Living With Endangered Languages in the Information Age show Opening next weekend!

The “Living With Endangered Languages in the Information Age” show at Root Division is opening on the 7th!  I will have my new mixed media sound installation Cultural Fabric Breathes Still there waiting for you.

Much thanks to curator Hanna Regev, the participants (who chose to remain anonymous), to technical collaborator Dan Garcia.

        Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10, 2015 – 6:00pm to 9:00pm

Exhibition Dates: Jan 7, 2015 to Jan 31, 2015

3rd Thursday Artist Panel Discussion: Thursday, January 15, 2015 – 5:00pm to 8:00pm

I hope to see you there!

Write Me for Art, installation at the Old Mint

Write Me for Art/Do you read me? (Disintermediation)

Write Me for Art/ Do you read me? (digital mediation)

Write Me for Art/ Do you read me? (digital mediation)

The envelope piece is…

Write Me for Art/Do you read me? (Disintermediation)

Mixed Media Participatory Installation: hand embroidery on cloth.

To create this piece I gave people (mostly strangers) around the country self-addressed stamped envelopes with personal questions inside and a description of the project, usually after a good conversation.

They were invited to write a short response in their own handwriting and send it back to me to become part of the project (also available to those following the artist online). The artist then hand embroidered every reply received by Jan 1, 2014, matching the color and handwriting as faithfully as possible.

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The tablet piece on the table is…

Write Me for Art/ Do you read me? (digital mediation)

Mixed Media Participatory Installation: machine embroidery, print on fabric, acrylic, weights.

This piece includes text from the companion piece Write Me for Art/Do you read me? (Disintermediation), but also text taken by the artist from online social media.

*For those of you who are unable to handle these, if you did you would notice that the ones that are machine-embroidered were heavy (about the weight of a phone or tablet, a little heavier).  Those objects corresponded to the text from the first piece (Disintermediation).  The others were printed rather than embroidered, were light and the text was taken from online social media.

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The piece in the background is Iteration #9 of Identity Tapestry.

Gala Night

The Gala fundraiser opening for SFAI’s graduate thesis show. 

This photo is right when things were closing down.  I liked the stillness and being  able to clearly see all three pieces without the crowd.  It was a really great night.  I love  seeing people interact with the work!

My work for this show included Identity Tapestry (iteration#9),  Write Me for Art/Do you read me? (Disintermediation), and Write Me for Art/ Do you read me? (digital mediation)

I poked my head out a little, but I haven’t seen the whole show yet.  I’m looking forward to a quiet viewing tomorrow.

only red and blue yarn there so far

also still empty

still empty at the end of the night

me in front of my work in the dress I designed.

I’m loving the way people have left stones on the shelf, the way it drapes

Mary Ma’s installation

Patricia Singer’s installation

Heather Jones’ work- I love the way this works with the wall and the space!

art cake!

another art cake!

Officially installed!

Done!  There is  more than this in the full installation (such as 40 more hand-embroidered messages), but this should give you an  idea.  Identity Tapestry is ready to go, the table is built, the tablets together and the envelopes hung.  All ready for visitors and participants.

Please join us at the Mint for the show this week! Details here:  http://www.sfai.edu/principal

Principal (SFAI’s MFA thesis exhibition)

 

For those of you who joined me for Open Studios it  was wonderful, and an extra thank you to those of you who contributed to the beginning of a new participatory piece.  I hope you can all join me for my thesis show!

PRINCIPAL: MFA Exhibition

Thursday, May 15 – Sunday, May 18, 2014

The Old Mint

88 5th Street at Mission

San Francisco, CA,

PUBLIC VIEWING HOURSThursday, May 15–Sunday, May 18 11 am–6 pm Visitors are invited to meander through clandestine bank vaults and decadent ballrooms to uncover site-specific and multi-dimensional displays of work.

PUBLIC OPENING RECEPTIONFriday, May 16 7–9 pm

Here is your map to my work!  There will be two stories full of incredible art.  I will be showing Write Me for Art (for those of you who have been following that piece) and a new iteration of Identity Tapestry.  If you are in the Bay Area and have wanted to try that piece out, now is  your  chance!

Write me for Art has become two integrated pieces which I will install together.  It came from the many people who sent me replies in the mail to personal questions, all of which I have embroidered and included.

Pulse Project

If you are wondering what you are looking at, it is my newest Interactive and Participatory piece and my first proper sound installation as shown at The LAB, SAn Francisco in the recent show Cubic (Sounds)2.

Visitors are invited to place a finger on the pulse sensor to have their pulse taken. This triggers the audio aspect of the piece: a story of a San Francisco Moment recorded from someone in San Francisco whose pulse matches theirs. The sound of the story is played by a the flask of Bay salt water using a vibrating piezo plate to convert it into a speaker.  The grey material is cotton cloth sculpted in a rough impression of San Francisco topography with a few major streets embroidered in red.

