Taking Stock

Ok, I finally have a moment to stop and reflect on the last month or so of frenetically paced art making (or really it feels more like art doing...)

Shall I summarize?

I think things are mostly captured online here already, but NO RUSE, the wackadoo project I was working on with Liz Nofziger, went off not so much without a hitch (as there were many ill-timed technical difficulties,) but quite satisfyingly. We're still going to need to figure out funding for the catalog and to produce it, but the event itself was really great. We managed to keep the surprise (that we were producing Boston's first underwater art exhibit) and achieve maximum impact when it was revealed. No small task considering how many people were involved...

Then Andi Sutton and I managed to finish our (equally oddball) collaboration Last Gasp Radio that same week, which was an especially amazing feat on Andi's part as she's a pretty brand new mom. The piece was made for Proof Gallery's BOSTON DOES BOSTON 8 show and will be on view through February 21.

The only bummer this month is that I have time to write this blog post today because an interactive performance piece that I'd been developing for presentation at Panolpy Performance Lab as a part of their MEGABUS SOCIAL RESEARCH ARTISTS' RETREAT was cancelled due to inclement weather. (It has been rescheduled for early March, but I'll have to think carefully about whether or how I can participate as I'll be operating under the restrictions of the RESIDENCY FOR ARTISTS ON HIATUS at that time...)

I may add a second blog post later this week to introduce my plans for my time with RFAOH, which begins on February 1. Both to explain what will be happening here (in my blogging space) during that time, and to extend the theme of taking stock with that project specifically in mind.

Meanwhile, I'll end this post with an image from yet another highlight of this month. Through a personal connection who knows how sad I was to have to put my smell-based art project on indefinite hold for financial reasons (see August 2014 blog post for the sad details,) I had an opportunity last week to participate in a workshop with a contemporary artist who works with odor a lot (Anicka Yi) and a biologist turned artist (Tal Danino) that focused on an upcoming collaboration of theirs. It was very helpful to me in understanding the technology (still far beyond my current economic grasp) involved in doing the kind of smell-based work I want to be doing someday, as well for deepening my thinking about the importance of smell based creative work. I got a few book recommendations (one of which I've already ordered) and cultured my own (very smelly!) dish of bacteria from the mouthpiece of my water bottle. I mean eventually to get to my studio and photograph it on top of my lightbox, but for now, here's what it looks like on top of a lamp in my office with a bit of tracing paper as a makeshift diffuser. If it lasts until February, maybe I'll rephotograph it as my first official piece of non-art. Until then, it's officially not only art, but super smelly art!

Too Busy to Talk, More Later!

So much in progress....

The open call for NO RUSE, the crazy curatorial/art project I'm doing with Liz Nofziger closes today, and we'll do the art-choosing tomorrow. The main push to finish LGR, my project with Andi Sutton, will happen this weekend. And I'm shooting some images with a volunteer model tonight for yet another January project, to be discussed later. I also managed to squeeze out one more little object last week called "W.W.S." that will be included in an AIDS fundraiser in NY in January, and to land a slot as a performer at the Guggenheim Museum in February as one of the readers of one of the works of one of my favorite artists ever, On Kawara. Oh, finally, I'm jurying for a film festival that I've worked with a few times in the past on a tighter turnaround than usual, so I'm almost a little too busy to write here. But you know what? I've got some work in progress photos. Here's one from LGR and two (kind of before and after shots...) of W.W.S.

A little messy detail of LGR

Blurry (sorry!) cellphone shot of of W.W.S. in progress.

W.W.S. finished and ready to go.

More soon!

Doing, Not Doing

Let's see… It's a rainy November evening... I've spent a lot of my art time this week writing (big surprise) and a little bit of it sketching and working on video.

Here's what's in progress:

I'm in the midst of creating a new and improved (or actually more distorted than improved…) edit of my super short film/interactive object La Mechanique Des Fluides for inclusion in a show in Munich in late-November/December. Will post show announcement as soon as the gallery's website features the exhibit.  

Liz Nofziger and I are at it again, this time assembling a wacky curatorial-art project (with an open call for submissions if you're interested) called NO RUSE and slated to occur in the first week of January 2015. The project focuses on the ability to let go of something that you have been holding on to, without knowing whether the thing is a blessing or a burden before doing so. We are trying to get at a form of acknowledgement of the essence of a (any) thing's potential importance without committing to realizing it. Valuing and celebrating things for their potential rather than their success or failure in reaching it. That's as much as I can say right now, except that the project has a slight Persian influence. But I'll add an update here before it happens.

Also up to my knees in a project that I'm developing with Andi Sutton for presentation at the 2015 Boston Does Boston show. Also in January, and I will also post an announcement for this when the gallery website begins to feature it. This piece, which combines interactive sculpture, sound and some texts, and which is tentatively called LGR, explores what is maybe kind of the flip side of what NO RUSE is thinking about: things that are gone because we were not attached to them. Again, I feel like I shouldn't say much more, but I'll update this post with some work in progress pictures within the next 2 weeks when we begin the sculptural part of things.

