the quilters, and then me

Found this picture today stuck in a random book that I was using to keep something flat. When I worked for the Liz Leach Gallery in Portland I got to meet a few of the quilt-makers from Gee's Bend, almost exactly two years ago. My job during their stay was essentially to drive them around from their hotel to interview and lecture venues around Portland. I also got to handle the quilts and mount them onto the walls of the gallery, which was exciting-- my favorites were the ones with old stains all over them, especially a smaller wonky one made for a child's bed. That's me in the middle clad in dirty jeans which I remember being embarassed about.

fold, furl, wallow, welter.

I took the time today in order to figure out a good title for the quilted piece I put in the Murphy Cadogan show. I'd been procrastinating because it seemed like whatever I named it would inevitably create some sort of tired menstrual metaphor (think 'cycle' or 'rotation'). So I had a hot date with a dictionary and a thesaurus and came up with the following: 'Fold, furl, wallow, welter.' Check out their awesome definitions, extracted from Merriam Webster:

fold: to lay one part over another part of, to reduce the length or bulk of by doubling over, to clasp together, to entwine, to bend, to concede defeat by withdrawing, to bring to an end

furl: to wrap or roll close to or around something

wallow: to roll oneself about in a lazy, relaxed, or ungainly manner, to billow forth, to devote oneself entirely, to take unrestrained pleasure, to become abundantly supplied, to indulge oneself immoderately, to become or remain helpless

welter: to rise and fall or toss about in or with waves, to become deeply sunk, soaked, or involved, to be in turmoil

Mostly I just like how these four words sound. But I also like how they allude to the laundering cycle of clean/not clean and an emotional cycle of order and chaos... and then of course all the grayness/greyness that occurs on the way from one to the other.

flashbulb memory

I spent a lot of time today doing research for my thesis and a piece of writing I'm working on. The main website I looked at was for The Memory Disorders Project at Rutgers University, primarily scrolling through their glossary to learn some new words. I really liked this entry and have been thinking about it this afternoon:

"A flashbulb memory is a detailed and vivid memory that is stored on one occasion and retained for a lifetime. Usually, such memories are associated with important historical or autobiographical events. For example, many people in the US who were adults in the 1960s have flashbulb memories for the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and can recall in elaborate detail when and how they heard the news. (Younger Americans sometimes have flashbulb memories for the explosion of the spaceship Challenger.) By contrast, few people have detailed memories of events which happened the day before or after each assassination. People also may form flashbulb memories of important personal events, such as hearing about the death of a family member or witnessing an unusual trauma such as a disaster. In each case, what makes the memory "special" is the emotional arousal at the moment that the event was registered. Subsequent remembering, discussion -- and even seeing TV footage -- can all also help to sharpen the memory.

Flashbulb memories are not necessarily accurate in every respect, but they demonstrate that the emotional content of an event can greatly enhance the strength of the memory formed. Flashbulb memories are thought to require the participation of the amygdala, a brain structure involved in emotional memory, and possibly other brain systems which regulate mood and alertness."

immediate future

Dates: October 7 – December 12, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, October 9, 2009 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Locations: SFAC Gallery, 401 Van Ness (at McAllister) and 155 Grove Street

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is proud to present Immediate Future works by the recipients of the 2009 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts. This exhibition provides a focused glimpse at what is being produced by promising artists within regional graduate programs. This exhibition presents an opportunity for these artists to share what they have been developing in their studios with a wider audience.

The Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts are annual awards sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation to assist art students in funding their final year of graduate studies. In partnership with the Foundation, the Arts Commission Gallery is committed to supporting works by outstanding Bay Area art students through the annual fellowship exhibition. The jurors for this year’s awards were Betti-Sue Hertz, Ellen Oh, Isis Rodriguez and Meg Shiffler.

Artists: Miguel Arzabe, Mara Baldwin, Michael Barrett, Bonnie Begusch, Oscar Bucher, Carlos Castro, Emily Dippo, Llewelynn Fletcher, Matt Kennedy, Ace Lehner, Bobby Lukas, Eric Martin, Susan Martin, armando miguelez, Kusum Nairi, Ruth Robbins, Eirini Steirou, rebecca wallace, Doug Williams, Sune Woods, Wafaa Yasin, Daniel Yovino.

