So, I am taking a casual process-oriented approach to this blog. The postings will not necessarily be finished products or finished thoughts. Rather, this will be my venue for engaging with my own artistic process on a more tangible level. Often times my creative process happens when I am walking to the post office, trying to fall asleep at night, while driving/riding my bike/walking somewhere, etc. Any of those moments where my head is allowed to use its energy creating a frenzy of thoughts often akin to a gerbil in its spinny wheel thing. Sometimes the result of this mental excess is an output of artwork. Sometimes it is lack of sleep, heightened anxiety, unnecessary hours of thought wasted on problems too large for my mind to solve. Either way it is my process. However, this blog will be an attempt to take that process from my mind to a different forum. The reader of this blog has now been forewarned.
FYI: I have posted a few videos that actually contradict the previous statement in that they are recently completed artworks. :) They are there because blogs are good forums for displaying video works. Other finished pieces are not posted because they are not conducive to consumption via blog, and therefore I will not waste my time.
Back to the mental ramblings I am calling a blog. Since completing my last body of work, which I felt embodied a great deal of growth for myself as an artist and presented a whole new level of personal expectations (not a good thing), I have worried about where I will go next. More installations or more video. More conceptual or more emotional themes. How will I get my energy and drive back after that explosion of work from Jan 09- May 09? I spent the summer doing nothing more than painting beach paintings for my family's beach houses. Very shiny beach paintings, with beach birds, beach grass, and beach bird nests. They were perfect for what they were. But now where do I go?
I have recently been enamored of researching death. Not in a morbid, goth sense. More through a poetic cycle of life lens. A few precursors have led to this interest. First, in the transition linguistics video I posted, I found the section that ultimately interested me the most was the section regarding my grandmothers aging process and her daughters reaction to this process. Furthermore, my other grandmother died the month after this video work. Finally, there is much recent media hype about "death panels" and end of life. It seems in my personal work, my personal life, and the larger social buzz I am hearing death. In addition to the recent messages from the universe :). I have always been one to be consumed with the "future." When I was in the second grade I decided I would go to Princeton for college. At 8 years old I was considering which college I would attend. Not at my parents urging, who really could have cared less and were usually somewhat perturbed with my type A anxiety and demanding nature. In this vein, one of my greatest fears has been getting to the end of my life looking back and being disappointed in myself. This summer I read a book by Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert titled Stumbling on Happiness. I learned that it is only since the development of the frontal lobe that humans gained the capacity to imagine the future. I have since decided that I have a overdeveloped frontal lobe. Either way, investigating end of life perspectives would scratch that itch that is my curiosity about a life in reflection.
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