sometimes the easiest thing to post (when jump-starting one's blog) is nothing at all.

or at least nothing of my own.

i haven't posted in quite some time, but rather than punctuate my blog with this same metronomic thesis, i might include that my (weak, summer-vacation style) return to the internet has filled my new life with lovely images and computer clicks and gasps. in the past few days, i've managed to stumble (oh thanks, google reader!) across various aesthetic means of conveying the impact of the written word, and immediately felt that such treasures could hardly remain trapped on my own internet island.

jonathan callan, for example, is a london based artist that often utilizes books and paper as sculptural mediums. some of his pieces combine books into large masses, while others rely on the paper to create singular forms -




meanwhile, joseph egan and hunter thomson are recent graduates of the chelsea school of art and design that created this marvel of typography and perspective -



i've been wondering, lately, at what it takes to elevate a piece of work from something that heartily satisfies the quotients of a great piece of art, to something that makes your heart beat a little faster and your breath a little more strained - something that makes you reexamine the components of whatever paradigm you've been happily subsisting in and wonder if maybe the world could be something entirely different. perhaps this delves exactly into our paradigms, exactly into those subjective inner levels that determine for us what has merit and what fills our bodies with longing and empathy for the human condition. but perhaps there's something else?

at the moment, i'm convinced the greatest of things probably just have grand mutual connections to something absolutely preposterous, like sprinkles of crocodile tears or dustings of fairy dust. at least that's what i tell my students when they need an extra boost of confidence, or when they don't understand how something works.

i drove through an industrial wasteland

(to visit my sister in philly, with whom i shared a saturday afternoon propelling a mutual addiction to shopping, peeps, and the general enjoyment of all things bach, korean, and sweet.)

3, 2, 1...

REMEMBER WHEN I USED TO BLOG?

sometimes. sort of?

the two (plus) week internet drought that has descended on my life has left me feeling faint. weak. lost in the world of things. and so, what better time to re-instigate my presence in the world of blogger than now, when i should be lesson planning?

i'm now going to proceed to read and comment on everything i can find -

xoxo

alright, fairfield, it's about that time

welcome to my new life.

attack of the first grade virus!

i am secretly terribly clumsy. this translates sometimes to grates on my left front tire from tragic attempts at curbside parallel parking, or dents on my cell phone from daily suicide level drops, or bleach stains unfondly reminiscent of 70's era trends that creep into the elbow creases of my favorite hoodies. but mostly, it reveals itself quite omnipresently in the multitude of scars that waddle their way across my shins, knees, and left hand.
(somehow, my right hand has divorced itself from this catastrophe and remains unscathed.)
"did you get knee surgery?" a friend asked this summer, eyeing the rather nasty remnant of a gash on my right knee. no, i didn't, it's actually just a scar, and actually, i don't even remember where it came from. actually, i don't even think i know where 90% of these gatherings of collagen delight found their origins.

clumsiness may not (seemingly) logically translate to an immune system under belligerent viral occupation, not yet protected by the hague conventions of 1907 (and/or a few years of teaching), but (unseemingly), it has resulted in utter surrender from precisely october the fourth of the year of our lord two-thousand-and-nine, quite merrily to the present. i had bronchitis for five weeks. i have had the flu. i have coughed up two and a half lungs. i have had a fever. and now, it is 103am, my alarm will ring in precisely four and a half hours, and it (the military junta of viral concoctions) is at it again!
perhaps and probably it's the fact that i teach a classroom full of germy wormy squirmy six-year-old guppies, but really, it feels a bit like those mysterious gashes: where did you really come from, why are you here, and when will i learn to stop picking up used kleenexes from tables, planting little birdy kisses, and abandoning the safe ship of sanitizer and antiseptics.

backwards planning to achieve my ideals?

It’s currently 11:37 PM. I’m sitting in bed in leggings and a green fleece zip-up, the one from Old Navy I purchased who-knows-how-many years ago because it looked and felt (and promised to smell) like skiing. There is a stain on the left sleeve where a piece of ceramic slurry from a March bronze cast landed and embedded.
Moot point.
My bed is currently suffering a coup d'état by swells of clothes I intended to iron, faintly emitting that self-satisfied odor of the recently laundered; a spiraled web of cords and pieces of electronic equipment (cell phone? video cam? slr? school lap top? personal lap top? stop listing, please?); and a large bowl of rice smothered in black bean sauce, better known to the culturally nuanced as ja jang myun*. I’m supposed to be a) asleep, or at least b) working tirelessly toward preparing for this week’s slough of lessons, but instead I accomplished absolutely nothing today. Actually, scratch that - I picked up a Jason Brown friend, drove to the middle of a Connecticut laden with leaves in metamorphosis, wandered about a farm regarding draft horses, antiquated weaving/cooking/plowing equipment, and contemplated the pungent nature of nostalgia. I watched the rain pour across a sunny, 70 degree sky and trace a line of refracted rainbow lights into the various parking lots of Suburbia. I consumed the pages of my newest issue of artforum in a drunken delirium, took exactly three naps, then awoke to rearrange the shirts in my second dresser drawer in piles of warms, cools, and whites.
Regardless, something must be done.

that one summer i taught in the bronx

and so passed two months

and at the moment, that is all i have to say about my summer of tfa.

