With whom would you weather the last storm?

One of my roommates, who already thinks I’m nuts (as I have recently taken to staging and filming elaborate rituals around the apartment), wanders down to the first floor one Monday evening. He gets half way down the staircase and looks out, but can’t see the floor. Instead, a canopy of colored fabric has risen to mid-stair level. A blanket sea spreads out beneath his feet and flows to the far corners of the finished basement. Swaying slowly in it’s own imagined currents. Shadows dart beneath the folds and fabric ripples on the surface. The underworld of the tent fort is occupied.

“Come on in!” We call. He wades in like a sport as we hoist up the remaining mast and string the last sheets to sail. The tent fort is finished when all of the collectively gathered sheets and blankets, chairs, poles, nets, hammocks, light fixtures, scarves, canvas swatches and tarps are connected to each other with some sort of pin or swath of duct tape.

There was no plan. The only blueprint I had for the evening was a well laid out veggie tray flanked by vodka tonics and friends who were game.

Once we had the structure in place, I took pictures of people in various poses for paintings – some staged and some candid. I’m making paintings with tents in them because they can suggest military outposts, refugee shelters, shantytowns, campgrounds, children’s forts, circus setups, post apocalyptic societies, native villages and romantic alcoves. What a medley! Sorting through all the associations and composing different combinations should keep me busy for a while.

When you look at a simple, low-tech shelter, you can read a lot about its maker and environment. Often its pieces are pulled from the immediate surroundings. Its production is transparent, as opposite to black box architecture and design (systems with fancy façades that render their complex, inner worlds unknowable) that dominate our infrastructure today.

Why go to all this trouble to stage elaborate life-sized references when the end product is a 2D image? (Did I mention drinks, friends and a good playlist?) The photographs that I took from the setup are very helpful to work from. But even more importantly, I find that once I’ve built something, I have a more comprehensive understanding of its form when I go to paint it. I’m able to turn it around in my head better, see it from all sides, so that I can play with and warp it instead of having to accept it as it comes in a still photo.

The other reason I gathered people to my basement was because my paintings are about young people gathering --- the patterns they make and how they group together. It made sense to set up a situation in which this stuff happens naturally. That way I could document the kinds of interactions that I’m interested in exploring “in the wild.” In the narratives that I paint (and write), the characters are often faced with extreme circumstances (environmental catastrophes, crumbling buildings, broken bodies). These were the people that gathered from nearby in Brooklyn when the stakes were low. But what if the waters really were rising and this was the group that got together to weather the storm? Would the structures that we built to stay afloat and the silhouettes of our huddled bodies look at all like this?

Thanks to the models! Check out the multi-talented bunch: Don (video art and mixed media), Siobhan (dance and dance writing), Marie (drawing and bookmaking), Felix (drawing and street art), Itzy (design and mixed media), Anton (journalism), George (film)

Ritual Still

A still from a video Don and I made last night as part of our new project, Ouroborix. There were many takes which meant many glasses of wine which means many glasses of vitamin water this morning.

“They Scorched the Snake But Have Not Killed It,”

was Banquo’s whispered plea. I wish I could remember what else he said to me with such intensity when he locked me in that room with the simple wooden furniture. The servant’s quarters. A bare alter and a bed. I was a woman he used to know. It was so good to see me again. He anointed me with oil and assured me that I was chosen for some great purpose. I was silent, as I had been instructed from the beginning. But he lifted my mask off and I guess my eyes were big as saucers. Wide open because nothing feels as good and as terrifying as surrendering your reality.

I knew what I was getting into, or I thought I did, when I lined up outside the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea to see ‘Sleep No More.’ I had brushed up on my Macbeth the night before. But the vibrant, violent world than greeted me inside was far more realized than I could have hoped for.

