just look at the pictures...

I have a brand spanking new artist website!

2010-09-06T15:03:00.001-07:00

I've moved!!

2010-07-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

http://angeloleary.tumblr.com/

I am switching to a single non-linear blog that will take anything I feel like giving it - photos, art, videos, writing, etc.... So go there to see what my wandering mind is up to now.

review of thesis show on Shower of Kunst

2009-09-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

http://showerofkunst.blogspot.com/2009/09/place-placeness-perception-chris.html

It's a long review, they seem to be fairly ambivalent about my work. The description of my use of shadows and light in order to evoke a sensation in the viewer is right on and I am glad that is what she got out of the show.

The Dutch Masters? Guild

2009-07-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

We finally had our first guild meeting yesterday. It went surprisingly well. There were only a couple of times that we had to cite our only rule: it cannot become a pain in the ass. We have our first theme picked, a general time frame for our inaugural guild show, and are setting up regular-ish guild meetings.

I'm excited to get back to working, I've been so sick for weeks that I haven't had the energy to do anything. But now I'm good and am cranking out the art. Which is the way it should be.

Now I have to make our initial logo, find a place for our show, talk to some more potential members, get started on my main piece for the show (which I am super excited about), work on my own stuff: diagrams, drawings, contact writers, start building stuff, etc....

The Dutch Masters? Guild

2009-06-07T02:36:00.000-07:00

Yesss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am a founding member of The Dutch Masters? Guild. And could not be happier. God I love artists.

The story of my life in paranormal experiences

2009-06-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

Yes, I see ghosts. I always have. I finally counted-up all of my strange experiences (I'm including aliens etc...) and the number was about 25.

I started this a while ago in school because of a professor's obsession with this stuff, but she had had no personal experiences. I thought that was odd so while she lectured about her study of it I wrote and sketched my own real experiences.

I was working on my thesis show at the time so this sort of fell to the wayside. This seems like the perfect project to work on now while I am studioless and not ready to work on a serious project. I'll post images as they finish.

Influences and Inspirations - I got to think about something while waiting for a workspace

2009-06-03T10:32:00.001-07:00

I am sort of stuck for a studio right now. I need to wait until the end of June to get one, and it's making me sort of crazy.

I make art because I have a need to express my ideas in a visual manner and also because I have a love of beautiful things and know I can make beautiful things (you are not supposed to say that -beauty is unpopular in art right now). But the main reason I make art is that it is the most effective means of keeping me sane.

I am starting to feel a bit unhinged now that it's been 2 months since I've had a studio in which to really work. I've been drawing a bit, but not as much as I need to be. Also jetlag tends to leave me with a death-like sort of inertia for a couple of weeks which makes it hard for me to force myself to do anything.

So I'm starting a list of the inspirations and influences that are lurking below the surface of the work. At least I'm thinking about working.

1. Depression and anxiety - it seems crazy that this would be the #1 influence on my art, but it is. My needing to make art to fight these off is a large part of it, and my experiences in low mental health are a huge part of the subjects I explore in my work.

2. Yoko Ono

3. Poetry & Music

4. Urban Industrial Areas

5. Adventure stories from when I was a kid - both fiction and real life stuff like Jacques Cousteau

6. Insomniac thoughts and nightmares

7. Leonardo Da Vinci - his inventions, not his painting.

8. Islamic Art

9. Birds

10. Car rides through desolate areas

11. Star Trek

12. Cages and traps

13. Eva Hesse

14. Louise Bourgeois

The Catalog of Things Lost

2009-05-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

This is another call out for contributors for a project I am starting.

I haven't done any work in a month, I go home in 2 weeks to no job, no home, no shows, I'm wandering around foreign places by myself, and I am feeling that I have sort of lost myself.

But this has started me thinking about lost things and how as a lost thing right now it feels important to not be forgotten. So I have decided to start a catalog of lost things. If something is lost that means that someone misses it. I am not sure yet what form this catalog will take, but I would like to create a visual catalog of the missed and missing that acknowledges their/it's importance to the people who lost it.

It has become a part of my creative process to send out a call for help to the masses for contributions to the work, and I am doing it again.

I am asking people to send me photos, drawings, written descriptions, copies - anything that represents something lost. The things you miss can be anything that you feel the loss of: I miss people who are gone, my little red stationwagon, friends I have lost contact with, a piece of jewelry my grandmother gave me, our houseboat, ....

You can include an explanation if you want, but only if you want to.

This will become a part of my art, so with that in mind let me know if you do not want this seen by eyes other than mine. Those private ones will be kept secreted away in a special place.

Please send this on to anyone you know who may want to have something they lost added to the catalog.

Please send the lost things to: catalogoflost@gmail.com

thanks, Angel

No more school, ever! -Thesis show and opening

2009-04-25T04:19:00.001-07:00

Getting set for the show aka everything is going wrong (but can be fixed)!

2009-03-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

We're 2 weeks from the show, and 5 days from vacating the studios. The catalog and postcards are here and turned out fabulous. Unfortunately, that's the only thing that's working for me right now. - And yes, we do have a made-up word in our title and unfortunately I transposed the i and o in a word but nobody so far has noticed despite how blatantly misspelled it is.

