State(me) Ment(?)

I wish to speak of the history of my image making as ongoing attempt to de/re construct my understanding of my self and my existence within the

Global

Political

Social

context

The impulse to make images first appeared as I became involved

Actively

Physically

Sexually

Emotionally

With two individuals

Before this time, at this time, our involvement was what affirmed/destroyed my life.

Our involvement cleared the brush so that I now I could see an entrance to a particular space in my mind. Linked to a space in my physical,

in my hands that I had no experience knowing what to do with. So I wrote small. Small lines. Small letters making up misspelled words, often in the wrong order and backwards I expressed in secret what I wished to ask the public.

Questioning; my growth and expansion

Confusion

Separation

Anger

Knowing the ebb and flow in masturbation, simultaneous love and hatred of self-flagellation, digestive and reproductive contraction.

I explored without them without restraint on paper

behind the closed door of the bathroom

I hid in order to avoid the inquisitive gaze of my mother, my partner until that time when I left her. “I need to be alone. I need to not talk to you. Just for a year or two” so that I may find my own understanding outside of your mouth that  disgustingly glitters with your ever-present reasoning. You had to find yours as well as I did mine)

Between the covers of a notebook

at the river

On the concrete

In patches of city grass

I attempted to flesh out an understanding of who this youth was and what she was like

All in a rush

To find an answer I needed more

MORE interactions to see my reactions to derive MORE analysis to have MORE conclusions.

It was of use

The more I did,

I Saw

I spoke

I Replay every night in my head behind my eyes

with commentary and pangs of irrepressible guilt, shame, regret and acceptance always with the intention of doing better later)

I am of buildings and bridges
I am made to bend in the wind
to withstand the world,
that's what it takes

She sang

“all that steel and stone is no match for the air, my friend for what doesn't bend breaks”

I’ve sung for years and still finding more of to what I am saying

I am

A (wo)man made form

Forms made by us that need other us’s to find what they made

So I found voices in philosophy texts with words that describe the streets and avenues for how contradiction navigates itself into our minds

It begins with a disconnect

Disconnection between knowledge

A unknown part of history

Using a dictionary for a language i don’t know

There were pages missing from the book

The reality that I hold more memory then I can account for given the events I can recall. I hold this memory within me and I desire to know the logic.

The logic that is presented, that dominates, that is coersive, that is a means for the ends of control. The control of my body. Control through capital. I can know this logic

What is more challenging is the desire to know the trajectory

The overlapping intertwined lines running parallel, perpendicular and at every degree and angle, gripping one another’s curves.

how it has happened

How I have happened

It is not written but it can be spoken

For speech and sight can shift and change and those changes can speak and see too.

Although I have just learned to touch my toes I have always had this flexibility

Elasticity

An ability to adapt

To be a chameleon

Not to blend but to assume a recognizable form in order to avoid confusion in conversation

To a fault according to some (myself included)

A close friend of mine was skeptical of my enthusiasm to ride different rhythms of conversations with a multiplicity of New Yorkers. Sketchy. Flakey. False. Were the characteristics she attributed to me, retracting them later in a letter. Stating that after three years of a college education she now recognized an attempt to communicate utilizing different cultural codes.

I still have this

The desire to seek the edges of how I am

For now I have come to a clearing and it is clear I have patterns.

One repetition is the impulse to please. Not a man, not one in particular although there is one in particular. Not my man, as if I could possess another person through a consensual relationship and if this happened, as if this happening would allow me to shed my penis shaped lenses.

(which by the way I was not born with but took years to procure through practice and encouragement. The hours of television, radio and uninvited cat calls and petting zooes on the street began at age 13 until the present that reminded. I should be flattered that people want to fuck me.

The comment “your beautiful” was a dotted color line where I would use my agency to say through clenched teeth “thank you” while I cursed them with my eyes, screaming “you can only say that because your not afraid I‘ll take it as an invitation to rape you motherfucker”)

Once these glasses have been put on and fastened with my granny strap I wait until I see the fog so I may take them off my face allowing the lenses to hang around my neck.

I make an effort to communicate with myself about what I feel and what I want because I don’t always have the desire to please but I often do so anyway.

This is something I learned. A practice we taught each other.

I cannot perpetually be a mirror. I can help show you how you are but I will not let you forget I am here as I do this. If you do not wish to see me as you seek yourself I will leave. I will steal the object you have made of me and hustle it out there as I strive to buy back my soul.  

I do however have the desire to establish a sisterhood

among the women.

Bonds that are not based on a depiction of ourselves as gossiping, competitive, hateful people, a picture of perfection that was forced down our throats as I was busy memorizing every word of every song on Alanis Morrissette “jagged little pill” and watching reruns of sex in the city.

I desire a community where exploring communication is primary. Where we seek out each others opinions to challenge them

with the intention of watching the seeds we planted in each other grow.

I want to continuously build a space where personal experience can be used to understand larger political dynamics

one that considers Bell Hooks observation that victimization used as rallying point for organizing community perpetuates distress and produces a shaky foundation.

