Memory and fragmentation

Things remembered from certain places one has inhabited, can be re-imagined (fragmented) to transform the physical reality of the thing remembered – into an idea or ideas. The meaning of this fragmented and transformed reality, now becomes ambiguous. It allows for experimentation, opens new trajectories while still carrying traces of the original memory. The heaviness of nostalgia is made lighter.

 

Monster Drawing Rally, Outpost@Armory, June 1st

On Sunday, June 1st, I will be participating in the Monster Drawing Rally. You will have the opportunity to watch art being made and can purchase drawings for $75 each. Proceeds benefit Outpost @ Armory. Admission is $10 at the door.

My shift will be between 3 – 4 pm. Hope to see some of you there!
Monster Drawing Rally

 

Squaring the Circle, Llano del Rio project site visit

A preliminary visit to the site of the first socialist colony ever to be established in the United States. It was a beautiful drive from Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley desert – to our destination in Llano, California. The desert, both dead and alive at the same time, opened my eyes to how differently and beautifully, ‘life’ adapts and thrives in very diverse conditions.

The realization of any big project is dependent on the success of its smallest detail.

Drawing as ‘seeing’

Heavy floats

Formless forms

Distorted whole

Represented reality

Drawing as a way of seeing;

Realities questioned as objects rupture

Hidden and obvious details surface,

Forms transform, adaptation ensues

Endless possibilities and unfamiliar sources

Only to distance the specifics once more

Familiar forms, seeing transpires.

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“The body’s footing feels so secure that the mind naturally interprets the daily bobbing up and down of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars as motions entirely external to the Earth”

 

People….ought to remember that if there were as great a scarcity of soil, as of jewels or precious metals, there would not be a prince who would not spend a bushel of diamonds and rubies and a cartload of gold just to have enough earth to plant a jasmine in a little pot, or to sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow, and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant flowers, and fine fruit. It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water. Those who so greatly exalt in corruptibility, inalterability etc. are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. These individuals do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa’s head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or of diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. – Galileo

“Indeed we should accept misfortune not only in thanks, but in infinite gratitude to Providence, which by such means detaches us from an excessive love for Earthly things and elevates our minds to the celestial….” Galileo Galilei

Notes

Thinking of rail roads, subways/metros as drawing….

Anyone who has played a game of pictionary knows how drawing can act as the most basic element for visual communication. A whole idea, part of an idea or the form of a subject can easily be revealed through a set of lines that  interconnect or disconnect. Drawing can be a metaphor for all things basic, everything minute, everything trivial and overlooked but also what is vital in our understanding of art, culture and our individual lives and how they are all connected. Just as a network of transport will take us through the scenes and sites of a city; hiding things, revealing things, always leaving traces and memories, open to interpretation and always in the moment.

 

Strathmore Residency program – opens to public: July 16th, 2011

The residency program is now open to the public starting today July 16th. Weekend hours at Strathmore are different from regular working hours, in case you plan on visiting, please call ahead of time.

The opening for the show is on July 22nd from 7:00pm – 9:00pm, stop by and take a peek at the work! Some photos of the installation process below:

Residency mock up

Still have a few more drawings to finish, but nearing the end of making drawings for this particular installation for the residency. Above is an image where I have photoshoped the drawings into a photograph of the window panel that I will be installing my works on.

Contrapunctus XIV

“A melodic fragment, heard alone, makes a particular impression; but when the fragment is heard simultaneously with other melodic ideas, or combined in unexpected ways with itself (as in a canon or fugue), greater depths of affective meaning are revealed. Through development of a musical idea, the fragments undergo a working out into something musically greater than the sum of the parts, something conceptually more profound than a single pleasing melody.”

Duplication, deferring

A study on making multiples of an image by tracing. Each drawing is different from the other. Certain basic criteria are imposed on the process, such as materials: Black ink, blue transfer paper and watercolor paper.

The process reveals natural limits for the number of ways one thing can be duplicated, given the imposed criteria. The process begins with a deferred image from memory.Every tracing made out of this deferred image then, is further removed; differing in meaning and constitution.

Progress of work

The process of replicating an image from a photograph furthers my exploration of images as metaphors, symbols or signs. The act of tracing from a photograph exaggerates the idea of substitution or a “supplement” and a continuous transformation and adaptation in its ‘meaning’. The old grotto from the grounds of Strathmore, seems misplaced in a transformed function of Strathmore as a music, arts and education center. This de-contextualized object (grotto) is deconstructed by processes of tracing (supplementation), displacement (the dualities of outside and inside) and re-contextualization (the installation being site-specific).


Strathmore Residency

A quick first exploration of the grounds at Strathmore. The mansion has gone through a number of transformations, not just physically but in its functions as well. This is very interesting to me in how I think about the residency here – the adaptation and transformation, the additions and subtractions – to explore the nature of intervention and alteration.

Some of the ideas being considered either separately or to be combined:

  • Intervention, alteration and memory
  • Logic of signs and the impossibility of consistent meaning
  • Topology and homeomorphic formations

 

From a Railway Carriage

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Robert Louis Stevenson