Because of the remoteness of our school we rely on mail-order for most of our supplies, and nothing that I have ordered has shown up. And so that means that I won't get the stuff until Monday afternoon, which gives me 1.5 days to do what I had given myself 5 days to do. So I am panicking and wasting time while trying to think how to work this all out.

So in the meantime here's the state of the show:

The interiors of my rooms for Everything I Love - I am waiting on more paint so I can't start creating the web out of brass wire for it yet. The mesh ceiling is almost done, but again I can't start installing it until the paint is here. The roof is made of 4 stretchers (that's Chris and Sean's shack by my ceiling panels), but can't be installed until the paint gets here. Boxes of photos that go in the room, I have 4,000 photos of things I love so far - I think I will spend this weekend uploading the other 4,000. So I will do that, build the tables for the photos and make the grill behind which the audio elements are hidden this weekend.

So far I have 5 of the Nets for Shadows finished, I want 7 but the wire didn't show up this week (so much for express mailing in Ireland). I'm fine with 5 but 7 will be better. Those are what I really needed to be working on this weekend. It takes an entire studio wall to make one and about 9 hours per net. I need to be out of my studio with the walls spackled and painted by Wed. morning, so provided the wire shows on Monday I will be pulling a couple of all-nighters to get these done and the studio cleared in time.

My House is done, and just needs to be moved to a different studio. But I can't fix it's wall until the studio is all cleared. So that adds to the insanity for Tuesday.

And then there is the installation for The Cage I Put Myself In - which can't even begin until next Friday. That gives me 5 days to finish a major piece - there is no part of it that can be done until I have access to the studio.

I'm starting to freak-out a bit, but I guess it's to be expected. And my poor poor hands - I scraped off most of my knuckles pulling those canvases and have smashed my fingers so many times with a hammer making my nets that I have massive blisters. It's probably good I can't work on the nets this weekend 'cause my hands are so sore they shake constantly and I can't do the detailed work.

That's my sad story. Hopefully the next post will be about how it all worked out great for the show.

catalog images

2009-03-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

The materials I choose for my art all carry associative meanings with memory and emotion. The wire, wood, ink and paint relate to places and periods of my life, I construct objects with them which help me to come to an understanding and resolution of past experience.

I use my art as a way to explore the conflicting psychological states which I associate with the places in which I exist. I show how my perception changes based upon the context in which I am considering it.

I am most interested in the extremes of meaning generated about place as experienced from contrasting emotional situations. I often turn to literature and to creative exchanges with writers as a means to find a different viewpoint in which to observe and evaluate my personal surroundings.

Nets, cages, home and thresholds are the symbolic language I use to express conflicting reactions to the experiences of my life. I hope that these images and structures allow others to recognize something in them that resonates with their own lives.

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound –the tumultuous motion of the heart, and in my ears the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch, a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought – a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavour to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival of soul and successful effort to move.

- The Pit and the Pendulum (fragment) Edgar Allan Poe

My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart...

"Yes," I said to the little prince. "The house, the stars, the desert-- what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!"

-The Little Prince (fragment) Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

- Invisible Cities (fragment) Italo Calvino (1972)

About 1/2 of these are faked because of the nature of what I am making. I will not have access to my installation sites until just before my thesis show. So for now the corners and floor and walls of my studio are turned into detail shots to approximate the finished work.

My Diagrams, some get made some don't

2009-03-03T02:29:00.000-08:00

The original idea for My House:

The almost finished version, I have since intensified the glow and restructed the hanging system:

The idea for Doorways started with this:

Which lead to this:

Which then became this:

And now doorways to... spans between the two rooms of Everything I Love -which have also changed considerably.

Nets for Shadows was not working. I could not figure out to make the nets right and the wiggling idea has come and gone and come and gone. Right now it's gone, but may come back.

The higher net to forever to make, but I worked out a more efficient method (on back wall). Now I can crank them out. And to make the shape correct I climb in and some friends pull it as tight and high as they can and I freak out and stuggle until I escape or they let me free. This solves two issues: the constant belief of my tutors that I need to experience physical entrapment (I disagree) and it gives them each a unique organic nature.

This one started like this:

The plan changed to this:

And now it's been dropped from the show. But the idea is echoed a bit in my Birdcage for Humans and the net is to be the ceiling of the rooms Everything I Love. I think I will make this eventually, but for now it's been abandoned.

These two have also been abandoned, I think forever:

What I'm up to now. New images soon.

2009-02-26T00:36:00.000-08:00

I just finished my thesis: 40 pages! (with pics) on the means and benefits of collaboration in the careers of Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, and Janet Cardiff -all of whom have made it a driving element throughout their careers.

This seems to be the path I am following as well, and I'm happy to have that be the case. Being a visual artist can be very isolating and in order to keep myself from becoming even more seperate from the world I have developed various means to work with others. Mainly writers, now a couple of musicians, almost always the audience, and I think next will be a direct collaboration with another visual artist. For me that will be the most challenging. Working with artists of other disciplines allows us each control over our own areas, but if I am to work with another visual artist those boundaries will be unclear and I will have to give up some of my control over the work. I feel this will be good for me and for my art, I am a bit dictatorial about the execution of my ideas. Not that I don't appreciate and take the advice of my fellow artists in regard to the work I make - it's the supremacy of my idea that I insist upon and this probably needs to be broken down a bit.

