take your time to think things through



ten minutes for cynthia hughart
mull it over make it last

something is out that window


something keeping me going


some things i have learned

one step forwards

i decided that i had to make a song between work and my internship.
if it was bad that was ok. if it was good that was ok.
if it was short or long, loud or soft, small or big, easy or difficult, memorable or forgettable. i just had to write a song and think about the eel river and that song would be limited to a single chord. that chord is E. it seemed to make sense since the eel river starts with 'e'

Eel in e by carinagdowning

ps: you can download this song if you feel so inclined, by clicking the little down arrow in the right column.

project description

i've been given the best of both worlds

i grew up along a free flowing river
one of the last in california
i moved to a city
that takes water from those small towns
and dams up their rivers

and i love this city
and i love the country

it was right to take all that water

we couldn't have a world metropolis
in the middle of this desert without it

it was wrong to take all that water
from those little cities
that couldn't possibly defend themselves

we needed it more
and they needed it more

and i need to make amends

to ninety six years of taking other people's things

what would it mean to do a ninety six minute performance

an action for amends
an exercise in reflection on the past ninety six years

writing ninety six minutes of sound using piano and voice
all of it relating back to this need to make amends
to understand
how something could be equally right and wrong
equally ugly and beautiful
strange and familiar
poor and rich
home and homesick

half empty and half full

---

For the second half of this course I will be actively thinking and making something for my project every day. Even if this is just a noted idea on how to proceed or an investigation into a related artist's methods.

My first step is to sit down at a piano and use piano and my voice to reflect on these ninety six years i mentioned above and explore the thought and possibility of doing something like this as a ninety six minute performance.

i am also going to keep more in mind the source of my interest in these issues. this is not a purely environmentalist piece, or a scientific study to show water shortage, i do not want to present only facts. i am so involved in this because i was allowed to have both worlds. a ranger woman at the visitors center in the humboldt redwoods, who grew up on the eel river's banks, nearly began to cry when i told her about the free-flowing sespe that i'd grown up at. She missed her home. It was taken from her. she couldn't go back to it.

i have two homes or more.

they are split and displaced into the places that i want and connect with.

my home is in los angeles and whenever i want i go to my other home in fillmore the river is still there for me, patiently waiting.

how is this digital?
if this does indeed evolve into a performance. the performance will be video taped and the video tape will become a document and an art piece in itself. the performance will not be for live audience only and will not be for the camera only. it will be for both.

i am also continuing with the visual materials that i've made the first half of the semester. as you can see by the earlier blog post, i am experimenting with spreading photographs and text over a larger wall space. like an exploded journal almost. we'll see how this goes.

experiments with india ink.
trying to personalize the material.

dave hickey on grad school and how to not make boring art.

sort of dismal yet funny at the same time.



too many artists.

janini antoni on sculpture

interesting thoughts on the potential of art.
i've always felt like antoni talks so naturally and authentically about her practice.
I like the way she describes the process of making art here.

evaluation

Strengths

Looking and Researching:

I watched some Lynda tutorials, did google searches and found solutions in forums as I ran into problems, I also just looked into features in Photoshop more and learned by testing new tools out (especially in the RAW dialog box, and Bridge) The same applies for FCP. Found myself running into odd problems and searching out solutions by testing abilities of tools I wasn't totally familiar with.

I wasn't always searching out materials that tied directly with my concept but was just checking out art in general by going to shows (GLAMFA, Soundwalk, OCMA, LACMA, Hammer, SMMA) and reading Artforum and Art in America, as well as looking at websites for art venues and checking out art blogs that I like. Also going to the guest lectures on campus has been super insightful.

In a search for narrative methods I looked closely at various poems, song lyrics and other poetic writings. I also searched out artists using writing (Walid Raad, Sophie Calle, The Harrisons, Allan Sekula, Miranda July, Daniel Melo, Gordon Winiemko) to see the formalities of narration, presentation etc. I looked at various methods of scientific writing presentation and signage, as well to see the language of presentation for materials outside the sphere of art.


I read books that are water related. Two were artists books with images and artist writings. One was purely images of water. Another was a historic non-fiction narrative about water in the west. I looked at Sharon Lockhart's Pine Flat show at the Hammer. Her work is tied in conceptually because she is also dealing with people from a rural area and marrying autobiography, fiction and non-fiction. I found musicians who were singing about anything water related and looked closely at how they were talking about it creatively.