The anti-chamber helps. A winding, light-less hallway spills into the holding pen where revelers start and end their nights. This space is a functioning jazz bar where guests mingle with each other, throw off their old-worldly cares and get a taste of the new reality (absinth-flavored) before being subsumed. It is an effective transition to the surreal, because although the year is suddenly 1930, the jazz singer is a jazz singer and the champagne is champagne.

Inside, the first thing that hits you is that people can move differently in this world; there has been some shift in the physical laws. We’ve all seen dance performances before, but these people can climb walls, they can fall in and out of possessed states, they can fairly fly around the room. They have obviously been swept up in a super-human storm led by forces that are out of their control. The witches can read but not change them. It is this volatile combination of elements that makes the Macbeth story just as potent four hundred years after its birth.

The occupants of the McKittrick Hotel are tormented by guilt and wracked with lust. They hurl their bodies at walls and each other with wild abandon. The brutal percussion of all the falling, slamming, punching, shoving, growling, panting, clawing and lunging starts to keep beat in your ribcage like the baseline at a rock concert.

The question is not “Do I believe?” but rather, “How deep down this rabbit hole can I fall?”

The voyeurs are ghosts -- observing silently from beneath identical, white masks. But at least we are on the same side of the looking glass as the action and can haunt the performers at will. It is refreshing to be able to bodily respond to a physical performance, to empathize with and echo an inspiring movement, to chase down something that catches your fancy.

Once I climbed through the window of a mental hospital ward and landed in a forest. The fog that snaked through the labyrinth of braided trees was glowing ultramarine. The space was big enough so that the corners of the room could disappear in blue clouds. I wandered alone for a while until I stumbled onto a cabin where a nurse was reading quietly at the window, her hut scaled on the inside with thousands of hospital records butchered like clumsy snowflakes.

Because I’m hopelessly insatiable when it comes to dream worlds and alternate realities, I had a hard time dragging myself away from that glitzy jazz bar at the end of the night. A sultry singer with a septum piercing and a sequined gown like a second-skin was crooning. A guy was asking me to explain Macbeth to him one more time. The performers were emerging to unwind for the night.

I asked the male witch, “Have you read the night circus?” He was beautiful and willowy, with distinctive dark eyeliner. His character was the provocateur, the button pusher, the tempter, the hedonist, the spark that set stuff ablaze. I had just seen him naked with a giant bull’s head on, dancing feverishly, leaping onto tables with blood running from his belly down his stomach to the curve of his thigh. I had just watched Macbeth kneel beneath him and lick it off as a strobe light and a screaming techno beat tore threw any last remaining inhibitions or distance we had between ourselves and the soiled fabric of everything else. “Of course!” he said enthusiastically. “The author saw the show in Boston a while back. I think it gave her a lot of ideas.”

Then I thanked Banquo for the anointment. “Oh you!” He was pleased to see his silent ghost in the jazz bar of the half-alive. In purgatory. In ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ (in which the Big Bang starts over from scratch again each night). He was trying to catch the last train, so we ended up walking to the subway together, climbing down different staircases and standing across from each other on the platform. As I am physically incapable of turning away from magical potential, I watched him until he got onto his train. He walked to the window, put his hand on the glass and held my gaze until he was swallowed by the tunnel.

I swore the scented oil on my palms was bleeding into the stale subway air. Or some of the witch’s calcite clung to my hair because, the whole way home, people kept coming up to me, asking me about this or that, directions, where I was from. They could tell I’d been elsewhere. If we had all been dining at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they would have told their waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Goldfish Grow to Their Corners

Geoff oggling Mimi's guest bedroom.

I recently visited the studios of two artists. Feisty, redheaded ladies with insatiable appetites for silliness and adventure and a lust for the brightest colors they can get their hands on. They are the kind of effortlessly generous women that can hardly find enough lucky targets to pour their affection onto. Both are figurative painters whose work walks right off the canvas and into the social sphere with life-sized portraits of friends and art scenes and the ways we gather. Sometimes their canvases even warp, grow a third dimension and morph into walls and installations. Neither artist finds reason to separate life from work so, as a friend of theirs, you’re never quite sure when you’re being framed.

