Ventures

I met with Kate and Tammy Rae on Wednesday, had therapy and a critique on Thursday and met with Colter yesterday. It was a deluge of advice after having gone for a long time just doing my own thing. My concerns about my practice are pretty widely spread-- I'm surprised how little I've ventured outside of drawing as a medium, though I think I still have a lot to learn and try still. I'd like to figure out ways to work with photography and film and sculpture as a way to investigate ideas past where drawing might fall short.

I'm also concerned about the commodity of 2-dimensional art and was shaken by the Holland Cotter article, "The Art Boom is Over: Long Live the Art!", which my mother sent me in the mail. I realized that the format in which I have been working has been unconsciously driven by a capitalist vocabulary-- drawings with borders that aren't too big, with pristine and archival paper, which can stand alone from the others (read: be bought, framed and put in someones home). This realization was sort of like the epiphany of realizing that you don't have to go to bed at a certain time or that you don't like wearing a certain style or piece of clothing, but that you always just have because it's what everyone else was doing and it seemed to make sense.

I'm really excited by the work of some of the students here-- there are a few people who are stumbling across really new ideas and methods and I feel so lucky to be able to see how they derive and activate these transformations. Spring Break is coming up in a week and I am excited to be here and working on things with some punctuative ventures out of the city-- maybe up to Portland, or to visit some farms to the south (there's a huge organic peach farm about an hour south of the city that I'd like to go see and a mule farm further down near Santa Barbara).

I picked this photograph for today because I thought "the road trip" seemed like a good summary of what I need to do within my practice and outside of the city. When I was scanning in the photograph, I was surprised by the simple caption on the back, oddly poetic:

My house used to stand at this spot when I was a child. (Mom)
Jim Falls, Wis.
Sept. 1978