fever dreams and wakeful sleep

Never mind houseplants and disposable income.. . along with other indispensables, maps are so passe, thanks to any number of bad art projects (see portfolio for starters).. never mind getting lost without a 2-way GPS system and the relation of text to geography. The poetry of memory has no place in a land grant summary of finding your way home and figuring that's probably enough til you can get organized enough to print maps en route to the next interview.. most likely missed that one too many times to re-apply... ever.

Passe or potential?

-narrative art+writing

-maps

-video art

-theories re. games & play

-craft in the contemporary world

-knitting

-gender, race, and class

-critiques around academic pedagogy (anthropology, anyone).

-virtual reality

-the internet

-sci fi and fantasy; aesthetics of/supporting.

-liminal and "post-" rhetorical studies

Colpa Press @ Wire and Nail

Please check out the Colpa Press Pop-Up Shop at Wire and Nail Gallery in San Francisco, this weekend: December 16-18, 2011.

"COLPA is a publishing company based out of San Francisco, CA that specializes in hand-made art books and collectible cards. These publications intend to challenge the relationship between printmaking and concept, creating objects in a reciprocal dialog with the way in which they are produced."

http://colpapress.com/

http://colpapress.wordpress.com/

WHERE IS THE GILBERT TO MY GEORGE?

While a 1+1 crying projects scenario would lead to nothing but increasingly neurotic, dark, emotionally disastrous projects that lost any formal edge, I long to find someone that is compatible as a collaborator as well as a first-sight-and-forever love.

I need a coatrack of a man (or maybe woman)--preferably one that will teach me Spanish and believe in a two-winged home, but turn out to find happiness as we grow to become irreconcilably codependent (and to not have a problem with this).

Please be unusually optimistic in attitude, even if the optimism is sort of an adoptive strategy and not one born from a long and easy life history.

Lying is low on my list of values; this is not to say that I am capable of lying, but I don't mind if you have to--as long as I can trust that you mean what you say at the time that you are saying it, because it comes out of a real deep-seated loyalty and love that permeates whatever chrysalis the words act as, until the real and always non-word and quickly departing thing emerges.

Please move this ring from right to left finger and hold what is right. Take it and run.

Now look up and see: did you take my hand or did you follow the directions and find yourself with an invisible key, surrounded by the psychic wheat field of your productive resolution to a life of solitude.

Maybe I'm projecting here, and should retract everything before things get even more complicated.

Serious inquiries only: lamb.katrina.2010@gmail.com

Real Love And Real Life

Of the things I lost in a stretch of computer mishaps was a winning e-mail collection: replies from Dan Savage and Dr. Phil. Correspondence with crushes, dates, lovers, and friends.

During a period in which my personal space shrunk to nil, I became self-conscious about having anything around that would reveal things that I felt quite private about--including e-mail exchanges with a talk show host and advice columnist, of course.

Reduced to the virtual world, that space was eliminated as well in November 2010 when my laptop self-destructed; Swung From The Gutter (Tortoise--TNT) provided a soundtrack stuck on repeat--this malfunction was one of many symptoms of more serious internal trouble. Nobody Belongs Here More Than You Do (the Miranda July book on tape) cover art strobed pink while my history went into the black hole quicksand portal of the trash.

A week later, my dad retrieved the contents of the trash--albeit in a scrambled series of lists...tracts of data plotted in rows of storage in a hard drive for future use.

Far from feeling discouraged or jaded, the loss of the computer and easy access to old work made it more or less impossible to ruminate in a the way that had become routine--I was deeply comforted by returning to the same photos and old poems and interviews, and embraced the melancholy and reminders of past loss and and failures. It didn't seem possible to overcome, but I quite unexpectedly lost my preference for the kind of premature sense of nostalgia that has so often gummed up my potential to make motions toward changes significant enough to threaten the already quickly evaporating present moment.

