The photo above is a collection of images in my sketchbook. I’ve been working on this collection of grey on grey shapes that are based on waterfalls and pours without vessels. I’m challenging myself not to keep the cut shapes, but instead, to throw them away after shooting. The idea is that I draw/cut better when I work fast, and I think I will get better at it with more practice. I hope this will also help me hone the forms. With this series I’m struggling between the desire to have things be loose and messy, and the desire to let them be monumental.
Monumental pour/fall
Maybe I can do both messy, notational and monumental. I think I just need to keep shooting and then go back and see what shakes out. Some of these shapes have art-historical echoes: cubist guitars, landscape forms, etc. But I am actively avoiding those references. People get excited by these associations, but I don’t. I’m always after something else.
However, I recently interviewed Abelardo Morell about his new show at Edwynn Houk and wrote about it for Lensculture, so I have been thinking about this method of dialoging with well known art. I respect his and other artists direct engagement with art history. I just don’t want to do it myself, or at least not in a planned or deliberate way.
Outside of the studio, it has been a season of travel. After traveling to Los Angeles for the Adobe conference in October, I went to Paris Photo for the first time in November. Lucky for me, my press pass got me free access everywhere. I spent nearly 2 full days at the fair until my eyes were bursting, then spent more time looking at art elsewhere: Carolyn Drake’s exhibit at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the Pompidou and the Picasso museum, currently thrillingly taken over by Sophie Calle. Evenings were full of delicious meals and conversation, and days were full of art and connecting with other artists.
With Ira Lombardia in front of her work, mounted on lazy susans at the Alarcon Criado booth
My phone’s battery was weak so I got around using a paper map and the metro. The streets kept me guessing, but the metro never let me down. It was rainy and cold, so it was a relief to arrive in Washington DC for the Society for Neuroscience conference, where it was sunny and the trees still had color. Highlights of the neuroscience conference included lectures on the mechanisms of the inner ear and the brain, the evolution of sleep in reptiles, and the launch party for the new Simons Foundation neuroscience publication, The Transmitter. Nonetheless, it was a relief to get home.
I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately—some about science and some about art. My review of Drake’s extraordinary book Men Untitled and my commissioned essay and photos for Berm magazine were published in November, and I have articles published at The Transmitter, including this favorite interview with two sailor-neuroscientists.