Escaping Noplace and Notime

New ideas abound in no specific direction. There is no escape. Maybe I will have to complete something.

‘“Escape” is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations. The search for the anchor in which I am engaged seems to indicate for me an avenue for escape, perhaps a metamorphosis, a resurrection. With a shudder I dismiss the thought that the prison is my mortal body and the escape that awakes me the separation of the soul, the beginning of a life beyond this earth.’ –yeah yeah it is another stinking quote from If on a winter’s night… it is a really good one for universal quotes for a lonely girl in the winter.

A loss of imagination would leave me stuck in whatever situation I land in, mediocre and without a wandering wondering desire to imagine things outside and away. It is so easy to slip into survivial mode in easy or hard times, but hopefully one can always imagine another world where space and time aren’t so long. You can’t live in an imaginary world if you cannot imagine it. You can get stuck in bleak grey and white reality if you aren’t careful. So no escapism, just a contract with Finland that my body is here but my brain can and will escape into the netherlands of the neverlands.In a more logistical direction:
I think it is a good idea to use this solo time, especially this empty space before I fill it up with a project, with copious amounts of email exchange. This has been decided to be ok with my inner management. The human relations department in me likes to write and to read the notes of others. I would like to initiate contact with all the army of office workers, homeless people, and perpetual inbox checkers in NY who I have failed to involve in a serious conversation in the last year of ridiculous kinetic energy. I might have to make a format for it so that I feel a good excuse to take it seriously, and maybe one or two others will as well. I am clearly not getting enough attention from the homeland.

I also think it would behoove me to write a new artist statement and to spend the time I usually wouldn’t to work it out, refine it, and to let it show me who is boss.

I would like to work on a video I have been thinking about where I use still photos I have taken in sequence and to weave them together with drawings and blank frames to make tiny narratives that read a little like film, but are so quick that they barely read. I am so mystified and wooed by other people’s teeny products. Products is a bad description. I don’t have a better one. But within the well presented but never featured life clippings of art and non-art friends alike, the little curatorial decisions like one blue set of eyelashes, a mix cd, a pile of books or dvds, a podcast, an unpublished email, a sticker on the notebook, tiny written notes in the journal, a bedroom wall display of jewelry, a good date, or infinite other perfect nothings are my favorite art things. They are fearless and honest, and they have to do directly with a person.

Anyway, I feel an insane amount of fear in showing my identity in my own art. The idea of authorship is a slippery slope for me. When it is intentional and featured as art in a place that advertises it as such it is especially daunting. The cursed responsibility that accompanies the presentation of one’s self as one’s art means that failure weighs ever so heavily on the ego when your friends don’t respond. Avoidance is of the utmost importance for we the weak of knees and other joints and arteries.

This little tiny gesture of packaging little observations or moments that I treasure so that others can like them too is a conscious step towards a braver, more flexible and experimental maker of junk. My life is in fact far more interesting than my art these days, and if I think of this as a mode of communication and a way of keeping people around me close to my experience, this work can take on a new functionality that my other work has never known.

Communication is a missing tooth in my art mouth. Never tried it, never wanted to. Now I don’t have much else since I don’t see people. Not even dead ones or gnomes or fairies (yet). The footage I have is of cars passing, highway fires, bulldozers, wild dogs running, horses standing, walking on the street, walking in the snow, walking on a sidewalk, walking in a forest, riding the bike, riding in a car in North Carolina, and things like this. What I hope is to combine them to find that the aesthetic and my perspective creates a strong enough link between all of them. I hope they tell a story or at least smell like something. That would be so nice.