While falling asleep last night, I had this idea in my head, so when I had time this afternoon I made this and put it up where you can buy it print-on-demand. It’s the image I plan on using for the cover of this post-apocalyptic 2003 NYC Mad Max meets bikes meets sex + a twist comic I’ve been making. Anyway. I was excited about it, so I thought I’d share.
YAY! super thanks to matt and mark I got this motion sensor activating a muscle wire. My partner and I are trying to make a wall surface that sort of gently winks and opens (maybe a bit like anemones) from the great sewing notion called horsehair (that’s not horsehair) but a mesh with unbonded intersections so it deforms in super cool ways (an array of pockets a bit like this)
but mostly i’m supremely excited that i made albeit simple electronics and programming work at the same time and eventually it’s going to be pretty! suggestions if you see something funny are welcome.
waiting for the 2nd pass on sealant to cure to try filling it up again. midterm tomorrow!
For those of you who don’t know, which I’m guessing is most of you… today is Hourly Comic Day. This is where you draw a comic every hour you’re awake about something that happened to you in that hour. Like journal comics on crack or something.
I will be updating these as the day goes on on my website . You should go check them out!
A couple of weeks ago I saw a really beautiful performance piece, Stifter’s Dinge at the Park Ave Armory in New York (which is becoming a really solid arts presenter). Excitingly enough I don’t know exactly what to call it. Essentially a sound and set installation as performance. The composer/director, Heiner Goebbels, has a a great name for one, and had a really great control of the visual effects and timing – calmly spending long enough with each scene to really notice all sort of sides of it.
a quickie post of a picture from i and my partner’s final housing project (i know you’re thinking oh my gosh i’ve always wanted to live in a giant black cantilever!) eventually i’ll post a picture of the model which helps explain the disco part – mirrors!
if it seems derivative of mies or el lessitzky that’s cause it is…
i think we should come up with a new blog. something that some of us will post to regularly, i think the content of our lives is really interesting, and maybe if we get some readers we will think so too and write about it. it’s been a wonderful experience though, being able to keep up with people and communicate things we might not normally be able to share. anybody with any ideas should mail me or post. otherwise i’ll be mailing out to see who is interested when i develop my brilliant plan for world domination.
well just to get people talking (maybe?) i thought i’d share my new portfolio! it is of course not perfect – but i had to pull it together for an application for an internship in renzo piano’s paris office – no clue what my chances are, i appear to be competing with 15 +/- 8ish of my classmates on entirely unknown criteria. go columbia and it’s consistent obsfucation of information in an extraordinarily self-deluded old-fashioned heirarchy masquerading as an open network.
http://www.papercanary.org/irony/www/art_architecture/091008_portfolio.pdf
anyhow since i’ll need to revamp it for a cumulative review in may (if i don’t get the internship) constructive criticism would be totally welcome. mostly i’m just in shock that it appears i did something documentable with the last year of my life…
come visit new york.
ps – i don’t know why when exporting to pdf it is insisting on adding a 1/16″ of white on the left and bottom, grrr…
in Alameda, CA. I know some of you guys are over that way, yeah?
The opening reception is tonight (Sept. 11, 2009) from 6-10 pm.
more pictures and posts soon, dan good and i are moving to a cottage in jingletown. whee!
I’ve got a lot of work in the next two weeks before school starts.
spent the day in a meeting down in san mateo, drove back and decided to stop around lake meritt for a hamburger in a rare eating out moment for me.
the place was run by a nice Korean couple.
I was reading Eldon Hall’s enjoyable Journey to the Moon but didn’t focus as well as i wanted to. because of that load of work i guess.
speaking of jazz, check out this brilliant jazz rock i had to good fortune to hear tonight. the song solidarity is the one that really grabbed me. chicago keeps churning out the tunes.
just now listening to the rest of the album, it’s more of a post rock kind of thing with a very nice use of brass.
So yesterday I showed a work in progress – emphasis on the in progress part because I found watching the video horrifying, so clumsy. Anyhow, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time so it was good to just jump on in and do it. Now I need to find a way to do it again – better.
Since it’s not zoomed in, the first section is me putting on my face with make-up and then smearing it with honey which sort of drips for the rest of the piece – the camera didn’t really resolve that texture. And as a disclaimer I think if I do it again I may use Heaven is of Honey, Einsturzende Neubauten or something else in place of the sort of emo radiohead song.
I’m supposed to be submitting a quickie thing for a catalogue of the thesis projects for the mfa program i’m a ta at. We found ourselve 10 words that had some combined relevance to a number of pieces one/two of which were mask/illusion (each word or set of words was given to an affiliated faculty member to write 100-150 words on). So this is my really pretentious, wordy shot at it…. I’d welcome any feedback – especially constructive – before I submit it, and it’s the only really tangible thing I have from this summer to share up here.
The mask is a powerful tool, ancient and contemporary – a site of obfuscation and revelation, a site of illusion and truth. Its power emerges from the potential for multiple identities where the binaries of real and unreal, true and false, mingle, disintegrate, explode. After the deconstruction of absolute realities, histories and identities where does truth remain except within layers of illusion and masks? The (animist, death, comedic, criminal, surgical, eye, emotional, Halloween, oxygen, ancestral, gas, diving) mask affirms that there must be a reality behind or within, whether the mask serves to hide an identity, construct an identity, or represent the identity, the individual within animates the illusion with desires: for anonymity, divinity, beauty, power, submission, grandeur, silence. The illusion in its dynamic negotiation of what appears to be and what is, creates a charged space for both wearer and viewer from which the sublime may emerge.
I am going to be showing a work in progress on Saturday I think so hopefully someone will take pictures or video of that so I can share with you all. It’s loosely based on TS Elliot’s Burnt Norton, a Virginia Woolf quote “When this you see remember me”, the word ’saudade’ and, generally, grief, with a score of Radiohead’s ‘Talkshow host’, Anima, Vinicius de Moraes ‘Samba em preludio’ and Gorrilaz ‘Starshine’ – just to add to the pretentiousness of this post.
Should be back in New York by the 29th – if anyone on this blog is there.
Irene
ps: a shot i took of an mfa-er’s thesis production, a wonderfully bit crazy woman Jimena Paz. She hung gold space blankets around the space and grow lights and ‘planted’ monitors in trays of dirt. Oh and dressed up in flourscent pink/orange jacket pants and boxing gloves to dance around.
I was amused to hear the title of this record by Black Randy and the Metrosquad. It was published in the late 70s by Dangerhouse Records.
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace