I was 16- I wanted to be a painter an artist. I wanted to live in the city.
How we speak our dreams of youth and they come to be. 10 years later I live my dreams.
A voyeur never a participant.
Struggling.
Self realization.
I return.
or did i emerge.. I feel that we start out in life need to get lost try out different things and then return to who we really were after we find out that nothing can break you.
I am sitting here, writing the edits and expansion sections of my MFA thesis. It is supposed to be a chronological development and documentation of my work and its' influences to explain how you have gotten to where you currently are and the in-depth analysis of my proposal for my MFA exhibition.
I wrote my thesis 5 days after I had surgery under the influence of drugs, sleep and quiet self reflection I had during prior days.
My work in my mind was so clear under the influence in the post op room- fentanyl. ahh the beautiful drug if I could touch again while not in pain but just as controlled I would. The beautiful soft dream in which I was so clear. After surgery most people speak nonsense. In April 2002- I laid there crying feeling hopeless and utterly alone. With no one to love to care for me or hold me. In December 2004- I felt powerful and content and in control. Peaceful. And I laid there for 2 hours being injected 4 times with heavy narcotics thinking about my work. I want to make my work breath. UREKA! I had it. I left the post op room- I never explained how amazing the drug was. They give it to people after chemo and those in pain with bad cancer. They also use it after surgery. Its a man made narc :"Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid and is about 30 times more potent than parenteral morphine."
highly addictive. sometimes I think about the one time i got to use it about how peaceful everything was and want to return there.
The only way I explained to justin was his description of K.. I couldn’t move but i could think in this clean world that was just mine. I was completely separate from my body and the things going on around me.
Thus far, this text has not been about what I started to write rather my own longings for a moment of calm warmth radiating through my body.
I could easily be addicted to it.
and i can understand how people are.
I came here to sort out my brain and reflect on my thoughts about my work. And how really after 3 years of grad school I am doing what I went to school doing. It grew. I abandoned it. I left it. I tried not to make work that starred me. I tried to take someone’s words "all your art has you in it" and work with out me. WHY? I wasted my time, money, my ideas. Art work, is always about the artist. The artist's self, their role in society, their ideas, their body, their experiences it may be about the russian revolution but it is through THEIR eyes.
I am proud to be selfish, self obsessed, self driven, self made, and making art about me.
I am pleased with being a creator. A self obsessed strong woman. With ideas and concepts that are going to make me be on the lips of others. I never wanted fame. maybe i lie . All artists want to be known- in life or after death. We all make work from our souls, work we dont know what is the driving force behind it, images that we later realize were the feelings we have inside. And if I say it is art, I believe it is art. Marcel Duchamp influences me more behind the scenes than many others. A piece is never really complete until viewed by the spectator.
we all want our work to be seen. to be complete.
Work is never the same. To each person when they complete the piece in their viewing- they look at it differently. They see something I didn’t know was there but is. They see themselves in the work.
So not only am I creating selfish work you the viewer are seeing yourself relating and being selfish during the interaction.
human nature is a selfish place.
So in retrospect of thinking about the evolution of graduate school. I went in doing performance, a shadowed self realization of a glimpse of beauty of self. As J would put it "I still needed time to cook"
I met him at the time the chef would be opening the foil to baste the meat. I still needed to cook and then brown.
I feel that at this time, I am almost ready to come out of the oven. grad school was successful. i regret where i chose to attend but it still accomplished it. I only had to push myself.
these three years amount to my tear filled eyes typing this. Realizing, I am an adult woman. who has things to say and says them articulately. That my selfish work is leading me to where I need to be. And I should have never left the work I was beginning in 2002- although i know- I needed to.
In some way- I never did.
I worked with myself- I was alone, cold and distant in the world I was living in. Taking images of what surrounded me and framing them in moments assigned numbers to hang on the wall. A voyeur never a participant.
I made videos which changed my life both as inner self reflection and outsider perception. Partially about one thing but in reflection about myself. Struggling.
I was charged with self discovery and exploration of my sexuality. Ashamed of my own dirty feelings. Taking apart and building from pieces of myself, materials. Self realization.
paint-how i returned to you after all these years. I return.
you let me present myself in so many ways. how the images i was painting were feelings, representations of my own inner workings of my body.
how right now you are allowing me to develop humor in the dark idea of life as we can now be created. In a test tube. How my own worries as an adult and concerns I experience are actually connected to so many others. How I can laugh at it with some sick sense of humor reflecting on how society actually works. my ideas and problems are placed in the context of the greater world I am apart of. And I can look around and know I can express this selfish turmoil and concepts which can relate to everyone differently but do relate to the outer bigger less selfish world.
The less selfish world in the big picture is more selfishly driven by people constantly striving to change nature. Creating test tubes of embryos, removal of self parts changing everything. We as humans can alter ourselves, our insides, our bodies. We can change how others see us. but we can not change ourselves. we remain who were are changing our outsides to match our insides in some cases and in others changing the outside so others can complete us more easily.
do i think its wrong. in some cases yes.
do i think giving someone the opportunity to bring forth life when they can not on their own is wrong.
in some cases- yes.
are we as humans dabbling in playing god. yes.
is it wrong?
i don’t know.
in some way the work I am doing now. These small representations of ovaries and embryos for sale. It pokes fun at the bigger issue that we now buy everything. in this perfect man made society we can buy it all. yet, what are we buying? we buy the things we lack. if you have enough money you can buy the opportunity to create yourself- I am sure it is being done. if it isnt- buying a clone will eventually happen.
in some ways we already do. we buy the ability to conceive if we can not. how long until we can alter the embryos dna to make them what we want.
woman look at long lists of men’s attributes to make babies.
woman pay other woman to buy their eggs. their womb. their fertility.
will i be one of those woman?
part of me is doing this piece to be able to come to terms with these ideas i may have to come to grasp with one day. part of me is doing this performance and work to poke fun at how controlling our society is. how perfect we try and make it.
and part of me is making these obsessive pieces because i can make them, control them to only some limits and nature, takes the rest - with gravity, temperatures, chemical mixing, and happy accidents to create these tiny litter representations of eggs, embryos, ovaries. In some way, i am playing god in this make believe world i am going to portray which is a reflection of our current society.
and i will be playing the programmed sales girl with perfect representation of how casual we as a consumer society purchase our own perfection, health, bodies and minds.
society equates to a selfish perfectionist being in which we all try to remove all imperfections and happy accidents. controlling nature and playing god.
