish the piece! I'll post a video still or image of the packaging to announce my success once I achieve it.
3) I'm probably not going to make my original January 1 deadline for moving webhosts. I just took on some work-work on someone else's new website which means I'll be too fried on web-work to do it well at the same time. Which leaves this site in some limbo—I'm not filling out the back catalog or documenting too much of what's happening in the present. Just the news feed and the front page for now I think. Sorry!! Email if you want to know more.
But for now, happy holidays! May you be newly inspired in the new year...
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November 19, 2013: Moving Virtual House
Hello, hello!
This is just a brief posting to let those of you who read this know that over the next month and a half, I'm going to be moving digital house. I've loved OPP's hosting and style, but they've changed the way a couple of things are done, and I'm wanting a few features and some flexibility that they don't provide, so I'll be packing up all of my pixels and data between now and January and moving them to a different service. Time will more or less stop here between now and then, and then start up again once the transition is complete (I'm aiming for January 1—but will update here if things change.)
I've got a piece in progress in the studio now and I'll try to pop it up on the splash page here sometime in the next week or so just for a little visual variety.
More soon...
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October 30, 2013: Again a Long Break From New Web Updates and Writing Here....
This time, I think I have been more or less in the same physical space, but my mind has traveled a long path to arrive at writing here.
I've been having not simply the usual doubts about making my own artwork, but also a profound shakeup over the last month or so of the ground that I usually stand on in order to believe that making art is a reasonable activity. Part of my belief in making art (whether I actually get around to making it or not) is based on two things: That being a "real" artist means being deeply, complexly ethical and treating people in a way that is rooted in this. In other words, because I believe that artists have to create their ethics (along with everything else) almost entirely from scratch, I expect them to have very refined, uncommon ethics. The other thing that I've held as a fundamental premise of arts practice until recently is the belief that if one has the strength and vision to form oneself—one's way in the world—completely from scratch, every other possibility will emerge from this effort. It may take forever, but if you can form yourself, why shouldn't you be able to form anything else that you might need to have in the world around you?
I lost my faith in the latter idea at the beginning of this month when a so-talented, incredibly self-formed artist that I admired immensely during the several years that we traveled in the same circles gave up her life at the end of an exhaustive, unsuccessful search for a housing situation within her means in an overpriced city that she had grown to love. Here I'll name names in order to keep hers in circulation: I'm talking about Louise ("Lisa") Bufano. If someone that was this talented an artist and this strong a self-maker couldn't bend even one small corner of the universe to her will, I'm certain that I'll never be able to do it. Knowing that makes me doubt whether the path of making art is worth such constant bucking against the current.
My other belief, that "real" artists are somehow inherently ethical, came to a grinding revision this month as well. This October, I had one of the most dis-empowering experiences I've ever had in my professional life while applying to do some work for an accomplished artist whose work I had always believed was "good"—as in struggling to connect genuinely with audiences and...ethical. In this case I won't name names, except to say that this one is practically a household one. For the first time in my life—which has included job interviews at a few of the most faceless corporations in the world—I had the experience of having a lively, encouraging discussion about a role that I was very interested in, with zero followup or responses to my attempts to follow up afterwards. It was a revelation to me that an artist whose work often focuses on the nuances and potential cruelty of interpersonal communication could be less humane in a professional exchange than a commercial software manufacturer or a political lobbying organization. I was also surprised not to be reimbursed for my travel expenses as I have been in every other instance where I've had to travel to discuss work with someone. But as the saying goes "whatevs"—I don't expect artists to be big spenders. Just generous in the more important ways.
So, I'm mired in a puddle of existential doubt this month about whether artists can do anything at all any better than anyone else can, and therefore about whether being an art maker is really worth all of the hassle involved. I hope to find my way out soon...and actually...thinking about Lisa Bufano again almost immediately does reassure me. No other professional or commercial approach to her body's situation could have made a more amazing, beautiful, challenging, powerful thing out of it than she could as an artist. For the practitioners of all of the other approaches out there to even catch a glimpse of her vision of herself was worth her hard work in realizing it. That short blip in history opens up an important set of possibilities that now have a slim chance of being uncovered again someday. Ultimately, her work was an incredible generosity—a gift so humane that it easily overshadows the inhumanity of one artist behaving too dismissively for my tastes. It's a shadow so grand that it even comes close—but cannot quite cover—the inhumanity of unaffordable housing...
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September 28, 2013: This Post Took Roughly a Month to Write!
Wow.
I started writing this post on August 31st in Provincetown. I had just photographed the last two pieces of the Dead Drop project "in situ" and was trying to decide whether or not to participate in the 2013 edition of Provincetown's 10 Days of Art festival. (I decided against for this year...though I had a great site-specific proposal for Town Hall!)
Then I added an update here on September 6 when I was in NY to deliver and install my piece for the UNTITLED (AS OF YET) show. But I still didn't finish or publish it.
Now, I'm at home (though about to head back to NY again on Monday...) and have just mailed out the 30 minute video that Katrina Neumann and I made.
I've decided to erase everything that I had already written here and start with a clean slate, because I'm at a clean slate moment. I have nothing in progress, nothing on the horizon, and I'm not sure what's next.
Certainly a little more old stuff catchup on the website is in order (and will happen) and actually I do still have to finish my Weather Report before January, but beyond that, everything is a mystery.
