Zinnias & Louise Bourgeois

Hello there friends,

Two square feet of my living room has been quite the source of inspiration the past few days. At the end of the couch, atop a small wooden table is a large yellow pitcher full of zinnias, just next to my new "LB" book full of images by the amazing Louise Bourgeois. Not to mention, the cover of the LB book is the prettiest shade of pale blue and it's a striking contrast to the fiery orange, plum, and scarlet of the zinnia blooms.

With a very busy week ahead, I can already imagine I'll want to crawl back into this space: nestled quietly at the end of the old blue couch, zinnias perched by the armrest, Louise Bourgeois images to pour through, while a stash of thread, pencils, and film wait very nearby as the kettle starts to purr and I rise to fix another cup of tea. Sigh! Saturday, you are going to be quite the temptress amidst a busy week.

"LB" is a delight. I'm particularly interested in the fabric drawings, fabric books, and works with text. Makes me swoon.

The zinnias are intoxicating! What we didn't know, was that they were also carrying several of the tiniest snails I've ever seen.

I tried to save them, coaxed them to one broken zinnia blossom, waited until the temperatures cooled and moved them to the backyard. I hope they make it through the heat.

I *love* this drawing by Bourgeois. The blue ticking stripe against the brighter blue stripe is breathtaking. I might try some of my own.

And I love this shape she created in another fabric drawing. I loved it so much that I incorporated it into a collage. Look under the embroidery, over the chair on the left, you'll see the LB swirl with the word "shine".

In progress: inspired by the pink zinnias, the cool blue cover of the book, LB's thread swirls, and my daydream corner of the living room.

Detail of the new collage. It reads, "My mother taught me to sew/ shine/ I believe in love/ too."

Even as the zinnias begin to fade, they are still a welcome surprise each time I enter the room. It's like the air circulates around them more freely, perhaps remembering the sunlight and soil, not just adding color and texture, but bringing memory of light and earth too.
xoxo, k.

My Review of Portland's Time Based Art Festival

(PICA's TBA festival #10: mostly in the rain. )

(Installation by Storm Tharp: view 1.)

(Storm Tharp, view 2.)

(Storm Tharp, view 3.)

(The legendary Portland view, base of the Burnside Bridge.)

(A trip to Portland's local coffee haven, Stumptown.)

(The perfect brunch at Bijou Cafe. Yum!)

(Another trip to Stumptown. We just had to.)

(One afternoon we managed to take a nap between shows.
Otherwise, we ran around ragged in all that rain.)

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We took a long weekend and headed to Portland, OR for four days of total art immersion in the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's 10th annual Time Based Art Festival (TBA10). As many of you know, my husband is a designer & director for performance & dance and he's had his eyes on the TBA festival for years now. So, we decided this year was the year and we made the trek north to the crafty oasis of Portland. (My gosh, that city is so darn cute.) Luckily, we also took a few hours here and there for coffee breaks, meals, window browsing, and long walks across the city.

The festival was amazing! I was prepared to be totally saturated in edgy performance, film, and dance but I wasn't really prepared for the intensity of the work or for the way my heart and head would threaten to explode after seeing several shows each day. I'd have to write several blog posts to fairly cover all the work that was meaningful, powerful, or knock-my-socks off professional, so instead I'll just expand on my favorites. (For just a few minutes, let's pretend I was there to review my favorite shows as an art critic. Eh hem.)

Let's start with Storm Tharp's "High House". Wow! (See photos 2-4 above.) I've long been interested in seeing how artists combine various mediums to complete an installation, but this was one of my favorites for so many things including the careful combination of mixed media: illustration, objects, plants, photographs, video, painting, and various ephemera. I think the beginning of his artist statement sums it up perfectly, "The placement of things/ The breeze from an open window/ A clear day/ A still life/ The re-assurance of what is joyful." I want to write the last line across my forehead, "The reassurance of what is joyful". Wow, heartache in the very best way.

However, this joyful sentiment was in the minority at the TBA festival. That's not to say it didn't exist, that's just to say that a prevailing angst was much more palpable than a promise of joy. The themes of the work seemed instead to tend towards irony, satire, cleverness, boldness, anger, and anxiety. Of course, there is a place in art for all of these things. And of course, there were several shows that also brought tenderness, levity, wit, beauty, and humor:

1. John Jasperse Company's incredible "Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, & Flat Out Lies", was so full of wonder and strangeness and beauty and surprise that my husband and I started to compare everything else to this careful balance of feeling/ thinking. It was truly and utterly inspiring.
   
2. I'd long wanted to see the Nature Theater of Oklahoma and their clever interpretation of "Romeo & Juliet" had the audience roaring with laughter through the entire first half.
   
3. The Wooster Group shared a mind-bending 360 degree film installation "There is Still Time..Brother" where the view was actually controlled by one chair in the center of the room and the other viewer's were at that one viewer's mercy. (I know, it's complicated.)
   
4. I keep thinking about the delicate, yet arresting, life-sized piano print in the installation "Children of the Sunshine" by Jessica Jackson Hutchins and it was even more meaningful that the original piano was in the room.
   
5. I loved the bright, cheerful, hanging soft sculptures at the Blanket Project Space by Danielle Kelly though I didn't get to see the corresponding dance.
   
