Current Obsessions
updates, links, quotes + more
This week I started an artist residency at the Peter Bullough Foundation. The studio has two massive windows and a beautiful garden — all walking distance from a vibrant downtown.
Dr. Bullough was a bone pathology doctor, professor, and researcher originally hailing from England. Eventually landing at the Weill Cornell Medical School in Manhattan, Dr. Bullough “felt that his greatest contribution to pathology was ‘understanding the pathology of osteoarthritis.’”1
So how do the homes of a prominent English bone doctor and researcher turn into a haven for emerging artists? I’m gonna find out.
The two buildings, buffered only by a well-manicured secret garden, complete with a Zen water feature, offer a unique oasis in the heart of downtown. The wooden fence and rich foliage muffle the sounds of cars, neighbors, and other human activity. Bird sounds and trickling water reverberate as kaleidoscopic light flickers through trees overhead.
The studios mimic a Goldilocks tale: smaller, medium, and large — and mine, I have to say, is just right. Two large windows ample table space and the sounds of my fellow residents making, working, experimenting echo through creaking floors.
Nerys Apple’s takes on the musician’s suite and can often be heard creating genuinely, hauntingly beautiful sounds. Music has a way of setting a mood or atmosphere and her music makes me feel the magic of the space and how many people gave created here or will create here — artmaking is such an incredible human secretion and I’m already overwhelmed with gratitude.2 My other fellow resident, Robin Ha, has already generously offered her mutual excitement and support for the space and the work we all will create here. And I have to say, the feeling is so incredibly mutual.
I can’t stop thinking about…
This article by hannah baer on artificial intelligence. What does any system we have created reflect about us?
So if we think of AI as our creation, our thing we made and taught to be like us, it stands to reason that we would be primed to expect that it will fail or betray us and disappoint us in doing so.
I want to keep pulling quotes to share with you all, but just read the whole thing.
In the studio…
I’m thinking about symbols and semiotics. Obsessed within my own psyche, I want to find the limits of my own understanding where my own brain’s capability of understanding itself reaches the precipice and falls off. I want to stand on the edge.
Or maybe, I don’t.
In the process is material exploration. I’m working on a large papier mache sculpture that I hope to finish over the summer. I’m continuing to take inspiration from Louise Bourgeois and Greer Lankton. (Hoping to visit the Mattress Factory soon to see Lankton’s permanent installation.) I want to put elements of their work, toy doll houses, early 2000s chicken themed wall paper, my own bifurcated form, and discarded dolls into a blender and see what comes out the other end.
I recently read the article Protective Buildings, Exposed Bodies-The Femme Maison-Imagery In The Art Of Louise Bourgeois, discussing Bourgeois’ work.3
Here are a few quotes that are resonating:
“room and house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy”
“The women, or in other words the fragments of them, that appear there, are confused with buildings and with the assignment linked to them.”
“Is the house habitable or is the woman’s body habitable?”
“Female artists today seem to make others readopt their (visual) vocabulary. Their artwork will not lead to any definite interpretation—but instead to new questions.”
Po·ly·se·my :noun: the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase.
I have fallen down the AI Photoshop generative fill rabbit hole creating images from hand-cut collages, digital collages, and then AI-filled space. After reading baer’s article, I’m wondering what exactly is being reflected back at me.
“Because by putting yourself in the shade of a pure mental creation to which, paradoxically, you have given material substance -- if you end up shaping your mental creations in such a way as to actually live in them, to make them your environment and, all in all, your world, a world you yourself secreted – what you gain for your mind is a closed circuit functioning: the mind feeds off its own fantasies and no longer off an environment provided by nature and foreign to it.” Writings on Sculpture, Jean Dubuffet, Page 47 Dubuffet, Jean. Jean Dubuffet : Writings on Sculpture. Richter Verlag, 2011.
Eck, Katharina. “Protective Buildings, Exposed Bodies-The Femme Maison-Imagery in the Art of Louise Bourgeois.” Women’s Studies 41, no. 8 (2012): 904–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2012.718650.