home and away again

Last night I returned from an epic month away in Florida, and this morning I depart for Christmas at Lake Tahoe with my brother and family. We will return to Vermont, to visit the wonderful Potters and see Grace's New Years' Concert!  I have decided to take this leg of the trip without my ailing and aged computer, and am excited in anticipation of the laptop liberation.

However, before I go, George sent me some screen shots of one scene from our Key West video. It is still in its roughest, most primitive stages, but I really think we might have something wonderful there. 

Here I am at Mallory Square, my green screen-ed shroud replaced by phosphorescent jellyfish we shot at the aquarium. It's much better in motion, of course, so this will only serve as a little teaser.

hemingway garden hello

Mallory Square

More of what we are working on in Key West...

things we are working on

so, this and constellations and centaurs and bulls and beaches and sunsets.

#263 From Key West

George and I are here in Key West, and are blessed with mixed weather. Blessed because how else would we get in the work-zone here in Paradise if there weren't some grey days. Our tiny dipping pool in our garden, the French doors that open onto that garden, and making watercolors on the multicolored quilt on our Murphy bed are helping our ideas to take shape. They are ideas about wildness, portals, stars, silly and serious magic, and the unknown.

ART BASEL MIAMI

Reflections on a freaky week:

•  John Baldessari, and basically no other artists present (sorry, Justin, I love you, but you don't count.)
• Strange lowbrow preview at the big boys' fair. It was fun to get dressed up and go, but cash bars? big lines? not much wine? Lame.  
• Great pie chart paintings in the back booth at Taxter and Spengemann from Andrew Kuo. (Is this my favorite gallery?)
• Lots of art about books (sculptures, drawings, watercolors and photos)-this could be a good sign? Are the artists reading again? Or is it: The art world equivalent/double for rich people who buy books just for show? Books in bulk to fill their "library?" because their McMansion came with a "library?" Fake books which are really just hollowed out secret hiding safes for jewelry? Art for the kind of people who use their book cases so infrequently that they hang art from shelves, blocking access?
• Lots of very "saleable" art: Paintings on canvas, dude.
• Lots of collages and altered photos and drawings that were re-printed on canvas or color laser paper, thereby creating instant simulacra and creating a highly polished wall piece (no muss no fuss)
• Endless lines, useless vip passes, angry rich girls in RTW high fashion fighting and pushing each other on the stairs outside the Delano for the Interview party.
• Pitch-perfect Deuce Bar, meeting place for friends!!! Awesome tunes. Best bartender in town.
• Amazing delicious cheap sandwiches at the sandwicherie, complete with mischevious, elfin  French sandwich boy, across from the Deuce.
• Lame mermaid and winged fairy at the Aqua Fair, but a terrific showing by Nudashank Gallery.
• No internet at NADA, which was otherwise a pretty great fair run by the great Heather Hubbs
• The utter farce which was "The Island"...all I got was a tote bag and some Cafe Bustelo.
• Jeffrey Deitch wandering about in a pale-Miami-pink suit.
• The awesome funny guy in the pushy taxi line at the Delano, who finally told his uptight boyfriend that he wasn't the "taxi police" and when someone asked his little dogs' name, he replied "Taxi!" without missing a beat.
• Embarrassing corporate sponsorship and expensive Nobu catering at the show-off-y Rubell collection, which admittedly did have some gorgeous Matthew Day Jackson wall pieces.
• Lovely, gracious presentation at the De La Cruz Collection, this weeks' winner by a landslide. A breathtaking top floor pairing Jim Hodges with Felix Gonzales-Torres, and an unparalleled back room presentation of Ana Mendieta. Also big props to the adorable 14-yr-old Tony Alva look-alike docent, the generous descriptions of work on each floor, and the gratis healing coffee and cookies in the garden.
• Kembra Pfhaler on the beach in a rolled-up sweatsuit. 
• Marc Horowitz writing erotic short stories with his bemused gallerist at his CreativeTime/Scope booth. So great.
• Cafe con leche from the storefront next to the Deauville Hotel.
• Shamelessly avoiding the bill at the $18 crappy Continental Buffet at the Deauville.
• Scary fight at German-hosted dance party at Rokbar or Funbar, I can't remember which. The bouncer split a guys' head open and they just left him there. There was blood all over the stairs, with a single paper towel left to soak some of it up. It was almost a really good dance party until that happened.
• The Horse-Drawn Hummer
  

Colt State Park

all work and no play

the fly

the grotto, in process

lara the acrobat

bundled up for street direction

the new week in screenshots

name that tune

the week in screenshots

I am working at Bergdorf during the day, encrusting and bejeweling, and doing all manner of moonlighting jobs until the wee hours at night when I  get home. It's all work and no play for this girl right now, but I occasionally look at the internet to cheer me up. Here's the week in review, from high to low and in-between (as usual):

Ira Glass putting a medal around Terry Gross' neck at some sort
of Journalism & English Letters Awards Ceremony or Other. 
He's so tall, she's so short, they're so geeky, it's too perfect. Love it.

