New Experiences, New Material
This photo represents one of the first bright spots in my new life as a disabled person (with ME/CFS). Last weekend was the first time in nearly five months I’ve been really able to move around outside the house, thanks to finally getting a power chair that supports my neck and torso. We went to Disneyland for my daughter’s birthday wish, and we did it to the nines.
I’ve been working on the next two installations (for the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles), with the assistance of friends. I know I will need to hire assistants for new projects, but I’m still feeling freshly vulnerable in this state and I need to adjust. Also, while I love inviting strangers into certain phases of my process, I’m very picky about who I let into other parts of my process. Thankfully I have amazing people around me.
With my current condition, half the people get better within two years, and most of the rest never do. I made the mistake of waiting a year for my back to get better nine years ago, and until my muscles stopped working (and compressing my spinal nerve), it never did. I am thankful to be out of that level of constant pain, though I know I would trade back the pain for mobility in a heartbeat.
So… I am not wasting time now. My art is moving on, and I have a fire under me to make new work about this experience. I am very aware that disabled or not, I am very fortunate. I have good insurance, my husband’s job supports us, freeing me to do my art without the constraints of whether it will sell or needing another job to support it. We have enough money that my condition is not bankrupting us and I was able to buy the expensive chair that allows me to. I have supportive friends, an education, the tools to self-advocate, and so much more. But this has thrown into relief how if this is so hard for me, how much harder it must be for most people.
After my recent experience of traveling with a wheelchair, the systemic lack of consideration and ability to do simple things like take a cab with any reliability, get on a plane you were assured you could take your chair on, or arrive with that all-important chair in one piece have given me fire to push for awareness.
I knew I had been thinking about a piece on Access for a while, but I didn’t realize it had been this long! June 2013! Usually with something that scale and cost it really helps me to know it will have a space to show first, but I don’t care anymore. I will build it, and I will find it places to show. As soon as the next two installations are wrapped, this is my next project. I have been thinking about it on and off this whole time, and developing it, but now I have new first hand experience of being confined to home and wheelchair to add.
All that said, this new piece isn’t only about disabled access, it’s about all kinds of invisible access- financial, educational, social, racial, cultural, linguistic, etc. It is about making people aware of what they can do without even having to think about it, and where others are barring and struggling to get in.
Natural Dyeing for Sukkah Project
I’ve been invited to inhabit the Sukkah at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco) on October 8th for one day of the holiday of Sukkot. They invited six artists to each take a day to create an open studio or installation project inside the frame of the Sukkah. I decided to take the opportunity to do a new Participatory Installation piece within that frame entitled Refuge of Leaves.
Process
These are photos of the dyeing process for this new project. These are the first three batches, using pomegranate dye, rhubarb dye and artichoke dye. Each dye changes depending on if I scour the paper first, or if I add a mordant, or if I add iron. I did every combination on four kinds of paper to get a wider variety.
As I’m going, I allow the paper to show some marks- wrinkles, the mark of the iron, irregularities, etc. Showing their history, that they have been through something, a difficult process that may even damage them seemed like a perfect parallel to individuals seeking refuge, to people who had a story to tell.
About the Piece
Traditionally a Sukkah is a symbolic ritual space of refuge in the wilderness created for the holiday of Sukkot in the Jewish faith and tradition. “Refuge of Leaves” creates a Sukkah as a space for reflection where people from many backgrounds can reflect on and share their personal experiences of refuge from “wildernesses”, whether physical or metaphorical. As a Sukkah it symbolizes a liminal space of safety within the wilderness between worlds.
I followed traditional aspects of the Sukkah in using natural plant-based materials in the form of a variety of papers from different places and times, including papyrus as well as paper that could be put through a modern printer. These are for participants to write responses to their choice of prompts on the subject of refuge. I am hand-dyeing the papers with natural dyes to mimic the color range of plants one might build a traditional sukkah from. The dyeing processes also makes each piece of paper individual in color and texture, just like the people writing their responses.
The word “leaves” in the title functions in a number of ways. The individual leaves of paper in a larger book, the plant leaves that form a traditional Sukkah, and the nature of a this kind of refuge as a temporary shelter (not a home) that eventually requires one to leave. The structure is very literally a refuge made of leaves that each participant leaves behind.