Bay Area colleges and universities represented by the twenty-two 2009 recipients are the Academy of Art University, California College of the Arts, Mills College, The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University and Stanford University. Media represented in the exhibition include: drawing, film & video, installation, mixed media, painting, fiber art, performance art and photography.

sight-specific

I installed the calendar quilt for the first time for a critique today and got some positive feedback. Everyone was suprised with how it came out, myself especially. The piece has a lot of potential for site-specific variation, which is great. It's heaviness and unwieldy nature to get it to those sites, however, will be challenging-- imagine the ardour it would take to carry a soap-covered king size futon up a flight of stairs.

texas hold'em and some others

Some new members of the club acquired yesterday at Urban Ore in Oakland. Most drawers of photographs were slim-pickings or picked-over. They had a huge beautiful wooden dollhouse that I just can't stop thinking about, but it was $200 and I'm as poor as poor. Today I bought a frame for my drawing in the Murphy Cadogan show which costed an embarrassing and excrutiating $300. Embarassing because that's how much it costs for 4 pieces of wood and a pane of glass. Excruciating because that cost was even after a 25% off coupon. If this whole art-making thing doesn't work out I have found my calling.

treasured

Had a great day with Morgan-- first we went to Treasure Island, simultaneously one of the most beautiful and post-apocalyptic places I've been in the Bay Area. Morgan and I decided we wanted to build a shack with a farm there, not on the radioactive part of the island though. I looked up Treasure Island on wikipedia and was both delighted and dismayed that someone already thought of our plan... plus some other unique developments:

In 2005, Lennar Corporation, one of the largest developers in the United States, proposed to build a self-sustaining city on Treasure Island. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the proposal has 5,500 units of housing in several lowrise buildings, restaurants and a ferry terminal facing San Francisco. The plan also contains several midrise towers, four 40-story towers and one 60-story tower called the Sun Tower (formerly Treasure Island Tower). It also has an organic farm, a wind farm, parkland and tidal marshes. The proposal is designed to be as car-independent as possible, with the ferry terminal and basic goods within a 10-minute walk of the residences. A toll of $5 has been proposed to deter non-residents from driving onto the island. This is a change from the original plan which was more car-dependent and had only one highrise tower. The Navy has signed two "Findings of Suitable Transfer" or FOST documents which allow development plans to continue.

The San Francisco Gaelic Athletic Association has recently leased land on the island to create athletic fields which will be used mainly for Gaelic football and hurling. The 3 fields will be home to future North American Championships as well as visits from Irish All-Star teams.

Uhhhhh.... and in this one paragraph my plans have been totally blown out of the ether. Anyways, after our Treasure Island experience we went to Oakland, ate strawberry shortcake on a curb, perused the shelves of Urban Ore and went to Essex, a secret ladies-only backyard bathhouse in Berkeley.

dictionarydotcom

Dear you,
I was thinking about loneliness and all of its recent conversational outcroppings and the sadness that comes with it. Both of us are people that engage with daily alone-ness and are good at being okay about it. But we've also talked about how the word is problematic because not only is it possible to feel lonely in the company of others but because it is possible to be fully satisfied in the presence of no one. So of course I looked it up. Merriam Webster dictionary writes that the state of being lonely can mean any of four things: 1) being without company, cut off from others 2) not frequented by human beings 3) sad from being alone 4) producing a feeling of bleakness or desolation. The definition doesn't leave room for content loneliness... which was disappointing until I read this by Paul Tillich: "Language has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." So of course I looked up some other words and thought about how tricky but essential their differences are-- for example, 'isolation' being a detachment and 'seclusion' being a deliberate withdrawal.

Words have been and will always continue to bewilder. I started crying this morning in front of my advisor James while we were talking about frames. I kept trying to tell him that he shouldn't worry because it wasn't about the frames-- he was certain that he said something to the highest degree of personal offense. I am certain I could have said something that would have been adequate, but I kept catching the words before they came out of my mouth, stunned by their inadequacy-- you know, things like "I'm okay" and "I don't know"-- expressions that short-thrift what's actually going on. I was feeling very lost in that moment about who I was making my art for-- it seemed (in the moment and still now) impossible to figure out. I'm in my studio all day, alone, thinking and making things which will eventually live in a space (and eventually, a world) without me to explain them. But I also feel very much not alone-- I feel responsibility to make things that matter, that will make my family proud, that will speak about issues greater than my ability to articulate. Of course, this relates to the impossibility of trying to figure out what's best for me as autonomous from the world-- because I feel so intrinsically linked to everything else, and this sometimes means to you too.

There are many different kinds of being lonely-- in fact, probably each one is entirely unique. I think that the loneliness of one moment is so totally shape-shifting that by the time you are ready to process it, it has already turned into another kind of loneliness. Sort of like how I told you that it seemed impossible to me to live in the "here and now" because the 'right-now' is just the corner between the past and the future. T.S. Eliot was probably getting at this when he penned the question "What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" He's admitting that there is more than one kind. In this quotation it seems to me that the distrust he is talking about isn't just something like having distrust in a person... for me he is talking about something more general, like uncertainty. To be uncertain requires a sort of detachment from certainty/sureness/confidence, and to be detached means to be, in any of various ways, alone.

I trust that everyone (not just you, not just me, not just twenty-year olds everywhere) oscillate/vacillate between being lost and being found on a hourly/daily/weekly/seasonal rotation. This makes sense-- that we experience and that then we attempt to evaluate those experiences. But how does one make sense of needing to be alone one moment and needing to be with others the next? I was heartened by this question and answer from the mouth of Kurt Vonnegut: "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." I'm comforted by this because this seems like a good strategy and because I understand his use of the words 'stable' and 'communities' to mean something more like 'supportive' and 'environments.' 'Stable' is sort of scary to because it almost means 'predictable' and 'community' is scary because it seems to imply a presence amongst 'many people.'