I'm rambling. It's the morning in Berlin, I've been up for hours with my serial insomnia. Time to gather up my stuff and go to the Zoo.

me to me

2008-10-07T11:37:00.001-07:00

As one of my projects this year I decided to take the premise of The Correspondence Project and turn it on myself. I am having a dialogue between the me that draws and the me that writes. I started with an initial journal entry, then drew a picture in response, then wrote a response to the picture, then drew a picture in response to that.... It's a little strange, I am experiencing the same frustration with myself as a writer as I did with some of the writing I worked with before: a focus on the darkness in the drawings. What makes it so odd is that rather than just stopping and changing direction, the drawing me is waiting for the writing me to lighten up a bit. I am thinking that the drawing me is going to rebel and start introducing color to confuse the writing me, but I'm not exactly sure when and how. As crazy as this makes me seem I am finding it a really interesting exercise. I am recognizing just how obsessive I can be and that I really have some serious dictatorial tendencies which I will even turn on myself.

current work and studio shots with no explanation

2008-10-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

Back to My Future

2008-08-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

I am back in Ballyvaughan and have been mentally preparing myself for the questions I am going to have to answer in regard to what I plan to work on this year and how my work has changed and why.

I have returned with a sense of emancipation from my old worries and am getting really excited to get to work. I think my world is a happier place than it used to be. It will be challenging and exciting to go back to my work with a new perspective. I feel that I am looking into the unknown I have always craved and rather than fear I feel anticipation and excitement. Like I can feel that this new place is filled with light and joy, unlike in the past when I thought it contained things of which I needed to be wary.

I have been having this image in my head that my soul had been scabbed over. That I never healed properly from the things that caused me pain and I had become covered with scabs that both initially protected me but eventually acted as a barrier between myself and the rest of the world.

And that the work I have been doing -not just this year, but also the years leading up to now -has been a ripping off of those scabs. But the last big bits got ripped off too fast and too many at once and left me raw and exposed and in pain. Despite that initial trauma I feel this time instead of being a soul patched up with hard scabs I am now actually healing properly. I still have scars, but they are healing not just crusted over. I haven't felt that my soul was whole and accessible like it is now since I was a kid.

I am returning to me, but a different me. It's such a strange feeling. And I don’t know quite how to express it in person yet.

I have always been very independent -to the point of pushing people away and not accepting their input. And it has been lonely, although I never realized that until recently. I do miss the give/ take of interaction and working with people. Because of the way I have isolated myself I have needed a way to reach out and connect with the world. My art is the thing that is most me and carries me through the world and has proved to be my way of trying to communicate. But the one way interaction of just throwing things out into the public to be looked at was just not enough.

I think The Exchange is a way for me to become a part of the world and to create that sort of relationship that I have missed. And the great part is that I will be communicating from the place of me I love the most: my art. And will be getting art back in return from my co-participants as their portion of our relationships. I think this is the best possible project for me to start this year off fresh. I know that I will be working on many other projects this year, but haven’t a clue what they will be. My sense is that they will spring from the ideas and work that The Exchange inspires.

Next project: The Exchange!!!

2008-08-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

It's going to be a while before I put up more art, but I am looking for people to work with me on my next project. If you or anyone you know is a writer, musician, artist, or photographer who may be interested in participating in a new project similar to but more egalitarian than The Correspondence Project please get in contact with me!!!!! And by musicians I mean contributing music and by artist I mean any type of art.

Rather than my sending out an initial drawing and then receiving responses, The Exchange will involve spontaneous(ish) exchanges. I hope this will remedy the main issue I had with The Correspondence Project (overall I thought it was great). I felt that the initial image I sent out set a tone that remained throughout the project. With the simultaneous exchange the series' will hopefully equally reflect the influence of both me and and the other contributor.

And I am really excited to open up the exchange to different media. I responded very strongly to the work I received from the writers and am curious to see what will happen when I work with people in other mediums as well.

I plan for The Exchange to be the visual counterpart to my written thesis and will continue it at least until the end of the school year and hopefully much longer.

A quick visit to my older art.

2008-08-17T23:58:00.000-07:00

I wish I could go back and put this at the beginning of the blog, but I can't. While it seemed appropriate to start this as a showcase of my more recent art it does seem strange to not show what a break this was from the work I formerly did. I have been thinking that I would like to bring back the cool distance of some of the work I did a few years ago, but am not sure that is possible at this point.

No matter the outcome it is always worth looking back occasionally and seeing where you have been. This is a chronological trip through my short art career.

Early prints and drawings:

Probably my first successful art idea was doing a series of prints based upon one of my favorite albums: Dusty in Memphis. My images are pretty literal visual interpretations of certain songs. This series remains the favorite of many of the people who know me and my art well. I've been told that it is partially due to the sense of my happiness in what I was doing that they see in the images. Which seems strange to me because while I was happy to be doing these the images are mainly about isolation.

Figure Drawing:

I LOVE FIGURE DRAWING!!!! I love to lose myself in the pull of the model's body. I never learned to love figure painting as much, I think because I enjoy the immediacy of drawing and following the light around the figure. I wish I could do more figure drawing at this point in my life, but time doesn't allow for it now. I'll go back to it as soon as I finish up with school.