As part of this project I will be there from 10AM until 4PM to discuss my work and facilitate the process. Please join me.
Overcoming Challenges
It has been a while. I have two pieces going up in museums shortly, and there will be another post for that, but I wanted to tell you what has happened to me recently.
For the past four months (since May 20th) I have been pretty much incapacitated. It started as suddenly feeling odd, tired and wrong at Maker Fair (while hydrated, fed, cooled and well slept). By the time I got to the car I was too weak and tired to move my arms without effort. There were many tests, and for over two months, no consensus on what was wrong. As a woman with a hard to diagnose medical problem (a group classically ignored and patronized by doctors), one doctor told me it must be psychosomatic (though thankfully he was only one out of six and the others did take me seriously). It turned out to be CFS/ME, a condition that many derided as not real. Thankfully Stanford finally developed a blood test that shows it is in fact a real thing and published just this July, and NIH has begun taking it seriously with research and funding the last two years.
So… even typing while lying in bed with my head propped has been difficult. Holding my head up has been a effort that left me sore like an intense workout (and as a competitive gymnast, 15-year martial artist and circus person I know what that feels like). I was not sleepy ever- my mind was fully awake, but my body could do almost nothing. It turns out this probably started over a year ago when I had a severe virus that sent me to the ER for _four_ bags of saline. They told me I was lucky to be alive, and I haven’t felt quite right since, with random bouts of weakness.
With this going on I have not been actively looking for shows and commissions, but when the Contemporary Jewish Museum asked me to do an installation I could not turn that down. I also kept with the other museum show at the San Jose Quilt and Textile Museum I was already signed up for because I knew I could do it with assistance. And I am. I will be there with my art even if I am in a wheelchair, and my art will not suffer for it.
For a while there was no sense of any time recovery might happen (if at all), but for nearly three weeks now I have been on an experimental antiviral treatment that seems to be helping, so fingers crossed. Not knowing was very hard, but today I am hopeful. If nothing else the experience gives me more empathy for those in similar situations. In good news, my back hasn’t been in pain every day for the first time in nearly nine years! Apparently the muscles are too tired to tense enough to squash the ruptured disk. Little victories.
Between the Lines (experience exchange)
Here are the pictures from Between the Lines (experience exchange) at College of the Redwoods. The piece has already moved from the library at the Eureka campus to another campus for the next two weeks. Sadly when I install a participatory work and then leave it I don’t get to see it fill up with responses, nor do I get to photograph later responses myself. Here are some of my images from Between the Lines (experience exchange) before I left.
To recap the action: Each participant responds to a personal question related to experiences in the book (Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates). They write their response on one of the 600 individually painted Pages. They then drop their response in the box and take someone else’s response to hang in the frame they feel it belongs in.
The images below are the subjects for the Frames. Each one is two sides of a major theme in Coates’ book. Because I was told that some of the students (and certainly the public) would not have yet read the book I had to make certain things differently than if they had. For example, one of the major themes of the book is “The Dream”, which might sound positive if you haven’t read the book, except in context it is an almost fictional, fenced-in privileged world built on oppression which other people are excluded from, the false promise of which which keeps people from addressing the systemic problems. Since people wouldn’t know that, I used “Privilege” instead. I also put quotations from the book around each major theme to contextualize it.
Here are some of the experiences which were exchanged…
Thoughts on Performance Art- my Ritual Space approach
So I have a lot of thoughts on performance art. Many of them come down to the idea that when you push it to the extremes (which is one of art’s natural habitats) it becomes about enacting extremes on the body. Extreme pain (so many), extreme pleasure (Seed Bed comes to mind), sex, nudity, privation, stillness, repetitive motion… so many extremes of what the body is and what it can take. An extension of that is the extremes of emotional exposure as seen in and through the body. There are many interesting, important approaches to this, but I feel like it is ground well covered, and not what I’m interested in for my own work.
My work isn’t about me or my body or extremes, it’s about creating a platform, structure, even a ritual space for others to engage with ideas I present: with each other, with themselves, and now, possibly with me.