I'm almost done writing this letter, but haven't reached any sort of conclusion-- I sort of feel like one of those french bulldog puppies stuck in the air with my soft little legs pawing in the air. When we were watching that video I was mesmerized by the juxtaposition of the desperate pace of those outstretched legs while the puppy scrambled to upright itself abbreviated and then by the calm stillness while it caught it's breath, the vulnerability of it's naked freckled belly arched towards the ceiling and it's dark eyes slowly scanning the room for someone to come help turn it over.

See you soon,
me

awake and dreaming

I read Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory that seemed to iterate 1) no memory is truly real and 2) memory is oriented by our connection to society. Parts of this make sense-- if we feel alien in a place than we remember our occupation of previous ones familiarly, etc. But I was thrown by the articles repeated use of the terminology "disconnection" to talk about the difference between the memories of waking space and dreams-- "In a way, contemplative memory or dreamlike memory helps us to escape society. It is one of the rare moments when we succeed in isolating ourselves completely." I recently started subletting a room after 2 months of being without my own and it was strange and wonderful to sleep in a large bed by myself. Of course, when I'm sleeping, even next to another person, I am completely alone in those dreams. But some part of me questions whether that is really true-- whether sleep affords a real disconnection from the body next to me... I'm not sure. It seems like a more umbilical relationship than that.

And I wondered about this disconnection-- how it was both essential to the inward emotional meanderings of memory and how it also destroys our ability to understand memory cognitively through societal cues and historical facts. The disconnection seems to be the place where things open up and get exciting/confusing. The article also threw out some of other words of interest-- "yearning" "identity" "nostalgia", before wrapping up with the following: "Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in through previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess."

Moby Dick and then some smaller fish

James Gobel asked me if I would hang some of my work in the nave of the main building here at CCA for a week and I was glad to be invited. Excitingly, the opening for the Wattis Institute's Moby Dick show is tonight so it's sure to be seen by a bunch of people in the community. I'm stressed out about making a choice for what to put in the Murphy Cadogan show still and it's nice to have an instantly-gratifying distraction.

historically rendered

I finished this today, and am happy with the results. But my friend Sune Woods told me after looking at it, "I like it but Mara, honestly, I have no idea what it's about." I started laughing because I thought she was joking until she said, "No really, please tell me." Another peer, Nicola Buffa, said something similar. After questioning them I realized that people looking at it couldn't figure out that it was a drawing, something which had seemed so obvious to me. Nicola suggested that I should include a description of how I made it because the forgery was unrecognizable. So here: 1) I bought a shirt from a thrift store that seemed like something I might have worn as a child 2)and then I erased the pattern by painting over it with gesso as a visual metaphor for appropriation and recontextualization 3)and then I drew the pattern back on the shirt with markers and pen as a visual metaphor for memory.

Apparitions

Starting to figure out the quirks of using a projector to make a banner for some directions I found online-- How To Remember Past Lives. I found these directions way back in the end of the spring and only recently re-read them to consider what they mean and their pertinence to my thesis engine. I'm working on the proposal for my written thesis tonight and have been thinking about using this text and it's 10 steps as a jumping-off point-- perhaps call-and-response style, picking a part of each direction to enunciate and respond to.

waste vs. haste

Today I started making this rag rug out of the leftover strips from the quilting project. I'm liking how it looks and have been thinking of ways to integrate it into my pratice... two ideas so far:

1)make a large rug and dip one end into a bucket of dissolved color-remover so that it soaks up and causes a fade from white to prisma.

2)make a smaller rug and draw a floor for it to sit on, except intentionally neglect to draw the floor boards over the part od the paper the rug will sit upon. Display slightly askew.

I also dropped my camera in a hurry to take this picture and now need to buy a new lens.

stacked

Well my friends, it has been a long time coming but it's finally done, this 300 foot long monstrosity of a quilt. I installed it in a tall stack in my studio on Friday while I consider what to do with it next. I'm thinking I'd like to draw a floor underneath and a wall behind it to put it into a more specific space-- one that is forgiving and articulatory.

traces

Today my friend Morgan let me trace her scars so that I could try embroidering their shapes into fabric later. I thought about that word-- trace-- and how these subtle marks were traces of an experience Morgan sustained as a kid that exist today only in her memory and her articulation of it. Skin, like the fabric of our clothes, tells the stories of how we use it with its warp, wear, stains and fade.

small pink accidents

Some progress on a new drawing I've been working on this week. I had originally planned on there just being one intentional error interrupting the pattern... like one of the flowers drawn upside down. But then I executed a few totally unintentional accidents-- drawing one flower just totally in the wrong place and then smudging the paper by leaning too close with a paintbrush in my mouth. After some preliminary freaking out I entered Phase Two of problem-solving by revising the idea behind the drawing. So now instead of being a drawing about minute error it's one about migration and absence.

