The Ride Continues-Studio shots and Excerpts

Excerpt from recent paper:
“In my recent works, this conversation between artist and object, object with object, and viewer with both is achieved first by capturing gaze through appropriation of a readymade, causing ambiguity through odd familiarity and identification. The white shirts, symbolic of formality, structure, and class, have an inherent pureness about them that points directly to my past personal identity, as well as to the nature of our past culture.
As objects, these shirts converse with each other and, in some with themselves and, like Shiota’s indexical bed and Lemieux’s postcard and furniture, create the illusion that lives are present even in their absence.
This state of presence in absence combined with the mark making and the places they inhabit, causes activity between form and space which sends the viewer continually traveling and conversing between past and present, present to present, and even past and present with the future.
In Figure 4: Relief, the viewer is kept from entering directly into the scene and only allowed to watch and read the narrative from afar through the placement of the spools of threads and buttons on the floor. The facing of the objects and the thread marks create that tug and pull that Elkins speaks of in his book. The tears and rips speak to the past, the mending the present, and through the gesture of the threaded needle placed in between the two shirts, the conversation is allowed to continue endlessly into the future.
In Figures 5-8 which includes imagery from works: Transference, Stay, Fragmented, and Holding on, these ongoing absorptions, transferences, transformations, comforting, struggling, holdings on to and carrying through conversations happen through ancestry, relationships and also within ourselves. This is what transports the viewer into verse. These shirts with their reference to the continuity and threads of the connections of human existence remind us that we are not alone (thesis topic?), that we come from that which has come before us, and with whom we have been connected, and that we are only as individual (in life as in art) as circumstances and choices will allow."

The Strange Life of Objects-Annette Lemieux

This photo is of the cover of the exhibition 'catalog' for Annette Lemieux's current show at the Worcester Museum of Art. It is actually a critical overview of her career in a hardcover book.

This past Thursday, I had the great opportunity to view her show and hear her 'conversation' with critic Robert Pincus-Witten, who has contributed to the book.

This was such an amazing evening. It was as if I were sitting in on an intimate conversation amongst friends. Talk about being transported to a state between reality and fantasy! This was it. At one point, Mr. Pincus-Witten, in less than one minute ran through a chronological list of the entire contemporary art movement. I have never had such a clear understanding of these connections before this talk.
If you get a chance to see this show, you should go. I am hoping the museum recorded the talk so I can score a copy of it.

As an added bonus, Annette agreed to be my mentor for this upcoming residency. This will be my second time working with her and I am so excited! ...AND I got my book signed by both Annette and Mr. Pincus-Witten ....

Dollar a Pound!

The Roller Coaster's Structure Needs a Bit o' Oil

Well, back to a slightly bumpy ride.

While flying at full speed, wind in hair, books, articles, websites and videos in arms, and an exciting and inspiring new medium in hand I went full force capturing the myriad of ideas that seemed to come at me like a gale. I made sketches by the dozens, and began my first art-piece in the White Shirts and Threads series. Pleased at the beginning outcome, I sat back with a sigh of relief at my newly found focus. Little did I realize that the big loop up ahead was going to keep me hanging upside down for a bit, while the kinks of the technical apparatus jammed my wheels. This roller coaster needed a major overhaul and I did not have the tools in my toolbox to fix it.

(check back later...a run to the hardware store is in order)

Threads and White Shirts

"I drew. I printed. I painted. I sculpted. I photographed myself. But every attempt was too literal, too romantic, too much to look at or too boring. In the book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking the authors’ state: “The developing of an imagined piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities” (Bayles 16). This holds true not only for the development of one piece of art, but also for the process of creating as described above. None of what I had imagined spoke to me with the materials I had enlisted, and none had connected with the viewer in the manner in which I had wished. After exhausting all of the “classical” methods of art making, the ones that I revered, as well as some contemporary methods, the possibilities were dwindling, but through process of elimination came revelation." excerpt from Threads-Residency 3 MFA Thesis


Click on White Papers in the side bar to read the entire document

Roller Coaster Quote of the Day

"An idea from the unconscious, as Freud would say, had punctured a hole into consciousness" (Elkins)