Patience, Possibility

February is a slow month for me every year. I have less work-work in this month usually than any other, and this year, not much art going on either. I'm lucky to have been commissioned to do a little writing and reflection on my art-making processes for a web/book/video project that's keeping me busy (and financially afloat, along with a few other small projects) through the slow time. So I am just appreciating the quietness of this moment. And the radical weather we've been having here.

I've been listening to wads of weird music lately which is keeping my mind very limber. But the only thing I've actually made this year so far is a tiny video for a friend's birthday. (See still below.)

Still from "Do Something" (2016)

The installation elements from WATER arrived at my door last week, so that is the end of the last real project.

The two tentative opportunities I mentioned last month did not pan out. (Well, one has not panned out yet, but still could, and I got too sick to follow through on the other one. But a small, quiet, amorphous thing is maybe evolving out of it's failure. Too soon to tell...)

The large objects are still sitting at my studio, and have now been joined by a few boxes of materials that can be reused from WATER if I want, and someone gave me a new (old) piece of AV equipment that I'm starting to think about how I'll work with. But it's been difficult for me to get to my studio for some reason. Really difficult.

In March, it looks like I'm going to be doing a performance/interactive piece (title TBD) as a part of the Fung Wah Biennial. I'm doing a little talk/tour during the Biennial's Boston visit, and then a thing on the Biennial bus going from Boston to NYC, and then another thing in NYC later in the week that follows from it, with a mini-residency at Flux Factory in between for development.

I also just got invited to do a longer (2-3+ month) residency at a local arts organization that I love later this year, and I'm excited about it because it's going to involve working with a medium that I've never set hands on before. Details TBD so I I'll wait to talk about it here until I've figured it out the shape of things a little better, but I'm honored to have been asked. Beyond honored.

Other than that, I have a lot of proposals out there in the ether, but no sense of whether they'll be successful in any way. More soon. And hopefully the next post will include some images of experiments with the new (old) device, big objects, or stuff returned to me from WATER. (I just have to get myself to my damned studio!!!)

2016.

Ha! I couldn't think of a title for this blog post so I lazed out with "2016" which immediately made me feel as if I needed to launch into a list of resolutions.

I don't have any—except maybe to make sure my work this year has me sitting less and walking around more as, despite having not written here since October (!!), I feel like I spend way more time in front of a computer than I should. Anyway, happy 2016, and apologies for the long silence. 

Now that I've called this "2016" it's a bit awkward to look back on 2015, but I feel like I should at least summarize what happened in the time between my last posting and this one. Really, it was just that I completed and installed WATER and was exhausted but very happy, and then it was Thanksgiving, and then all of the other holidays piled into place, and now it's now.

WATER (Detail) [Photo Credit: Jerry Mann]

I've used what down time I've had to kind of clean up and dig out of backlogged stuff that I lost track of when things were at their busiest, and have also been doing some writing... 

Art-wise, at the very tail end of 2015, I tried to replicate the performance/photography series Days After the Darkest Day (currently on view at the Mass Convention Center,) that I did at the end of 2014, but had a technical failure that I still have to figure out whether there's a possible way to recover from.

Next up is (very tentatively) a possible project focused on my anxieties around friendships for (maybe) inclusion in a very low key show in NYC later this month (but I'm still not sure whether this will happen. Need to figure this out tonight really.) And also (very tentatively) a possible performance-sound collaboration thing might be in the works. Oh, and I've also dragged a few large objects from the street into my studio that I want to do something with, but I'm not sure what yet. All of this is far too nebulous-feeling to bother talking about.

So 2016 is pretty much a blank slate. I'll let you know when that starts to change....

Actually, a little addendum.

If I learned anything from my time as an artist on hiatus last year, I learned this: art making happens in mysterious ways and you don't always know when you are and aren't making art or having something in progress. I'm trying hard these days to pay better attention to smaller art-making-related impulses. Towards that end, I'm adding one note to this posting.

Near the end of last year I had this recurring urge to paint my fingernails black. I tried to shake it off because nailpolish has always made me feel as if my fingernails were suffocating, and because it felt childish. But the urge never went away, and so finally, a few weeks ago, in a 99 cents store in Williamsburg, I gave in to the urge and bought some cheapo black nailpolish.

Proof. (Also, can you believe this tiny hand is the hand of an adult person?! It's my hand but it shocks me anyway..)