Vespa's and Ape's:

I did this series while studying in Rome for a quarter. I have always loved the organic grace of Vespas, but had never seen the little Ape trucks before visiting Italy. This was such a nice series to work on, I would wander around Rome with my parchment taped onto a board drawing all the pretty vehicles. I met so many nice Romans while doing this, they love these vehicles and all seemed to get a real kick out of my doing portraits of them. I finished off the drawings with shoe polish, iron oxide paint, and silver leaf.

More early prints:

Post Apocolyptic visions where all that remains are toppled sky scrapers and flocks of birds. And my angst birds - an early incarnation of these characters who have stayed a constant in my artistic vernacular. Plus some with nice feelings about people paired up.

Early random drawings and prints:

The Tree series of paintings:

The darkness was starting to seep into my work at this point. I felt I needed to find a way to control the images I was making both formally and emotionally so I decided that everything would be okay if I did them all 1:1 scale with the trees I was depicting. I spent day after day wandering around the UW campus measuring tree branches and making diagrams and drawings of them. Yet even with my attempts to subdue the dark it came roaring back in with my Looming Figure. With this painting I drew upon my sewing skills and created a quilt of a 1:1 scale drawing of some trees. I then stretched it and started painting. I stuck with it as trees for a few days then flipped it and worked on it for a couple months with these figures gradually emerging. Bleeding Tree was another one that just sort of made itself. This is what I feel like often when I am hurt, a hard skin with holes punched in it that ooze and ooze pain.

Tree collage prints:

These are less directly ominous, but are still about blocks and uncertainty. I made them by layering printing with collaged wood veneer and paper. I think these are among my very favorite things I have done. And they are HUGE which is always sort of satisfying to me.

Boxed In collage prints:

These were all about my constant claustrophobia and isolation of oneself. They are also about trying to break out of this and back into the world. I continued working at a 1:1 scale only this time the subject was myself. I cut a variety of plexiglass plates and built wooden frames with the same inside dimensions as the plate edges. I then smooshed myself into the frames and took timed photos of myself in these positions. I then layered collage and print until I was satisfied with the claustrophobic effect. This was the last group of work I did before starting my MFA. Although very different in appearance, I see a continuation of context in the work I have done since.

Lost in the night and the fog you have no place.

2008-08-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

Lost in the Night and the Fog You Have No Place. I found that sentence written under a drawing in one of my sketchbooks from this past year and it seemed to fully sum up the state I had reached after 6 straight years of the toil, isolation, and self-critique of art school.

The images and words of this show are enlarged snippets lifted out of my sketchbooks. Stylistically they are a return to the type of little paintings I did before I had any training, but subject matter-wise they are a continuation of the examination of self that I have been doing this past year in Ireland. Some of it is very sad and some of it is very strange.

Lost in the Night and the Fog You Have No Place turned out to be a sort of clearing out of residue left in my head from this past year and from the difficult turn my brain has taken in these past 6 years. The constant self-examination and critique has taken a huge toll on my psyche. And the level of seriousness with which I have approached my education added to that hugely. I feel that I failed at everything I attempted until I turned to art. And once I recognized that art was the only thing for me I threw my every energy into it with a seriousness that I had never produced before in my life. Which has served me well scholastically but has also backfired into a loss of happiness in my life and even joy in my art-making process.

This past year as an MFA was the most difficult of my life so far. I have delved as deeply and openly into hidden parts of my life as I feel possible. It was important for me to do this but I had put no thought into the after-effects of such exploration.

I returned to Seattle this summer in a state of complete emotional numbness. And soon after my homecoming I experienced further personal upset in a break-up that added hugely to my downward spiral of pain. This was the catalyst of my downfall, I think because I had clung to that relationship as the last thing that brought me happiness. Without it I felt completely detached from the world. For three months I sunk further and further. Initially I blamed this all on the break-up but the further I fell the more I saw that every single thing in my life had been slowly shifted and I no longer had any sense of belonging to anything or anywhere.

The ultimate push into massive depression for me was working on the project I had originally planned as the work for this show. The sadness of it was overwhelming. I would work and work at it while crying the entire time. I think focusing on the pain of others at this moment in my life was both the thing that finally wrecked me and saved me. This forced me to recognise the level of my depression and also made me decide that I am through with being Sylvia Plath and that I was also done with hiding how I am from the people I love.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to find a way for me to let the people in my life know what I have been going through. I have rarely felt comfortable expressing how I feel in person which I think may have been the initial reason I turned to art, and explains the personal context of my artwork.

Once I recognized that I could not survive doing the show I was doing and that it was too late to just not do a show I had to scramble to find some idea that could come together quick and to a level that wouldn't cause me mortification. I turned back to my notebooks and started culling them for ideas. I decided to return to something I had done a bit at school and did enlarged versions of little sketches and words. Looking through them I saw in my tiny automatic sketches that the despair I currently felt had been seeping out of my brain onto the pages for a very long time.

While doing this work I realized that I have reached the finish of this artistic voyage through the sadder part of my brain. The sources of most of my pain are far in the past and I have addressed them in ways with which I am satisfied. I no longer feel that I am lost in the night and the fog, but I still haven't found my place. But not having found your place yet is still better than settling into the wrong place.

I do need to address the source of the phrase "lost in the night and the fog you have no place", but that will have to wait a few days.

And check out the Cafe Racer site for other images from the show: http://www.caferacerseattle.com/art.html

Queen of the hold outs!

2008-08-02T23:18:00.000-07:00

One years worth of me!!