the end and what came after

I woke up thinking about the last day my grandmother was alive today. The story my grandfather told us was that she had been in the hospital after a small stroke left her unable to move her arm. A doctor told her that he suggested she undergo surgery to remove the clot which was constricting her circulation which she seemed wary of. Very early in the morning my grandfather received a phone call from Mimi at the hospital requesting him to come and bring a pair of scissors. Upon arrival she cut all of her tubes and cords and demanded he take her home. They sat on the couch in the living room together until she died. My grandfather called my uncle on the phone to come over. My uncle hadn't even known she was in the hospital. At the funeral my grandfather confided to my mother that he was concerned people would think that he had killed her. Visiting her house this past July I found myself surprised by what traces were left of her. My grandfather almost immediately got rid of all her clothing in the closet, but her makeup was still in the bathroom drawers. The dresser in her room was liquidated but dozens of pairs of small calfskin driving and foul weather gloves are still in the drawers in their front entryway. The address book and telephone directory are almost entirely in her handwriting.

some things come together

My answer to the first assignment of what's sure to be a great forthcoming semester. Here's what I wrote, some bits and pieces taken from previous blog postings, brought together by water.

I bought my first photograph when I was a senior in college at an antique mall in Asheville, North Carolina with my girlfriend Margaret and her little sister Flynn. It was of a family standing in lake water up to their chests, the matriarch and an aged man seated in a wooden rowboat behind them, a small boy dogpaddling off towards the other shore. It was the idea of these people standing in their wool bathing suits for an hour in front of a 4 x 5 camera, the low perspective of the shot and the shifting focus of the surface of the water that convinced it to go home with me. After college I moved to Portland, Oregon where I continued to buy old photographs, mostly cabinet cards of pretty young women or uncomfortable babies, people that I would have liked to know. I organized them into albums by type, theme, by the gender and age of their subjects, by the era of their production. I was interested in the biography of their images and the handwriting on their backs, aware of the feeling that these stories were somehow part of my story too.

The same year I found that photograph I lost my mother’s father and then my father’s mother. I had been working on a series of drawings of their personal collections, drawings whose meaning were articulated when those objects lost their ownership. The French verb, souvenir, means in English “to remember.” But the word more literally translates to mean “to come from under” which suggests to me a submersion into the depths of memory and a resurfacing in a familiar place. The objects my grandparents left behind, souvenirs of their experience, glimmered under the water and my own narcissistic inquiry pulled me in.

Every home is a museum of personal identity. The rooms are strategized to fit a family, the furniture comes with stories of acquisition, the walls are adorned with trophies and tales of origin, the composition lace with priorities, beliefs, ethics and expectations. For my grandparents’ era, the home was composed by the wives, the layout telling their version of the story of who we were and where we are going. In Mimi’s suburban Indianapolis home, a house built in the 1960’s to look like a New England colonial manor, the walls were devoted to historical prints and drawings. My father has stories of her picking him up at college and having to share his seat in the car from Connecticut to Indiana with antique dressers, porcelain plate sets, thatched baskets and Adirondack rocking chairs. In Grammy’s canal-shored Long Island home the house is decorated with a similar affect but the imagery is less land-locked and almost entirely devoted to the sports of fishing and boating. The furniture is pastel and wicker, the floor covered with a light-colored sensible carpet, the pictures on the walls always featuring the water as a prominent character.

When I looked through family photographs in both of these homes I was stunned by the lack of information they provided about the lives of my grandparents. Photography having only become affordably accessible to middle-class families in the 40’s and 50’s the beginnings of the lives of my grandparents were almost wholly undocumented, to the exclusion of some staged formal portraits. In pursuit of a reason for my own obsession with the family photographs of strangers I read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, a book in which he talks about the power of images to invoke memory. In one chapter he wrote of his experience flipping through familiar scrapbook photographs of his mother’s life after her death and coming across a picture of his mother as a four year old standing in a garden during winter. He muses on how and why this one specific picture, taken twenty years before he was born, seemed to supply the most truthful image of his mother, albeit in a state he had never known. When flipping through Mimi’s photo albums keenly labeled “The Baldwin Family” I was disappointed to find that they began with pictures of my father as a baby. There are no pictures of her and my grandfather at home during the years between their wedding and birth of their first child—not even pictures of her pregnant with him. It was disappointing and strange for me, as a queer-identified post-feminist and individual with a permanent health condition to discover that documentation attributed the beginning of their identity to their production of a child.

After living in Portland for a year I got a gig dusting and organizing at an estate sale store once a week for trade. Sellers would come to the store with cheap polaroids of furniture and belongings that they hoped to hock, which I started keeping, interested in the casual bluntness of these photographs—their total ignorance of composition, the wan colors and washed-out details, the voids of information where the Polaroid had failed or the photographers finger crept into the frame. The accidents and unintentional information in these pictures seemed to suggest a much more interesting and potentially unscripted narrative of who these people were and where they were going.