Oh, finally, after all of this doing in December and January, I'm going to be not doing quite a bit, starting in February. I was selected to be an artist in residence in the (virtual) RFAOH program and have agreed not to make art for six months, from February 2015 - July 2015. But of course what I'll be exploring during this residency is whether it is even possible for me not to make art. So it should be interesting. During that period, I'll probably just replicate my blog posts for them in here.
 
That's it for now. Except here's my very first sketch of a potential logo for the LGR project (which will need a logo.) It doesn't even have the letters on it yet. Still looking for the right font...

Mini (but not short) Update

Hello! Sorry for the long gap in writing. Originally my excuse was that I had a couple of things in the works and was waiting to see how they shook down before writing here so that it could be kind of an announcementy post. Then while I waited, I got overwhelmed with work-work that I was trying to wrap up before doing some traveling. And now I'm traveling and haven't written because of that....

I'm still traveling for another day or so—I've been in South Korea visiting friends and doing just the tiniest bit of cultural journalism, along with some more routine work-work that I brought with me. But after a few days of minimal email access, I've gotten updates on several things that were in play so thought I'd pass them along.

In September, I submitted a proposal to produce the "extremely low budget audio project" that I mentioned in my last update at an arts festival in Boston called Illuminus. It was modified for an outdoor setting, included a supercool lighting element that was not a part of the original idea, and pitched in collaboration with the fabulous Liz Nofziger. The good news is that it was selected as a finalist in the competition, but then (as I understand it—I'm still foggy on the details as it was Liz who had the last conversation with them due to my absence,) the spaces all got shifted around due do zoning or permitting issues and the two spaces that we had proposed for the piece were no longer available. The whole festival was moved into one space, and because our piece was motion sensitive, it would have been constantly triggered and basically wouldn't work. Anyway, the festival seems like it will be a cool thing even without our participation (heh heh) and it was really nice to get such a strong positive response about the proposal from the Illuminus team.

To complete the ongoing theme of things that fell through, I have heard nothing further about the show that I was invited to participate in in Berlin, but it was slated for October, so I'm assuming it (or at least my participation in it) is not happening.

But the good news is that I've been invited to participate in a Boston show in January that I'm excited about and simultaneously have been offered a very unusual online residency. These two things are actually a little bit in conflict with one another, so I'll go into more detail once I've sorted out the details, but I just wanted to end this post on a positive note. Oh, also I'll end it with a little bit of Korean art.

This is a detail of Aubade III by Korean artist Lee Bull. It was one of several really cool arts I've seen on this trip.

Rejection, Failure, Stasis (But Not in a Bad Way...)

Art plans are falling through like a landslide this month:

• Melbourne screening devolved into bullshit. Apparently when you are invited to present your work within the context of an academic conference, you are expected to pay the conference registration fee. Whether you are attending in person or not. Pardon my French, but fuck that.
• And Just Like That, You Die as originally conceived has been deemed by a trustworthy, highly accredited physical therapist as "not quite 100% guaranteed to cause permanent, irreversible damage," to the small bones and nerve canals in both of my hands/wrists "but some percentage quite close to that." So development of this work is on hold for the moment. I'm planning to consult with a mad genius instrument builder to see if there's an alternative way to accomplish the same goal, and have also submitted an inquiry in to the piece's main inspiration for some feedback, but I'm not holding my breath about getting any response in that case.
• My perfuming apprenticeship is about to get put on hold because an unexpected wad of health-insurance-gone-awry-debt has suddenly surfaced in my life and made investing in perfuming supplies in an effort to understand something slightly ineffable about class consciousness seem too extravagant an endeavor.
• I've also had a few grant and residency applications that I didn't bother mentioning here rejected.

The good news is that I am feeling upbeat about everything. I'm excited for the aspects of the perfuming project that I can move ahead with even without being able to invest much, and I'm feeling ready to revisit a few "archival" project ideas that I set aside awhile ago for a rainy day.

One is an extremely low budget audio project, and the other is a kind of drawing-based 3D object thing that I stopped working on years ago because the construction was too expensive. Just recently a local artist doing something that uses a similar technique gave me some tips for doing what I wanted to do using some relatively inexpensive pre-fab components that didn't exist when I was struggling with this before, so now I'm ready to revisit this project. Or will be this Fall.

Finally, because my local camera shop was having a sale on some soon-to-expire Fuji FP100C film, I decided to resurrect my Polaroid 250 Land Camera from my packed-away analog camera collection in the basement this month.

It's been really fun to have this clunker back in my life. And to be reminded of all of the funky techniques I had once developed for using a medium and tool that's far harder to control than other cameras and film. Here's an image taken under a bridge in Pawtucket RI during the DOT AIR Experimental Music Festival.

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Crooked scan of FujiPolaroid image taken during a set by The Eyesores at DOT AIR 2014.

Oh, crap, I never gave you my Summer reading list and Summer is almost over! I can't remember all of it, but here's what I can remember right now. Maybe it will end up retroactively shedding light on some project that hasn't been made yet...