Why bother to differentiate art vs a dinner party? (Painters from left: Mimi, Laini Nemett, Ellen Schneiderman, Geoffrey Miller)

They are also at opposite ends of their careers -- Laura looking up from her just-sprouted practice and Mimi looking down over her tall, lush one that bears strong, intricate branches and encases many concentric rings.

Mimi's.

Oh. And both Laura and Mimi have big live/work spaces (as pictured in all of these photos), which is the reason I thought to write about them together in the first place. Huge. The word “cavernous” comes to mind and can’t be shaken.

Mimi's studio space.

Mimi Gross spent a chunk of her twenties traveling around Italy in a horse-drawn carriage, supporting herself hand to mouth with puppet shows performed out of the back. She’s shot the shit with just about everyone you’ve read about in your 20^th century art textbook. Her stories of travel and art world exploits are endless and spellbinding. It’s hard to fathom all that she’s seen and shaped and loved and left behind.

Early portrait of Mimi.

The one piece Mimi did about her travels in Berlin. A light box diorama. Simple and a bit slapstick -- I was immediately brought back there and felt the weight of the city in the paper construction that must have weighed next to nothing.

She has lived and worked in this giant flat in Manhattan for (I believe) over 30 years. The walls are stacked salon style to high ceilings with bright, bold art that documents and fictionalizes so many pasts it’s dizying. And the other half of the space is all new work – her studio. I think what leaves me most in awe of Mimi, and it’s quite a list to top, is the freshness of her palette. Her studio is like an enormous, overgrown garden. The new work climbing up the walls, ceiling and floor, is obviously on some sort of super fertilizer.

The bedroom portion of Laura's room.

Laura Hudson, who graduated from MICA’s MFA program with me last May, is discovering and staking out for the first time the territory that will be hers to mine and build on. Like me, she has little more than instinct and the voices in her head (painting teachers, the elder art gods, buddies, favorite musicians, Tom Bombadil (that could just be me)) to guide her to strange new lands. At this point the path seems arbitrary and disjointed, but I have a feeling that when she looks back over her travels, the path will show itself to be patterned with purpose and direction. Laura is someone who is sensitive enough to feel the pull of her “true North” and bold enough to follow it blindly.

The studio part.

She chose to stay in Baltimore after she graduated in large part because of the space she lives in, one of the rooms in the H&H Building – a vital organ of Bmore’s grassroots art and music scene, housing 3 galleries and 2 music venues (the count changes weekly). The show that is up now at Gallery Four, Laura’s floor, “Cowboys and Engines” by Dustin Carlson, stakes out the vast, industrial space brilliantly. The director of the Baltimore Museum of Art told me that she thought it was one of the strongest shows she’s seen, anywhere, in years.

Laura's door opens onto this.

Laura has a solo show coming up at the Arlington Arts Center in Virginia in the fall and, to prep, they let her throw a sleepover party in the space. She filmed it and is plotting life-sized paintings of the revelers that she will hang for the opening as a similar crowd fills the room.

And then this.

And finally this.

Fight for Me

Perseus slaying the dragon and freeing the maiden by Edward Burne-Jones.

If you want to marry my daughter, you’re going to have to find the ring I’ve dropped into the middle of the Red Sea. If she is your heart’s desire, you will have to find the secret place where she goes to dance each night. You must beat her in a race, even though she plays dirty. You must eat 300 oxen -- skin, bones and all -- and then drink 100 casks of wine in one night. If you fail in this, I will cut off your head. But if you succeed, the kingdom and the most beautiful bride will be yours.