In the end the project worked and was well received.  I’m sorry to say that during most of the opening it was almost impossible to hear though.  Even when I made an exception for the opening and added a conventional speaker under the table to compete with the sound from the other sound installations in the echoing space it was too quiet once the room was full of talking people.  Still, for the rest of the show and at the beginning and end of the opening you could hear it and it ran beautifully.

This is a piece I would love to re-work and do again in a quieter space.  In a quiet space the flask of water speaks to you quietly, but audibly- intimately.

 

 

Collecting Stories

An interesting venture indeed.  So I’m determined to not just ask friends (easy), but it was clear early on that this was a much more difficult kind of participation than I’ve ever asked from people before.

I’ve been going around the city on my normal rounds- the yarn store, the playground with my daughter, the cafes, the hardware store, art supply store, etc. and collecting stories about “an SF moment” from people in and around those places for the sound piece City Pulse (San Francisco) going up in the LAB.  Thepiece involves collecting little San Francisco Moment stories from people in the city. I then take their pulse and

I left the story collection towards the end because I was more worried about the technical and sculptural aspects of the piece and I thought the participatory part would be easier.  No.

The microphone looked like a taser to some people- very threatening.  The pulse meter seems to be equally threatening- medical devices are just scary.  This is a huge barrier if handled badly.  I almost wan to crochet them little wooly jumpers to make them more approachable.  Something about fabric instantly disarms and comforts cold technical devices.  I started carrying both these and my extra batteries in a little transparent cloth bag and that actually seemed to help (transparent process, softer, easier to get to quickly, etc.).

In “Write Me for Art” it’s so approachable, so soft.  I generally give them to people after they’ve seen me embroidering for a few minutes.  Then I can explain the project to someone clearly interested already.  This one is so much less visual at this stage that it’s harder to get people to engage.  Getting participation becomes and art form in itself.

It’s funny, so far the stories seem to circle around the Haight, the Castro, and random naked men (even when I’m taking the stories in other places).  There is something about the Castro and the Haight that say SF more than anywhere else.

I’m excited about getting the piece all together and seeing it up and running.  This is so different from other work I’ve done in terms of materials, but very close to the heart of my work generally.

…and for tonight, more embroidering a landscape of San Francisco!

And for tonight… more

Cubic (sound)2 Opening Dec 5th

  I have my first sound piece in this show.  Storytelling in SF.  Come see… and listen.

There will be five performances, including one by Laetitia Sonami.

I will have an interactive piece in the show built on participation.

At the LAB.

machine text

Round three of the machine tests for “Write me for Art” has finally yielded some results I’m happy with!  More, I did some sample parts for covering/framing the machine embroidery to give it the commercial, generic, electronic device (+ voyeur?)  feel I’m after.  This half of the piece I’m now very pleased with and I feel like I can keep going from here knowing what I want to do.

Yesterday I was still really wrestling with how I wanted to install the hand-embroidered work.  I met with another fantastic lady and got some great feedback.  It’s funny how it’s rarely a case of someone offering a suggestion that I then take- never that I can remember.  It’s more that when certain people can’t connect with a piece or aren’t seeing what I want to pull off it tells me where I need to connect, lean, etc.  Sometimes it’s just explaining the piece to a new person and the way you need to explain it to them (as that person rather than some other person) helps concentrate what you’re really after and guides you to a better method.

In this case I knew I wanted people to be surrounded in the space by the handwritten ones.  I wanted them to have a presence like a crowd of people.  I wanted you to walk through them and encounter them, look them in the eye, look again, not see the writing until you found a new angle.  I’d been wrestling with how that would happen.  Now I think I found a way to do that.  The exact detail of how I physically attach the written part to the forms I want is still in the air, but I’m nearly there.  With fiber, every method has history and symbolism.  Just doing the most practical physical method may not be the way (though it could be).  I have to think of the connotations of different methods and their visual impacts.

Broad Strokes

*a continuation of the “Write Me for Art” participatory art piece.

I had a very productive talk this afternoon with an awesome lady in my studio today which led to me figuring out the broad strokes for the “Write Me for Art” installation!  I’m very pleased.  Sometimes no matter how many times you’ve asked yourself certain questions, the right person at the right time asking the same question can be the tipping point.  In this case the combination of her lecture on the Text/texture/material (fabric), the encounter, fetish, surface, intimacy… in conversation with structuralism and post-structuralism primed the studio visit perfectly.

Sometimes I need someone to suggest something that I know instantly and instinctively is Wrong for the piece.  When I step back and answer to myself why it is wrong it gives me a better idea of where my subconscious has been going and I can unpack it and name it better.  Then I know where I am going and why.

In this case one thing that had been a stumbling block was somehow thinking I had to keep the computer text and the hand embroidered text together.  I don’t.  I want to treat them totally differently and so it’s okay that they be physically removed from one another within the space.  It also makes people search a bit, make the connection of the identical responses themselves rather than having it spelled out.  They get to make the relationships.  I learned other things too.  None of which she suggested to me (even indirectly), but the conversation helped get me into a space where I could define things.

The part of this project that was hanging over my head and making me drag my feet a little is cleared.  There is plenty to work through still (and plenty of physical work to do), but the broad strokes are there now.