Week Thirteen

In London and Boston I have listened to many talks, words and discourse about making art and what it all means. At its heart lies Freud’s “return of the repressed”: the more we try to deny who we are, the more we become what we fear. Freud’s psychological abstraction in the realm of everyday living is everywhere we choose to see it. Is making anything a feeble attempt to call order out of chaos and give form and fiction to the entropy and uncertainties in living? What are we doing and why really do we do what we do? Why do we run when we can walk? Why do we sleep when we could play? Why do we paint when we could stitch? Our lives are riddled with decisions. We must become impervious in order to relate in the world and yet we must also become tender and thoughtful. We must repress to hold ourselves together and we must also be honest and reflective. Why is this so hard? Are we empty or full inside anyway?

I have been working on the Terrarium Project. It is good to focus on a single ambitious project since it includes both building and experimenting with the enclosed world (the terrarioum @ 50" cubed). I have 6 canvases to paint the six views of the world including its skin, the enclosed and the enclosure all to scale. It is a play with the contained and the container as a metaphor for the enclosures we establish ourselves in (our skins, our clothes, our rooms, our homes, our psychological comfort zone). I really don't know how it will come out but Sheila has been really encouraging and sees a breakthrough in this process for me. I see it that way sometimes and other times I doubt what really I am doing. Since I have realized that the 'politics of the personal' is really where I am right now I do have to find ways to crack open that container and comfort zone that I, until now, have worked in with my painting and making art. Certainly, in landscape architecture I work with the public in mind and de-personalize the creative process entirely. It is about practicing the art of completing another’s dreams and personal visions.

My advisor has given me sound suggestions: “Don't think that you need to have all the answers right now. Start by outlining your basic concerns and interests. Establish some questions that will drive your exploration. And then examine/investigate different ways that your project might address these concerns, interests, and questions. This might entail making things that you then discard or reject. But eventually, you will inch forward to your final objective.” Thanks Stuart.

Also, Stuart mentions to “re-read Robert Smithson's essay entitled "Cultural Confinement". You might also check out his "Site/Non-Site" pieces from the late 1960's. This body of work served to thematize the binary oppositions between inside/outside, contained/uncontained, nature/culture, controlled/uncontrolled, etc.”

I am sorting through excess, consumption, growth, family and the materiality of home.