Saturday, September 14, 2013

9/14 Phone Consultation with My Advisor


     I talked about how my Memory House came to be: Ben’s comment that I should isolate parts of my images & blow them up, and Molly’s comment that I should take pieces from my images and reconstruct them into one larger 2-dimensional house image.  I got thinking about Cornelia Parker’s Hanging Fire sculpture at the ICA, and I became fascinated by the idea of making my shredded imagery “float” in space.  (“Shred” was how I saw it in my mind – I think Ben & Molly were thinking of cleaner boarders.)  DT told me to think about the words “isolate” and “attach”.  She also said that what Ben said & what Molly said are two different things.  Ben told me to “isolate” because there was too much going on in my images.  And now I’ve isolated, but put them back together in a format where there is really way too much going on.  DT asked why am I doing this?  She asked if am I reacting to Ben & Molly’s comments, or am I thinking and investigating?  I need to look at how I make decisions.  She also asked me to try to answer what is hitting me about the word “isolate”.   Why am I doing what I’m doing?  But she also said to be careful not to let the thought process guide the work.  Have intuition steer the work, and then step back and try to understand it objectively.

     DT said “process” and “place” are both very important in my work.  She said my work is both material driven and location driven.  She said I seem to be trying to make something that can be seen only through a particular way of working.  She said I seem to work intuitively, but I need to look at how I make decisions.  DT suggested I take some scraps of chicken wire and make small samples of various imagery attachment methods.  I shouldn’t think about a finished product, but rather delve into the investigation of materials and attachments and what the various results convey.

     DT said she looks at my Memory House and thinks that it is not going to just exist as an object, but that something will happen to it.  She said I like to create a situation and a spectacle and document it.   She said I take objects and turn their presence from “is” to “was”.  And she wondered if this was a “fact”, or a “fiction”.  She said I seem to be bumbling down the road to dissatisfaction, and that I am trying to see something I haven’t seen before.  She said I again that should think about “absence” and “isolation”.

     DT suggested I look at the Situationists, like Guy Debord.  And I should read Lucy Lippard.  She said my process reminds her of psychogeography.  And my next paper should be trying to dig down deep into the “whys” of what I’m doing with my work.

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