Rigor! That\u2019s what I decide the curator called for during Tuesday’s marathon 3-hour studio visit including fortune reading. I spent the morning sweeping, nitpicking, meditating to support her fortune reading. \u00a0She walked amid the illuminated sculptures in the front studio room while I made tea. \u00a0We sat on the cubes looking at them, and she began a most incisive and inspiring crit with the question, ‘What\u2019s the wire?’ I told her it\u2019s line. \u00a0Leading me through problems about the body of the work, asking directly into the spongiest aspects, popping my clever idea bubbles, ‘why do artists think the conversation is happening somewhere else?’ she asked me, pinching her sinuses like she was bracing her mind for the bad idea she was helping me to discover.<\/p>\n
Rigor and tightening the work in every aspect<\/a> \u2013 its body, its relationship to the words around it, what I am asking of the viewer, how I am\u00a0presenting the ideas that keep me in the studio<\/a> day and night, and what is the work<\/a> to the room. \u00a0in the room.<\/p>\n She zeroed in on the weaknesses in valuable, concrete ways, not by naming or suggesting, but by turning my attention to where I let pass, where I quit too soon, where I’m kidding myself, to mismatches between concept and execution, to extraneous elements, and questions<\/a> the work is asking. \u00a0Luck-o-the-irish\u00a0\u00a0made it so she stepped in when my studio was the least like a museum installation as it has ever been, no walk-through environments, or address to the space, just 11 discrete illuminated sculptures hung prim and not talking to each other against the walls. \u00a0How are the objects answering, how are the objects any more optical than any other artwork, these are the tough-love questions, what\u2019s going on in the space on the way into the fortune? (I see SO much wire knotting)<\/p>\n Then she turned to face the weakest piece, the one with the fabric, work-whisperer, the work soaked into her empty, intrepid eyes, and she inquired of me into the blank corner, \u00a0so I could see the questions for myself.<\/p>\n She said to make part of my space a walk-through, to push it, make the closet room that expanding contracting vessel (Well, I<\/em> said it, but in the gleam of her<\/em> eye) and what is the word when unframed cloth panels hang blowing like that, and why and what, she asked, is the purpose of every body part of the pieces, and referencing architecture, since I insisted on it, falling into my introduction like a cold water cliff dare, into Vitruvius, and I need a PATH to presenting the work.<\/p>\n She makes herself empty and that makes it easy to see what I am presenting to her. \u00a0Instantly I envisioned the atoned, demonstrative works that respond to my specific inquiries. \u00a0and interactivity, how can the environment be interactive… \u00a0beginning with the part about deep assumptions, and re-thinking them, then the panels which aren\u2019t called that, suggest a pathway, I tell her. \u00a0W wants to see the path difficult, wants to see the path have to make you crawl, but I have a better idea, using shadows, let me make a path that only looks<\/em> difficult, and is in fact a walk through shadows.<\/p>\n and optics, she cited olafur and how he runs a near lab of tinkering and unquiry<\/a>, well, well…? it could get there, she said, and I do see a whole in service to the madeness of the art, the body of my work, and the presentation of it, and she\u2019s right, I\u2019m not there yet, but I can see it from here, and she spent 3 hours talking about it. She made way through my thoughts so I could see for myself, when the agreement had been I would show it to her, as far as a fortune telling is a showing.\u00a0\u00a0I could have taken her hand a little more, I cold water cliff dove her into the fortune, I could have walked her in.<\/p>\n to craft the journey, the experience of the viewer, the visitor<\/a>, to make it into something \u2013 here\u2019s how you enter, here\u2019s what is offered, it\u2019s an instantiating \u00a0installation about perception, a walk-through conversation with a fortune telling core. How it all fits together. Everything in the room at work, like Vonnegut\u2019s Don\u2019t Waste Their Time, every word adds value. \u00a0Argh, the wrenching feeling of seeing something I haven\u2019t done yet.<\/p>\n I experienced it as lifting a veil<\/a> from the work easy and whole. and just like the rest of the practice, I’ll begin with the first line, and fill in the aspects with details and attributes and talk talk talk, in the repeating universal pattern of the parts not predicting the whole.<\/p>\n I say three times, The work satisfies my<\/strong> inquiries and is whole all inside the studio<\/em>, the double edged maker\u2019s mantra that only works when you do. \u00a0She suggested a regularly scheduled fortune telling time, fridays after work, or monthly on the date, something regular,<\/a>\u00a0as the installation evolves.<\/p>\n I\u00a0can\u2019t believe what got brought, a shift in perspective and awareness, too, of how much worker I have to hard, how much more uninterrupted focus is necessary to pull off what I envision. Or, maybe I\u2019ll be surprised, maybe I won\u2019t be living in the iron age, but in the shadow age. What percentage of the work is the shadows and projections, she asked? 100? 50? 0?<\/a><\/p>\n and how the grasshopper<\/a>, this time the live insect, last time the shadow<\/a>,<\/p>\n sleeves up, it’s not like I ain\u2019t got work<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rigor! That\u2019s what I decide the curator called for during Tuesday’s marathon 3-hour studio visit including fortune reading. I spent the morning sweeping, nitpicking, meditating to support her fortune reading. \u00a0She walked amid the illuminated sculptures in the front studio room while I made tea. \u00a0We sat on the cubes looking at them, and she … Continue reading down the rabbit hole<\/span>