Years ago I realized that while I took bazillions of photos, there were rarely any of me 'cause I was always the one behind the camera.

So I started doing hold outs to record myself in all the places I would be.

This grew into my secret solo photo shoots I do whenever I am bored or want to pretend I am something I am not. It's gotten to the point where I think I actually take far better pictures of myself just holding out my arm than most anyone else does of me. Probably because I spaz out and get shy and can't seem to look normal when I pose for others. Except my cousin Bridgette, but that's a whole nother thing.

So here's last August to this August. We have me crawling in and out of the cracks of the Burren pretending I am Millais' Ophelia, being a fallen statue in the wildflowers, freaking myself out in the thicket 'cause I am sort of afraid of the woods, loving London, performing Come In and Visit, so so sick with the flu in both Brussels and Amsterdam in hotel rooms with no TVs and a book I didn't want to read, laying in a bed of grass, falling in love with livestock, traveling through Berlin, Prague, and Italy, distracting myself from the pain of a broken heart, and finally happy again in my studio killing time while paint is drying. All in just 40 seconds!

Ruby's Dragon

2008-07-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is what I do in the middle of the night while the rest of you sleep. My little stop-action videos have made me feel like less of a sleep-deprived lunatic and more like a hard-workin' artiste!! Of course most nights are still spent with my thoughts racing obsessively around in the dark.

Thank you Ruby for the fearsome dragon tattoo.

New Show opening August 14th at Cafe Racer

2008-07-27T00:17:00.000-07:00

I've made a change of my plan. I can't work on this project right now. It's so sad and since I haven't been too happy lately the addition of working on this has sunk me lower than I thought possible in the summer. I also didn't feel right about rushing this work to finish it by the show deadline. I will pick this back up as soon as I feel healthier again. So for the show I am switching back to some drawings and paintings I had been working on before this project came to me. At least this way my work on the walls won't make Kurt's customers cry.

(This is a work still in progress of The Spiral Minaret of the Great Mosque in Samarra. It is something of an indication of the direction the work is going)

Most of the work relates to the devastating toll of the Iraq War in terms of Iraqi citizens and culture. This is a major departure for me artistically; I have never done work with political content. The majority of my work has been very personal, and I suppose this is as well at a certain level but via sympathetic feeling and reaction rather than any personal experience whatsoever.

I am generally so absorbed in exploring my own issues that I would never think to make any sort of altruistic statement or protest through my work. I initially stumbled across my subject by accident. I had been doing loads of research trying to find direction for my thesis, which usually devolved into my looking for my favorite works of art because looking at them made me happy but I pretended in my head that it was for research. I have always especially loved the art that originated in what is now Iraq: art from Ur, Uruk, Sumer, Babylon, Nimrud, Islam.

As I was hunting for my favorites I kept discovering that many of them had been stolen or damaged or destroyed since the Iraq War began in 2003. I then wanted to find out what has been lost and what remains intact.

I started to feel strange about being so concerned about the loss of art and architecture when so many people have been killed. I began researching how many Iraqi civilians had died, I had already heard reports of close to 300,000 but wanted to know if that was accurate and how that number was reckoned. In all my research the database of Iraq Body Count was consistently cited as the reliable list of identified deaths. When I read how many were on the database and how many more were estimated dead I was sickened. The only way I can describe how I reacted when first (and still) reading the Iraq Body Count database is to compare it to the reaction of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars when Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

When I get an idea for a body of work I usually see the finished project then have a flash of a high-speed sequence of each element of the work clicking into their proper spatial relationship. This is what happened here: I wanted to black gesso over white gesso on paper and board. On that I would make drawings of compromised artifacts or architecture, but instead of lines or shading I would carve the image out using the names of killed Iraqi citizens. So far it is coming together well with the visual and contextual impact being what I imagined.

Some may find this art offensive or heavy-handed or insensitive. I apologize to any who find it to be any of those, I mean for this to express my sorrow at this destruction of so many lives and the culture of the place they live.

My primary research sources have included Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.
I think that being aware of the frightening numbers of Iraqi civilians killed is very important for US citizens right now as we near this presidential election. There is no true count yet but Iraq Body Count has documented approximately 90,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. The true count is exponentially higher:

"This is a list of all named or partially identified individuals in the IBC database as of Saturday, 26th July 2008, together with some of the personal details that are known about them. This list is constantly being updated. The latest version of this file can always be obtained from http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/download/ibc-individuals.php Concerned citizens and advocacy groups have for several years drawn attention to Iraqi victims of the war in public readings and displays using compilations of names drawn from Iraq Body Count and other sources. In any use of these names please give due honour to the as-yet unidentified dead who are not in this list, and whose numbers far exceed the named or partially identified victims. For every identified individual on the current list there are another 21 confirmed Iraqi civilians killed for whom we do not have identifying information. In contrast, virtually every coalition soldier who has been killed can be identified by name and other biographical information.
There is no organised effort to name all victims of the war. Only when all have been identified and duly recorded can there be any talk of respecting their memory. To those who knew and loved and miss them, Iraq Body Count offers its condolences." -part of the explanation at the top of the list of names in the Iraq Body Count database.

12, 14, 16. April 2008

2008-07-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

12, 14, 16 was my final project before the end of our school year. Of all the art work I have ever made this was by far the hardest, both subject-wise and physically. Visually I do not feel that it is among my strongest work, but was necessary for me to do in order to move forward with my art.