Lastly, I started thinking about the concept as being summed up by the idea of half empty/half full. Depending on how you look at the situation, from a different perspective it was either good or bad, right or wrong, ugly or beautiful, strange or familiar, hopeful or hopeless. It was was all these things at once. Then I saw this concept happening everywhere, in everything, and each aspect of my life. I guess it is just subjectivity that I am talking about and how the power of persuasion can make the gray areas shrink and appear black or white instead. When this happened I started seeing almost everything as potentially being conceptually related to my work.


Thinking and Reflecting:


I thought of possible solutions to some of the technical issues I was having. Some are half-way implemented and solved. Others have a bit longer until they are solved. Asking other people for tech advice definitely helped.

I've gone through a couple drafts of the fountain animation and the version I have currently is still a draft. I need to clean some things up on it and make the color palette more in tune with the rest of the work in the series. I did a few drafts of the writing/image pieces as well and need to do more drafts. The presentation is too typical. The presentation of the Owens Lake bed concentrates on the length of time it takes to pass the lake bed. I need to preserve the duration message but somehow take the video out the the "driving video" pigeon hole it is in currently.

I am totally overcome with thinking about the concepts involved in this project. When it was just about water that was manageable but now that I see it as being under the umbrella of dealing with subjectivity things are getting out of control. I've been wresting with thinking about everything in terms of subjectivity and it is becoming unbearable. This has been a completely half empty/ half full year for me. (marriages, deaths, separations, job loss, academic milestones, awards, all the time in the world and no time at all {not even for lunch}) Anyway, when I see the work I can't tell if its communicating what I would like it to because one day I can convince myself it is and the next day I can convince myself of the exact opposite. What a frustrating mess.


Making:


I still need to solve tons of technical issues.


Drafts are a plus for working through the look of a project. That has been the biggest help so far.


I am dealing with related issues since they are tied together by water and California. I feel that dealing with multiple related bodies of water will help the concept. Since it is not a singular body of water it can be related to easier and by more people.


What could be better?

Making stuff regularly was a totally new part of my practice and an incredibly awesome one. It gave me confidence because I was moving towards my goal continuously and making improvements all along this path.

I have not solved most technical issues but have ideas for solutions and really need to get going on implementing these ideas. Since this series involves several conceptually related works that are not as related visually or in medium I have been concerned about spending too much time polishing any one part until I have drafts of each to start seeing how they communicate visually with each other.

I could have planned better. My in progress critique would have been more helpful I'm sure if I had brought each part to a viewable and relatable level of completion.

Working with various mediums and in various places made it seem like I got to play at each step of the way. Each part was exciting.

I met with Mark, Kyle, Todd and Rebecca regarding the work and got helpful resources and criticism from each of them.

I got really into taking notes on whatever was happening around me that related in any way. It is weird and interesting to look back on them. I like seeing some small idea at the beginning of the notes that has turned into a big idea weeks later in my notes.



How can this be improved?
I need to set more deadlines for meeting with people peers and faculty, to talk about the progress of the work. I am super glad I didn't stick to a rigid plan. This work would be terrible if I followed my initial idea. Only by letting the ideas and imagery evolve through process did I feel like the project was heading to a rich place.
I definitely need to look at more material that is conceptually related to my work in all types creative disciplines (poetry, fiction, theater, movies, music, dance (maybe)) The scientific stuff and history is so easy to find that I end up looking at these less creative takes on the material more often.
I think I need to be out of the house as much as possible. I can't think constructively at home.
I need to become very strict in time management with the next part of the project to make sure that it works out in the end.

How do you go about making your art?
As long as the project is open ended this is how it works for me.
(if its an assignment i almost always make something i do not like)

Something will be affecting me a lot and I'll try pin point this something.
In the past this has been the effect of television on social interaction, wonder or lack thereof, uses of public space vs private space, contextualization of art, accessibility of art, disconnect from home, death of someone I know etc.
I end up making these self-guided projects that deal with the issues that are affecting me.

For the past year my work has been rooted in the idea of home. I'm thinking about what "home" means, what makes it home, what it means to be separated from it, what influences it has on you and the way you perceive the world, how it can be displaced into different geographical locations, how it exists both in the actual structure of the home in the in the greater surrounding community.

I made Houses and Homes I, a work looking at home through interviewing people on their experience of moving away from home for the first time. This became an sound installation (September of 2008). This work informed following works.

From here I wanted to look outside of the house structure and knew that the rural aspect of my town had a huge effect on my feeling like it was home. I found The Sespe River to be both symbolic of my home and it also physically exists in my home town. I've branched off to look more closely at The Sespe, then at The Los Angeles River because it is the closest river to my house in Long Beach.

