Open Studio Prep

Wall Tattoo nearly finished

New sound piece done.

2am cutting followed by 7am dusting

Sorting layout for images from 'Silence of Becoming and Disappearing' for artists talk.

Hopeful

Hundreds of evites, facebook events, phone calls, text messages, notes on napkins, business cards handed out

3 replies advising of typo, 7 attending through facebook (all people who live in Australia), 37 Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

Ready to make a big impact!

Chanting and disappearing

 I thought that perhaps the solution to the ash flocking piece was to just do more.

 

So a couple of more days were spent facing a wall, and I resisted with all my might heading out to the Al Enatsui exhibition at BAM or the Woolfgang Laib and Dieter Roth at MOMA. The more-is-more approach however drove the work closer towards a decorative feature wall, and still I would look at it a think "So what?".

A different possibility emerged whilst listening to Gregorian chants during music class. Drawing whilst listening I came up with this solution to the composition. It bares no visible likeness to Medieval music and in fact its syncopated chaotic ups and downs and its polyphonic patterns seem more Jazz like, but in some loose way my expanding knowledge of music is providing a pathway to opening up methods of patterning. I was excited about re-working the design and rushed back to the studio to start masking, painting, drawing and radical destruction.

Out came the white paint and I began erasing sections of the pattern and then... there it was, the problem had not been the design or composition of the work but the work itself. Whilst painting over the flocking I began thinking about the Wabi Sabi idea of all things 'emerging from and disappearing towards nothing' and I found a comfort in the possibility that the ash flocking was being erased before it was finished and that this process of erasure was a process of construction, so i kept painting, covering the wall and trapping the work between the wall and new layer of paint. It was there but dissapearing towards not being there.

Snow drawingplay

Nothings easy but everything is possible

 

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So I think we are up to here... the ash flocking. What a filthy mess! But more on its way towards something possible than it has ever been in studio attempts back home. I finished the 4 meter sample on the wall but was surprised by my own disappointment when I realised that it looked very much like a sample, that is to say it looked like I'd stuck it against the wall with all the care of a teenager tacking up a poster, or worse still like I'd tried to do something ‘arty’ with the wall, 'mere' decoration the critics would cry. And whilst you know I'm a can't-contain-myself-fan of decoration and of art against walls and yes even despite my intention to create a sample of different ways I work for the open studio... I just cannot bare its uncertainty, its lack of being the thing I do not yet know it can be. It currently looks like it has no consciousness of the space it occupies, an utter disregard for its place. Something needs to happen to it and I don’t know what that is, so it presently cowers at the end of the studio, trying to apologetically hide is girth and height.

Meanwhile I moved onto other things – a reworking of a pinprick piece. It’s a work I love. No one ever asks me to exhibit this work, but when ever I’m allowed to choose what I exhibit I choose this. 

Sounds and the sublime

There are too many things to do in NY to waist time tolerating mediocrity. So after sitting through one half of a contemporary dance show which was more Rock Esitedford /So you think you can dance than our Sandra Parker or Jo Llyod, and my silent laughter turned to visible shaking at the ‘troubled-yet-passionate” dance to Hallelujah in which the couple kept running away then towards each other, him with his open shirt fluttering around his bare chest, her with her flexed footed leaping, we legged it out of there. Caught the L across to Brooklyn and after getting lost, getting lost and getting lost again found a gallery opening at 10 o’clock on a Friday night. And in a compressed night which covered the ridiculous to the sublime, we listened to a sound piece generated by the movement of the audience transferred into vibrations which then passed an LPG bottle. The amplified micro movements were at first perplexing then quite fascinating as it revealed an unseen world of minute particles busying themselves with the flow of travelling through air. It made me think of how full the empty space of air is.

Later that night we became the recipients of noise rather than the emitters of sound at new club in Brooklyn. In the blacken bunker space we were slammed on all sides by a crescendo of repetitive beats. (My history of music professor tells me I shouldn’t be intimidated by Italian words, and I can simply say “the volume gets louder” but I think that the sound of the word ‘crescendo’ feels a lot more like you head has been crashed between two subwoofers and four turntables, so in this instance I’m going with that.) We had been told that “this room had the most sophisticated sound system anywhere in the world tonight!”. And whilst I’m learning to find the exaggeration of Americans endearing, grains of salt still get sprinkled. To my great surprise they could have this time been right.  The music was felt through the floor, through the bar, through the air, through the bodies of the masses dancing and yet we could talk to each other without shouting, we could hear each other without lip reading. Although I should confess when I mentioned this to our friend who had built the sound system he said “What?” and then I had to repeat myself 3 times, which comically disproved my compliment to him.

Sounds and the sublime

There are too many things to do in NY to waist time tolerating mediocrity. So after sitting through one half of a contemporary dance show which was more Rock Esitedford /So you think you can dance than our Sandra Parker or Jo Llyod, and my silent laughter turned to visible shaking at the ‘troubled-yet-passionate” dance to Hallelujah in which the couple kept running away then towards each other, him with his open shirt fluttering around his bare chest, her with her flexed footed leaping, we legged it out of there. Caught the L across to Brooklyn and after getting lost, getting lost and getting lost again found a gallery opening at 10 o’clock on a Friday night. And in a compressed night which covered the ridiculous to the sublime, we listened to a sound piece generated by the movement of the audience transferred into vibrations which then passed an LPG bottle. The amplified micro movements were at first perplexing then quite fascinating as it revealed an unseen world of minute particles busying themselves with the flow of travelling through air. It made me think of how full the empty space of air is.

Later that night we became the recipients of noise rather than the emitters of sound at new club in Brooklyn. In the blacken bunker space we were slammed on all sides by a crescendo of repetitive beats. (My history of music professor tells me I shouldn’t be intimidated by Italian words, and I can simply say “the volume gets louder” but I think that the sound of the word ‘crescendo’ feels a lot more like you head has been crashed between two subwoofers and four turntables, so in this instance I’m going with that.) We had been told that “this room had the most sophisticated sound system anywhere in the world tonight!”. And whilst I’m learning to find the exaggeration of Americans endearing, grains of salt still get sprinkled. To my great surprise they could have this time been right.  The music was felt through the floor, through the bar, through the air, through the bodies of the masses dancing and yet we could talk to each other without shouting, we could hear each other without lip reading. Although I should confess when I mentioned this to our friend who had built the sound system he said “What?” and then I had to repeat myself 3 times, which comically disproved my compliment to him.

3 days in NYC facing a wall

 

Time to go out now....