"Living on Departure" take two (a new tangent on transit 2011) and my love for Jean-Paul Sartre

"I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves." Jean-Paul Sartre

In 2002 In San Diego I was working on a body of work that we exhibited as "Living on Departure" at the Price Centre theatre in La Jolla California. My approach was the building of structures upon a moving plateau, working the idea of permanance and dissolving it. Time pieces (100 x 100 latex gloves suspended from the ceiling with dental floss and slowly precipitating powder) created large scale white hazy paintings from a distance with the effect of opaque gloves, white powder, 2.7 m grid of dental floss and the 2 inches of tension space (nothingness) between the hands and the floor. the slight movement as the hands slowly shifted as the weight of the powder fell through the cut fingers of the gloves. it was a shimmering quiet piece with release and colour field sculpture principles at play.

and so the floating sculpture continues, similar to this and so soft, so light in 2011
perspex- is as much as ordered. Scale models in action. and YES! I can buy 3 x 4m sheets of 10mm perspex in North Sydney and YES they deliver!. Now I just need a confirmed space to exhibit..to work out the proportions.

and some transit works. hubs of inbetween/floating.


SKIP OVER THIS PART BELOW IF YOU Want to Cut to the chase: and continue part B
2002 Again:
release: with love letters which I decoded and took backwards imprints of type writer cartridges that I obsessively filled with love letters and declarations over a period of 6 months. so all I had to show of it were 9 drawings made of the backwards font saturating the page with hues of deep black to thin threads of grey. Lots of lines

doing something then taking it apart.
filling then emptying

boxing gloves turned into mittens
deconstructing objects into a fine powder and making pigment mandalas out of them ( my kitchen noodle packets included ) and for the future I wanted to do this with an old car on the farm. but practicality and wanting a boyfriend to like me, stopped me. and then I painted pleasant pictures instead.

however back to my heart:
the opposite of progression. the importance of cycles. celebrating movement and flux...

taking boring text and turning it into a visual cryptic painting. for fun and to falsely fascinate my professor because he hated representation.
making symmetrical compressed powder sculptures with loose powder, delicate deceptive 'solid' (not) sculptures on a mirror. touch it and it disintergrates, touch the reflection and it remains strong. take one and you lose the other. co-dependance with the dionysis and Apollo, form and formless energy.

antimatter
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point. Jean-Paul Sartre

of course words make it sound pretty stupid, hard to visualise, I dont have any documentation of this show (except in the hands of a friend Jesse Rider who disappeared into New York somewhere...he took photos that night in 2002) We used to go on pretend dates and be strange couples throughout history.

and Ozomatli played a concert outside and congo-lined the party goers into our show. Super cool, but the wine evaporated. and something terrible happened that night. as did it'd opposite with the show- so wonderful a response.

So the show was with Philipa Juliet and Jennifer Myer. Jenn made sculptures of the moon at a graspable size...and worked with giving form to music by taking old records and making creatures out of them... Phillipa took images of from Titian's vintage and kind of characatured them. there could be more written here...soon....


Part B:
so part Two : living on departure. I am going to work again with Transit Zones. places where time loses a pattern and space changes all of this. Of returning to Sensation over system.

The Future isn''t what it used to be..." Jean-Paul Sartre

I love him...
At least I think I do..

I think therefore I am..? ( that's Plato, Yes)
No! I think therefore I was...
well,I think....hmm??
was/past not 'am at all........because thought is one to 20 steps removed from the sensation, the moment and the most 'real' connection and falling into a pre-determined system of words; decyfering syntax, fabricating Semantics.

I confused things with their names: that is belief. Jean- Paul Sartre.

So today I wrote my usual hidden script behind a painting.
I was looking at an old book I found in New York in a second hand store in brooklyn 2008. somewhere in Brooklyn, I am not sure, but it was still decrepit. It is called the Dictionary of Existentialism.
and I found it interesting reading a part on Future by Jean Paul Sartre. my 1/1/11 favourite. (please forgive typos:)
"There are two sorts of Future: the one is but the temporal ground on which my present perception develops, the other is posited for itself but is that which is not yet. When I play Tennis I see my opponent hit the ball with his racket and I run to the net. Here there is real anticipation since I foresee the ball. But this does not posit for itself the passage of the ball to this or that point. In reality the future is here but the real development of a form induced by the gesture of my opponent and the real gesture of this opponent communicates its reality to the whole form. In other words the real form with its zones of real past and real future is effected entirely as a result of his gesture. As for my provision also being reality, I continue to carry out the form by foreseeing it, because my provision is real gesture within the form. Thus step by step there is always a real past, the sense of an actual form in development, or, in other words, as the meaning of the universe. And in this sense, it is like presenting the unperceived real aspects of objects as present which is real and envisioned in a vacuum, or as a real future..... all real existence occurs with present, past and future structures, therefore past and future, as essential structures of the real are also real, that is, correlatives of a realising theme. But if on the contrary, while lying in bed, I anticipate what might happen when my friend Peter returns from Berlin, I detatch the future from the present whose meaning it constitutes, I posit it for itself and I present it to myself. But I give it to myself exactly while it is not yet, that is as absent, or if one prefers, as nothing. Thus I can live the same future in reality as a ground of the present (as for instance as i look for Peter at the station and all my acts have for their meaning the arrival of Peter at 7:35pm) or on the contrary isolate it and posit it for itself but by cutting it off from all reality and annihilating it, by presenting it as nothingness" Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination.

