Studio Archaeology

I've been cleaning out my studio, (again), not really the studio itself but the things I brought over here after I sold my place, things that started to feel like an enormous weight. Mainly paperwork, documents and traces of ownership, the stuff we call a paper trail, leading us back to who we were. The rest of the things, the objects, just moved from here to over there.

But since my studio is inherited, adopted, clearing it is like a dig, an excavation. I find:

two tiny harmonicas,

mid-century roses,

a pin-up girl for matadors,

awesome co-eds, (I do love a teenage boy in a cravat),

girls who were really, really mad for plaid,

and a folder of photos of my Dad, as a young artist.

Lichens

There is something to be said for having to stop in the middle of a shopping center while your friend takes a phone call, and there are Royal Palms all around, to give the strip mall a bit of that Miami Beach made-up kind of glam, though there's really nothing glam about a strip mall no matter what is done with it - the purpose of this run on sentence is to say, even in strip malls there's always something that amazes. Something that beats out all the things we try to make to entertain ourselves, things that nature takes back and makes over, without caring whether we see it, and does a better job than we ever could. Foliose lichens clinging to the trunk of a Royal Palm, set in an island of concrete, outside a TJ Maxx:

Ernst Haeckel's take, wonderful :

Shouting Out

I've been interviewed by the excellent Michael Pershes at StyleShout.com, and he wrote the nicest things possible :

Style Shout Out

Young Palm in Bloom

Let me say first that this palm and I are not in love. I didn't think it was possible for there to be a dysfunctional relationship between a person and a tree. It is. We have it in for each other. Young palm is the ornamental kind plopped down on front lawns of Floridian planned communities, one that doesn't ask for much, or gets that much attention. And when it does, when raking or weeding or any kind of proximity is required, it gets its revenge, tearing at you with its tiny trunk spikes, pulling out your hair with its saw-toothed fronds, generally scratching and biting. It's like that kid in junior high who stood by herself in the school yard, the one you thought you might befriend because you too were a solitary kid in the school yard, both of you with strange hair, too-big glasses. Until you tried to get close and the kid went cuckoo's nest all over you. So we stood on either end of the yard, by ourselves, me and this kid. I mean, tree. Me and this tree keep our distance, mutually misunderstanding each other.

But every April, ornamental lawn palm has its own spring awakening. It doesn't care whether it's admired or appreciated. (Yes, I know, it's a tree. But work with me). It bursts open thousands of tiny cream colored palm flowers, snapping all over it like popcorn. It suddenly reminds me of all kinds of surprising and transcendent things, on my way to the car to do something routine and ordinary. It seems happy, or, at least, generous and forgiving. I take a chance and get close. And it lets me in.

Work

As much as I complain about the times when I have to produce a lot of work in a short period, those protracted, intense marathons turn out to be  all about the actual experience of making things - the physical act of it that I love so much, that I would miss so deeply if I ever used assistants or had a staff. (A staff. Do go on, snickers undermining inner voice.). Though the computer has become inseparable from the process and the second act impossible without it, the old-timey dirty fingers aspect of art making is the best part of the whole thing. This has prevented me, so far, from making anything huge, imposing, atmospheric, all-encompassing. I know this a weakness. But this is the part I love. That turning my back to the window, the round shouldered myopic centering in, the unfulfilled and unfulfilling longing to make things perfect with very imperfect hands. I worry about the neglect of important things, (and, sadly, people). And it comes with mess, the scraps and strings and piles of stuff, the digging through boxes of fabric and paper and bowls of paper fungus, the broken needles, the leaking glue bottles, snapped thread, the cranky coffee maker peeing thin coffee mixed with grinds down the side of the work table. The contantly disapproving stare of Mrs. Van Eyck. And losing my chair to Oliver, who otherwise couldn't care less.

Outside the Box

A tour through Outside the Box, Sibel Kocabasi's latest curatorial journey, at Whitespace, in West Palm Beach - a through the looking glass experience in the dark, with videos, sculpture, an enormous dress,  installations, light shows at the edge of Lake Mangonia. Add to it the calls of gulls far out in the black mixing with recorded crow caws and electronic techno heart beats -

      

                 Georgeta Fondos

     

Cheryl Maeder

Matthew Falvey

 Sam Perry

TD Gillespie

Karla Walter

Hanne Niederhausen

Kristin Miller Hopkins

Anja Marais

Eren Kocabasi

Carolyn Sickles

Isabel Gouveia

Two nights only of a house built around memory, the myth of privacy, secrets and loss, of consumers of conspicuous consumption, of nightmares, book circles, drawings come to life, pillars of light, textile nests,  an inflated dress, a sea visit preserved like a dream, a figure crumbled into what seems like, even if it is not, salt. 

Forgive me everyone not pictured, my camera does not love the nightlife.

Whitespace, The Mordes Collection, March 30 and 31