12, 14, 16 started out as one 5' x 36' piece that I stretched onto the studio walls and eventually cut into three pieces. It was visually inspired by Hellenistic sculpture, most specifically The Pergamon Altar. The female figures are made from my clothes hand-sewn onto the canvas which I had gessoed (you cannot imagine how painful it was to sew). I then used ink, sparkly dust, oil paint, graphite, and oil bars to create the environment and nauseating color. The appliqued photographs are taken from the window of my room I had growing up.

12, 14, 16 is a very personal work that addresses traumatic events which occurred in my youth and their aftermaths. I chose to address this subject in my art because it continually seeped in anyways. I felt that it was time for me to approach this subject in a direct manner rather than continue to not acknowledge where the darkness in my work comes from.

Most important to me was to illustrate reaction to painful events. In my mind it is important for people that hurt other people to be aware of the effects of their actions. And also for the person who has been hurt to be allowed their reaction.

I do not feel that I need to revisit the subject further in my art. I do feel that now I have addressed this so publicly I have no personal limitation in regard to the themes I chose for my work.

The Correspondence Project

2008-07-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

The Correspondence Project was the main project I worked on during my second semester at The Burren College of Art. It expanded on my interest in the collaborative process. I recruited 14 writers from the USA and from Ireland. The 14 included professional writers, writing students, poets, song writers, amateurs, journalists and playwrights. Some I knew and others I had never met and found through placing an advertisement.

The only real limitation I set was that the exchanges would be easy to send and download via email. I limited my drawings to black and white as a quality control since color varies among computers and printers.

I sent each writer the same initial drawing. They then sent me a written piece in response. At that point the project split into individual correspondences between myself and each of the 14 writers. Some of the 14 correspondences were extremely prolific, while others petered out fairly soon. This was an expected part of the project and in my opinion was an intriguing aspect that made me question why did things end at the point they did.

For me this was a wonderful experience. It was challenging and rewarding. It expanded the relationships I had with the writers I already knew and introduced me to new people with whom I felt a strong sympathy of ideas. I had planned to continue The Correspondence Project until I graduated, but that does not appear to be possible right now. I renewed a romantic relationship with one of the writers while working with him on the project. With the failure of that relationship I found it impossible to continue. I may pick it back up eventually, but not quite yet.

I am currently contacting some of my collaborators and other writers to start a new project that will be similar to this one, but hopefully less in my control. I would like to initiate this one with us submitting simultaneously, inspired by the collaborative work of Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage.

Escape! November 2007

2008-07-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

Escape! was a multi-media installation that was shown in The Project Room (part of the gallery space at The Burren College of Art). My show in The Project Room was due to be exhibited 5 days after I presented Come In and Visit. Due to this time limitation I chose to adapt and re-purpose many of the elements I used in the previous show.

One of the key things I learned doing Come In and Visit was how much I enjoy and appreciate collaboration with others as a part of my art practice. For Escape! I again asked Jon Rentler to collaborate with me. I was very impressed by his writing and also his generosity and enthusiasm. I wanted his work to not be overly influenced by words I used in explanation of the installation. Instead I built him a miniature of the finished installation and told him only that it was titled Escape! To my delight he returned with a series of amazingly creative investigative reports that provided speculative explanation of what took place.

This perfectly suited my idea for the space. I incorporated the cage, the barbed wire photos, redid the tree cut-outs, and the drawings of creatures with angst-filled eyes. I created a net out of the red and blue string that had made the web/ thought matrix in Come In and Visit, and projected Twirly Whirly a video of myself twirling around in the wind on top of the burren.

The concept behind the installation was escape from the cage and eluding all of the traps and barriers of my own making (literally and figuratively) - to freedom.

I was very very happy with how Escape! turned out. I felt that with it I was able to focus the creative chaos of Come In and Visit. Both exhibits helped me to realize that while I really love making individual pieces of art, I am most interested in using different elements to create environments that reflect the concept that I am trying communicate.

Come In and Visit, November 2007

2008-07-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

Come In and Visit was my first real project as an MFA student at The Burren College of Art in Co. Clare, Ireland. It was a 3-day multi-media installation in 3 empty studios that I adopted. The project came to be out of frustration and desperation. I experienced an inability to produce satisfactory work at the onset of the school year. I felt unable to explain or defend the work I was attempting. I think that this was because I was trying to continue along the artistic path I had been following for several years, but subconsciously knew it was time to push my art further and possibly in different directions.

In order to break this artistic inertia I decided to reexamine all the thoughts and images I had recorded since my move to Ireland. I wrote out many of my entries to my journals, printed out loads of my photos, and projected and drew some of the small drawings I do whenever I have a pen in my hand. My idea was that I would spread them all out and would find direction for my art work.

For all my thoughts of being stuck I had managed to do a ton of work, but it was not the sort of work that I normally associated with my art practice (painting, large drawing). In order to display this collection of thoughts I took over a group of small unused studios so I could place everything up at once. During this process I had a number of discussions with our tutors which lead me to decide to open the collection up as an interactive exhibition and also to incorporate performance as part of it. The installation involved drawing, writing, photos, videos, music, and performance. My hope was that the end result would be a visualization of the working of my brain.