After my grandparents died their secrets were unveiled. My father told me that Mimi, a woman known for her intense control and sobriety, had suffered from breast cancer years prior and that months before her death, at age 82, she had been convinced by a doctor to reverse her age by receiving a facelift. On the other side of my family, my grandfather died having kept his Type II diabetes a secret for over a decade, even from his wife. My parents were each hurt by this information in their own way, but for me it seemed to finally validate my feeling of disconnection from who my grandparents were and it was this unknowingness that liberated me to finally be able to imagine them outside of their identities as grandparents. I realized that the photographs I had been collecting were not so much photographs of strangers but perhaps more photographs of myself—each one selected as a souvenir of something that seemed vaguely familiar, just under the surface of the water, the truth told slant, blurred by the fluidity of memory.

things seen working on labor day

mussed

I've been thinking a lot about this word, 'mussed,' and the way it rolled off of my grandmother's tongue familiarly and frequently. Growing up, my brothers and I used to spend parts of our summers with my grandparents in Indianapolis. My grandmother insisted upon a pool membership to Meridian Hills Country Club for the socialization of her grandchildren. Those long days at the pool, however, I remember being awfully lonely-- we didn't know any of the other kids and it's just plain awkward to meet people when you're pre-adolescent and in a bathing suit picked out by your grandmother.

But the summers just happened that way, and they always happened that way and my grandmothers documentation of them in her scrapbooks denote only the most joyous moments of the endless hours we spent there: a leap off the high-dive, a wave from the top of the water slide, my brothers and me towel-clad and eating mozzarella cheese sticks from the food stand.

Looking back I realize how controlled those summers were-- Will and I eating the same breakfast every morning, pre-planned play dates with other visiting grandchildren, tennis lessons and the Children's Museum. And in between those activities, always driving in Mimi's car, the windows tightly sealed and air conditioning blasting out of the vents to suppress the mid-western heat and haze. We were never allowed to roll down the windows, even on the most temperate days-- and putting down the top of the convertible was out of the question. My grandmother, a Midwestern woman, had her hair done (sculpted, really) once a week and she insisted that the wind would muss it. After swimming we had to sit on towels in the car, less our wet bottoms muss the leather. Must to avoid mussed. Once I had my fingers in the slightly cracked window and my grandmother rolled up the automatic window. She interpreted my incomprehensible screaming as unnecessary fussing and continued to press the up button. My fingertips were bruised and I wouldn't talk to her for hours-- a total muss.

I wish that my grandmother had loosened the tether, not just on us grandchildren, but on her own appearance and lifestyle too. I found out before she died that she had requested my parents keep her battle with breast cancer from a few years before a secret from us grandchildren, as if grandmother's aren't allowed to have breasts or suffer from a medical condition. I remember her having intense nose-bleeds, which I always attributed what seemed to be her perfect feminine daintiness, not to her anemia or hemophilia. Months before she died a doctor convinced her to trim years off by undergoing a face lift in her early 80's-- my family attributes this decision to her subsequent unraveling of health.

Sometimes I figure out why I make certain drawings after I already start making them-- an awesome realization that I think is only attainable through their repetition and meditation. These drawings of patterns I've been working on, patterns slightly interrupted, speak a lot about how I am coming to understand and interpret the decisions and lifestyle of my grandmother four years since her death. I was struck by the differences in each of my grandmother's homes-- in Mimi's, a commitment to pattern, in Grammy's one to soft pastel tones. I think there's a way to talk about pattern and ritual by showing where it fails-- showing the places where control gives way to secrets, accidents and muss.

on making

I looked it up in a red Merriam-Webster and here are some of the things I found...

make a face — make a mountain out of a molehill — make away with — make believe — make bold — make book — make common cause — make do — make ends meet — make eyes — make friends with — make fun of — make good — make good on — make hay — make head — make it — make light of — make love — make much of — make nice — make no bones — make one's mark — make progress- make public — make sail — make shift — make sport of — make the grade — make the most of — make the scene — make time — make tracks — to make up for — make use of — make valid — make water — make waves — make way — make with

...which I'll start making sense of in the next few postings. Here are some pictures of me making.

barn-raising

Home is something I carry with me.

Opening: Friday, September 4, 4-8 p.m. @ 3352 24th Street & 951 Shotwell Street
Film screening: Friday, September 4, 9 p.m. @ 348 Shotwell Street

Open Houses: Saturday, September 5, 12-5 p.m. @ 3352 24th Street & 951 Shotwell Street

Home is something I carry with me is an alternative art exhibition and film screening featuring over 40 Bay Area artists whose work interrogates the concept of home. For one weekend, two homes in San Francisco’s Mission District will transform into exhibition spaces and the backyard of a third home will be used for an outdoor film screening. By reinventing three homes as art venues and opening them to the public, Home is something I carry with me exercises the rights of renters to use private residences for what we deem public good; an action that can be considered a resistance to the current housing crisis and the lack of economic sustainability for artists. Individual rooms within the homes will act as galleries organizing the work around themes of shelter, migrations, domestic space and memory, mapping, borders, and neighborhoods.