The Grimm brothers recorded more than a few of these deadly trials. The common fairytale trope works to prove the strength and dedication (love never seems to factor in) of the competitor to the one in possession of his object of desire. It also impresses upon our protagonist the weight of what he’s getting himself into. And it’s not all boys slaying dragons (although it’s a lot of boys slaying dragons). If you happen to be a girl, you can line up outside the castle to present yourself as the most beautiful maiden in the land. If you win, the kingdom is yours. But if you are outshined, you will be drowned in the lake.

Brutal, right? Trial by fire with the highest of stakes. But isn’t it preferable to sitting at home and mailing letters into the void, checking the horizon for a horse-backed messenger every morning for months, not even sure if your courier was waylaid by bandits or delayed in a tavern of ill repute? Isn’t it better than biting your nails down to and past the quick and venting to anyone that will listen that if you could just see the princess, just for a moment, if you could entertain her with stories about your travels to the East and play her that new song on the lute and if she could just see the way this season’s harvest has made your body strong and tan then she would choose you above all the others? Instead of cursing the advantage of men whose fathers are close with the King and can bypass all that red tape, wouldn’t it be better to have the chance to win or lose her on your own merit?

I thought about this a lot when I returned from the Vermont Studio Center to my parents’ house in Connecticut this November. I spent a few days converting the basement into a studio space and then dove headlong into a stream of job applications. (A one-way stream, which carries time and effort and carefully crafted sentences away from you at a very fast pace and returns nothing but new waters.) There has been a lot written lately about how hard it is for us young folk to find jobs, especially in creative fields. The market, especially in New York, is saturated with academically decorated, creative minds and there’s just not that much money in the arts to go around.

After a week of sending out email after email into the web abyss, I spent a day in North Hampton with an artist friend. I was walking his dog, which looked like a tiny, toy luckdragon, down a bustling street and I was afraid someone was going to step on it. Its bones as delicate as a bird’s. “I wish I could just fight a dragon,” I said.

“Huh?” Don said.

“Sometimes I wish I could just fight a dragon or find some really far away herb or walk through a burning forest in some epic, bloody trial to get a job. And if I didn’t make it, fine. But at least I would have a chance to fight for what I want instead of sending out all of these faceless emails.”

“I think you’d be good at fighting a dragon,” he said.

“Thanks. Can I use you as a reference?”

Anyway, “Be careful what you wish for,” etc. etc. I got a call soon after from an artist’s studio. I’ve been a huge fan of this woman’s work and philosophy for years. They asked me to come in and work with a team of assistants to fabricate a large-scale installation. It was pitched as a trial period for a permanent position. I made it sound like I was already in NY, so when they asked if I could start the next morning, I said “Sure!”

In progress installation.

It was already dinnertime, but I called a true friend in Brooklyn (“Can I move in with you tonight and stay with you for an unknown length of time?”), packed in an hour and a half, and worked a seven-day week. It turned out when I got there that the permanent positions were already full. But, long story short, there have been many challenges, obstacles, puzzles and riddles to work through as an assistant. I am still at the studio and, although I don’t know how long it will last, it’s good to know that I’ve had the chance to prove my mettle.

Weaving gold tinsel.

The Longest Nights

Winter Solstice at my grandmother's house in Houston.

My cousin Mira -- belly dancer, painter, costume designer and body painter. She has a new project called Sirens where she transforms women with fabric, feathers and paint into their particular type of goddess. I drove to visit her on Friday southwest of Austin in a small town called Driftwood. I passed Enchanting Oaks Drive and Crystal Hills Drive. After a wooden sign proclaiming "Wizard Academy," I took a right turn onto her dirt driveway. Her studio sprawled across the ranch-style house with headdresses and Indian garb adorning every surface. A cushioned construction in the living room was shaping up into a hookah lounge. Three feline sentinels took turns keeping watch and bossing around her large dog.