This afternoon I had an urge to do something that required me to use my sewing machine... a project about trying to join two very different types of material together for a long time. I imagined a long strip like a zipper or a road, but not connecting neatly...verging off from each other and getting bunched in their efforts to synch up. I don't know if I'll make it or not and/or who would want to see it and where if I did, but it might be a nice thing to do to get into the studio and overcome the fear that I have of the sewing machine.
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August 17, 2013: Home Again, Arting Every Day
Hello, hello! I'm home in Boston! I just passed the 2 week mark which is the longest I've been home since April. It's nice to be here—I've been eating peaches off of my next door neighbor's peach tree, melons out of my own melon patch, and working feverishly on one art project or another almost every day since I got back.
Here's what they are:
I'm still subtly managing the very subtle Dead Drop project in Provincetown, MA. It's very, very subtle.
I've got wads of SP Weather Station material and data to process from my residency at Flux Factory, but am only just starting to sort through it.
I'm working most hard this week on an art piece/publication commissioned for a group show at Flux Factory in September called UNTITLED (AS OF YET) that's going to be pretty weird but hopefully cool!
And finally, I'm very casually putting time in on the post-production of a video documenting a collaboration between myself and Katrina Neumann called Doing Nothing Together. Though I should probably work less casually on it as I just discovered this very moment that she's featuring the project on the landing page of her website!!
So I guess I'll end here and get to back work. On my porch. In my hammock. Drinking homemade ice tea. With lemon balm in it from the garden...
A girl's attempts to simultaneously work her ass off and engage in leisure are never done! (And neither are the updates to her website.)
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July 6, 2013: The Updating Begins Now
Greetings from Queens, NY, my new favorite part of NYC!
I had no idea in advance how much I was going to dig the Long Island City/Astoria corner of the world, but it turns out the answer is "a lot". It's mellow and diverse here, and you can by pulque for under $2 a can in the tropical grocery store. It reminds me a lot of not just where I grew up, but when I grew up. I feel like I've stepped back in time a bit. It's also a good place to sweat, which is what I'll be doing here mostly.
A quick refresher about what I'm working on: I've been invited to be a Weather Reporter for SP Weather Station for the month of July 2013, and am doing so as an Artist In Residence at Flux Factory, where the weather station is based.
Most artists involved in this project get the weather data from their assigned month after the fact and do their interpretation of it at that point. My goal is to gather my own data, with my body, in real time, at the same location as the weather station. I'm sweating onto a piece of body sized canvas, on the Flux Factory roof, right below the weather station, and taking high resolution photos of the canvas afterwards each day. I will also be conducting some audio interviews with locals about the weather here, and hope to animate the photos to accompany this as a final product.
But the piece is really about discomfort—or the place where social discomfort and physical discomfort meet and cancel each other out. I'm interested in when people talk about the weather—how talking about the weather fills uncomfortable social space and how feeling the same things during extreme weather overcomes interpersonal distance and all kinds of social difference.
So that's the update on what I'm doing, but I'm also finally starting the process of backfilling this website TODAY!
Oh, and I've also got one more alternative-interpretation-of-a-vocation project on the agenda: later this month I'll be acting as a security guard, securing something TBD with a fine team of professionals at the Poets' Security Force.
A girl's work is never done!
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May 26, 2013: Still Behind on Updating Site, But Here's Some Newish News!
I'm writing this entry from the sunny city of Barcelona, Spain where I have the first good internet connection that I've had in several weeks…
I have still not brought the web content here up to date, but doing so is now officially on the schedule. It is one of several things that I will be doing while an Artist in Residence for the month of July 2013 at Flux Factory in Long Island City in New York. My main focus during the residency will be my Weather Report for SP Weather Station but I'll also use the focused time to catch up on all of my art-related work.
Two other brief pieces of news: I've got a small music video that I made being featured on Thrill Jockey Record's Website and the open call for submissions to a project that I'm working on called Dead Drop is closing on June 9, 2013.
Participate if you have the time, it will be a really fun project!
That's it for now, but more soon...
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April 20, 2013: No New News, But Some Old News...
It's April now, and like everyone else, I've been caught up in taxes. Oh and traveling a bit as well. So...there has been zero progress on the backlog of putting previous works into the website here.
But I realize that I never shared an arty piece of writing that I did in March here, so here's that to keep you warm for awhile. The Mattering of the Mattering of Matter: Some Non-Light Reading.
I also have a work in progress for this Summer now noted on the home page called Dead Drop that I'll talk about in more detail here soon.
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March 14, 2013: S-L-O-W + Beehive
Slowest New Year's Resolution ever!
I'm moving backwards in time (with gaps where I don't have access to any documentation at all) as I try to pull together pages on this site for each project. Got stuck for a long time at Seeing Red (too many pictures, resolution low in almost all of them,) and now I'm having a similar problem with D und H Productions. So many low-resolution photos, so little time... It's moving at a snail's pace. I'm stuck on the cusp of 2011-2012. Need to get all the way back in time to 2004 before I'm done.
Meanwhile, I will be participating in a performance called Festooning The Inflatable Beehive about bees, honey, art and community on March 17. Hope to update the home page photo with something from that next week. I've also been slowly building up a piece called Merge, but I'm unsure whether it will make it to prime time.
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March 12, 2013: What's Up on The Site and in The Real World
Oh wow, there's a bloggy feature in this CMS now!
Looking for updates on my slow progress at adding documentation of older projects to this website? You'll find 'em here! You'll also find updates and invites to everything that I have even a vague involvement with in the immediate future, starting NOW.
Enjoy!