Needless to say, the attempt to slow the loss of the present was fruitless, but perhaps something will prove yet to come out of the care that protected against the kind of dramatic change that seemed to have the potential to cause a more violent form of erasure than the kind of erasure that comes more gently with time and the failure of memory.

If nothing else, this internal running back to the door to check the lock several times may illustrate the place that nostalgia has had in my life--less bittersweet than hysterical, and renewed by the self-perpetuating hyper awareness as I found myself locked out of both the present moment that is never there, for we have already always passed it, and whatever corridor that would suggest a more normal kind of forward momentum without so much indecision about whether to keep going at all.

What are these present places then, that are always behind us and never revealed. As experienced in the sense of present experience and memory, a present moment is a sum of a stunning array of phantasmagorical parts, moving past and through each other, catching enough light through these iridescent filters to cast a projection onto the wall that we call memory...this "memory" being limited in scope--I mean it's the part of memory that recognizes some familiar thing that a narrative can be quickly paired with, tossed together and onto the shelf with little more care than would be paid to items on an assembly line, paired without close examination, with one eye on the time clock, one hand reaching for a cell phone, and nodding to your co worker's never-ending gossip.

Finding an ability to engage with the possibility of change, I have decided to return to my original goal, which was and is now to become an architect.

Eventually.

My first building is in progress; the sketches have everything to do with something that will be built; this is not intended to be a self-effacing exercise in reaching for unattainable goals, with drawings as end product. I have no interest in planning to draw for the rest of my life, escaping into a fantasy world that remains fantasy.

P.S. On that note, if you want to marry me, I'm on the loose and don't have a shred of intuition left. And to clarify--I guess by marriage, I mean commitment of sorts--probably a formal romantic and collaborative partnership with someone that works best without having to try to interact in naturalized domestic ways or something, interested in performance in a gender studies way, and does better in life when there's someone in close proximity almost all the time.

Note: drawings in this post are 2009-11 architectural & spatial studies; please e-mail for information about current and forthcoming projects. I'm not sure how protective to be of my sketches for the architecture project. Any thoughts on this more than welcome. Thank you!

makeshift

SNAPSHOTS: AUG-OCT

my how we've grown

Pre-nostalgia

In a renewed effort to seek employment (albeit not necessarily 'gainful' in the singular, Career-ish sense) my mom sent me a few links this a.m., including a job posted on Springboard For the Arts for a string installation artist.

Like all jobs that really sort of seem like they might be most in keeping with my interests, the job triggered an onslaught of stories and memories--ones that seem to occupy my time in a way that is disproportionate to the amount of energy that I am able to delegate to trying to live in the present.

Recently, I ran across this term "pre-nostalgia." It was used in an art show on some internet site from...Portland?

With little more than the suggestion of a new word, I want to find a way to reverse my long-term and recently soured relationship with nostaliga and 'nostomania,' as introduced by the 'off-modern' east-European author Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia.

Don't know quite where to go these days, haunted by an uncomfortable conflation of memories that feature failed personal relationships with failed academic/art relationships--including many people that are no longer living.

My grandma, at ninety-eight, recently fell and broke her hip.

It is hard to try to explain to certain family, and to her especially, why I can't be there for her more completely. There is no way to be fair about feeling exhausted by the grief of having already felt the very unfair betrayal that goes along with having people leave this life--something that most people reserve for intimate relationships--family, partners, friends.

How do I deal with the kind of exhaustion that I feel from having already had too many people that I spent too much energy caring about that don't fit into the categories that are more easily accepted. All of the people that occupy more peripheral spaces in our lives.

Has anyone walked past David Ireland's house lately? Who is there now to hold vigil now that I can't? For all those years that I walked past, on schedule with religious regularity--without question or explanation. The bust in the upstairs window, lights changing, 'we're-gone, back at so-and-so-hour' laminated clock in the front door window--along with a wooden elephant. What is a sculpture is a memory or is the number fifty-three eventually again just that.

Barometers and Systems of Care

bindings

August-Snapshots