This is my life. Breathe.
On September 30th, the contract for one of my three jobs ended. I know that doesn’t sound horrible, but I am a freelancer, and I need three jobs to survive. I can’t remember not having three jobs. I can’t remember not always searching for a new job, perhaps a slightly better job, or perhaps just something to pay the bills. I can’t remember not being broke.
Indeed, I am underemployed and living on my best friend’s couch. Two overflowing reusable grocery bags, filled with my belongings, sit on her easy chair. A pair of flip-flops, a pair of flats, and my running sneakers are tucked beneath. My friend has begun calling me
Kato.
To be fair, I was living in Adrienne’s apartment for the entire month before I lost my job. At first, she wasn’t here; she was vacationing and I was performing valuable services: watering her plants, retrieving her mail, making the place look lived in. Then she returned, and I stayed because it was an opportunity to hang out—we hadn’t seen each other in over a month! Plus, I could cook and clean for her. I love cooking! I love organizing! And my friend really doesn’t, so again—valuable services. But, at this moment, as I sit at my computer in pajama pants and watch her get ready for her job at a big, corporate law firm, the fact that I have no work today makes the situation feel ever more pathetic.
In high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” Now, my ten-year reunion is approaching, and my goal is to have health insurance before I attend. Why this impending reunion has suddenly motivated me to acquire a healthcare plan beyond band-aids and my friends’ expired prescription drugs, I’m not sure. Perhaps I’m fearful that seeing my former classmates married, with children and homes and pets and full-time jobs, leading peppy suburban lives, will send me over the edge. I’ll drunkenly take off running and wind up smack into a metal traffic sign, ending the night with a concussion and in desperate need of stitches and a tetanus shot.
I try to remind myself that I have chosen this. I am an artist. I have chosen to live this hobo/ boho lifestyle, free from job security and most of what modern medicine has to offer, but also free from suits and meetings and moral/political compromise. I get to make art. And sometimes, I get to show the art that I make. I get to help other people make art, and teach people new ways of artmaking. I get to be an artist. And so, on the brink of an anxiety attack, I repeat this mantra: This is my life. This is my choice. Breathe.
Work in Progress
I took a break from blogging for the summer to settle into a new job with
Sarah Sze and a new studio space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
But now, school is in session, and I am back. In addition to working for Sarah, I am also teaching a printmaking course at
Columbia University.
Pictured is an installation in progress from my studio. Built from recycled cardboard tubes, styrofoam packaging, copper wire, string, and pushpins, the work is meant to use household/ industrial items to recall ecological systems.
In the Hudson River Valley...
I have three pieces presently on view at the
Ann Street Gallery, in Newburgh, New York, located in the Hudson River Valley.
The exhibition,
Printed Matter, includes work from nine contemporary artists working with printmaking, often combining traditional techniques and modern technologies.
Pictured are my pieces,
Swarm, woodcut, digital, and collage on Japanese paper and
Into the thicket, woodcut, monotype, and collage on Japanese paper.
At Gallery Satori
An
article in The
New York Times this week talks about the "SoHoification" of the Lower East Side. It's referring to the glut of new galleries in the neighborhood. I visited one of these galleries last week.
Gallery Satori's inaugural exhibition,
Unreal City, features work from twelve emerging artists that explores the perpetually changing urban landscape.
Highlights include
Stephanie Costello's pen and ink drawing of a deteriorating landscape filled with tattered flags and ribbons.
Cosme Herrera's drawing,
New Forests II, uses minimal elements to create a complex space. A wood grain vinyl sits starkly on top of a white sheet of paper. The horizontal line of the grain contrasts with the organic, root-like structure in the foreground, while the vertical grain emphasizes the lines of one point perspective that the wall-like structures follow.
The show is open until July 27th. Gallery Satori is located at 164 Stanton Street in Manhattan.
Low tech works too
At
RARE PLUS, Italian artist Eugenio Percossi's installation,
Black and White, made me smile. I was so enamored with
Olafur Eliasson's Room for one colour, in which the Scandinavian artist used a weird yellow light to make viewers in the room appear to be black and white. Percossi's installation also evokes old cinema and black and white photography, but it does so in an even more low-tech way. Every thing in this empty bedroom is in shades of gray-- from the bed and bedding to the wallpaper, the paintings, the books and the bookcase that holds them, even the plant. The viewer then comes upon a mirror in which she sees herself, a startling splash of color, an intruder in this vintage world. Fun show.
On view through June 21st at RARE
Take your time
Take your time, an exhibition of Danish-Icelandic artist
Olafur Eliasson’s works is presently on view at
MoMA and
P.S.1.
The works reminded me of the
Spencer Finch show at
MASS MoCA that I saw earlier this year. Both artists are interested in space, light, nature, and research as a means to artmaking. But, unlike Finch, who's experiental studies are obsessive recreations of natural phenomena, Eliasson is interested not in replicating but in interfering with the way in which we experience space and light.
Some projects, such as
Negative quasi brick wall, a wall filled with mirrors stacked for a kaleidoscopic effect, come across as simply special effects—superficially dazzling, but in the end, vapid, empty.
And, indeed, the artist does have an affection for special effects, for almost filmic illusions played out not on film, but right in front of the viewer. But, Eliasson’s most successful installations are magical.
Your strange certainty kept still appears to have stopped time—a scrim of precipitation seems to be frozen in mid air. I walked into
Room for one colour, a vacant room with an odd light, and then, I watched amazed as the person who walked by me looked as though he were in black and white. I looked down at my own arm and found that I too, had been transformed into a monochrome heroine, a character from
Pleasantville.
And yet, the magic is not lost, even when we learn the trick. In each of his installations, Eliasson reveals the lights and motors and parts that make it function.
Reversed Waterfall, on view at PS 1, is a mess of scaffolding and pipes and pumps that sends water streaming upward.
Beauty is rainbow in a darkened room, created simply with mist and light. This exposure, like many of the effects themselves, is also reminiscent of early film. We can watch
George Méliès, the "Cinemagician's" works now, and know how the simple, yet innovative effects were done, and still feel charmed, even awed. Charming too, are Eliasson's often low tech magic tricks. They are more mesmerizing than any summer blockbuster's
CGI. Take your time and enjoy.
Pictured are Olafur Eliasson's Your strange certainty kept still and Beauty.
Columbia at Fisher Landau Center for Art
Diane Wah displayed a series of
large-scale, printed album covers that commented on race, gender, politics and art history, and included one with
Gregory Amenoff posing as
Don Imus.
Large drawings by
Alyssa Phoebus are dense, labored works: a mix of seams that resemble both scars and pinking shear cuts, of letter fragments and lines that simultaneously recall barbed wire and embroidery. With phrases like “Harder Harder” or “Rough Sex With A Big Man,” the works comment on our relationship with gender, sexual violence and sexuality.
Pictured are: Shoot the Moon, by Oz Malul, Way Down Under by Diane Wah, and Rough Sex With a Big Man and Good Woman by Alyssa Phoebus.