I have the smallest most gnawed fingernails in the world, and can't keep polish on them for more than a day without it being destroyed by how I use my hands, but I've been dutifully repainting them once the polish completely disappears, and despite how often people tell me it looks ridiculous.

I can sense that by following this dictate (which I imagine is coming from some very adolescent part of myself!) I'm paying attention to something muse-like that may reveal itself later (or perhaps at least eventually choose a form other than black nailpolish for its expression.) So 2016 is actually not a 100% blank slate. It has a few scrappy little spots of black enamel on it...

Culture

It looks like this time I really missed the 1 month mark completely! Sorry about that. It's been a pretty busy art time. Not busier than planned for, but with much more shuffling around and scrambling than expected. I'm not going to feel too bad about it as I have yet to encounter anyone who admits to actually reading this blog. But I'll make this long enough for two months to make up for it.

I'll update first and then reflect on the notion of culture a bit.

Install for Ovation in progress (at Fenway Park.)

Since the end of August, I've been hacking away at the several big projects mentioned in previous posts. Ovation and Driving Culture are completed now; (Eau D' Wilderness Grove) is out for review before a final round of refinement; and the fourth (WATER) is still in the depths of progress, but due soon.

Roving public artwork, Driving Culture, parked on Boston's City Hall Plaza.

As I've been working almost exclusively as an artist these last few months, I've been experiencing phenomena that I'm used to in work-work contexts, but not art contexts. Namely, that of making things by a deadline that are not quite what I'd hoped they would be, but having to “publish” them anyway.

The good news is that sometimes people can't tell when things aren't quite what they were supposed to be, and they love them anyway, and you feel like they are “good enough” even if not perfect. Other times, people just won't to tell you if something falls short of the concept. Which sort of sucks but I guess is the best thing when there's no space for making improvements.

The best case scenario is neither: it's when something is close to what you'd hoped for and people around you are willing to point out its weaknesses and have the patience to let you keep pushing closer to the ideal for awhile.

But most commonly in my experience? People say nothing. You do things that you know are good, bad or meh and there's very little recognition of the effort, and in my case, zero press coverage. Getting better press coverage of my work (and better documentation in general) should probably start moving higher up on my list of priorities, but it's just painfully difficult for me to give those kinds of considerations as much “mental real estate” as actually devising art projects.

My documentation of a colleague's work (Shaw Pong Liu) during Boston Creates.

Also on my mind, and hinted at above is the culture of my arts community. It's been awhile since I've been so exclusively focused on/in Boston. And the arts culture here—which I have long been a part of, but have always stayed just slightly removed from—is sometimes kind of intense.

I've been in a zone for a while where I almost prefer to collaborate with people than to work on my own. Definitely I prefer projects that put me in contact with people I would not normally meet on my own to working in a solitary mode right now. But I've been feeling this way in the context of a loose-knit arts community that is spread out fairly widely around the world, and am not sure how applicable it is locally in the long run. Culturally, this city's arts community could do more to encourage collaborative practices as much as it encourages individual practices.

So I'm thinking about culture in the anthropological sense; about the conditions of the production of culture in the “cultural plan” sense; and actually I'm also thinking a lot about culture in the fermentation or oyster bed sense of the word. My art-heart wants so much for things to build on things in Boston—for them to swell up and expand like sourdough starter, ready to be passed around and nurtured by everyone, and making an endless supply of bread.

1st sourdough bread by a filmmaker friend (Katya Gorker) in Philadelphia using starter originally received from a Boston musician (Shaw Pong Liu).

And in fact, as a kind of an aside to any particular project, I'm excited to have set the wheels in motion to begin tracking the movement of an actual sourdough culture through a loose association of creative types in Boston and beyond. I don't know how yet, but I feel like the key to some problem I'm trying to solve about the mindset here may lie in an informal, longitudinal study of the life of a special little batch of sourdough starter. Perhaps a super goofy mockumentary style biopic is ultimately in the cards for this particular ball of yeastiness...we'll see.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to how WATER will come together. I'll be thinking about this almost non-stop for the next two + weeks, and then heading to Ohio to make it real.

I'm also looking forward to two sort of educational opportunities on my immediate horizon. One is a local symposium next week on Black Mountain College (I think I wrote in here about my obsession with these folks and my visit to their museum in NC last year...) focused on its impact on collaborative processes in the arts. I signed up at first because I'm slated to do an article about a related exhibition at Boston's ICA, but also feel like it might be relevant to things I'm trying to figure out right now personally.