Participating artists: Mara Baldwin, Taha Belal, Jesse Brown, Michael Campbell, Julie Cloutier, Pablo Cristi, Torreya Cummings, Cindy DeLosa, Amy Wilson Faville, Jonathan Fischer, Molly Goldberg, Pablo Guardiola, Alvaro Guillen, Jason Hanasik, Amber Hasselbring, Malak Helmy, Amanda Herman, Nanci Ikejimba, Josef Jacques, Amy Keefer, Claire Kessler-Bradner, Lynn Marie Kirby and Lisa Robertson, Milena Korolczuk, Laurel Lee, Lauren Mardsen, Lynne McCabe, Klea McKenna, Ranu Mukherjee, Jeff Norman, Alexis Petty, Simon Pyle, Hilary Schwartz, Renetta Sitoy, Bayete Ross Smith, Lewis Watts, Mira M. White, Anna Whitehead, Megan Wilson and Carmen Winant.

Participating filmmakers: Terry Berlier, Michael Goodier, Amanda Herman & The Morris Family, Lynn Marie Kirby, Katherin McInnis, Gloria Moran, and Kari Orvik with Veronica Majano & the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center.

Curated by Adrienne Skye Roberts

Catalog essay by Zachary Royer Scholz

For updates: http://soex.org/alternativeexposure/home-is-something-i-carry-with-me/

Unfortunately, 3352 24th Street and 951 Shotwell Street have large staircases and therefore are not wheelchair accessible. There is a hallway leading to the backyard of 348 Shotwell where the film screening will be held is that can accomodate 29" inches across. No stairs, but a few steps down from the hallway

To avoid overcrowded the houses on Friday, come on by early--we open at 4PM. Or wait until Saturday the 5th, both houses are open from 12-5PM.

Feel free to bring blankets or lawn chairs to the film screening. Popcorn will be provided!

floored by florals

Now that I'm about 3/4 done with my current drawing I've started to distract myself from finishing so I can start strategizing for the next one. The mug and plates in these pictures are from the same free pile found this past June during a post-pizza-party walk down Potrero Hill with George Pfau, Brigid Mason and Brandon Olsen. I'm pretty excited about those small red roses on the mug, unless I sink my micron pens into this bad boy pattern below, the trim from my parent's wedding china:

progress(ions)

Still working long and hard on this drawing for the Home Show, coming up in just two-ish weeks. It has seemed ironic to be working on pieces about home and not having one to call my own these days-- but it also has been an interesting reference point to think about all the homes I've lived in as something sweetly abstract and nostalgic. Speaking of which, orientation for the first-year grad students begins tomorrow-- which brings me back to this time last year when I was sleeping in a treehouse with Holly in Oakland and freaking out about my life. A year later, I'm thankful for where it's taken me.

certain of something

These pictures from the mid-60's are always so fabulous. The colors are saccharine, the patterns grotesque, the poses classic, and the facial expressions always seem so certain of something. These pictures, taken at the advent of affordable and accessible domestic color photography, show the insides of homes in a new way. It's hard for me to relate to the background interiors in older black and white photographs because color is a major reference point for me when I think about my own home. I once looked at an amazing coffee table book which had published restored photographs taken with really early color film before color photographic printing paper had been manufactured. It was so strange to see photographs of people from the 20's and 30's in vibrant color because most of the photographs I know from that era are black and white. It seems appropriate to me that the photographs I find relatable are those from the era after my grandparent couplings met and started their respective families-- it was the advent of each couples marriage that also begins the main photographic paper trail of our family's existence. Again and again I find that my grandparents somehow become the referent of most things that I am making. They are the oldest kin I've known, the parents of my parents, they walked me into my twenties, I witnessed them wisen and gray.

things that go whoops

It's been a few days of flare-ups and mistakes. Like the paper buckling off the panels I glued them to, and the gorgeous puddle featured in the picture above.

I've also been thinking about words like the following, since my days have also been occupied with drawing eensy teensy, eeny weenie, itty bitty, teeny tiny, tiny winy, itsy bitsy flowers:
harum-scarum, topsy-turvy, wishy-washy, knick-knacks, zigzag, seesaw, ticktock, pitter-patter, tip-top, rickrack, pit-a-pat, shipshape, flip-flop, dingding, ticky-tacky, dilly-dally, flimflam, hoity-toity, hocus-pocus, hurly-burly, fuddy-duddy, pell-mell, ragtag, willy-nilly, boohoo, helter-skelter, hotshot, namby-pamby, super-duper, slam-bam, whang-bang, lovey-dovey, boo boo bee boo, heebie jeebies, crumb-bum, fender bender, brain drain, razzle-dazzle

What is the common denominator between these concepts that makes it okay to refer to them all with ridiculously cutesy-wootsy terminology? I'm almost sure it has something to do with making light of potentially dark situations. Sometimes I'm astonished by the acclivity of people to joke around when things go horribly horribly wrong, but having used this as a strategy myself, I have got to say-- it works.

three little words

holy : worthy of complete devotion
holey: having holes
wholly: to the full or entire extent

I was thinking about these three words today and wondering whether the wonderment of completeness/abundance might not be the same feeling as that adressing complete deterioration and destruction. Both are sort of horrifying concepts and are rarely encountered in their true form (complete presence or complete emptiness) in this gray/grey world of ours. But if someone were to ask me what the opposite of presence is I would probably immediately say absence before backtracking-- if I think about presence as the completeness of something then defining it's absence or incompleteness becomes complicated.

