This first residency, I joined a 10-person family called group 1. In the first few days of the residency I felt really uncomfortable with what I had been making in the past. I came knowing that I wanted to explore other media and somehow focus on making viewers more engaged with the work. I wanted to make experiences more than paintings.

The critical theory readings and seminar affirmed this feeling as I realized what I was making before lacked a palpable driving force or need, despite how enjoyable painting was as I made them. My paintings before were made out of momentary delight and a need to distract myself from other obligations rather than a social or personal statement.

The critiques brought me through intense emotional highs and lows and further distanced me from my past work. I found myself damning innocent words like "kitsch" or "literal", making them out to be evil when they are simply adjectives. Looking around at the other people's work in my crit space, I saw a concrete divide between what they make and what I had been making. Theirs looked real to me and appeared as evidence of some conceptual underpinning that my work lacked. The cohesion of the work made this feeling stronger. Each of my pieces was alone with little connection to another in its arrangement. My peers' work had common threads that reinforced the significance of it.

Overnight, between the first and the second critique, my brain had switched from failure mode to "get your shit together" mode, and I felt reinvigorated and detached from what I'd made in a freeing and refreshing way. As I started to explain myself and what I wanted during the critique, I started to better grasp the direction I might actually move toward.

My brain over this week did something like this:

In the mix, here's what I've learned:

PAINTING

Prime with mix of modeling paste and heavy gel medium
Stretch your own canvas on heavy-duty bars with 10 oz canvas sheet
Try Golden A-Z kit to play with texture
Try oil paint, especially if painting portraits
Stop straddling this literal, perfectly kitsch line that is painfully predictable.
Abstract, abstract, abstract.

CONCEPT

Write ideas down, then circle the most important/key words and redefine them through other symbols or images to abstract
Take pictures of things that tickle me in everyday life
Research human tendency
Research feet
Allow ideas to be half-baked.
Stop jumping to conclusions, let things process. PROCESS.

IDEAS

--Connection --

In Vonnegut's made up religion, Bokononism, touching feet together with another person is so intimate it's more vulgar than sex. Why did he choose feet? Possible significance: It's a body part we purposefully desensitize and turn to callous to withstand the harshness of our own impact/weight. There is something significant about trying to connect through an intentionally numbed outlet. This reminds me of Biblical washing of feet.

The idea of connection also reminds me of I Heart Huckabees and how everything is "the blanket." One of the most impactful scenes for me is this:

Dustin Hoffman plays an existential detective/coach and reminds Mark Whalberg's character that despite his crisis, he is everything, and so nothing is right or wrong or gone.

I enjoy this scene because it reminds me of the truth--that there are little gaps between atoms that only seem to create concrete matter. I enjoy imagining that some of my atoms are actually sinking between the atoms of the chair I sit on, and I imagine it looks a lot like this image.

PROJECT?

Between 2 framed panes of glass, I will arrange found object such as feathers, pieces of foil, etc to represent the space between two hands or hand and foot, whatever. They will bleed into each other.
Attach Go Pro to my face and wash strangers feet. I will have people describe the experience to the camera as I am washing. I might project video over cheesecloth or other filmy, creamy textured clothes that resemble sloughs of skin.

--Disconnection--

After contemplating connection, I ran into the wall of disconnection. It seems that diconnection is a loaded topic and might be too large to attack. I thought about my own inability to connect with others, specifically romantically, and how I've created a self-relient system that I now seem dedicated to. This mode of thought might be blocking me from future connections as I grow comfortable.

"Replacing people with things" just kind of flashed in front of my head. I thought about sex dolls. I'd seen them before. Not the blow up variation, but the silicone, detailed, humanoid versions sold at true sex shops. I thought about how porn has been working in a similar manner, exploring territories partners aren't willing to or exercising taboo fantasies as a replacement of the real. I wondered if these products were desensitizing people the same way we desensitize our feet, by overwhelming them with extreme terrain and beating them down until it's what they know (I'm sorry feet). I thought about how this seemingly "safe" space--where people can explore without risk of disease, backlash from partners, or judgement--is also a blocking mechanism.

Here are 2 projects re. Sex dolls that I imagine completing:

creating grotesque, faceless, amorphous sculptures with embed found materials that become dangerous to touch--screws, bottle caps, glass shards, pencils--until the "sex doll" is untouchable.
Placing objects that protect or block, such as a traffic cone, in front of a projected recording of someone trying to use it for sexual release. Grunts, sighs, and "I love you" would be heard over the short film. The realization that the object is a sex toy would change the way the viewer interacts with it. I want to know if the viewer blames the object or the user.

Ok, that's just about everything!

"No manure, no magic" --I Heart Huckabees