Weeping Trees
15 minute performance for Microsoft Teams
Walk from studio space to dark room while reading text. Turn camera on in dark room and perform postures.
put images in chat
ask everyone to turn off cameras
start at entrance to judd st
[Turn off Wi-Fi so dont lose service half way thru]
\
I lean on you
i actually lean on you in the morning and i feel your chest
i see you in the morning in your vintage silks and long hair
what is the truth about grief
bristles of a beard
My over-the-ear headphones still irritate my fresh piercings. I stand in the red light, in the cold air, and I hunch my upper back, I extend both arms up and then out as far as i can while i also attempt to allow them to drape toward the floor. I stay like this, still and slightly moving, as my heart beats, as I breathe. It is not actually possible to be still. Like when you think about not thinking about anything. You notice all the movement, like your heart, like the blood moving thru your veins, that keeps going.
I change positions. I stretch up I turn my torso to one side as I reach high high but out like Im stretching up but then actually leaning to address something much shorter than me, forward and up with one arm, back and down with the other
Drop the film, feel for the scissors, avoid cutting the skin between your thumb and forefinger.
Maybe you absorb what the trees do, their postures by looking at the exposures for nearly a year.
I come out of the trance, aware of myself.
A weeping tree is a pruned varietal, so even though weepynes can occur in nature, most are cultivated. In 1730, the weeping willow was imported to england from aleppo, syria,
IMAGE 1
what I want to do is physicalize a feeling, bring it to the world, like the curtain virginia wolf describes that was crushed by the grieving woman.
Make it visible
Can you physicalize an emotion? physicalize the feeling a memory leaves you with? like the feeling of eating watery scrambled eggs off a styrofoam plate on a specific morning in April 2017, nearing 5 years ago.
the starting point isn’t the emotion — its a lived experience — the feeling that remains from that moment — is there a form for it?
Is a weeping tree an embodied form of an emotion.
is a word like flexibility described by the tree that can then serve as a model for the way for me to live
this year i have made with the word embodiment in mind
embodiment meaning different things in different contexts: it is matching your mind to your body, it is matching a form and an idea “She was portrayed in the papers as the embodiment of evil.” She's the embodiment of all our hopes.
i have embraced physical process as a way to incorporate my body in to the making. by thinking of the artwork as a body: it has a life span, it has faults, character, maybe it dies an early death, maybe it lives beyond me.
yes, a body is always incorporated in to the process of making, but since i have started to center this idea as part of my research, as a way to see if i learn anything more, the decisions are easier.
IMG 2
like this image is about doing an action to find a state of mind: putting a towel over your head in the middle of a stadium watching you -- the towel keeps the viewer out and it is the vehicle to an inner space. how to give this image which is a screenshot a body, in a way that reflects those things … in this case print it as a 4 color screen print.
the cmyk print requires precision, patience, delayed gratification. my wrists are sore for a week after the 4 days of work, from the tightening and untightening of the bars to register the screen
the image of the print portrays a person trying to focus.
The player went on to win the match but the outcome was irrelevant in the moment -- these prints are imperfect, the inks kept drying into the screen, no two prints are the same. this is not what print making is supposed to be. if i were making these the way an athlete practices, i would do them again. but bc this is what I'm left with, maybe I allow the process and what occurred within it to remain, allow the physical imperfections to remain … as a remnant of the work,
embodiment as a framework for my work, links the variety of the things i make: a tennis net, a set of etchings, a beaded curtain or set of prints — they take different forms, but they all demand my physical labor, inordinate amounts of time, a slowness, and i think a lot of the work in turn is also about some of these ideas: slowness, time, embodiment, repetition, labor, state of mind, being a body. my personal experience of being a body
10 push ups
1
2
2
2
3
4
5
5
6
7
8
9
9
hold it
10
i did gymnastics when i was a kid
and if one person wasn’t doing the pushups, everyone had to do the repetition again, until everyone all did it all the way
i remember trying to learn the back hand spring and i was scared to do it
instead of telling me not to worry and that i had surely received the proper training and to just go ahead and do it, my mom told me that if i was scared i should tell the coach that i didn’t have the confidence to do it.
i did that i said i dont have the confidence
and rather than tell me you can do it, dont worry, she said, where did you learn that word?
recently i have thought about this as a moment to return to. to look at and question this moment, because in fact i think i carried it along with me: if i am worried i cannot do it, I say this out loud, give voice to this concern, allow it to be real … but what if you dont? what if you tell yourself instead: yes actually you can do it, and you will.
i think this is “manifesting”, being the person you want to be, but also as an artist, by making, you manifest a certain way of thinking. just carry on. see what happens
i interviewed for a job when i first moved to new york for a restaurant called what happens when. they had a 9-month lease and each month the menu and decor changed according to a theme suggested by neighbors. i didn’t get the job but i often replay the title in my mind — i guess my question is what happens when you give an idea everything you can give it, rather than dismiss it,
CA Conrad writes somatic poetry - soma being from the body. And they say that it is a way to understand that everything they encounter is a way into a poem. Here is a sampling of some of the different ways they describe somatics:
Somatic is derived from the Greek, and it's our flesh. It's also the body's cavity, the place where our organs rest, live, and work.
(Soma)tics are how I live in my awareness.
This poetry truly is in everything underscoring Freud's statement, "Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."
A year later I began growing my WAR HAIR, but that first poem, which became seven poems, was subsequently published as (Soma)tic Midge. And I called it "midge" because a midge is a little bug, an insect, and it flies around, buzz buzz annoying. And I knew that THIS was merely the beginning of some THING and some WAY to SEE how poetry is everywhere. It was liberating to finally trust in the world this way.
lets start over
this is an artist talk
what is my work about?
giving a physical form to a feeling or experience
what do i want from my work?
i want to feel challenged by it: physically challenged by it, as in: the shlep of carrying the board from leylandss to the studio is part of the work. mentally challenged as in: how do i make this thing? emotionally challenged as in, if i am introverted, can i give myself tasks like interviewing people to bring myself out. challenged as in, if my heart beats faster, its a good sign.
what do i want my work to do?
for the curtain prints, for example, i want the viewers body to be implicated.
o Want the scale of my body to be implied, the scale of another body to be implied.
i basically just hope that my work functions the way any good art work does: communicates something to someone … a feeling, my experience of what it is to be alive, an idea. i want someone to stand in front of something i make an for a brief moment just be with it.
what am i scared of?
stopping
what do i want from you?
what do i want to say to you?