For me, it begins a conversation about loss-- I'm not sure if you can lose only a little bit of something and really still say you've got it. It seems to me that it's incompleteness must be recognized first, then there is some sort of reevaluation during which you decide whther it will always be "almost the whole thing but not" or just a new thing entirely.

Working with abstract ideas can be dizzying, but it's nice to have days like today when this sort of dizziness seems incredibly rich and important. A few of my peers are obsessed with various lace, crochet and knit patterns. Weaves like these are based upon a series of knots and tangles which craft an object that is made from one string but constructed by making spaces that are defined by their nothingness (holes, duh!). This is, after all, how I draw holes too-- I draw the space that the air takes up, the holeyness, and then I draw the wholeness later.

The drawing I'm working on most right now is one that is not about holes, but about masses. It's interesting to be coming back to objects-- even flat abstract ones like stains and patterns and textures. But I wonder how I can push the envelope a little more to make sure that I'm not walking away from my commitment to grayness-- is the language of holes vs. wholes too didactic? Written language is the architecture of lines around the white of paper to form words. Interesting.

disenchantment

I spent the last two days building a new panel to mount paper on for a new drawing. An enthusiastic clerk at Arch convinced me that spray adhesive was the way to go. He was wrong. Morgan helped me glue that paper down and the next day when we went in it was buckling off the board like it had somewhere to go in a hurry. I couldn't deal with it so we went to the beach and played wiffleball and ate barbeque.

I drew two things today. One was of Morgan and the other was this disfigured bird tattoo on Morgan. Luckily it rubbed off within a few hours.

impossibly long and improbably short

I got this picture (a polaroid) from The Magazine and love it for her teetering stature, clasped hands behind her back, immaculate whiteness, and unorthodox orange-striped kicks. The summer has been incredibly long but is pulling to a close in just three weeks. I got a TA position working with James Gobel for next semester and was promised some hours working at the library. I'm moving out of my house this week and into my friend Adrienne's house while she attends an artist residency through October in North Carolina. This means a lot of moving and scrambling, especially with the approach of the Home Show in September and the Murphy Cadogan Fellowship show in October, both for which I'm trying to make some new work. It's been interesting getting used to spending my days at the studio again-- I was so into practice last year that by May it seemed no impossible feat to start at 8:00am and go home at 11:00pm. This week it's a good day if I get 4-6 hours in, and then afterward I go to Adrienne's or Morgan's where I stretch and whimper about my daily turmoils. I'll stop here-- it would be cliche to discuss the days being too short and the list being too long, and I wouldn't dare do such a thing.

question marks

Yesterday Morgan and I met at 5:30pm on the steps of the Asian Art Museum before walking up Larkin to go to a store called The Magazine which specializes in vintage magazines and catalogues of all varieties. But they were closed. So today we met at 5:30pm on the steps of the Asian Art Museum before biking up Larkin to The Magazine and they were open and we went inside.

I got a bunch of new pictures including this one of a dinner party with handwritten annotations of "?" and "X" on the front. My guess is that the person making the marks was trying to recognize someone specific in the picture by narrowing the options with their ball point pen. Maybe a question like "Which one is my father?" or "Which one should I ask on a date?" For someone like me for whom all the faces are strangers the possibilities for each person seem limitless.

I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary of living in San Francisco and it's interesting to think back to all the people I've met since then and try to figure out if I could have guessed what our relationships were to become upon introduction. When I was a freshman in college a picture was taken on the first day of orientation of the entire class of students standing on an artificial embankment which no longer exists. I have no idea who I was standing next to in that picture because on that day I knew no one. But I'm sure if I looked at that picture today I would realize strange proximity between myself and the students with whom I would be knocking elbows for the next four years. Here in San Francisco the community is small and the elbow knocking is rampant. I wish it was easy enough to commission such a picture of the San Francisco population to see how the proximity changes between me and the people I know, will come to know, or maybe just knock elbows with.

still to see

These images are ones of California from vintage postcards I found when I was not in California. California really is an epic place, where giant trees and alpine peaks and blue bays and dry desert are all within 4 hours from where I am right now, sitting here at my laptop in San Francisco. Which is funny because sometimes I forget that I even am where I am-- always a few miles from an ocean that goes all the way to the places you can't see anymore.

a girl blows up a boy and he floats away

I got this strange and wonderful thing from a barn in Vermont during my epic cross-country adventure. The images are printed on glass and it's meant to be projected on a wall with a beam of light to tell a story, in this case a story described by the title of this posting.

why metaphors?

