tissues, blankets, and tea...

I finished my most recent text piece, above washed and ready to iron, but then my day yesterday went down hill and I officially have a terrible cold. I feel a lot like a pile...

But alas hopefully I will have energy to do something and if not me, my blanket, and bad daytime tv will be friends. Or maybe a little bit of both.

learn with me...

Textile Arts Center- Brooklyn Location

'Til death do us part- Embroidery Workshop
Sat 11AM - 5PM, January 28, 2012

Celebrate, investigate, or pine about the experience of marriage and romantic partnership. Work with fiber artist Joetta Maue -who's work is inspired by the most intimate relationships we have in life- to create a one of a kind piece of embroidery art. Come with an idea to make a work about marriage, love, love loss, desire for love- wherever your heart is. Discuss how one can make a hand made ketubah, the Jewish wedding contract, an image of the bridal bed or couple, or a creation inspired by wedding vows and how these make a meaningful heirloom or treasured gift. In conjunction we will talk about the role of dowry and embroidered wedding gifts in history.

Just in time to make it for Valentines day. No experience required, basic stitches and techniques will be taught.

Sign up here

For more info or to sign up contact the center at info@textileartscenter or (718) 369- 0222.

complicated femininity...

A few weeks ago I saw the work of Julie Moon on a blog that I occasionally visit. Her work popped off the page with skill, color, and intrigue. Her ceramics are incredibly unique explorations of the body, femininity, color, culture, and texture.


She paints, glazes, collages fabric and decals, and attaches elements to these strange and beautiful creations.


Her use of the decorative is powerful allowing it to be beautiful but also strange, almost alien on her forms.


The femininity in her work is overt but feels very heavy with complication as well.


In a recent press release of a solo show her work was described as :

Moon combines skilled craftsmanship and traditional Korean motifs in a highly contemporary, conceptual approach. Interested in ideas and expectations of beauty, identity and gender, Moon’s most recent work explores form, pattern, growth, and multiplicity. Delicate, surprising and engaging, Moon’s innovative work pushes her medium in provocative new directions.

one recent series:

focuses on abstract representations of the body, which Moon project personalities onto. while no piece is a literal body part, rolls of fat, breasts, bellies and bottoms become quietly apparent.

She says this about her work:

I consider the forms I’ve been building over the past few years as figurative... more an expression of the body…and perhaps an expression of culture and consumption and indulgence. I try to work intuitively but I definitely believe that the traditions and properties of my materials influence my work most.
Making for me is play and throughout the process I have a tendency to anthropomorphize the objects I build, including my materials. Clay itself is fleshy and sensual, moist, malleable, dependent on gravity, slowed down by its size and weight, these are things that I try to channel in my work. However, once it’s fired in the kiln, when all chemical water is driven off, the work becomes lifeless and brittle. Working the surface by adding glaze and decoration, helps me to give the objects I make identity and meaning.

You can see A LOT of her work on her website here and read an interview here.

step by step

Sorry ya'll I just did not have the energy to write yesterday. I have been trying to listen to myself a little more and take a bit of the pressure off. I have a lot of great opportunities going on around me which is wonderful but with that I can easily allow myself to get totally stressed out and turn the pressure cooker on. And that never helps, it just makes things worse.

I know that part of my stress is residual from the move. I was talking to a friend in Brooklyn yesterday and through that conversation I had to face all the fear I still have attached to leaving. I have great opportunities now but as an artist you are also always looking for the great things in the future and there is a huge part of me that fears that opportunities might dry up now that I am no longer in the city. Intellectually I argue that, I know that this is not the case, especially since I will continue to go back to do things regularly and be aware of the scene, and know so many amazing and successful folks not anywhere near the city. But the gnawing thought still sits there as a little layer of fear that I have yet to shed.

But alas I do feel good progress coming in my work, thought not necessarily quick enough for my deadlines. But I am SO close to finishing my most recent larger text piece, took a new photo this weekend for a narrative portrait that will be gorgeous, got a rough, rough draft for my article written, and am really excited to get back to working on my image based works (though the break from them was SO nice.) So step by step we all move forward.

hand/eye

Here is a link to a recent feature over at Hand/Eye. They ask artists to write from there own point of view and so I thought I might approach it a little differently since I kind of do that all the time here. I almost wrote mine like a story I guess.

Anyway hop over and read it, let me know what you think.

to those that were lost.

