Baginatree sound and drawings

This is my drawing assignment for China, the page is 11x14 done with micron pen. I have bought all the colors and plan to keep this up using colored lines instead of black.

This is a sketch for a sculpture idea, they are meant to be bags rolled into balls as one would when knitting. To me they are like cocoons, representing potential. I have had this experience when asking the staff at the high school I teach at for bags. They have completely bombarded me with bags, and every day more keeps coming. This caused me to ask why do people have so many bags saved? I guessed people don't know what to do with them, even though on the bags it says "Please recycle drop your bags in the recycle bin at the nearest participating store." We have a lot of Market Basket stores in our area and not one one them has a bin. So here we have this packaging item that people just can't throw away. This lead me to think about string; during the depression my grandfather would get packages from the store they would be wrapped in paper and string. He would very carefully unwrap the package and keep the string in a ball in the kitchen drawer. He did the same with everything.

The video is supposed to loop. So the idea is the bag is taken out put back in taken out etc. A reflection of my own struggle of do I want the bags in the trees or out.

This will be reshot without the zoom and framed better. I haven't done that it yet.

American Beauty moment. I tried not to move the camera most of the movement is coming from the wind.

There is no image only the sound. This is also supposed to loop. I think it's funny and have thought of it as a "musak" sound going on in the background of an installation.

Collecting Art Supplies

The last 2 weeks have been very tough for me. I have a ton of ideas but I got this horrible cold that I couldn't seem to shake. I'm back in the game again and feeling up to doing things. Spring is showing up and that has made a huge difference.

Lately I'm reading about the work of Mierle Ladderman Ukeles. I have been inspired by her Maintenance Manifesto and Flow City. When I think of the bags in the trees I am conflicted. Is my idea to remove them because they are bad for the environment or is it because I enjoy my relationship with them the sense of discovery as I notice. Hey look! "bagintree".

Everyday I drive home from work and I see the bags they become visible. I start to see them as friends along my route and when a new one appears I notice. This activity of marking time and my journey is very comforting.

Then I know the reality of them, they break down into more and more toxic substances as they get smaller and smaller poisoning the ground as apposed to something like a nurse tree that returns nutriants to the ground and brings forth new life.

Ukeles talks in her Flow City proposal about our relationship with the earth. Earth as virgin, the untouched landscape of the romantic waiting for the swashbuckling hero to arrive on the scene, earth as mother the giver of life the always forgiving and loving, and earth as whore something to be exploited and used for our pleasure. All of Ukeles work at Freshkills landfill is to banish these anthropomorphizing visions that have become exploitations

So here is my own struggle: Am I making more commodity for consumption? Am I simply responding to my environment from a holier than thou perspective? Or am I engaged in a maintenance project of change?

For now I'm looking into maintenance.

Studio Work

Progress is being made on the drawing collage. I went for a bike ride yesterday and found a nice blue plastic bag. I plan on incorporating this into theses ideas. I am also in touch with a lighting guy in Merrimack who hopefully can help me get different colored plastics to fool around with. I've been looking for interesting shopping backs but NH is very vanilla when it come to shopping bags.

I am frustrated having to be physically in my studio in order to work so I am fooling around with drawing and collage. Something I can do while at work and do at 4 am when it's too cold and dark to go out to the studio. Who knows were this will go but I've been given permission to really screw up this semester so I thought I would take advantage. Opportunities like that don't come up often!

Studio Work

This is done in Illustrator and I am working on cutting them out of wood for now but I have found a guy who does water cutting so the end product could be in metal or glass.

Studio Work

These are castings I am working on. I am still working out the bugs in my technique.

Dream about AIB work 2/20/09:

I was driving along a highway and looking into the trees and the whole forest was covered in plastic. Giant sheets of clear plastic weaving in and out of the trees, it seemed to go on forever. I said to myself "this really is everywhere isn't it." I got out of my car and started walking among the trees I was reminded of Christo's Running Fence. As I walked further I saw a small path in the woods leading to a doorway as I walked along the path I noticed these tiny hollow shapes they looked like barnacles but in the dream I recognized them as mud dauber homes. I reached the door at the end of the path it lead to the common room at AIB. A few people were milling about but I found Cindy Newsome and told her about the path the dream ended with the two of us setting off to check out the path.

Here is a picture of a mud dauber nest for those who may not know what they are: