ladyparts

Multiplication

To design is
To plan and organize,
In order to relate
And to control

In short it embraces
All means opposing
Disorder and accident

Therefore it signifies
A human need
And qualifies man’s
Thinking and doing.

Josef Albers
Josef Albers was an intellectually driven artist obsessed with color perception. His paintings were created with palette knifes, no tape, and the colors never overlap. The scientific pursuit of color was an obsessive and motivational task in both his teaching, painting, and printing. Formation: Articulation, published in 1972 as a set of two boxed portfolios, contains thirty-three screen-printed folders and each folder contains one, two, or four images. The edition is on 1,000 copies and each set is signed by the artist on the title page.

The value of Albers work and perspective is incalculable. His respect and understanding for color, a reality, a wavelength that we are in perpetual interaction with has changed, and continues to change, the way we see, the way we observe our relationship with the physical world. This is perhaps entirely embodied in the repetition and potential for research inherent in the printmaking medium. Although Albers work or theory is not dependent whatsoever on the medium, it is enhanced and ever-present within it. What I mean by this is, color and form are the primary concepts printmaking dares to experiment with in a ritualistic, scientific method. Thus, each user is reminded or exposed to the revelation of color and form, it’s variables.

I have been thinking about the impact of color. Not in an overtly emotive or spiritualized sense, like Rothko, but in the sense that it is quite literally effecting our physicality. That something could do that.

What’s more, I am thinking about this man’s life and how it was lived on the principles of design. I want to live a whole life, which recognizes, appreciates, and justifies thinking and doing. Not because the universe requires it, but because it is the best feeling ever to be awed and moved by revelations, silences, and production.

If there were ever an idea that Existential Media were to justify itself with, it would be this:

To distribute
Material possessions
Is to divide them

To distribute spiritual possessions
Is to multiply them.

Josef Albers
I ask you not to think of this, just now, in terms of religious spirituality. But rather, think of it as the intangible, the relationships between living things, the Internet. When we share “truths,” we only multiply their goodness through interaction.

Fragments

Today in my photography class, my professor read a very mystic quote from Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which lead to a discussion about tourism. When I think about tourism I think about this movie and about changing my major. I could never justify documenting people’s lives and cultures that I only witnessed and never lived. I just couldn’t get past feeling like a thief; I had so much to say but I had to be honest and only use my self.

Photography can be perceived as a right; documentation is an obsession. Our culture is entitled to history, to keeping records of literal images, right?

Anyways, this lead me to thinking about being at the Japanese Garden in Washington Park. People were littering the walkways in poses for pictures. At times we hurried through areas to avoid the awkwardness of interrupting a photograph. What would it have been like if people we just walking, no cameras?

How much we have missed and continue to miss.

I started crying today in CVS. I ran through the isles looking for a person to talk to. Matthew watched my bike. I slipped past a woman and her mother, brushed my clothes against her arm. I saw a small girl looking at the candy. This was my chance. So I said, “that candy is almost as tall as you are,” referring to a yardstick candy of some kind. She pulled it out from its cardboard enclosure, and thoughtfully held it up to her body. I could not have dreamed of a more sincere gesture. I walked outside and cried some more, holding matthew. A few feet away in the parking lot, a woman with a cart directly faced me. She had on sunglasses. She was perpendicular.

I want to make it through this.
I think everything is going to be okay.

Cheeky

I have this pair of jeans (now shorts) that have a hole in the butt, right below the pocket. It stretches nearly across the entire width of the back of the pants (shorts). I had mended them, but it was hard to get the sewing machine in the right position to ensure quality. The patch has come undone, resulting in a nice, but shocking, ventilation system. When the hole originated I was working at a Christian conference center and was sent home to change so that people would not be “stumbled.” It was smaller back then, barely showing any skin. I had forgotten what it was like to be in that ever-present, looming shame and fear of the body. It made me really sad.

I recently made the pants shorts, as mentioned, and was wearing them on the flight home from Portland. The thing is, I had this overwhelming and very real fear that I was going to be stopped by security or, when on the plane, by a flight attendant. I felt like I was carrying a very dangerous weapon. An exposed upper thigh? Come on! I felt so tense and frightened. It was really weird.

I think that is an extremley important metaphor. It sort of makes me want to cry.

Sometimes I escape the trained guilt/shame of my youth, then it sneaks up on me. EVERYWHERE. I hate shame, if i were to identify the force to work to eliminate from the world, it would be shame.

I like to think that maybe it’s like Harry’s connection to Voldemort’s mind. It is at first helpful, goes through spells of being seriously harmful and you wonder if it is going to lead to his death, but the eventual result is that he is able to use it for good. To overcome. I guess that’s how everything is.

Like this brilliant comic from Tao Lin

The green one could be Dumbledore and the blue one could be Harry, or it could be me and you, etc.

I ask why a lot. I wish I did more than ask questions sometimes, like make stuff.

Why? Why don’t I just make it?

Is this you?

I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ll just come out and say it, a conversation I had has been passed out at an art show. Tonight is actually the closing night, I am going out there for the party.

The conversations were cataclysmic variables, binary star systems with one white dwarf star and one normal star, in close orbit about each other. Material from the normal star falls onto the white dwarf, creating a burst of X-rays.

I think that is the perfect description: Instant messaging and the internet, our orbit and channel, allowing material to drop on one another.

It was deeply sorrowful at times to lose connection and misunderstand each other. I couldn’t stop thinking about the exchange for weeks. How strange I acted, which self is my real self, but mostly it caused me to be still in awe at the infinite possibilities that continue to manifest themselves over and over. I truly believe in our earnest efforts to be good and in the necessity of juxtaposition.

If you want to, you should go tonight. Here’s what we will see.

The aesthetic and intellectual interests of this group are varied and expressed using video,
photography, painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and performance. The navigation of sites and space is considered in works addressing the militarized landscape, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map of the earth, sites of historical trauma, and the ever-changing neighborhood where LACE is located. Other artists explore the body and interpersonal relationships. Figures pose in lushly constructed paper rooms, a woman
interacts with images of deceased artists, and animated bodies engage with each other in intimate and awkward ways. Others use criticality and humor to expose Dr. Condoleezza Rice, stereotypes of Japanese femininity, and the vagaries of political speech.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the various positions and dynamics at play in political, philosophical, geographic, bodily, and emotional states of being. It refers to a fluidity of perspective and the artists’ multiple attempts to upset the familiar and re-route its meaning through skillful and thoughtful manipulations of their chosen media. With equal doses of wit, analysis, poetry, and attention to craft, the work in this exhibition exemplifies the diverse influences of the institution where these artists met.