artist statement?
I didn't know how to make a new forum topiccc???!!! Now that every one knows what we should be doing our artist statements on, lets post them!
“She will be another's. As she was before my kisses. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes………
because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.”-Pablo Neruda.
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Installing, “Tonight I can Write The Saddest Lines- (Virginia Lovers)” was an emotional unraveling for me. I flew to Virginia for Thanks Giving and spent days in the attic and in the closets of my Mothers home compiling hundreds of old letters, poems, pictures, and gifts of three of my past lovers, and boarded a plane a week later with a suitcase weighing exactly 50 pounds of these relics. I knew I had this idea, I knew it sounded a little odd, but I felt as if I needed to execute the idea in order to feel “the last pain he makes me suffer, and the last verses I write for them.” I felt as if I wanted the most sterile environment possible so I could clutter it, and I could form a memory with fuzzy spotlights with no other distractions. Once in front of my huge white wall I felt tiny, I opened my suite case and felt even more overwhelmed. 50 pounds and 5 years of baggage. My plan was to give each partner a six foot wide space in chronological order with black masking take from the ceiling to the floor separating them, and in the center of the space a 2x3 ft color photograph that I felt represented them well, and underneath them an audio track of my voice narrarating our relationship, before seeing this the viewer would walk in the room and be asked to press play on an old answering machine reciting, “Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines” by Pablo Neurada .
I started with Ian Burke the boy who took my virginity and I first ever said I love you to. It was especially hard to collage our relationship on the wall, it had been destructive, I was very young only thirteen and fourteen, and our relationship ended with me being sent to inpatient rehab for 5 months. I threw away and burnt half the things that he gave me or reminded me of him, it took me two years to be able to even talk to him again after we broke up, the only objects that remained in my possession that reminded me of him where photographs I had taken the journal I wrote in when I was with him and a book he had given me on my return from rehab. I took a photograph that Chase Libson had taken that portrayed him the most, in the photograph he is wearing a skeleton mask in a dim lit room behind red and yellow fake flowers. He is posed with his arms behind his head like a 1950’s glam shot, with the under side of his left arm showing a full sleeve of a black a white beehive tattoo with red bees crawling all over the hive, his shirt reads, “Better Dead Than Domesticated.” Ian has many masks and the front side of his arms tattoo sleeve shows a burning city from his wrist to his elbow. His part of the installation was scattered and almost bare, showing photographs that I had taken and developed when I was fourteen, they are not of very good quality and look like a distant memory, I no longer even own the negatives. Other photographs my mom had taken of me during this time. From the photographs I stretched string across the wall to pieces of scrap paper describing the situations, (the string was for esthetics only.) These little memories spoke of all the trouble we had gotten in together. In-between Ian’s piece I placed snap shots of boys I had, had little flings with I am assuming I will forget some of their names in the next five years. The next piece was all about Tucker Reeves Duncan, boyfriend of exactly two years. The amount of shit that I had in boxes from him was disgusting, and I didn’t even use half of it for my installation. The picture I chose for him was a Polaroid I took after we broke up. In the photograph was the first night he told me he felt he had lost all hopes in ever coming together again romantically and felt comfortable with it. In the picture I was living in Salt Lake City and he was touring through and played a show at the house I was living in. In the picture he is leaning against old gold and velvet wallpaper in my living room with no ceiling next to a window, with one eye closed taking a drag from his cigarette holding a whiskey sour. I might add that there was no smoking aloud in that house, he has what we call a little bit of a drinking problem, is oblivious to anything he doesn’t want to know, and walks like the high heavens are asking for his presents. Amen. When I first met Tucker the only thing that kept him sane was poetry and skateboarding, he was 18 and I was 14- I think these two ages clearly indicate we were going through times where we where changing a lot in the next two years. We started out creatively feeding off each other, the amount of poems I have from him and for him are outstanding. The amount of letters, ticket stubs from favorite bands, pictures, old clothing, records, songs I have wrote, paintings, comic books, and panic attacks. Outstanding. I learned so much of what to never do again with this guy. Tuckers piece was covered from ceiling to floor with no wall showing. A lot of it was small text that the viewer would have had to spend an ample amount of time looking at to take all in. It was not intentional on my part but many of the viewers told me that the first thing they noticed from his piece was a white t-shirt with “Fuck Tucker” stenciled on in perfect cursive. The t-shirt was made as a joke, and I wore it so much that I wore holes in the side of it. I think the viewer first looking at that t-shirt may have received a fairly good view of half of our relationship. Some of the poems and letters showed two people in exaggerated puppy love and some showed distrust, and the games young people are so good at playing with each other for no apparent reason at all, and living together became a big mistake. The process of reading all these letters and poems again was a little melancholy, at the end of Tucker and I’s relationship we mourned the death of the people whom we used to be, we stayed together for a year to long because we didn’t realize what had happened, we had grown. I think this piece showed a little girl who loved a guy so much she was unhappy, and extremely scared. If you have ever have ever hear the Byrds song, “your water” you will understand how he felt.