I desire an environment where interest in others is from the impulse to teach and learn. Where we can check and challenge each other with premature judgment.  

I understand the threat of the medical institution, their ability to deprive me of being born in a place my mother feels safe.

I desire the choice to give birth when and where I want to, with or without drugs If I want to.

Where I will not fear persecution for miscarrying a fetus when my mother has had four.

I desire a world where I can state fuck H.R. 3, H.R. 358, H.R. 217 and those who it effects will know I am talking about a war

A war on the working class, a war on women

We need to know BEFORE the are passed into law. So we can fight them together.

I desire to live this way be able to come and go

To take lessons learned inside of myself popping this bubble where ever I am to bring my inside, outside to table to share with my family.

un-realist ick support

4ft X 8ft collage

 I make to mark

To stand as witness to the births and deaths
witness of those who pass without monuments.

I grieve to give
giving value to what has gone

Forming a headstone of what was once whole

The whole of mother and child

The service of their titles dependent on the existence of the other

one

I make to know

I know I have mourned the loss of my childhood

A passage I killed with self imposed responsibility of care
carefulness needed for the illict and explict

It is through no letting go that our hands have scabbed over

The fear of in grown nails has been banished from your nightmares

as the in from one has become out grown in the other

These nerves ceased to make my knees shake as it moves free form on its own accord satisfyingly snapping the layer of ice

penetrating parts I never cared to know the name of

We grew together

I Made me be

you

An articulation of a need

to leave

to be free

to be rid of her

in order to see me

I did not speak of this decision

That I would be partnered to perch

in the corner of a tree that was named after a mind where a bug eyed man-child knew the weather ahead of time

For now I can see

looking through from where I now was and had wanted to be

to a scene where I cannot find the parts of two that made us three

Influences; Composite, Digital Imaging and Silk Screen

I am primarily a collage artist. I enjoy the challenge of integrating collected clippings from my life and seamlessly integrating them into a world filled with surreal humanoid landscapes of my design. With the immense amount of paper product the printmaking process produces I have been able to rely on my own clippings rather then my collecting habit. My working is completely autobiographical. The subject matter may not always be a conscious decision I recognize before the creation of an image but it is rare that I do not gain personal insight from further analysis afterwards. Although I see myself throughout all of my work I do not wish to shut down alternative pathways for other interpretations for my expression is the response to living within a web of dynamics which effect all of us collectively and individually. I believe that utilizing materials collected from my life allows me to draw connections between the memory of an event (as solidified in the clippings) and larger dynamics I read from their combination with more ambiguous images.

My androgynous characters reappear consistently throughout the body of my work in different arrangements, sometimes recognizably the same person, often mistaken as distant cousins. I have listed some of my artistic influences for these artists are those whose lives and voices are carried through a compilation of images from their daily lives and imaginations. The people and things that they see are depicted throughout their work and serve as a jumping off point from which these artists are able to depart from and let their impulses guide the development of the image.

The Lithographs by Kathe Kollwitz (1867) titled “The Call of Death” “Death Seizes a Woman”, “Death Swoops” and “Death and a Woman” if read in the context of a body of her work are all clearly informed by her sketches from life. They partly may have been scenes she observed or perhaps created by referencing previous sketches yet there is a clear point of departure where her imagination becomes necessary. This necessary point of departure is the subject of Death. Death being an event that often has different feelings of relief, surprise, fear or anguish, Death is a happening Kollwitz found necessary to anthropomorphize, to make a present being in her work. These depictions of death may be more true to the experience of the loss of life then a rendering of a dyeing person or a dead body. I sought out these particular prints of Kollwitz is because I believe it is necessary to talk about the end of our lives as it is an event that happens to all of us. I do not wish to ignore or demonize or ignore the end of my life when I do not know how it will happen and what effect it will leave. Furthermore, death is often the result of bad health due to hierarchal organization. The information concerning the causes and effects of death are mostly concentrated in the hands of our health care providers, doctors, the medical industry and governments who, though they possess such knowledge still avoid the topic and have difficultly discussing death with those who will experience it. The duty of making the topic of death understandable is left to our artists, those who make horror films filled with young women ravaged unexpectedly and the recorded history of genocides where the power relations and banality of evil becomes clear but no singular voices are heard. Kathe Kollwitz is another source of information on the topic as I hope to be.

Ralph Steadman (b. 1936) work is a valuable documentation of his life and the events he has experienced. The disruptions within his illustrations often look as though they were made after the arrangement of a collage while his titles, phrases and handwriting are a inseparable part of his pieces. There is a consistency in all of his work written, photographic and illustrated that I can personally relate to for the vast majority of what I have created I can see a trademark style that could only be my work. Through this silk-screening course I would like to put this belief to the test and see if my signature taste and style will extend into digital work that has less of my physical hand.