• Mr. Benson by John Preston
• An unpublished novel called Fading Blue by an old highschool pal, Rachel Neuburger
• Stoner by John Williams
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
• Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
• On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
• About 8 recent issues of the New Yorker
• Up Against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theater by John Lahr
• Making Your Own Days by Kenneth Koch
• An Elmore Leonard book about Somali pirates that I can't remember the name of

I promise not to make bullet points in next month's post. It's incredibly annoying and I know it. Sorry.

The Puppy Days of Summer

Greetings from the not-quite-yet-but-definitely-getting-there dog days of Summer! It's hot and mostly muggy, but it could be a lot worse. It could be August.

I've got nothing against August, I've just felt a special affection for the month of July since I got to know it so intimately last year...

Though it's hard to believe that anything could be more mellow than tanning on a rooftop in Queens, this July has so far been one of the mellowest I can remember. There's hardly any news to share, but here's what little I've got:

• Civic Engorgement is going moderately well. People have been excited about it and having fun interacting with it. I sold out of the first batch of "product" much more quickly than expected, but there hasn't been too much "consumer followup" so I don't know how many people have really put the pieces it into action. Still, I'm putting a little bit of work into it every week and will continue to through the Summer. If you're reading this and haven't sent in documentation of the edition you acquired, please do!
• I'm excited that two video pieces of mine are scheduled for inclusion in international programs later this year: one in a gallery exhibit in Berlin, and one at a conference in Melbourne. I'll fill in more detail later because I'm still waiting for a lot of confirmation around both of these opportunities. (And fantasizing about finding a way to accompany the piece going to Australia...)
• I've got no new projects on the horizon exactly, but am developing two ideas very incrementally. One is a long-duration performance piece that I've got all figured out but which I'm kind of scared to actually do. I am also not sure what the right venue for it would be. Here's the working title: And Just Like That, You Die. 'Nuff said.
• The other, which gets its own whole separate bullet item because it has a little story, is a long-term, large-scale project that I would like to do someday, but probably not any time soon due to the scope, likely expense, and possible impossibility. I won't tell you the working title because it's extremely offensive, but I will tell you that it involves working with naturally produced scents and that this July I've begun a very low key apprenticeship with a professional perfumer in an effort to develop the skills I would need to undertake it. I'm sure I'll apply them in some smaller scale way once I feel a reasonable sense of mastery. That's it. That was the little story.

So maybe I had more to say than I thought. Next time I'll probably have less. In that case, I'll tell you what my Summer reading list has been. That was my fallback plan for today.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation: Not Enough, Or Is It?

Hello. I'm writing from my Summer vacation, a no-budget tour of North Carolina, which I am trying to somehow use as a roving artist's retreat. It isn't working as well as I'd hoped it might, but it's not not working...

The time in motion and away from my usual routines is definitely stimulating thought. Tonight (it's 12:22am on June 19) I'm thinking about my art-work as writing-work (as opposed to my writing-work which is not art-work) and how to make it better writing. My bedtime reading, borrowed from the generous friends I'm staying with in Oak Island, is John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist. It's serving as a reminder to me that no matter what form writing takes, it probably needs to have a story embedded in it to be compelling. Even if it isn't intended to be read traditionally.

The next step is to move this into the writing component of the piece I'm currently working on, Civic Engorgement. The mini-texts involved have been separate from one another so far, but I am thinking now about how to bring them closer together into a single story even though they will never be received that way. I think it would make the piece stronger even if no one sees it. I would like to somehow make Civic Engorgement into story about heroic things that people do as citizens of an international, time-spanning creative community to sustain an amorphous creative non-state that people can become citizens of by sheer willfulness regardless of where they actually reside in time and space.

I've been thinking about writing all month (see this month's Big Red & Shiny) but also am trying not to get too bogged down in it, and have managed to do some small amounts of work (see photo below) on the non-writing components of Civic Engorgement while in transit as well. Not the amount of this work I had hoped to do, but some.

Blurry vacation cellphone shot of a tiny speck of Civic Engorgement in progress.

I've also managed to see a little bit of art and am appreciating the art-sensibilities of the South as a nice change of pace from the Northeastern ones that I am most familiar with. A kind curator-friend in Chapel Hill showed me some interesting, thoughtfully assembled new additions to the Nasher Art Museum's collection at Duke University, and I was very, very lucky to get a full-building tour of Elsewhere in Greensboro. I hope to spend a bit more time there someday...

So four days and halfway into my Summer vacation, I haven't done as much work as I'd hoped I would (what was I thinking when I thought I would be able to work straight through a vacation??) but I am starting to see signs that taking some genuine down time might improve the quality of what I actually make. If I can get it made!!!

Going Live!

Folks, this is it! The long-awaited and oft-mentioned website revamp. Quietly launched as of today.

It's not 100% complete: not every page has been proofed, not every link has been checked, not every stylistic inconsistency has been weeded out, and there are still a few bits of documentation missing/projects not yet represented but it's functional enough to go live and covers at least the ground that the old one covered.

I'm not publicizing widely yet, but if you've found this, I'm taking feedback for ways to tighten and improve and if you see a typo, tell me about it.

Thanks for your patience, and whew!

—Heather