“In the beginning you really loved me
But I was blind and I could not see
But when you left me, oh, how I cried
You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry
I was a playboy, I could not be true
I couldn’t believe I really loved you
But when you left me, oh, how I cried
You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.”
I will conclude that Tuckers piece was the easiest to complete with material, and that I think of Tucker and Ian’s relationship almost like the part in The Little Prince when he finds the rose bushes full of roses identical to the only rose he thought existed on his tiny planet. In-between Tucker where some more substantial snapshots of men who’s names I will probably remember for about 10 or 15 more years, mainly because two of them have their names in my songs. The last piece was for Eric Parker Smith, Parker, P-nut, Parkie (barf), that drunk guy, his large picture portrayed him how I loved him. It is again a Polaroid, we were on top of a mountain and about to go swimming he was napping, I set the Polaroid in the grass to get the tops of the blades and took the picture of him sleeping in the best Virginia summer. This was the hardest installation for me to complete, I had broken up with him three weeks prior and still love him romantically. There was nothing wrong with our relationship except for 2906.30 miles. I felt extremely guilty putting his part together as well, one of the things he said to me after I broke up with him was something along the lines of, “If you put me in that fucking installation I will be sick, I am no fucking Tucker or Ian and you know it.” I also felt guilty because I had kissed another man and was to big of a coward to tell him this, when he was the first boyfriend who had not cheated on me. Parkers installation started at the top of the ceiling, with the phrase, “And Every Thing That You Hated Me For….Honey There Was So Much More I Just Didn’t Get Busted” hung with each individual work taking up a 8.5x11 inch piece of paper. The phrase was ironic because it came from a Songs:Ohia song that I had put on mix tape for him, the song became the song that will always remind me of him, and vice versa. The phrase matched up to my guilt. Parker and I were pretty much inseparable for the year we where together so there were countless photographs of us and of him. I had many letters from him, two months of our relationship I was traveling and living in Salt Lake City, and two other months I had moved to Olympia, part of our attraction was clear “and believe me I’ll go crazy” says James brown, and “believe me I believe you it’s part of the attraction.” Says Parker. He liked Neil Young, Otis Redding , and Gram Parsons, while he beat his drums hard enough to put holes in them to music that would make those three-artist cringe----- and he was completely insane. This installation included these pictures, and letters L.P.’s he had given me, a song I wrote for him, there was space at the bottom that showed white wall, and below were swimming hole rocks, the most precious diorama I have ever seen that he made for me, and toys that I used to send him that sat on the shelf above his bed we slept in together every night for months. The audio was especially hard to track for Parker, it was by far the shortest, I just wanted to talk about how much I loved him in it. I told our story as best I could. I had this feeling that making this piece would have shed some guilt or may become “the last line I wrote for him” but in reality made me miss him. Some of the viewers responded that they thought it looked like the relationship was incomplete, I think that my subconscious hopes so. My finishing touch I decided to put three chairs facing closely to the installation with a bright spotlight facing the three pieces from the ground, the room had no window so I shut the lights off and closed the door. This installation was a success to me, I have always seemed to make the best artwork when I am first interested in a person or when I love someone romantically. Love and attraction is something that fascinates me very much, and has been something that has inspired lots of my past art work, this installation kind of compiled my inspiration. It is work that I intend to keep experimenting with until people are not interested at all in it any more, or until I feel closure. I am not sure how people could not be interested in love though. A project I would like to document in the future is middle school and high school relationships.
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