Ritual space is something I have been interested in for as long as I can remember. It was central to my studies in my first undergrad in History of Religions. I took a wonderful anthropology-based (Turner-centric) course on Ritual, but I saw ritual in everything from folk tales to architecture and football games. Ritual space is throughout our secular and personal lives- the ritual space of a hot bath with candles, a classroom, a bar, a gallery or a public library. These spaces have forms, rules, and roles which set them apart from other spheres and spaces in our lives and they create feelings and thoughts unique to those spaces. In these spaces we are ourselves, and yet ourselves in a specific role or character to fit the space, observing certain rituals of that space (a 3rd grade teacher will be themselves at both a bar and their classroom, but different selves).
In #DadaTarot I am creating a ritual space for the action to happen in. That action requires a mediator with a certain level of otherness and authority. A slight change of clothing and demeanor is enough to create this. I am still very much being myself, but I have given myself certain rules (some of which I specifically gave myself permission to break). The rules, the clothing, demeanor and the simple object of a table give me the structure of a ritual space for the piece to work in. Given the nature of Dada I didn’t even allow myself anything fancy for the table- it is a ready-made cocktail table and the covering was the first plain black piece of fabric on the top of my fabric pile, not sewn or tidied in any way.
For this piece, the Role of Barker/carnival worker has to be there to set the interaction apart from other gallery interaction, but also to get the participants to enter in a questioning way. These roles are known for being untrustworthy. I want people to come to this project with skepticism. For this piece I would absolutely not dress in any kind of clothing associated with actual fortune-tellers with very good reason: my role does not actually involve doing the fortune-telling. That I leave to the participants. The barker’s role is to bring bystanders into the action and tell them what the rules of the game are, which is what I do.
Me in the role as artist would to explain the piece and how it fits into my work. In the case of me performing in this piece (as opposed to someone else performing the piece while I stand next to it as Artist) I mostly steer clear of this. If they press, I mostly answer as Barker, not artist as to the nature of the piece. That said, I am remaining myself. This performance allows for expressing what I want to say, holding back, and then allowing myself to be pressed for an opinion, even as I say I should not really be giving it… which is what good Barkers do too.
I suspect more of my work is heading in this direction. Most of the participatory works need some kind of “baby sitter” during interactions to explain the interactive process to people and to keep people (especially drunk people) from breaking them or walking away with parts of the art. Mostly the ritual space of Gallery with the role of Gallery assistants covers this. Now that I am looking this aspect of my work in the face and acknowledging that what I am creating with my installations is ritual space (inside the ritual space of gallery/museum/etc.), it logically follows to incorporate ritual roles for certain works.
*note: I am fully aware that not all performance art involves extremes, and there is a lot of performance art out there (physically extreme and not) which I admire. A lot of it is politically extreme and I applaud that too. This studio blog post is about my own artistic path.
#DadaTarot at SFAI Alumni Show
#DadaTarot at the SFAI alumni show (curator Katya Min of the Yerba Buena Center) was especially interesting because it was right after the election (November 13th and 14th). There were unsurprisingly a fair number of questions about the direction of the country. Notably a few of these were answered with a U-Turn sign. One question about whether “It was going to be okay” (post election) was answered by a picture of Trump making a rude gesture with his fingers, a plane and a car. Definitely an intense and rattled climate here in liberal San Francisco at an art school.
The gallery environment of the Diego was more open space with people coming into the gallery in a steady stream of singles and small groups for hours. The pace people approach a piece and how much they see of what other people do first really changes the dynamic. In this case people were greeting it almost on their own, or one group at a time. One of the best dynamics in this case was two strangers wanting to do the piece, but lacking a partner they knew. There were people who looked like they had little in common (age, clothing, etc.) who seemed deeply skeptical of each other, but in a couple cases embraced after doing the piece together and found they had ideas to offer each other. This was one of my hopes for the piece. Really, it has worked out to be everything I hoped for and more. While the records are interesting, the interaction itself is the core of the piece.
#DadaTaroT at Pata Dada for Citylights Dada Anniversary
#DadaTaroT was at Pataphysical Studios’ special exhibit on the ‘Pataphysics of Dada’ as part of Citylights Dada World Fair. Here are the participants from the Nov. 5th event.