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Text of the page (random words):
u can only work on very small parts of the image at a time because only small parts will fit into the machine so you wind up collaging bits together like so i have to make each element of the lace individually then slowly stitch it all together this large lace piece wound up being 38 x 36 and i can only work on a piece about 8 x 8 on my machine at a time so there was a lot of piecing that happened ultimately it wind up being a process that combines the best of working by hand with the best of using a machine it s creative and one of a kind and truly handmade without being too crazy making what would have taken me 30 hours by hand takes me five or six hours by machine still a while and still a significant investment of time and attention but a huge difference and this piece which wound up to be quite large wound up taking about 60 hours all together i don t know how long it would have been had i been doing absolutely all of it without any assistance i honestly probably wouldn t have ever finished it this is what it looks like in the end and i m psyched i feel like a whole new door has opened and now i have the ability to really go further with this process than i could before i m already working and nearly done with my second piece permalink leave a comment lace making part one june 26 2014 at 7 05 pm uncategorized i have a small piece of handmade lace up in a group show at sargent s daughters right now i ve been playing with the process of needlelace for a few months now but this is the first piece i ve shown i had a bunch of people at the opening ask me how i made this work and i sort of struggled to explain the process so here s an attempt to explain it better by showing you a piece in progress i ll blog more as the piece develops so you can see the variety of effects you can get with needlelace first off i should mention that i m definitely doing experimental needlelace there are ways to do it so that your threads line up and make a grid if you think of something like fishnet stockings that s a very easy texture to get using this process but that s exactly what i m trying not to do in some cases i let grids emerge but i really want a texture that is more obsessive and more frenetic than that secondly everything i m doing in these projects comes down to making hundreds thousands of buttonhole stitches a buttonhole stitch is the easiest thing in the world to do if you imaging taking a length of string and taking the two ends and tying them together to make a knot that s essentially all it is just a tiny simple knot but the beauty of needlelace as is the case with so many fiber arts processes is that beyond just this very simple gesture that you do there are a million variables that come in and can change how a piece looks the color of the thread the thickness of the thread the material the thread is made out of how tight you pull it how many knots you make per stitch these are just some of the basic variations that can radically alter a piece ok let s start by looking at this piece i m making now this is the upper right hand corner of the work i need to divide the piece up into small chunks and work on them a bit at a time this isn t something necessarily inherent in the process but it s something i have to do to remain sane you start by doing a drawing on a piece of paper in this case this is an ultra simple landscape just a green hill and a white fluffy cloud in the back if you look at the green part you can see that the string is tacked to the paper this is done by poking holes through the paper and stitching it to the paper with just ordinary thread you tack it to the paper about every half inch or more if it s an intricate design this design is really easy so the tacks are spaced out a bit in this picture you can see that i ve started filling in the sky behind the hill here s a closeup if you look closely you can see what i m doing is starting in the upper right hand corner i m tying the thread to the top bar of the string that frames the image then i m extending that thread over diagonally to the right hand bar and tying a knot then i m working to the left taking the thread so that it extends to the top bar again but stopping along the way to knot it in the middle of the first loop i made oh dear does this make sense do this over and over and over and eventually you come up with this remember i m making a particular effort to not have a perfect grid which actually makes it trickier than if i was trying to make it perfect this is about 4 x 4 and took me easily four hours of work to do the sky isn t not even close to being done i want those stitches to get way more dense before then that s for tomorrow i ll update when i have more to show oh and the biggest question from the opening last night how do you have the patience to do this answer loads of exercise a relatively quiet life and knitting once you ve made a scarf out of size 2 needles you basically have the patience to do anything permalink leave a comment social experiments may 18 2014 at 11 14 pm uncategorized i have this memory of being in the 6th grade or so could be a year more or less not sure i used to do these things that today i would refer to today as social experiments or performances or art but as a kid they were just things i was playing around with summer camp provided especially fertile ground given that every week a new crop of kids would arrive i was one of the kids who was enrolled for the entire summer so i was always there but it was otherwise a revolving door of other people my age and summer camp is so perfect for this sort of thing because it s not quite school and not quite real life one of the first ones i did was to decide for a week i would be the most unhappy person on earth i complained about everything all the time if i stubbed my toe i made a huge deal out of it and any kind of slight or sadness i felt was reason for me to go on and on and on about it really was pure performance acting this way is not in my character at all and i have the distinct memory of staring up at a beautiful blue sky one afternoon and trying to find something ugly about it to complain about kids my age fled from me except for a few well meaning types who must have taken pity on me and tried to cheer me up by the end of the week they were done with me too no one wanted to be around me and it was understandable i was a completely miserable person who never saw the good or pleasant in anything i took comfort in manipulating the interactions for the next week i decided to do the opposite i showed up bright and early on monday morning with a big smile on my face and spent the entire week being sweet as sugar to everyone around me anything negative or dark that came my way i just hastened it out and laughed it off i remarked on how wonderful the weather was constantly i went way out of my way to never talk about myself and only say great positive things about other people the response was a bigger surprise to me than the response of a week before people absolutely loved it i mean i knew they d like it but i wasn t expecting how much they d go for it they fell for it everyone wanted to be around me popular kids invited me into their cliques and counselors cut me all kinds of slack when it came time to do unpleasant tasks like swimming lessons it was 100 fake but at about 11 years old i had figured out the secret to climbing the social ladder as a result i lost