(miss and love you all. hoping dearly to return to the internets soon.)

i haven't written in a long while! (PART TWO)

it turns out that i am a terrible blogger. and so i'm sitting in a hotel room in san francisco at 1:42am pacific time (which means that somehow it's already friday, which means that somehow it will already be saturday tomorrow, which is the day that i leave this side of the country), trying my best to sound belatedly penitent, which might require a series of excuses, but for the moment will have to be justified as follows:

i spent this last month doing nothing, and it was wonderful.
by nothing, i mean the nothing between graduating and putting together a final show and then finishing another fifteen-ish paintings and putting together another show - between that and sitting here on my heels in a swivel chair, overlooking the lights shining bravely through the san francisco fog, adjusting my legs every now and then in a futile attempt to keep my left foot from creeping right back to that spot where it has begun to prickle in sleep.
by nothing, i mean the nothing of spending my evenings on a porch with dear friends, soaking in the milky bath of iron and wine on vinyl under the nectarine glow of japanese lanterns powered by halogen lights. by nothing, i mean the nothing of incense at noon and watermelon at dusk (and dawn and everything in between) and poetry in pajamas around dinner. by nothing, i mean the nothing of admiring threads of night rain connect ground to street light and back again.
in two days (or i suppose i must correct for the hour, and say tomorrow), i will wheel two large black suitcases (the old ones with the faded identifying tags reading LIA FARNSWORTH2901S KENWOOD STSLCUT 84106 in eight-year-old script) out of the hotel, into the airport, and board a plane to new york, where i am going to live for the rest of the summer while i train for teach for america.
tfa: that's the other part of my month of nothing. i did a lot of reading. i did a lot of attitude shifting. i decided to accept my acceptance into the 2009 connecticut corps. i did a lot more reading, and paperwork (oh, the masses of paperwork), and studying, and more reading (oh, the masses of pre-institute work), and writing, and now i'm sitting here trying to wake my left foot out of prickly slumber and succeeding only in procrastinating my last hours of work by resuscitating this dying blog.

i needed this last month. i needed it to fall back in love with provo, to fall back into the magical stupor of accidentally bumping into a friend under the tree-green light of the street, of walking through an open door just to say hello, of gathering around a guitar and a sofa on the lawn. i needed it to remember my gratitude for having so many people to love. i needed the crunched drive to california with my family to laugh and sing jumbled italian to our old pavarotti cd's (o, sole mio?) and engage jungle chants to my sister's disney mix (in the jungle?) to remember my gratitude for having such a family to love. i needed today to spend entirely alone in sweats in my hotel room with nothing but my teach for america prep books and masses of washington red apples (brought to you by this morning's continental breakfast) to remember that i need time alone. to love.
i jump-started this blog out of dying ashes about this time a year ago, ready to leave to korea, unsure of the entirety of my future. maybe i'm still pretty unsure, and maybe it'll swing yet a lot of de-LITE-ful surprises my way (actually, let's make that a definitely) - but of the three thousand significant changes this year has brought into my life, one i can back concretely: this august, i'm moving to new haven, connecticut for two years to teach first grade at amistad academy, an achievement first charter school. and i couldn't be more thrilled.

i haven't written for a long while!

because i've been busy:

1. TWO shows going up next week! final show (installation and video art) and positive + negative (painting and mixed media show for the gallery stroll with morganne)



2. oh, you know. finals. and that whole graduation thing.



(3. also, if we haven't phone chatted in a bit, it's because my cell has taken crazy pills)

i am for the art of bread wet by rain.

i am for the art of friends studying at borders. i am for the art of late night conversations on the telephone. i am for the art of front room discussions on women's issues. i am for the art of sleep-overs on blown up mattresses with grapes, yogurt, and tivo. i am for the art of mid-afternoon philosophizing. i am for the art of giving in to purchasing books. i am for the art of parking lot dance parties. i am for the art of poems left in packages. i am for the art of making last minute phone friends. i am for the art of waxing nostalgic over a million beautiful provo memories. and i am for the art of accepting my addiction to diet coke with lime, staying up too late at night, and joining a silly site called twitter.

thank you, claes oldenburg, for sponsoring this moment in time.

food food food: a performance art piece

if you have just a moment,

click here to see a response to a group art opening in which patrons came and took reception food without looking at our art.

p.s. this was so. much. fun.

i am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

painted acrylic on forged steel.
(a hopeful piece for the student show)

Art is not about art. Art is about life… a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.
(Statements from an Interview with Louise Bourgeois)

This is the land where bees come to die. A hundred thousand of them falling to the earth, catching on the branches of the great trees and saturating the ground like a summer monsoon. We came here to eat crackers and sip tropical Capri Suns and study our books in the crisp coolness of shaded grass, but the stillness of death and of dying filled the air with a thick sadness we couldn’t ignore.
I am holding hands with the world, and suddenly it releases me, nonchalantly unlatches its grasp, or perhaps I’m the one that’s turned away, too weak to hold on, or too unfaithful. Maybe the distinction isn’t important. My fingers reach out like hopeful vines, only to grasp at emptiness, at the stale air that whispers the dusty perfume of decaying honey, like a secret.
The air is still here. Still, slow, and silent.
I wrap myself into a synthetic womb of blankets and heaviness and material things to mimic my birth, to anchor myself with skin flesh against earth flesh, to bury my feet like roots into dirt and declare that I am yet alive. I fill my belly with heaviness, wrap myself into the warmth and out of the land of the dying, and wait.
We gathered the bees in our palms and sanctified their passing with streams of moistness from our closed eyes before we packed away our things and walked, slowly, into the sun.