ok so I am confused also. but it sits well with me. the duplicity, co-dependance of two time points. as I quoted from an earlier piece of Sartres above: " no finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point"
perhaps the theory of relativity falls into place here.
...and that leads me to the next question...antimatter.....???
hmmm

why am I thinking about all this.
I think sensation runs contrary to the invented world of our generation. to try and understand connection a little better, I can start making art that touches before it translates into another data file for the progression of man (words thought reason/purpose) . I simply miss touch. and many don't realise they probably do too. If we weren't confusing things with their names (Sartre again) Sensation simulation generation, limitless options, plastic fantastic....cyber/matrix and so on.

I have been well rested for a few months, Finalising the last touches to two art shows and a little bit of life in-between. Now I am back to thinking again. exploring. Luckily I have a cyclical philosophie underlying my intentions as something progessive would be insatiable.


:

Thomas C Chung

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasturtlechung/4619907084/

....and his art:

A friend from art school, and a wonderful playful artist with a dark side. Loving the shadows that are cast within, loving the fresh, fun, playful sculptures he crochets. Neally everything is personified, animated, imagined. Like a scene from childhood. The knitted paint tin toys say it all, and the world goes on backwards, forwards, inwards and outside, like a game, for adults.

Thomas is based in sweden and exhibits regularly. If you are lucky enough you might catch him next year back in oz.....

rojogarabatomagazine.tumblr.com/

soma sketches in progress

All sketches are in progress. surprise surprise~

this painting is a small detail of a much larger image. they are full length bodies. the same woman, different costumes. Fun to draw

I have been borrowing old life drawing sketches and laying them out in a composition. I want to do a copy of the composition and make them all absent, woven or porcelain. I am wanting to connect again to the physical, solid forms, a small healthy break from imagination or intangible,

Japanese Death Poems

Bokusui
A parting word? Jisei nado
The melting snow zansetsu ni ka mo
is odorless. nakarikeri


Enryo
Autumn waters Yoizame no
of this world wake me kore ya konoyo no
from my drunkenness. aki no mizu Fufu

Arimaru
Running shallow Kawa no se ni
with a year's end sound: shiwasu no oto no
river rapids. nagarekeri


Bill Viola is talking on the radio. He is talking about how much he loves Japanese Death Poems. Up until the 16th century, in Japan it was customary to write a Haiku poem moments before or on your death. An idea.... one that I will adopt, imagine the feelings, you cannot imagine.

He is also talking about Love in Postmodernism, or the absence of it. working backwards, like a super sleuth from sensation to theory.
I think I am now in love with Bill Viola

Soma/ Body

body

I know it seems basic, but when you are coming out of an existentialist high (like as if it the answer to all the problems of realities' limitations and you are so free..ahhh free like being trapped by open space and the claustrophobia of limitless imagination..arrgghhh) anyway like i said, basic. free, relief. loving painting bodies, movement, what is, outside of self...wonderful reality, to just observe. the movement of the brush loaded in pale sepia, to the heavy confident and straggly lines of charcoal like a web or heavy iron constructing the form. i am loving drawing.

so I am painting again. loving it. all thought is somewhere embedded in it. but not over it.

I will have the drawings up on walls before Christmas.

an excerpt: (not necessarily related)

The greek word for body, "soma"means corpse in homer. Soma is what is left lying on the field when the battle is over and the psyche has left the dead person. Only when Psyche is gone does Soma appear to be something different from it, and vice versa. But even if homeric man did not have an overall concept for the body in our sense that does not mean that the body was downgraded in relation to, for example, the mind. On the contrary.....a standard example is all the words for snow in an inuit languages, which also lack a single word for the concept 'snow'. If one is to think of greek cultureand pre socratic anthropology, one has to think in physical terms, and try to forget our body-mind divisionto avoid projecting it onto the homeric way of thinking. the body is the self for Homeric man. The term the greeks use for whole body is 'autos', self.

....In Homeric anthropology, it is impossible to distinguish and catergorically separate between the emotional, sensory and intellectual and rational the way we do. so there is no word that means 'reason' in homer'......

one of my favourite books that is taking forever to read, "A history of the Heart' by Ole M Hoystad.

NEXT TIME i want to write about the new book I found in a second hand bookstore last week. It's called 'Portrait of the lover" by Bettini (it's translated so it loses a lot. I guess I will just have to learn Italian (smile smile) domani domani!!!

imagine following a train of thought that traces the origin of displacing the lover, from real form to representation.( from Butades Daughter who stole the image of her lover by tracing his shadow on the wall (beginnings of clay sculpture) and made a statue out of clay) to Nietzsche and his concepts of shadow in Zarathustra....and so on and so on......sigh....oh so beautiful. this book is amazing, but yet to be read.