At this point I made Houses and Homes II (February 2009) a two-channel video installation showing both the Los Angeles and Sespe River. I interviewed several people about their experiences with these rivers and cut these interviews together into a fifteen minuted narrative and played this aloud in the space.

Then this summer I went to the Eel River because when I saw it I fell in love with it and romanticized about how perfect it was and how much better and wild it was than the Sespe, only to find out i was totally being totally naive. Things are so much more complicated than that. Went to the Eel to interview people about it and found that the river was in poor condition in so many ways but still as beautiful as I originally imagined in other ways.

Stories that I am using currently in my work come, in part from the trips that I took to Humboldt County this summer to talk to people about the Eel River and spend time on its banks.

From dealing with the rivers I started seeing how truly interconnected water systems in California are and that this county, Los Angeles, was at some point or another trying to get the waters of almost every river in the state. This lead me look more in depth at the history and science behind the water systems and got me interested in dealing with the subjects of Mulholland and the Owens Valley.

Through this project I have worked in smaller steps, more loosely than before, more intuitively and have attempted to approach the subject matter in a more subjective, less removed way. I've learned a lot from the past related projects that I've done and feel like I need to reveal the way that the project is rooted in the personal more. Still trying to figure this out... I really want to make this series cohesive, maintaining similar conceptual underpinnings yet implementing different visual language in each portion of the project.

work day

As a child I looked out on the owens lake bed coming and going from Lone Pine, a small sierra city that my uncle lives in. I was always amazed at how long the lakebed stretched. (24 miles) Trying to imagine that bed full of water in the middle of the desert was nearly impossible but I tried each time we passed it.

This was an impressionable experience, one that I still think about today as I work on water related art works.

I drove out to the desert on Sunday and filmed the entire passing of the lakebed from my car. It takes about twenty minutes to fully pass the lake bed. The bed is red, orange, green, yellow and has very shallow sectioned off pools of still water. Water from the aqueduct that is set there to minimize dust storms. There is also salt grass planted for the same reason.

This morning I drove up to the lakebed in the town of Keeler. (pop 100) There was a surfboard sign stating that "this lovely vista was brought to you by the City of Los Angeles.

using today to:
finish reading Alan Sekula's Fish Story
capture video i took of the Sespe this past Sunday
look into some artist's whose names i've run into in readings or out and about over the past week.
plan a trip to the Owen's Valley this weekend to start gathering footage and ideas on the Owen's Dry Lake Bed.
evaluating my progress.
making sense of relations between the various works i'm doing.

a cloudy day on n alboni. lb turning into an sf sunset.

the october sespe on a sunday afternoon.

searching: artist writings

i've been searching for examples of visual artists who use writing in their work.

here are some things i found.

If anyone has recommendations of artist's who use writing, pleeease send them my way!

I am interested in this for both the content of the works as well as the various presentation methods.

From Sophie Calle's 2009 project Take Care of Yourself with various women artists.

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has invited guests into her temporary bedroom in the Eiffel Tower, worked as a maid to photograph strangers’ travel possessions, collaborated on a fictional character with writer Paul Auster, and been followed by a private detective at her own request. Her latest turn, at New York gallery Paula Cooper, finds Calle dealing with a lover’s breakup via email, using the traumatic experience to explore issues of intimacy vs. mass technology.














From Gordon Winiemko's 2007 piece Recommendations

Contemplating a juried show called "IOU," I sent letters to several friends, family members and colleagues, asking them for a favor – would they write a letter of recommendation on my behalf, asking the gallery to include me in the show?









From Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive

reading: fish story and the lagoon cycle

more info on lagoon cycle
A couple of artists, husband and wife, travel to Sri Lanka and find a hardy blue crab. They make it their mission to use the crab and its lagoon and the making of artificial lagoons as a metaphor to talk about western technology, history, socioeconomics, relationships, environmentalism, power and the place of the artist in society.

Just a really great book that combines text and image and helped encourage me to implement text in my own work and some possibilities of presenting content through text and image that would not have been possible with image alone. I'm tired of people saying that art should not need text to explain it and that it should exist without text. Some art can and should, other art would not be possible, would not be the same without textual accompaniment.


more info on fish story
Another bonding of photographs and narrative writings. Looking at the world economy, capitalism, technology, society and nature, through the ports of the world, including The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles.