6. "The People's Biennial" still has me thinking about inclusion and which artists are included in international art shows and which artists aren't and, sadly, knowing this is somewhat based on geography, culture, and education.
   
7. Lastly, I adored "Hard Edge, Hard Work" films by Maya Deren and Kate Gilmore, Deren's historic work paired gorgeously against Gilmore's contemporary films. (If you haven't seen Gilmore's films, watch this one!)
   

So...what's my summary? Well, It's taken me years to build my confidence as an artist and to trust my instinct for what I like and what I don't like and when I'm on the other side of the canvas, camera, page, or stage I try to employ the same instincts as I go. I've learned to allow myself to scan the work that doesn't really grip me and trust that there will be other work that will bore itself under my skin, quicken my heart rate, shorten my breath, and make me stand there gazing powerless for quite a long time. Luckily, this festival had a number of pieces that quickened my heart rate and kept me gazing. xoxo, k.

Red, Brown, & Gray and Other People's Art.

Finally, I finished this adaptation of Natalie Chanin's Rose Shawl. I took the pattern from the Alabama Stitch Book and substituted the rose stencil for my trusty barn swallow stencil and then added a few brown leaves. I've been cozying up with this shawl at the end of our chilly San Francisco days and I just love the weight of the double t-shirt layers (the front panels are backed with matching panels) and find it ideal for that needed autumn warmth. It's also super satisfying to wrap up in so much red hand stitching after months of working little by little.

I took a few photos to show you the finished results. Now I'm wondering if I have it in me to commit to another shawl for a friend. I can't seem to commit to another color scheme and would want them to be unique. Do you have suggestion for a 3-color shawl like this one? (The main color is gray, the leaves are brown, the birds are red, and all fabric is "upcycled" from thrift store t-shirts.) Color combination advice is very much welcome-- I'm stuck in red, brown and gray.






As I was leafing through my photos I started to notice the other photos that also keep with this favorite of gray/ red, or brown/ red, or red/ brown/ gray combination. The more I looked, the more I giggled at my own fascination with this palette. I was kind of amazed that I could find this palette in our food, our clothes, and even our landscape too! I suppose every color combination is waiting for us to notice, we just have to hone our color-noticing skills to see it. Here's a mini sample of my red, brown, and gray photos from the digital archives.





Now that The Dresses/ Objects Project finished this summer, I'm feeling a bit of waffling and waivering in my studio life. Certainly I did other shows and wrote other poems and took a zillion other photographs over the three year period, but having that larger project in my creative background made it easy to find direction when I was waffling between smaller deadlines. As I sway to and fro this month trying to enjoy the post-show tilt before fully committing to the next big thing, I thought I'd point to a bit of the work around me that I've been attending around town. Here's my short list of August & September, before and after my trip to NY.

Short list:

1. Spin by my sweet friend Mati McDonough and her co-conspirator, Jennifer Judd-McGee at the always lovely Rare Device co-owned by the talented, Lisa Congdon.
2. A benefit for the poetry reading series The New Reading Series at 21 Grand, complete with some of my favorite poets in town.
3. A new performance by local theater wiz, mugwumpin, this time focused on our belongings and the psyche of possessions.
4. The Intersection for the Arts and Recology exhibition, Art at the Dump, where they showed highlights from 20 years of the *amazing* artist-in-residency program at the San Francisco dump. Such an inspiring show.
5. Most recently, the film screening of Sarah Klein's Stop & Go Rides Again where Klein's animation totally made me swoon.

It seems I won't get grounded quite yet as the mister and I are shoving off to Portland, OR for a four-day weekend soon. He's going to the PICA festival for work and I'm tagging along for a few days of fun. Seems like a good excuse to stay in a downtown hotel, cart my manuscript around to cafes for editing, and join my mister for a handful of performances by night. My best friend once told me, "But this is what you do. You ruminate between projects until you're ready to fully commit to the next one. Then once you've committed, you don't look back again". Perhaps she's right, wise friend. xoxo, k.

I Heart New York.

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Hello friends,

We have returned from our two-week trip to NY. With one extra week to readjust to our usual schedules (returning to the office & studio, attacking the laundry heap, assembling some groceries, and reminding our little garden that we do still love it very much) I think we are just about back to normal now. Well, as normal as normal gets around here, you know?

Our trip was packed with visits to family and friends. We met our newest family member at just 13 days old (hello, newest nephew you), we visited parents on all sides and ends of NY state, we attended a gorgeous (so gorgeous) wedding in the Catskill mountains, we dipped in and out of Brooklyn for just 36 hours of 90 degree heat, and we spent an entire week helping my dear mama heal from a recent knee surgery (she is plugging away like the champion that she is, thank goodness). Even two weeks was somehow too short to see all of our friends and beloveds in NY but it was a good start, at least.

The time away from the day-to-day proved to be meaningful, reflective, and important, as always. I found myself staring out the car window thinking about final edits to my poetry manuscript, reflecting with new insights to the recent Dresses/ Objects Project, and the whispers of new art dreams started making themselves heard. So while vacation wasn't quite long enough, it was also just long enough to feel like I stepped away and came right back again. And it's good to be back because, honestly, I missed you. xoxo, k.