I'm also registered to take an online course for journalists on data visualization through December. I'm not actually interested in data visualization itself. I'm interested in what makes people trust it so much. Gotta figure out how to apply the same principles to smells.

I'm curious to see how these dips into slightly more academic realms impact my art making...

Letting it All Hangout (Together a Little Bit)

Hello! It feels like it's been awhile since I've written to you, but I guess it's just been about the usual one-month gap. I hope you've enjoyed the Summer. I feel like I've almost missed it but now that I've realized this, I'm grabbing onto its last little shreds very tightly and hanging on, hoping to squeeze what I can of sun and beach and forest smells out of it.

Speaking of forest smells, I've just come from de-installing the data collecting elements of Eau D'Wilderness Grove. They were meant to be in place a bit longer, but some spiders and some people were lightly vandalizing them in a way that made them difficult for people to interact with so I pulled them down a day or two early. I've begun the data analysis phase already, and should be able to start the perfuming process towards mid- or late- September.

What else is up? I'm hard at work on three major projects, all of which are in states that feel uncomfortably underdone at the moment, but all of which I'm sure (gulp) will come together properly by the time they have to. I'm trying to keep in mind some words of cooking wisdom that a chefly friend imparted to me after tasting a chili-in-progress of mine once: "Everything you want is in there in the right amounts, you just have to let it all hangout together a little bit." Right now I feel like I'm letting it all hang out over the edge of a cliff, but I'm taking long, slow metaphorical deep breaths.

Here's what's in the pot right now for Sept/Oct/Nov, in order of when it's happening. (Bullet points. Sorry in advance.)

• Short (like micro) performance at this. (And possibly another longer performance elsewhere the same night...)
• Ovation, a piece I proposed for a large public event last year looks like it's going to happen for the same event this year, but on a larger scale. Stay tuned for an update on this soon.
• The outcome of my work as an "artist-ethnographer" for the city of Boston will be presented publicly in some way.
• The perfume component of Eau D'Wilderness Grove will be completed/presented somehow.
• I've got a tiny (video!!) piece in a drawing show.
• WATER, a whole big multi media thing I'm making is in the works for this.
• And I have a video I'm still working on in another part of the same show.

Everything is partially cooked, and it feels like an awful lot to have on the stove plus various bits of work-work as well, but I'm grateful for it all and hoping on all of my in-breaths that I don't burn anything!

After November, I have plenty of ideas for next things, but may take a little break before implementing them.

Photo of the day is a detail of WATER. It's some tap water from Dusseldorf, DE.

Where Nothing Overt Happens

Last day of July...it has been an exciting month. But again I'm too swamped to go into detail, so here's the quickie version of what's up: I finished the Residency for Artists on Hiatus a tiny bit early (July 23) because I had too much going on to go to the end of July. I still owe a final report, but you can read something approximating that here. Even before I finished that, I was involved in an intensive non-art project called Catfishing, which I won't link to here yet because I'm still trying to process how I feel about it. But it was challenging and interesting in several ways, not the least of which was coming to terms with making work where nothing overt happens.

In a somewhat similar vein, now that I'm reflecting on it, I'm currently showing a very rare (for me) piece of "on the wall" art at AMP Gallery in Provincetown, MA. It's a series of photographs documenting my environment during what was essentially a private performance.

I'm also working now on two projects for the City of Boston. The first is next week, and is scent based. The second is happening already and will continue through early October: I've been hired as an "Artist-Ethnographer" to document/interpret/respond to a city-wide process that will reshape the region's art programming and cultural focus.

AND I'm working (but haven't been much) on two projects for a gallery in Ohio, one is a video based, the other collective-engagement. I'm behind schedule on both.

Plus I just pulled off a cool but otherwise unsuccessful fundraiser event for a film that I want to see finished, and have a video (made earlier this year) in a show coming up in October as well. More detail on all of this soon. Meanwhile, here is an image is from the fundraiser, where again, nothing overt happened. It's me holding a lamp blindfolded for writer Eileen Myles during a "seance" meant to bring in some support for The Ladies Almanack film project...

Recycled Material

Another month where I'm too busy to even tell you what I'm busy doing!

In lieu of a real update, here are a few images from my June 2015 shenanigans. You can also get an update on how my Residency For Artists on Hiatus is going and see a super short episode of Weather Shmether called Fucking Patriarchy B in my June blog post over there (wherever there is...)

