30 Americans

I went to se the 30 Americans show at the Corcoan with the Black Student Union. The trip was great, we went to china town and had lunch and the saw the exhibition. It was warm for January and it was nice to get out of Baltimore for a day and see what DC is like in the winter. This Corcoran Museum like the rest of DC is very American. the walls, the signs, the buildings scream of  Roman architecture. The show was disappointingly traditional. I saw a lot of art I expected to see from the artists exhibited. I later found it that this was a part of the Rubbells family collection and the collection was donated to the Corcoran for the exhibition. As I walked through the collection I found out how much their collection and selection influenced the scope of this exhibition. Black Art, Post Black Art or any artwork classified based on an ethnic genre carries the burdens and stygmas associated with educating the masses about a cultural experience. The Rubbells collected artwork of very famous it exhibition African American artists for over a period of thirty years. Although  I appreciate the family collecting this artwork I am surprised by the lack of diversity within the collection. There were a few sculptures one by David Hammons and another by Leonard Drew. A few installations, probably one  the strongest works in the exhibition by Gary Simmons, another by Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. The show was a riff with imaginative hype about the black experience lacking substance and freshness. The title was the first key to this staleness, the title called  The exhibition due not generative fresh blood into what it means to a black artist working in present day United States. The work is strong but had very traditional formats, portraiture painting harkening back to early American portatire of Kenhende Wiley, Carrie May Weems  and photography of Hank Willis Thomas, commenting on how Africans were enslaved in American, Nick Cave sound suits.

Diaries of a Winter's sleep

reflections on how I got here and where “here” is.

Go. Capture light in a bottle. Draw your quivering hand. Transcribe the wind. Make a new subatomic form, make an origin story. Use your head... destroy your mind.

Break eggs.

Everything has a reflection an opposite...an opposing side. To show again what cannot easily be seen,  a manifestation. Everything I have made has been a manifestation of my views. What I like is a reflection of my nature… this is common. Everyone has this and everyone uses this. I am no different, I eat, I sleep I use my senses, I survive. In my physical way, my behavior is correct. I see another day.  My mind is common and my body follows. My world view is my surroundings, what I know. Miniature

mu

I try to connect the dots, making work, place things, entwining them into the words I have read by men and women whom I believe,

 know what I seek.

I find little satisfaction in making things. I make them, they are made. It ends, I end.   And what follows is a void this feeling of loss. loss of a purpose. So I manically make things attempting ignorance loss. i clutch  something,  anchor something push myself against something. But I am mistaken, I keep mistaking something for air, I keep slipping. I wasn’t meant to capture this I tell myself  to keep moving. if I  am kinetic I will be in the world. I will be present. I state but have no belief.  I tally my lies. To make a relationship between objects and people feels incomplete. And I feel that, I know that, I am to do more. I don’t have an answer to the equation of where I am to be. Nor do I have the answer. I have no goal, nor do I expect to find it soon.

void

 I have to be told to fall in love with losing to jump in confidently into nothing. But I am too cautious, fearful because I do not know my consequences.

I am exhausted and I am stuck. I am trying to trace some origin, some birthplace of ideas. I look to the past and find o nourishment. I think about the future like a chess player planning every move. But I am no tactician. I can see my moves felling the king.  I try, I lose and I try again. I lose again. I analyze, I look but I don’t learn anything new. I try to read my palm like a seeker looking from an outward manifestation of something I have kept. I overturn rocks.

 I leave a portion of my creativity ability to a force outside of myself. I have plan But I don’t have a resolution to heal the wounds.

I think this path is correct. It feels correct. I write knowing I am supposed to write.

Heat water…make tea

drink

I am an old woman with a young woman’s problems. 

But I am consumed

 so I continue.

thoughts on craft

I fail craft. i fail to meet the restrictions and expectations of craft. I don't understand how to construct something a linear fashion. I can, but it is confusing process to assemble parts and put them together. it a lot easier to disassemble a whole and look how the parts came together. I can't figure how to make a bowl. I understand the process of centering and and shaping, pushing and pulling but i am missing an element of understanding. I can't understand how that form then becomes a bowl, a thing with an implied function and structure and a name.

the sound of prey

Today I gave a presentation and the room was so quit while i was speaking. i could hear my voice reverberate off the walls. the silence of the room paired a cloaking darkness created this covert moment. and the silence on that filled the room was eerily beautiful because the room was filled with people. This is the first time I felt alone in a room and felt fine. or maybe it was a feel of distance, a distance not determined by a physical space but rather by mental space. i felt like I was so disconnected from everyone around me so I felt more connected to mental and physical self. I was surrounded like prey but I was not  overcome and eaten.

ryan's prompt

Ryan Hammond gave me a prompt last week that have to give a high five every time I see him.  It's a small commitment, one I believe I can keep.

wild

I am read Robert Bringhurst's book the tree of meaning and I read about the language of the wild. I  like his idea of the wild. hard to approach. free. based on his definition I had forget what it meant to free to be wild. but that is what i want to be. but i am afraid i don't have the tools to be this and survive. i am fear i don't know how to survive, that my survival up until now has been predetermined by the powers of something much stronger... more capable... simpler higher. I keep thinking everything i need to learn will disappear, i keep grasping for a resolve and come up empty. I keep thinking time will rescue me and so I don't stop read the signs as they in front of me.

water

I was traveling by bus to go get clothes and this was on Monday. two after a fresh snow, and sky was thick with mist and was damp with snow. Water was everywhere hanging low, saturating every opening. It was beautiful,  and streets looked as romantic as the forests in Gothic novels. water brings romance in winter. waters keeps lingering, everything follows a pace so nothing can be quicken.

grad

Omer told me something beautiful today. he told me that as I get older i will become so intelligently superior that people will have a harder time communicating with me. i laughed, at the time I couldn't process the profundity of the thing he had stated so casually.

Intrigue

This moment isn't loud or large but it is important and there. that is why I am intrigued by it. It is physical so insignificant, but mentally jarring. It jolts me awake and that what I like about it. I feel slower, more reflective and sharper, I can see the cause of effect of every action and I am cautious of it. but I also want to i want to explore how this feeling of transition and  side effects, physically or mentally it can create. This moment is like a gesture, one action that spring boards and effects everything around it. but the effects are equally small ripples, but more constant, more true.

threshold

I have this fear I need to get over. I can't stand stepping on the cracks and space between pavement or sidewalks. I hate the raised white lines on cross walks. I don't hate the products themselves, I just hate how they make me feel. I feel uneasy, my body feels off balance. but the strongest feeling I have, is the feeling of not being in the right place, like i have crossed over into another place when the top of my foot hits the next block of sidewalk. i feel like I have teleported, (my moved this time and space) to get to another place. I don't know what that place is but I know its different, and I think differently, as a result of touching the periphery of that space. It is feeling haunting me every time I walk on one. So I consciously avoid them. the feeling is so powerful I need to remove it but as i write this I am also intrigued by it.

Genesis

This blog is a place to store my thoughts and reflections as well as the thoughts of others whom aspire me. I will use this blog as a memory bank as another place to reflection on in later years. It will be compromised on writings, thoughts about my world and the world around me. they writings will be small, ranging from a few sentences to a paragraph. I do this do because I need to put my thoughts some place else, to see them in a place outside of my head or my computer and I know I can access this at anytime and it will be saved and safe. The blog will contain writings within the next three months. These months are significant because this are the last three months of my senior year and i want to remember how I was then. what i was interested in then. I want to see my mistakes, but most importantly I want to have a free space to thrive, write whatever I want regardless of outcome or expectation.