I now reject facebook for journalistic blogging (ugh, terrible word, blogging). Surely, keeping a record can have more dignity than the daily wordbite.
So, now,
I'm beginning to seriously look at grad school, as rejection letters from residencies seem to rain down on me (2). I joined gradcafe, am requesting catalogues, and reading tarot cards (my superstitious behavior becoming even more pronounced).
So, I make photos and then paintings. Yeah, to my ego, this seems an overly simplified process when compared to the complex processes of others. I have yet to find the program or teacher who really delves into this dichotomy of image-based perception which so fascinates me (no actually, Kristin was my first mentor, I miss her being closer).
Reality, an instant, the time it takes to make a fucking "heroic" homage to a single second. These, like the truism of books as a unit of time (to write, to read, to process, to simply hold in the present, impossible to devour instantly). Why compare, why quantify so damn much, the painting/printmaking, the sculpture, the public process concentration! Why can't I find a program to aspire to! And I'll ve damned if I go somewhere that puts me 50,000$ in debt. Concentration camps happen folks.
Really, I just don't want to pick a future, and my cards say it's not going to be easy. They reflect my current mood, much like a parroting therapist. My paintings are nets for seconds digested, this is practice for saying, and a lie as soon as spoken!
So, silly again with juvenile angst and self-consciousness (our confidences seem, in retrospect, such diletantes), I troll for the little trail. Seriously, I hoped to travel the entire world, be more perfect, confident, worrldly. All these "labels" Alana said during one of our first conversations, and so what if these words project my "Neapolian" or "Chihuaha" complexes. Yes, I like to put things neatly into boxes, to file and measure. It makes things safer, more accessible. Visually, this comes in frames. In viewfinders. Stretched and labored over. 2-dimensional, as real-life overwhelms me. A frightened tiny hero; what a silly and typical stereotype.
Double-Jointed Sleeping.
Walking through the sundust days of rest, I spy a handmade cage swelling with grass still sweet, crinkling with memories of the field. The bars are lashed together with bright yellow unraveling thick ropes, and completely open in the front.
"Is this for viewing purposes?" we ask each other.
The shrinking grass pads the bottom for some odd creature that swings trapeze above it. Two of them, in fact, curled on hooks. Like to children's flash cards of caterpillars as anything I have ever seen. Little snakes, clumsy, compacted, cute even, but eyeless, which would eliminate any inkling of a cuddle, or even a quick fingerstroke. My small companion, big with the bravery of childhood refuses to even look and in her eyes closing stumbles, knocking the enclosure.
The curl (like a newborn fat finger releasing) goes jumping, changing, growing spider legs, thick and jointed, out of the open bars and onto the wet concrete floor. It skitters away with typical terrific speed into the freedom of the zoo viewing area. The day becomes tinted with magenta and we continue to the tigers.
While leaking with the orange-striped, pacing, eyelined rolling paws, you are reminded of your own lost patient passions. The day stays pinkish, sunny-yellow retreating as we sit arrested, grey in the knowledge of our complicity in the creation of the zoo.
