Don’t ask me how I remembered the Rolling Stone cover, but as I was researching topics and materials for Columbia class on Tuesday, I was immediately struck by this popular reclamation of Cindy Sherman’s early-ish photo work.

Sherman’s piece from 1981, Rolling Stone cover 1999.

As seen on the Blue Line CTA going downtown this morning. New Advertising campaign from dentyne ice employing facetime media vernacular.

After taping a nice lecture last night of Alison Bechdel – diary based graphic novelist and “cartoonist” – I started to think about my own work; clearly not as an illustrator or writer, but as a media practitioner and enthusiast. Combined with the lecture, and teaching class yesterday – a mild and speedy attempt to cover 3000 years of media history – I thought of rethinking some statements I’ve made, and how to discuss on-going threads or oppositional strands in my work. This all, of course, is fairly masturbatory, but perhaps also essential for young artists like myself to undertake, especially when there is not a clear unifying theme or topic that defines me as a person (i.e. race, gender, sexuality; for which i have no unique qualities).

So with all the apologies out of the way, here I go (again) ::

My work, a conglomeration of media based art ranging from super8 film to specifically web based projects, shifts between poles; authenticity and ego, selfhood and community, myth and memory, immediacy and slowness, etc. Clearly these poles or binaries, are conventions that typically plague art by means of needing classification and compartmentalization. These oppositions mark my work due to my insistence that when stretching these poles to their maximum on each side of their unifying spectrum you actually bring them closer together than separate. This play, this reverse gravity or magnetism, shapes a large fence around my pasture of artistic production. It allows me to simultaneously create work that can be both ideologically dense and casually precise with formal or aesthetic simplicity. This practice often allows for an undermining of both approaches to creativity.

In valuing play, and encouraging subversions of myself and the weight of art history, my work leaves much room for audience interpretation and investigation. In this way, my work can be viewed as being demanding; asking viewers to make judgments and assessments for themselves. My father put it well in Pulcera(2007), a 27 min documentary about memory and its (de)construction: “Without having to give answers, you ask the right questions, and that in itself is a tribute to the medium in which you work.” Although this film clearly had many questions – and perhaps in some ways created clever solutions to those for me personally – I now find myself reaching further into the margins by not needing to ask questions to begin with. Instead, as is the case with The Natural(2008), I wish to regulate the subject material in such a way as to render the information output as relatively narrow, while still working with these poles in which I speak of (in this case between fantasy Hollywood blockbusters and nature documentaries).

I image future projects to involve more discrete play in which medium itself plays a more heavy role, exploring the polarity between amateur and professional, or quality of image versus quality of meaning. In this way, I intend my work to be more quick, easier to digest, and to utilize a growing common visual language to confront issues of serious play, and methodical relentless sketching.

Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, there were moments of many strange things occurring at once. I have a small fan in my room – which i recently moved to rest on the corner of a box of unpacked posters, although I’ve been living in my house for nearly half a year already. This fan, leaning against the cardboard seems to create a frequency of vibrations that made me at once feel in tune with the earth’s melody. The spinning of the fan blade seemed to be in unison with the breathing of the planet, or else just the rumblings of my house. At any rate, the sound was penetrating, and i felt as though my bed was shaking beneath me in time with the movements of the earth. At a moment of some kind of clarity, I started to hear a woman crying. Clearly a hallucination, but unmistakable in my head. She did not weep loud, or even very regularly, but instead she sounded as if she had been weeping for a long time, almost exhausted by her own relentless fit of tears. It was breathy, inconsistent, and pitiful, only in the sense that in hearing her i at once was overwhelmed with empathy. I knew it was astral projection. Then i tried to preoccupy my thoughts, tried to think about the projects I wanted to do, the chores I had to do in the morning, and the glowing colors of my svengoolie shirt. Even with my eyes open, the whirlwind of the fan and earth and the crying of my nighttime ghost seemed as lucid as the half-secure bare light bulb hanging gingerly from my ceiling. Then Jes called; an unexpected occurrence, since not only do i rarely talk to her, but she had somehow gotten my number and called me to get Tamas’. The only way that I would imagine her finding my number was from Tamas; but i remembered that he had switched his phone recently, so the logic seemed to match. She had said that Sarah had not been picking up her phone, and that she needed to urgently get in touch with her. Still unsure if I was hallucinating, i went through my phone book and retrieved Tamas’ new number in the hopes that she might be able to reach Sarah about her matters of concern. Then texts, and bridges came. Like vikings, or pilgrims (which, if history has taught us much, are ostensibly the same thing). These men, these figures in the dark, sang opera’s or hymn’s to their brothers, carrying coins to pay the gatemen, or else to have some copper to keep their hands busy. They might’ve wanted to place their taxes on my eyelids, in order to encourage me to sleep, but i heard the crying again, this time mixed with a hint of pleasure, shifting between extacy and agony. I had though of the other side of my empty bed, almost in a confessional manner, brought the pillow closer to me, and tried to start counting sheep. They too seemed to sing and cry, grieve and rejoice. The woman started talking now, in whispers of lust, with twists of shame and glory. I stood up in bed. Went downstairs to have a cigarette and console myself for the bitter-sweet nightmares I was having half-awake. Afterwards, I slept on the futon downstairs.

Moments around Chicago, mostly in Pilsen after Golden Age 1 year celebration. More on that later.