I forget that people come from all around the world to Long Beach, just to bring us stuff. To bring the United States stuff. Then we pick it up with big trucks and move it again. The system seems so primitive but what else can we do?

preparing to print

using test file
you can go here to get the test files for free: http://homepage.mac.com/billatkinson/FileSharing2.html
print one of these to compare the way your monitor renders colors and values to the way the printer renders them.

soft proof
ICC profiles are binary files, and are opened automatically by Photoshop, the operating system, printer drivers, and similar files. Profiles need to be installed in the correct location on your computer for them to be available to image editing and other applications. These locations are:
Mac OS X:
Library-->ColorSync-->Profiles allows all users to use them.







set up soft proofed image in another window next to original. try to change things to make soft proof match original. in this case the soft proof shows loss of saturation so we would increase saturation to match the non-soft-proofed image.



if our image ends up printing less saturated than we want we can do a test strip for saturation. select an area of the image that would be good for a test strip. copy and paste this section into different layers of the image. apply different levels of saturation to each layer using adjustment layers which are made into parent/child layers so that they only affect the layer immediately beneath them.




when you are about to print make sure that you have photoshop managing the colors.

He said, "Go to Loleta, to the mouth of the river. Past the cheese factory there is a dirt road. Follow the road until it ends. You'll see how strong the river is by what it brought there."

We were the only people there, save one man and dog in the distance. There was no telling which way the river was coming or going, so we look out on it as the sea.




A home away from home. It looked and felt exactly like beneath the Old Road bridge on the Sespe but we didn't get in the water here. I don't know why.

And later we talked to a gas station girl who told us about the river being full of syringes and sweat and about her friend who ended up in the hospital, accidentally high on acid, after being shot with squirt guns.


(these images are small. 4 inches across. the size comes from vintage photo-postcards which contain a nostalgic language, (it is important to me that they are not a standard size used presently)they are small to remain intimate, to balance the text with image, not allowing the image size to overpower the text. the text will be handwritten in cursive another sort of nostalgic reference to old ways of doing things. letting the images exist outside this present time. nostalgic in ways but not set in a particular time exactly)

progress: half empty/half full

This week I transitioned into working a bit on some pieces related to the fountain animation.

I'm using images from my trip to the Eel and creating non-linear, open-ended, short, narrative texts to pair with them. The texts combine fiction with reality, auto-biography with documentation, subjective with objective, history with interpretation, assumptions with facts. The idea is to present a more full and complicated story of the river, one that is not from one perspective but from many, one that includes contradictions as these occur naturally with people's varying perspective on the river, its history and its future. I don't want the text to be didactic because the situation isn't so. I want narratives that allow the viewer/reader to project their own interpretations onto the situation.

You're damned if you do and your damned if you don't.
There is just not enough water to go around. There is not enough water to give every city as much as it wants or needs. Give to one city take away from another. Both places need the water.

Water is such a complicated and limited resource (as complicated as oil, if not more) and its distribution and redistribution are such charged personal and political matters.

I want two things that are irreconcilable.

I want an Owen's River and Owen's Lake and I want Los Angeles to be the crazy sprawling desert metropolis that it is and all that that has to offer me.

I want the Eel River to keep its waters and the steelhead trout and native salmon to flourish again, providing for the people who's families have depended on them for generations and I want to drink my wine from Marin that's watered by this redirected water.


I'm thinking of the concept of half empty/half full. For every issue there are two ways of looking at it.

I went to Humboldt and I saw the river and I thought 'this is a beautiful river' and it is. But it is also a ruined river. It is half empty/half full. It's not as bad as The Owen's River because it is still there. The Owen's is just a dry bed and will continue to be that way. But its worse than free-flowing rivers because 80 percent of its water is diverted south and its animals are all dying. Its half empty/half full. depending how you look at it.

Water travels hundreds of miles across the country, gets to LA and then is used in water fountains, spraying up into the air, added some imitation of nature to parks and schools. People like them, they are nice and calming. At the same time they are ridiculous in their waster. They are half empty/half full.

discovered some new material

browsing through Bookforum today I noticed two books, each on one of the main topics I am dealing with in my work right now.

The first one:

desc: Writers and artists offer new perspectives on water, with writings and projects that touch on subjects ranging from new water infrastructures to the bliss of bathing.

The second:


desc: What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in belonging.

Now to find them...

Sometimes, walking home, I like to imagine that I'm still in San Francisco and sometimes I believe it.

Fall air and ambulance sounds remind me a lot of when I first moved to Long Beach.

lynda

just watched an hour and a half worth of tutorials on preparing to print and learned nothing new. : (

first draft

working on getting it to resemble the actual fountain. having a difficult time creating fluid movements with dirt.

any suggestions?

really odd mulholland fountain tribute video

Mulholland Memorial Fountain from Brian Lowe on Vimeo.