Amy Sedaris being swallowed by her dress on Letterman.
This is an old clip. She is the best.

George finally has internet in the poolhouse. Skype rules.

The Real Housewives of SNL Reunion Show, on Hulu

Le Voyage Dans La Lune, the seminal French film from 1902.

Weekly Review

Dear Natalie,
The days are just flying by, and are packed so tight. I've been working a six-day week, seeing as many old friends as possible, running errands, working on collages, planning for a move, and making a Halloween costume. Having dinner with you and Danny was a real highlight for me. I am so sorry not to make it to your party tonight, but I am swamped with projects and need to buckle down before I start it all up again tomorrow. Without giving too much away, here's a little bit of what the week looked like:

 

Love, Shorty

what t he wha the ???

Any Old Wednesday

A Great Week Already

Totally Awesome Weekend

A re-counting of one of the best weekends in recent memory,
(even though I was totally sick and coughing non-stop)
where I :

1. got a brand-new iPhone, and am already addicted.
2. got a very relaxing pink pedicure, and no longer have busted toes.
3. had a very successful curatorial meeting with a man from Maine.
4. had champagne and my dad's homemade chowder
5. had a studio visit and hang time with the excellent James Foster.
6. enjoyed an old-school style evening of Schlitz at the Red Fez
7. watched the first Harry Potter movie in bed, on the projector.
8. was introduced to an original sandwich "The Weekender."

9. learned to ride a moped, and had so much fun I felt like a seven-year old. I was whooping it up through a church parking lot and down the beach road. I had an enormous goofy smile on my face for about an hour.

10. immediately proceeded to go on a long bike ride along the water with my honey, on my new bike. We found a beach shack at the end of the bike path where we could have stuffed clams while sitting on a bench.

goodnight, moon-food

back in nyc

It's good to be back. the house looks smashing, the cat smashed a glass, and I hope to be smashed myself-perhaps later tonight. New York is the same and different, and was waiting for me. I am moving in my old patterns, from home through filth to the divine, and back again.

Miss You Already

These two people are both reluctantly in need of a haircut,
and also do not like to be apart.

1st Order of Business

Many moons ago, Dieter Roth came and turned things upside down at RISD. While I recognize that he was unabashedly radical, sometimes careless, and somewhat badly-behaved, I have since quite fallen in love. It happened at the show at PS.1 years ago, walking into the room where an annotated version of Gartenskulptur was on view. I'm sure many will see this show of work-table-boards-cum-bas-relief-sculptures as a secondary exhibition, but I can't wait.

Dieter Roth at the NYT

Dieter Roth Show at Hauser & Wirth

Warren Beach Walks

Here on my second to last day in Rhode Island, Arlo and I went on an exuberant, damp stroll. We tromped through muck and puddles on the beach paths through the marsh and out to the beach.

There was a Great Blue Heron, soaring over us in simultaneously graceful and awkward flight. It was like a big, blue, feathered dinosaur, all angles and lavender-pewter colored in the gray sky. The poison ivy, rampant and threatening all summer, has turned a solid dark satin purple, and stands out plainly in the reeds. A murder of crows landed on a dead tree next to us, and began chattering, in their clattering and mechanical way. Their voices carried over the marsh, sounding like bicycles constantly in the midst of changing gears. There was a bleached crab shell, and there were whelks filled with barnacles. There was a very small pile of small gray feathers where some small bird had met it's fate.

application season at RISCA

A sample page from absolutely the worst online grant application EVER.

Practicing

Here's a new artists' statement I'm working on. It took shape as I was running the dog along the water this afternoon. Writing an accurate and succinct statement is so difficult. I have so much to say, yet I want the work to speak for itself. Here goes version one:

"Three themes continue to emerge and overlap in my practice: the artist at play in the studio, the fanstastical nature of the carnivalesque, and an investigation of the supernatural. At best, the resulting work creates an uncanny and whimsical universe all its own."

The imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place

Last night I was driving home from Pawtucket to my parents' house in Warren, when Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" came on the radio. Mr. Keillor read a quote from the poet Eavan Boland, to celebrate her birthday. I was struck by the piercing way she describes the division between her life and her work. Something there rang true.

"I'm a feminist. I'm not a feminist poet. I've said somewhere else that I think feminism has real power and authority as an ethic, but none at all as an aesthetic. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends. I think the imagination is an ambiguous and untidy place, and its frontiers are not accessible to the logic of feminism for that reason."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/09/24

(for Kat)