almost all faith i had in any kind of human interaction the whole thing seemed like a huge game and a boring silly game at that which i had already figured out the ending to i started really fucking with people around then i went to a playground this was outside of camp and decided i was going to transform into a cat i crawled over to a group of kids my age who were hanging out there and addressed them with a meow the kids freaked out and fled they literally ran away from me and i was left standing there alone in the middle of the playground i concluded that this was it an honest reaction and from now on i would be a cat i quickly changed my mind later that day when i remembered one of the popular girls from camp where i had been all smiley had invited me to a slumber party and that i really wanted to go thus ended the cat experiment human interactions were stupid and fake but by god there would be potato chips and pizza and other forbidden foods at the party and that totally one upped knowing better than all of humanity permalink leave a comment lost one april 11 2014 at 8 46 pm uncategorized i know that you don t wanna hear my opinion but there come many paths and you must choose one and if you don t change then the rain soon come see you might win some but you just lost one you might win some but you just lost one permalink leave a comment space is the place january 13 2014 at 9 49 pm uncategorized i m in a really cool new group show called space is the place at bravinlee programs in nyc also in the show are jeffrey beebe steven charles chris mccaw fred tomaselli and eugene von bruenchenhein and also one other artist but he s chosen to remain secret for some reason it runs january 9 february 8 2014 here s some pics of my piece that s my soft moma to the left and steven charles s amazing painting to the right here s the soft moma as worn by jeff it s a floating cube that you walk into to view the museum and here s a detail of what s inside with better pics forthcoming permalink leave a comment november 29 2013 at 12 16 pm uncategorized oh amy wilson where have you been all this time ugh i ve been busy busy in that collapsing after a 17 hour day kind of busy and also busy in that endless navel gazing question asking living in my head going around and around thinking too much kind of way the last few months have been a lot and they culminated in the last six weeks of hell over the last six weeks i went from having a minor toothache to a major one to a swollen face to emergency surgery to more surgery to yet more surgery loads of antibiotics that didn t work exhaustion from the non working antibiotics and the infection itself nightmares depression anxiety seeing things my body should not do and finally as of this monday a huge gaping hole in my mouth with about 20 stitches holding it together loads of vicodin and yet more antibiotics not fun and i m not out of the woods yet but i do kind of feel like i got a kind of break from the ordinary bodyhorrorvacationinhell that is maybe giving me perspective on things or maybe that s just the vicodin in my bloodstream or maybe it s that december is upon us and with it the end of the year and all sorts of summing things up and wanting to put a nice cap on everything i don t even know anymore but here are some things i have in the works and have had in the works 1 i was in a really nice exhibition at montserrat college in massachusetts it doesn t look like there s a link up on their website but we got some press from the boston globe which was great 2 more art commissioned me to make a series of drawings for their envision 2017 project in which several artists are asked their hopes and wishes for nyc in the future one more set is forthcoming 3 i started my school s first old fashioned non digital all by hand fiber arts class which takes up the crafts of spinning weaving sewing knitting crochet etc in a school city that is very craft adverse this has been a really interesting experience and has lead to all sorts of conclusions in my head that i don t know if i ll wind up going back on everything from the growing generation gap between my students and other people my age see footnote 1 and the difference between art vs craft footnote 2 4 i ve been a little obsessed with this drawing i made actually a page from an artist s book over the summer which combines drawing with writing and embroidery here it s out of context and the photo sucks but maybe you can get a sense and it s informing the newest piece i m working on right now more info in a bit so that s a start a first stab at getting back to normal and getting back to blogging i ll end it there to not go on over and over and over then obsessively edit then delete because it s not good enough footnotes 1 i m amazed at the difference between my students opinion on art events vs what you hear from the majority of artists or at least the artists art critics dealers etc of a certain age for instance my students are nearly unanimous in thinking that chris burden s new museum show sucks i haven t seen it yet but have only heard glowing things from my colleagues meanwhile they loved matthew day jackson at hauser wirth which was pretty universally panned by critics and fellow artists i don t think they re doing it to be contrary i think these are genuine reactions to a genuine difference in opinion it s interesting 2 thinking about the difference between art vs craft has been a nearly 20 year long obsession of mine it s something i want to eventually write a book or at least an essay or something on but my newest definition between the two is this art at least as we understand it now is somehow connected to the notion of the avant garde craft is connected to the idea of tradition and history this is not to say that art cannot draw upon history it s just that art s relationship to history is more antagonistic than craft s this is also not to say that craft cannot be innovative it s just that craft doesn t seek to kill the father in the avant garde sense this definition creates all kinds of problems but i should mention they re problems that i rather like for instance 19th century academic painting would now be re classified as craft to me that feels right it also eliminates the previous twin signifiers of craft utility and materials from the discussion given how much art has changed over the last 50 years i think this is super important and that there s way more to the difference between the two than just art is made from paint craft is made from string or whatever anyway this theory is very much still a work in progress but this is what i have so far permalink leave a comment oh little blog september 2 2013 at 5 48 pm uncategorized i know you think i ve forgotten about you but this song accurately sums up my feelings toward you i ve started and trashed at least 30 blog posts somehow i ve been unable to finish anything but i swear you were always on my mind and more is coming soon permalink leave a comment july 27 2013 at 10 31 am uncategorized i owe this blog a major update because i have been up to a whole bunch of things but what kicked my butt in finally getting me to write a post was this morning s sleepy internet surfing which lead me to discover this artist s work chéri samba makes work that is like frida kahlo meets david wojnarowicz meets i don t even know and not knowing much of anything about the politics and culture of the congo i find myself completely unable to really pull apart the exact meaning of this ...