The show was open for three hours each on three days, all of which I spent blindfolded in a large cage/ bell jar writing and drawing in a new sketchbook about the experience and where I thought it was taking me. Basically starting the whole process all over. Since I was unavailable to assist the visitors my friend Jon Rentler acted as host and observer.

Before the first of the three days I had placed red X's next to ideas and images that I found significant. The visitors/collaborators were invited to place blue X's next to things they found significant. Before the second day I strung red string between ideas and images which I felt were connected. On the second day the collaborators were invited to do the same with blue string. On the third day the collaborators were asked to whisper comments and reactions to me through ear holes in my cage.

I feel that Come In and Visit was successful both visually and also in serving the purpose for which it was conceived. It forced me to look at things I had been avoiding and glossing over in my art. Most of the work I have done since had part of it's origin in this work. It was very hard putting my private thoughts out there for the public to see, but this showed me how kind and respectful people can be. I no longer feel that I need to hide the darker side of me, which is very important because it is through the art making process that I am able to exist and work with that darkness.

Some posts on the walls:

-how does the shadow manifest itself in me?
-I think it’s been on the outside a lot
Obsessive/ possessive

-the little prince –I am visiting other planets when I try to see as others see!

-reflection, evolution, mutation, revolution –both revolving and revolting

-float, float, float, fall, then swoop and fly

-circle the target then shoot and hope nothing comes to get me

-sometimes I think it would be fun to be a lunatic

-I have a love of the broken. I close my eyes to the brokenness. I don't want to fix, I live with the broken until I break myself. Then I rescue myself, over and over. Is it selfish to use the broken in this way. Is it a way to moderate my own cycle of breaking. I would probably break with the whole –and make them break too. The same cycle happens in my art.

-I sometimes feel less evolved and have found that the best outlet for that part of my personality is in artwork. But that part of me rejects planning.

-Martina said she thought I like to place myself in situations of personal fear – I believe she is right- I think it goes back to my determination for self-rule

-finding my space- part of my claustrophobic tendencies and part of my art

-the physical of the idea

-destruction/ emergence

-I think my super ego is out to get me. I didn't think so before, but then I didn't know what my super ego was.

-This may explain my history of head injuries, spilt drinks, and sprained ankles. I think I have mistreated my ego horribly!

-remaking nature – relate to making the unnatural natural and the natural unnatural

-I like it when it seems like I am looking at my own vision, but through someone else. But I also get sad because they expressed it before me

-I miss painting for the joy of painting. It’s feeling wrecked right now. I feel like I need to explain and analyze it before starting, which stops it because the reasons why I do anything usually become clear as I paint- my clearest, freest, and happiest time

-I hurl myself into an idea, know exactly where I am going. Then it usually gets to a point where it’s all fucked up and needs to be rescued. Then I question it all- why, how, should I quit and start anew, it it worth continuing with the idea? –almost always in a way

-pressure/ fighting back

-blocks/ barriers/ fences/ snarls – constant – isolation

-why do I never show the open? I make obstacles for the eye to navigate, but to get to what?

-what is up with me and trees –I really do like them, but they have become animated in my imagination

-I am nicer than ever before. I think I maybe care less

-I miss color, why do I use muted colors now? I think it’s a part of a certain timidity based on uncertainty -of place and understanding
-color is joy and chaos and freedom and confidence – not confusion
-fewer colors and less to understand and control – but doesn’t work – I crave color – better to throw myself off the brink into?

-I like it when an artist forgets something and obviously goes back and sticks it in – supremacy of the idea

-I hear better when I draw- why? How?

-twist landscape artist- I picture inward in the landscape –about self in place. Landscape = place to me. A metaphorical landscape.

-my thoughts on the power of nature and my feeling of smallness and sometimes not welcome or out of place

-I feel that nature is resentful or patiently waiting for me to be gone – but not always here

-why do I always draw my fat little roundy people/ scary birds/ circles/ people with crazy anxious eyes?

-I find that I have a hard time maintaining concentration – my doodlies act as a filter
-I am distracting myself in a passive way in order to avoid further distraction

-I do have a recurring sense of melancholy in my work –a reflection of my years of depression and what came of that

-sometimes I feel like a pair of floating eyeballs

-I seem to have returned to my beginning.
-I seem to have returned to my beginning. I feel doomed to go in a circle forever
-I need to get spun out of the cycle and fly out into the unknown

-something like the Ophelia

-poor impulse control in my history – less so now, perhaps too much correction

-confronting things I hide- but I don’t feel this must be through my art

-what matters most –the process or the end piece – for me they are one, but nobody else really cares about my process unless it relates to them

-holes become figures

-it (I) fight to be free, but the struggle doesn’t show

-what do I not want to do?
-give in/ give up

-I often have an overwhelming sense of pressure

-I think my art relates to a personal mythology that centers around fear or sex or the one regarding the other

-I have always exposed myself in my art –it may seem vague but to me it’s quite obvious

-caught/ trapped/ blocked

-I think I see more in my own art than is actually there to see

-pushing back like looking toward an emptiness

-I make screens to push through to get free –about love and sex and relationships

-break through or shut out

-I think that self-rule is my motivating force. Usually makes me work extra hard so I cannot be caught

-want to be clear/ not empty

-holes with escape holes

-I like the physical nature of the senses –vibration, microscopic particles (smell has weight) –except vision, it has no physical