            Kiki Smith (B. 1954 Germany) has created a body of work that function as a dictionary of contemporary iconic imagery. Utilizing combinations of print media and direct hand work her imagery addresses the life cycle of a woman whose contemplation of her origin, her end, and her body have encouraged me to approach these topics with calmness and understanding. Kiki Smith work explores our human life cycle, anatomy, birth and death while effortlessly crossing borders between artistic processes, she has helped pave the way for the sculptural collage illustrative language i am trying to achieve.

Ariel Pinks (b. 1978) is a combination of observed and abstracted images, many times bodies, many times himself makes it easy for me to enjoy the brutal, grotesque honesty of his work. With bodies and parts that come in and out of one another it is hard to distinguish a birth from a death scene as they often happen simultaneously. The photographic texture he achieves with graphite brings realism to his exaggerations that can be achieve through a digital combination of hand and photographic imagery.  Pinks humor is clear in the lack of reluctance to pin down the meaning of the image with phrases such as “old fart booty time” and “fool for love”. These images can be found on the web at  http://www.angelfire.com/la3/zanna/art.html where he facetiously states that all prints can be bought for 10,000$. It is for his honesty, the interest in orifices,  the combination of the real and fantastic and his willingness to share his personal experiences with others that I list him as an influence.

Feminine Relief

The imagery I produce addresses my experience as a female-bodied individual. The expression of my life realized in woodcut prints span the entirety of my imagined human life cycle from birth to death. There are times i must have other eyes to guide me to the wells of the waters of my mind. 

Currently I have been meditating on how we as a society and I as an individual understand and act in the event of birth and death. Our being born from another, from a female is primary for all. I know my existence is a product of another human, myself constructed in relation to my mother. She began to think of me and how she would be once i was here. If I had not arrived she would have still been momma to my sister. I did come though. Once i arrived it would be a few more years until i had enough practice to store memory of my own. Too busy trying to sit up and focus my eyes.
In this way the formulation of myself began before I physically arrived in the world and I believe will continue after I leave in the form of memory.

            Through the creation of woodcuts and the process of tearing apart and piecing them back together as larger scale collages I will encourage viewers to enter to a surreal world infused with personal experience and political commentary. These collages could entirely made up of proofs of one image that through a variety of assemblages create an environment infused with the subject matter of that one original image. I have been printing with mostly black and white on recycled paper. By recycled I mean that I am printing over old drawings, etchings or found pieces of paper. For I find that the more history I associate with the image the easier it is for me to utilize.  Many of my subjects appear in multiple pieces, reincarnated with different stories yet all related within the same general subject matter. I am challenged by my desire to simultaneously highlight the consistency of my subjects without giving the impression that I am trying to convey a distinct narrative of events. 

Theories below are the first authors I have encountered that are able to articulate the multiplicity that exists in a single person that I try to convey in my visual work.  Death is the end of our consciousness. This understanding is key to having an idea of an individual definition of myself. If I am sure to end then I can be sure of the existence of my beginning, middle and the reality of the present. Jean Paul Sartre and Helen Cixous’s fiction writing demonstrates the importance of life in the context of death. I find her metaphors that speak simultaneously about birth and death through personal experience useful to my individual pursuit of grasping my life cycle. Cixous concept of “the Third body” is the birth of another consciousness that springs forth from the dynamic of those who were once two separate existences. This ever-changing combination of two that makes a third is not an additional entity or something outside of oneself but what I become when I am interacting with another. The Third body is what I know as the birth of a dynamic between any two people where by being in proximity to another we adapt and slightly change. This Third collects and dissipates, is born and dies with the coming together and separating of any combination of people. I found this Third to be incredibly useful concept for understanding specific experiences and larger social political dynamics. These Third bodies are exponentially distorted due to the systematic separations we embody and proliferate. The knowledge of ourselves as the present state of a trajectory self (lineage) through a larger history informs and helps to sustain a complex web of social dynamics. The present past and future selves are not fully understood and are at odds with the pervasive ideology that dictates concepts of defined selves based on shallow social arc-types. Instead of building on shaky foundations I must try to clear the fog so I may live in and act upon the grievances I see that inhibit me from understanding others and myself.

In a hall of passage ways asking how they got in and how they are going to get out
4ft X 8ft Collage

4ftX4ft collage

I have

placed myself and I choose to stay

to see

what we make of each other

with my right foot up

Contractions. Pulsing. You feel that?

Its I. I feel that

Tighten

Release

I am not sure what that is

I’ve been told

Of my insides working

And I would like to hear them again

She waits for the wholeness of family to appear out of the shadows that keep for company.

I sleep without light
Without my eyes darting through makeshift threats
lucid dreaming through near escapes each night
Without you
Without fear

My evil voice of inner monologue

Judging others and myself

That’s my mirror, my reflection in the warped image of fluorescent light

My stagnation 

through youth and age few are wise 

yet you once told me i was your heart 

and i 

lost in the ancient rivers of your winkled milky eyes saw this to be true

so hello and goodbye to the one hundred year old year old woman 

departing in a timely fashion

her last moments come at the anniversary of her birth 

with her dearest nearest

i wish you well