MY NEW SUSPENSION PROJECT: mini model draft 2, talking about sensation simulation era

This project is so much fun. The images I have posted are a little prototypes for some sculptures I am going to start as soon as I play and navigate my way around how to express the idea better.

I love sewing, threading. Laborious repetitive processes, the idea of suspended space, giving space a physicality, and accessible solids (like an x-ray vision into an inaccessible space. Interactive but not integrated (you cannot enter the space of the artwork, so there are invisible barriers) like the decline of sensation in the cut paste generation. (Living on the knowledge fast track plane and not the sensory primary response plane.

(sensation simulation era)

What to put inside the block of space…? & what is suspended, situated, and relative in it /to it.
This will be determined by the direction of our collaborative body of work (exhibition 2011) (‘our’ being myself and a friend, Thomas C Chung, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomasturtlechung/show/) “somewhere/Anywhere” the idea of location, place, is our base (so far) and whether I go with an ‘objective-subjective’ division or focus simply on the suspension element. I am Enjoying creating forms that rise and fall in the space through rhythms and weight imbalances.
Outside of this, I am currently mapping the spaces between things and am obsessed with love, so no doubt

Bla bla bla…
The image below is the first draft where I wanted to connect the styro with pins. The pins were too heavy, fiddly, needed glue and looked crafty.
I then moved on to sewing, the images above are sewn in white thread in an enclosed foam space, the thirds draft will be in invisible thread and Perspex walls. Ideally, if I could fill an entire room and fill the space without barriers this would be perfect!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Actually, if that room had see through walls…. ove will play a huge part in trying to tell my story, (or lack of) (OR investigation of

my new kaleidoscopic images, in prayer

(October sketches from an amazingly clean studio)


new work: on location. Kaleidoscopic, fractured, multifaceted lens. particle theory and connection

subject: tiny images in prayer

sensation overload and confusion. temporal sculpture can wait
operation: this time I forget to think hopefully so I can feel when I am making.

dionysis and apollo undercurrents...chaos and order and alchemy (understanding the practice)

a little big bang, a little anti matter, a little religion, quantum physics and newtonian gravity, and a lot of anti existentialism. Plato and good old Ole Hoystadt(History of the heart). The idea of a tree falling in a forest & does it make a sound. to exist is to be observed? ,maybe. then how is the observer observed... ego, super ego...rah rah rahh...and so on and so on...a little cyber identity, new age plasticity and matrix stuff out the door. I am finished now with plastic fantastic and the constructed world. Flux, you can stay. still

BIOS - Trabajador@s del Arte - Sandra Nakamura / CDAPC

2 artists: Sandra Nakamura & François de Sabourin

As I am in art stasis at the moment (Studio overhaul) I am still doting on art I love and checking out the work of friends as a healthy past time. Sandra and I studied at UCSD (uni of California San Diego)in 2002, and lived together, and thought about putting bubble bath in the fountain together etc..François I met randomly in Belfast, Ireland. I watched him draw, so perfectly, but only a nose. So I think of Gogol, The Russian Novelist and I treasure it because I will never be sure if it is incomplete or not. It sits perfectly looking normal, ambiguously on the top left of the page...tbc when I am at my own pc and able to upload some images. In the meantime:
SANDRA NAKAMURA
Working with everyday materials and situations, Sandra Nakamura creates temporary interventions in which she seeks to actively engage the public. Many of her works are based on the gathering, accumulation, and distribution of objects...

MY CONTRACT STIPULATES 15 DAYS OF VACATION February 2007
Jena, Germany


Thinking about the significance commuting has in our daily lives, I calculated that if a given person in a city like Jena spends an hour per day on public transportation, after the course of one year, this would amount to 15 days of travel time.

During 15 days, the lights on the inside of a streetcar on Line 1 (Zwäten – Winzerla) were made pink. This route was selected for this intervention because it best illustrated the relationship between commute and work, traveling from a residential neighborhood and through the city center, to the industrial area of Jena. On the other hand, pink lighting offered stark contrast to the bland, office-like atmosphere of white fluorescent lights, brown seat covers, and tan fixtures on standard streetcars in hope that the experience of commuters would be transformed.

I had never before thought that a color alone could embody the feeling of vacation until I stood on Jena’s Paradise Bridge. Although I have never been to Miami, the bridge made me think of pink flamingos and an extravagant weekend in Miami. And it was just because the bridge was pink, all of it.


François de Sabourin

Xing Junqin ~ on military meditation

(apologies to www.bankuart, for poaching your images for my collecting pleasure)
I checked out some of Xing Junqin's art at White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale www.whiterabbitgallery.org

opening night pictures

I have posted a few pictures from the opening night we had in Binalong august 28 for the exhibition 'construction sites'which I had been working on for the last 12 months. The show was an amalgamation of two exhibitions, with similar themes of new vanitas paintings (see statement in the about me section of this blog- rather appropriate with the vanitas theme on a personal note!) and the contrast of consumer culture and our temporality..flux and the constant state of building in our lives. I will put pictures up of my work soon.