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.