Let’s Talk About Sets, Baby

It’s a funny thing to build pretend worlds for the eye to trust and explore. Literally. There have been many funny moments -- stringing naked girls from impromptu crucifixes in my studio, burning model houses on private property, convincing your local YMCA lifeguard to let you into the pool with your clothes on and perform multiple costume changes. I would like to begin this post with a shout out to all my friends who have made my painting references possible. Procuring naked photos of oneself covered in broken glass isn’t something that a girl can get through all on her own. Here’s to you guys!

My flooded Baltimore bathroom.

So when I start a painting, the mental image almost always comes first. And if that happens to be something that I can handle translating from mind to matter without assistance, great, I’m off and running. But that is almost never the case. So I set up models or puppets in my studio to look at or people in a setting to photograph. Then I often suture these images together Frankenstein-style in my head. Every painting calls for a different method. (Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.) Nothing is “cheating” in my book. I’ve used tracing paper, printouts and projection. (However, during a critique with Julie Heffernan on a painting that drew from only one photo reference, her response was “Love the image. But wouldn’t it be horrible to make paintings like this all your life?” True story, Julie. Because although the process involved a much-reduced risk of an anxiety attack, it lacked the generative thrill that comes from birthing something new. And then, of course, if a photo adequately communicates an image, why make a painting?

Me in a skirt.

I end up using my own body a lot because I’m always around and am very supportive of my cause. I wish I could show you all of the bizarre imagery I have floating around in the ‘References’ folder on my computer – the pics are usually even more surreal than the paintings because the subject is often acting out something that clashes absurdly with its setting. But, unfortunately, many of the photos are un-postable because there are naked(!) people in them and we’ve all learned the hard way that once an image is out there, it’s almost impossible to reign back in. (For instance, the first image of me that pops up when you Google my name is a chubby-cheeked, Ms. Frizzle-esque catastrophe from my sophomore year in college. Dear Oberlin, I really appreciate the publicity. All press is good press, etc. etc. But, for the love of God, take that photo down.)

Each painting ends up gathering together a digital mood board of sorts, filled with images from all kinds of sources. I use this collection of internet detritus, mixed with video clips and primary sources, to figure out the composition, palette and desired feel of the piece.

Delta advertisement that informed "Honey I'm Home."

Especially since so much of my recent work stems from a specific place, my travel photos feed into my work directly. In Iceland, I kept a folder of images that I had collected as a color journal.

Sometimes all of the images are too much to combine in my head, so I physically cut them up and paste them together or do the equivalent on Photoshop.

I owe much of my thesis work, “Outpost,” to a plexi-glass house. May it rest in peace. I had its components cut at a plastic company in Baltimore. I decorated the inside as one might a Robinson Crusoe style dollhouse, using model materials, furniture from my childhood dollhouse and random debris. It had a different role to play in each of my paintings. I had hoped one of those rolls would be a working aquarium. So I followed every Youtube step for making it water-tight. But it flooded my studio almost immediately. Since you can pass notes down to the floor below you in the Balitmore warehouse where my grad program was posted, I quickly scrapped that idea.

The house’s final act was a daring night stunt. Accompanied by three lovely female assistants, it was put afloat on a winter-cold river and set on fire. Apart from the toxic odor, it was a beautiful send-off. Afterwards, I tried to throw away its remains, but they were rescued by some of my more materially-experimental MFA peers and reincarnated as yet more art.

The best actress award goes to poet and neuroscience guru Ryann. The woman in my “Fielding Terns” painting was born from a combination of her body strung up in my studio and a puppet I constructed from material scraps. The forms ended up having a surprising amount in common.

These are images that came together to become “Everything That Rises:”

Most of my photos of Laura Hudson are not for the public eye! But luckily for you, her paintings are. (Be patient. They rotate through.)

In which Chaney (an awesome painter and fellow adventure seeker) and I braved a tangled Baltimore underpass adjacent a sprawling homeless person’s shelter, shattered a sunroof that I had procured from a car graveyard and filled her hands with broken glass:

This is something that I am working from now. Kind of love this messy Photoshop collage so hopefully my painting will be at least as cool.