Stay tuned for a July update featuring virtual interactions with sex crazed strangers, non-virtual interactions with robotic dancers, a seance, watery conference calls and ghetto sniffing.

This is the final version of Jiminy Mac & Cheese created with Thalia Zedek (in front of a live gallery audience) at The Boiler as a part of Menu For Mars Supper Club's Test Kitchen on June 13, 2015...

...and us looking extremely satisfied with our work and chefly afterwards. We also got strangers to drink hydrogen peroxide and eat unlabelled pink pills via pure charm/for the sake of art.

This is a not-particularly-good still from Crappy Day, the first episode of the Weather Shmether video series I produced for STROBE NETWORK. I'll eventually post all of these little videos on my "Various Videos" page.

This is a still from Flabby, the second episode of the Weather Shmether video series I produced for STROBE NETWORK. I'll eventually post all of these little videos on my "Various Videos" page.

Right Under the Wire

Geez, May is about to slip away, isn't it? You'd think I'd have tons of time to write in here because I'm not making art but you'd be wrong on both counts.

I'm helping make other people's art non stop, and I'm starting to plan my next real art project, which is scheduled for the Fall. Actually, there may be one before that.

I want to write here about how my work life and art life are blurring.

******

Whoops. I started (and titled) this post "Right Under the Wire" because I really truly thought I'd finish writing it by May 31st, but I was wrong. May didn't almost slip away, it actually did.

That's okay. The title is still appropriate if you imagine the wire to be the line between making art and not making art that I'll be continuing to limbo under via RFAOH through July.

Meaning that I've got a ton of non-art going on: Next week I've got work (that is not art) in two shows in New York—some video work that I consider "alternative journalism" will be a part of the STROBE Network project and some food and drink that I consider recipe testing rather than art will be cooked/mixed as a part of the Menu For Mars Kitchen project.

I've also just begun developing the plans for the creation of an immersive installation piece that I'll make between the end of July through October. It's for an exhibition that is at least tentatively called "the natural itstory museum" at the SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, OH. It will be up from late-November through January 2016.

What else? Oh, I have one small piece of art work that I made in December of 2014 that will be in a show in Provincetown, MA at the AMP Gallery at the end of July, and I've gotten involved in a film project that I'll probably be producing an event around there at the end of July as well. Plus lots of art-related writing and thinking for my "day" jobs...

That's it for now except that I promise to come back and update this post with a photo of the first draft of recipe testing for the "Jiminy Mac & Cheese" I'll be making at M4MSC within the next 48 hours...

Totally edible cricket-enhanced, mars pantry friendly mac & cheese.

Other People's Art

I shouldn't put it this was because it's like confessing that you're cheating on a diet that you put yourself on voluntarily, but for the last month or so I've found a way to get around the restrictions imposed by my RFAOH contract. I'm sticking to the letter of the law, but bending the spirit ever so slightly. And compulsively, as I describe in my April blog post over there.

I've made one piece of inadvertent artwork (pictured below and titled Multitasking) and then have been helping other people out with their projects (so making their art, not mine...)

Here's the breakdown of (mostly) other people's stuff that I've been up to and/or will be up to in the next little while:

• Packaging, labeling and selling “art-infused water” (like holy water, but with different properties...) and DIY art installation kits as a fundraiser for the production of the print catalog for NO RUSE. (PDF version of the catalog is done! Will post link to it on NO RUSE page shortly as well.)
• Modeling/acting the role of an FBI agent in photographs and in audio recordings for someone's upcoming installation.
• Creating two recipes and cooking them (along with a partner) in a test kitchen that set up in a gallery (more on this when it happens.)
• Acting as an onsite (text based) documentarian for an artist doing several very public live performances (more on this soon too.)
• Assembling some videos for a temporary TV channel.

Will try to post again sooner rather than later. Been work-working a lot (which as always, is good, and has also involved lots of lovely exposure to the arts.) Should also have an update on some long range plans for a group exhibit in the works for late 2015 by then.

Meanwhile:

Multitasking, 2015. 18" (diameter.) Aluminum, carbon.

Oh, also, not as an aside but as a direct response to the title of this post, will take this opportunity to share my happiness that a great pal along with a dear friend (and even occasional collaborator) were 2015 winners of Boston's most esteemed contemporary art prize, the ICA's Foster Prize. So also this post is a little celebration of other people's art!!