Another highlight for me at the MOMA was the works of Doris Salcedo on view. I have known about her work for a long time now but had never had the opportunity to see her work in person. The museum had one of her cement filled furniture works and her shoes.


Her works are often almost like memorials- delving in to the issues of the violence in her native columbia and makeing works that honor and recognie the vitims of this violence.

The Moma says this about these works:

Salcedo spent weeks with the families and loved ones of the deceased, infusing herself with the details of their lives. Based on these experiences, she created sculptures from domestic furniture and clothing once touched by the warmth of daily use. Complete with legs, backs, feet, and handles, the dresser and chairs in this untitled work may be seen as stand-ins for the missing body of a victim and the fractured lives of his or her family.

The soft, warm grain of the wooden furniture contrasts with the gray mass of cold, hard concrete and rebar that fills the interior spaces and violates the structure of these objects. The furniture, bulky and mute, has been rendered useless by the sheer weight and volume of its concrete interment. The objects now mark time and space, bearing witness to an act of violence and functioning as memento mori. They are public reckonings of private loss and personal grief within a desperate, charged political environment. "My work deals with the fact that the beloved—the object of violence—always leaves his or her trace imprinted on us," Salcedo has said.

From her series of working with clothing of these victims on view are some of the shoes. The shoes are in the wall, viewable from both sides, hidden behind a layer of stretch animal skin sewn to the wall. The works are powerful homages to the lost.

Salcedo's work is work worth knowing about and understanding and was lovely to see in person. See her work here.

solo scenes...

I have been meaning to write about my most recent trip to the MOMA but with all the going on in my life it just has not happened but I am finally starting to want to revisit that trip. Often I struggle with the MOMA it rarely moves me. But it seems that they recently did some re -working of a lot of the permanent collection especially in the most contemporary galleries. I will be re-visiting many of the works I saw while there as I was super pumped the entire visit.


But one piece that moved me A LOT was unexpected. I walked towards the end of the contemporary galleries to face a crude scaffolding wall holding 131 video monitors. Easy to walk by and think of as boring, anti-aesthetic, video art. That is exactly what I did. Then I read the nameplate and saw that is was the last work of Dieter Roth. An artist that I have always been perplexed by but drawn too. His work seems lost in questions of identity and self and has been work that has moved me. So I thought--- Ok I am missing something here.
I went back, sat down on the floor, and watched.


In essence it is boring footage of Roth living his daily life for 6 months, you see him in his small, crowded, minimal live-work space, sleeping, eating, drawing, writing, making work, packaging work, organizing, reading, speaking on the phone. Beyond banal. But when you let your eyes open to see. You see a poignant portrait of the artist alone in his studio, alone in his mind, never escaping the artist's mind that is his. To me it ended up being a raw and honest portrait of the artist- stripping the romanticism, the fame, the prestige away and seeing all that was left. An artist that must make.


I wanted to write about the piece because I already know some people who have been to the MOMA while it was up and did not give it any attention and I just wanted to give my thoughts. That way if you visit while it is up you can stop and take a minute. Or 10. To me it is time worth spent.

Of course some people will not appreciate it in this way but to me it was a truly moving, beautiful portrait of a man.

Neighborhood Beat.

This was filmed almost 2 months ago, feels like forever ago, but just now has been published. It is a studio visit with me at my Red Hook studio. I am very happy with how it was produced.
But not so happy about the BLAGH color of my shirt and the horrible hair situation. But atleast my work looks good and I sound half way good.

Let me know what you think.

Read my article on Susan Lenz's project I do/I don't over here. Read a previously published post about her work here.

hopeful...

I finished this over the weekend, it happened very suddenly. I was working slowly, quietly, and then all of a sudden I looked down and I was done. It still needs washed, ironed, and properly photographed but it is done.
I am happy with it.
As I said before I started this quite a while ago maybe in the spring... then I got distracted by my solo show this summer, then I felt ambiguous about some color choices and the work in general...but with my upcoming solo show it felt like it would really fit in and so done.

The thing about the upcoming show is that I want it to be about the moment in a relationship where you feel disconnected - like 2 ships passing or maybe even 2 ships violently crashing- but I also want it to allude to how you get through it, that you can get through it, that reconnection can occur. So along with some of the heavier emotional pieces I also want pieces that have hope and love in them. This piece felt like it could be one of those?