Time-Lapse @ Site Santa Fe

Mary Temple

Currency

Since 2007, Temple has been completing one drawing a day for her series entitled Currency.  In an attempt to understand world events and politics, she studies one article a day in depth, draws a portrait of the primary world leader associated with the event, and writes a short caption underneath the drawing.  The drawings are hung like a calendar by month, and the drawings in this show were up to date as of the day before!  History in the making.  

Byron Kim

Sunday Paintings

Kim has been making paintings of the sky from wherever he happens to be every Sunday since 2001.  Scrawled on top of the paint is a short, diaristic entry of his moods, feelings and activities on that particular day.  Many of the paintings/entries touch on family life, outings with friends, an obsession with his children's education, social anxiety and a commitment to meditation.  The presence of vulnerability in these paintings is what kept me moving through a year of Sundays with the artist.   

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Pulse Index

With a quick scan of your index finger, the viewer/participant instantly becomes a part of this video collage by Lozano-Hemmer.  The most recent scan is the largest and bumps off the oldest and smallest fingerprint at the other end of the room.  Each frame is pulsating with life, while it lasts.

Georges Méliès

A Trip to the Moon

A film from 1902, each frame hand-painted by the artist, and set to the music of the French band, AIR!  A gaggle of scientists, giant mushroom forests, hoppy aliens, sexy ladies dangling from planets, dream-time adventure... What else could we possibly want?  

Unstretched

More time, more work, more play.

Full Moon Fever

Yes, it was old school week around here.  I haven't been to an arena show in years.  Never been to the super drum.  And now, here I am, twice in one week.  Arena shows are what I grew up on.  It's what you do when you grow up in a small farming town in Iowa, and the closest metropolis (if one could call it that) is Omaha.  And, it's the late 80s.  So, as you might imagine, I saw my fair share of big hair and cock rock.  However, a constant beacon of sweet badness beamed through all of that hairspray and cocaine, and that bright light was Tom Petty.  And the Heartbreakers, of course.  And, I still love them.

Saturday night's show was like a campfire sing-along, and I was surprised I still knew all of the words to the classics.  Thanks to endless hours driving around on country roads, and thanks to my high school boyfriend, no doubt, who was a huge Petty fan.  Those lyrics will probably continue to bounce around in my head for days...  

You're so bad, Tom Petty.  In a world gone mad, you're so bad.

Joan Jonas @ Fusebox!

Joan Jonas

I was only able to squeeze in one performance at Fusebox Festival this year, and lucky for me, it was Joan Jonas' The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things.  In this performance she tells a story of anxiety, culture and ritual, layered with the perspectives of the patient, the analyst, the intellectual, and the artist.  It is a reflection on her study of and fascination with Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the German art historian, and their common experience of witnessing Hopi ceremonies as visitors to the American Southwest. 

The performance both opens and closes with what I believe is a quote from Warburg's writings.  But, I didn't write it down in the moment because I wanted to soak it all in, so I'm unsure of the exact wording.  But, this is pretty close:  "Even the weakest member has the duty/possibility(?) to strengthen the will to/for(?) cosmic order."  For me, this is the key that unlocks the mystery of the work. 

Soaking it all in was the only way to go, because there was so much happening simultaneously.  A backdrop of video played while the performers moved through and around the space: sometimes dancing, sometimes drawing, sometimes in monologue, sometimes performing a ritual, sometimes pulling a taxidermied coyote on wheels, and often all at once.  And, it was lovingly layered with Jason Moran's piano, composed especially for this piece.

Jonas' work is both difficult, in that there is no way to accurately convey what was really going on, short of saying you had to see it, and completely natural, in that it makes so much sense!  I stayed on after the performance for a conversation between Jonas and Lynne Cooke, the curator who originally commissioned the piece for Dia:Beacon.  And, in her closing statement Jonas said that "work has the power to heal."  Amen.  

Joey on an Orange Field, for Joan

Comfortably Numb

Well, those were the days!  These days, not so comfortably numb.  More like, uncomfortably aware.  Not that I'm complaining.  It was time to face the music.  So, Roger Waters and I, and thousands of other fans of Pink Floyd's The Wall, faced it together on Thursday night. And, it was well worth the anxiety trip.

Far, far away...

We don't need no education!

Who are these lucky little ones?

Outside the Wall.

Who is gonna clean up this mess?

The almost full moon, truly outside!

The Universe is a Mirror

Constellation Overlap (April)

In Between Our Closeness

Or, The Closeness Between Us.  I could never decide.  

Just stumbled across these little gems of my niece, first contemplating, then running away as fast as she can from my art during a documentation outing at the Texas Biennial last spring.  I have been sifting through documentation off and on all week as I try to pull it together for a website renovation.  Of course, Sarah is doing all the hard work.  I'm just dumping photos on her.  She is the one responsible for brightening up dime & honey too!  Don't you love it?  I do!

Hand Me Down

I so love my new/old farm table from Stacy and Aaron.

Outdoor dining starts now!

Katieland Preview

I got a peek at Katieland last week.  My friend Katie's South Austin bungalow has spent the last several months going through quite the metamorphosis.  This is the light that will hang above the dining room table.  I hope to get more photos soon of the amazing colors, light and architectural details...

Roof!

Bulk pick-up time in the hood is always rich with evidence of the impermanence of our material lives.  It feels good to stretch out my eyes on the edgy and organic mounds of matter sprawled out in my neighbors' front lawns as I walk Joey around the block.  It is visual exercise for my brain.  I have long documented the found paintings and found sculptures of my environment, and thus far that research has only loosely played a role in the studio work.  But, I'm now wondering how I might make a more direct leap from found to form.  I think the observational drawing and architectural rendering classes I have been teaching for the past few years are rubbing off on me.