-keeping things out or trapped

-I like to think that my art is very personal, but maybe I am just inventing justifications

-I take about 1000 photos a week, I am able to not worry about the artistic integrity of them. Not because it doesn’t matter –more because I crave the immediacy .
-I am confident in my ability to take photos with which I am satisfied… I often wonder why I never relate to my photos as art
-I think I see the camera as such an extension of my brain –more a vision of my inquiry and obsession.
-brain: blue, blue, blue / camera: blue, blue, blue

-to break free of boundaries. Feel like a caged animal

-pressure and tension. A sense of waiting

Notes from inside the bell jar:

-I didn’t realize how much this would be about other people

-Me as one of my peoples

-I can feel people watching me

-Big Star always makes me think of . I always feel sad when I think of him. But I think that is destined not to be.

-Everything makes me feel colder. –the music, the people talking
-Cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold cold FUCK

-What the fuck was I thinking!

- I am going to write using the camera.

-I have oppressed him, I wonder if he is as bored as I am

-I really should get back to my experiments in synesthesia

-I think it’s weird that “I feel like floating eyeballs” was my most significant idea to me
-had the most connections

-I think I am being watched

-This is a fucking freaky feeling

-Is anyone still out there?

-I think today is harder, but I thought it would be easier

-I am so aware when people are near me
-This is such a strange feeling.

-I am definitely starting at all the noises. This is much more like being in the woods

-I swear a lot in my journal. I wonder if I could ever stop swearing. Even in writing

-Someone is right here. This keeps fucking freaking me out

-I am hearing things that make me sad again.

-I don’t know if this is supposed to affect me in this way

-Am I his Ophelia?

-Today was more and less intense

-I am being watched

-This is generating paranoia not ideas

-I’ve been in here too long

-This is making me realize that maybe I don’t enjoy the gaze after all

-It’s so cold and empty in here

-This has changed completely now

-I am only drawing dark today

-I think I resent being looked at but I made myself be like this

-I am eavesdropping. This is so strange. People are having personal conversations here- forgetting that I have ears.
-It’s sort of like if you don’t talk they think you cannot hear

-I am happier with them ignoring me, but I sort of miss the attention

-The girl with the crying flower eyes

-I think Jon has left me? Did he go somewhere else?
-I feel left to die

-Music like snakes

-This is a huge waste of time

-I will ignore the outside now. I will only listen to the music. I can’t do it. I only want to stop feeling like this. This song doesn’t help

-I’m starting to get sort of sleepy and a bit meditative

-I wonder if this is still working?

-I will draw all of my favorite things now. Just to keep me from freezing my ass off.
-small dogs, spaghetti, American cheese, black gel pens, the flowers in Mommy’s garden, gallows frame mines, PBR, the bright blinding sun, roadtrips in old cars, shows

-I wonder if people think I am sick or crazy
-Definitely obsessive and self-obsessed

-I think I am understanding more of what this is really about. I’m not sure that I fully know though

-I am prompted to ideas and reaction by people and music and my own brain. Mainly the music

–it’s clearer how much this means

-I am sort of forgetting that other people exist

-It’s so weird what’s going on

-Someone is close again. I can feel them circling.
-Fucking sharks-how odd, I am starting to respond in an animalistic manner

-I think that people think that I cannot react or do anything

-my cage is starting to feel smaller

-The dynamic changes according to who visits.

-I want to get out. I have impatience

-It’s so odd to not have this place be about me. But I like it too. It seems like at least it’s a place that people feel okay. Which is strange because it’s surrounded with me

-I Love, Love

-I should just loop this song over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over

-I didn’t realize that I now sense the presence of certain people
-This is generating personality specific reactions by me

-This is going on way too long

-I now understand what they mean by this being an endurance piece. But the only thing that bothers me is that I am freezing.
-And how hushed people are
-Is this that serious?
-I feel a bit pretentious
-I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings

-This would be horrific without my notebook

-This song reminds me of my lovely childhood. I love when I am instantaneously dragged back to my happy times

-But certain people definitely make me feel like I am in a cage.

-Certain people don’t make me feel like I’m in a cage. They make me feel more like I am just sitting in another room

-I am doing a performance for nobody
-It’s sort of nice
-Definitely the most relaxing this has been

- ’s lovely song is on. The one about . I wish that someone would feel that way about me

-Today I am learning to not rely upon others. Yet again. It’s something I just don’t understand. I would never just leave someone hanging like this

-This is the most comfortable I have been in here. Probably because I don’t feel so exposed

-The in-between is both too much and too little

-I remember that this process is about me

-The girl who cries string

-It’s best when I forget where I am at

-My drawings are so dark. Why do I always draw dark things.

GIRL: I think you are very brave to let people inside of your head

response to BOY: -I don’t know if I would agree with it if he means being critical in the work. By that I mean addressing things –I think it’s important to be honest in ones work. I find hiding ones opinion to be cowardly or fake. At least for me. I prefer to let my opinion be known –and if I were not to do this in my art as I do in my life wouldn’t it be a bit of a sham?

-I think some feel I should tone things down a bit, but I won’t and can’t.

-I am actually starting to like being in here. It’s a bit comforting.
-I am starting to think of this as more of a nest than a cage

-Get out of my head

-Is there a reason I am in a cage?

-I’m free!