A lot of metaphors have been coming up in conversations with friends-- they seem to elusively creep in without us noticing until all of a sudden we are minutes deep into conversations about floating boats and ocean currents, staircases and tunnels, doors and windows in various states of being opened or closed. Metaphors are about talking about something without actually talking about it. They create the distance between us and what we're talking about essential to understanding it, but they also pull us back in to a place where we realize our loneliness and disconnectedness is very much connected to everything else.


Some definitions:
*A metaphor is the expression of an understanding of one concept in terms of another concept, where there is some similarity or correlation between the two.
*A metaphor is the understanding itself of one concept in terms of another.

Some shapes have been announcing themselves in my work-- a commitment to holes and clusters (wholes?). I continue to be invested in figuring out how to convey the space, shape and passage of memory. The poem I posted yesterday got me thinking again about the shape of time and all of the versions of what that could look like.

Understanding the Past, Present, and Future

Think of the space in front of the body. You can't walk in. You can't find the door. We call it the present. You don't know what to do with your hands. Whereas the past is an orchard. This is how you know the difference. Birds live in orchards but not deer. This happens behind the body.

While everything in front is overexposed or snow. You stop at the edge and wave your arms, but they get lost in the wash of diffused light, which makes it the future. You are waving goodbye.

by Cole Swensen

reintroductions

While I was gone the roof of my studio building was being repaired and rained down fiberglass particles all over everything-- a thin layer of black dust welcomed me back. But it was nice to spend the first day cleaning and reintroducing myself to projects I haven't seen for a month. Hello drawings of photographs, ruin and patterns. Hello epic quilting project. Hello rag interventions. Hello grandmother relics. Last night I went to Adrienne's house and saw the spaces she'd like my work to go for the show she's curating next month. I'm planning to finish three small text drawings about houses I grew up in like the one in these pictures, and then also one large watercolor of liberated linen patterns. The studio is clean and so are my deadlines so it's time to get going.

the fog of maybe

We were helping my grandmother pack up her things when she showed us an old drawing of a small house on a beach and told us that she and my grandfather had bought it as a young couple when it seemed to them that a small shack like that was all they could ever really want.

As we drove across the country Dennis and I were overwhelmed by the number of small abandoned roadside structures we saw and we fantasized about what our lives would be like inside of them. My arrival to San Francisco was a traumatic re-entry, one of romantic processing and housing eviction. I just spent a month moving, a month making decisions and a month of self-sufficiency. I remembered that living in a city means that although you're never really alone you can be bewildered with loneliness. Daily navigation through a city is full of compromise.

settle, v: 1) to place so as to stay 2)to establish in residence 3) to furnish with inhabitants 4) to cause to pack down 5) to make quiet or orderly 6) to fix or resolve conclusively 7) to arrange in a desired position 8) to come to rest 9) to sink gradually or to the bottom 10) to take up an ordered or stable life 11) to come to a decision 12) to become clear by the deposit of sediment or scum
settle for, to be content with
settle one's hash, to silence or subdue someone by decisive action
settle the stomach, to remove or relieve the stress of nausea or indigestion

Here I am, settling back into San Francisco. For people in their twenties and thirties, a community of transience, settling is at times desirable and others absolutely terrifying. We are aware that stability does not always ensure safety, decisions are not always the right ones, and easiness doesn't provide satisfaction or the reward of challenge. Contentedness seems like a safe but pale state of being.

At a house party on Saturday a group of friends inspected the hosts collection of snow globes. Most, once shook, whirred dizzily with activity before settling after a few minutes. But one, once shook, clouded with particles and eclipsed the skyline of a small San Francisco inside. A fog globe. This seemed funny to me-- to think of fog and the confusion of it's opacity, it's local significance to the Bay Area, and it's stubborn refusal to settle much like the community of friends that I have come to know here. I think that this refusal comes from a self-awareness that settling means sacrifice-- my grandmother never got her shack. She had children and settling into her life with them meant a settling of her own.

I've moved many times and each time it has disrupted a consistent desire to settle. Driving across the country I kept thinking about how nice it would be to be sedentary upon my arrival. But upon getting here I realized that the fog of being twenty still stubbornly suffuses the air-- which is confusing and dangerous and exciting. It's nice to be reminded that sometimes it's not right to settle and empowers the helplessness of feeling constantly in motion.

When we left the party the fog globe, over an hour after it had been shook, was still milky and churning. But the whiteness of that small encased storm made it seem like anything could be inside of it-- the skyline of San Francisco, sure maybe. But maybe also another city, or not even a city but a person, or maybe two or three, or maybe not anyone at all, or maybe a small shack on a beach somewhere, or maybe all I could ever really want, though I don't know what that is, but maybe.