This Day.

Screenshot from the video I am working on.

Work in Progress

Untitled (Scaped II)

What I am looking at next

Here are a few screenshots from a couple video pieces I am putting together. All of them were recorded in Germany except one at the Opryland Hotel.

back to it.

Now that I'm back in Nashville and settling back into home, I'm excited to announce that my friend and I are sharing a studio space in the Chestnut building. Along with preparing a new body of work for a show in April, it is our hope to facilitate a space for creative discussion and meetings. Come see us.

Frankfurt

A quick and unexpected venture to Frankfurt proved to be a rewarding Sunday afternoon of contemporary art.

Berlin Natural History Museum

All summer we have been exploring European zoos, which are so different and fascinating. Never before have I visited a natural history museum, and I didn't want to leave Germany without going.

The experience compared to the zoo was dead, old, and flat. Although nature has similarly been placed in to an institution as spectacle, it serves a different function. It's presented as something that once existed, in another place or time. We are to educate our selves, as if reading a textbook about a foreign subject that we never participated in and never will. This perspective could be more realistic, maybe nature came and went already.

Few photos from Venice Biennale

After reading from writers such as Julian Stallabrass, and other people who, rightly so, criticize the global art market, visiting a the Venice Biennial for the first time was an experience that deserved more credit than is often given. It was an overwhelming representation of installation and critical art. The experience of several countries representing themselves (some countries such as Germany representing others), was really interesting. Seeing countries such as Turkey, Egypt, China, and others who  have been in political turmoil and what they represented. Egypt and China seemed censored and limited in their exhibitions, which in a way speaks more to culture in their countries than the represented work itself did. Turkey's installation was a part of the protest, being the only country that I visited that openly protested with in the pavilion.  It was an experience that I would recommend for every person. 

Here are a few highlight shots of the show, unedited and just taken on my phone.  

Marisa Merz

Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen

Viviane Sassen

Sarah Lucas

Vladimir Perić

An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale. Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze

Terikie Haapoja

Terikie Haapoja

Ai Wei Wei

Mark Manders

Mark Manders

Mark Manders

Berlinde de Bruyckere

Antti Laitinen

Antti Laitinen

Camille Henrot

Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow

Phyllida Barlow

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Matt Mullican

Matt Mullican

Ryan Trecartin

Walter De Maria

Ryan Trecartin

Alice Channer

Paris: Le Centre Pompidou

I had the incredible experience of seeing a full and well organized collection of modern to contemporary art. Here's a few of my favorites:

American Festival in Berlin

While we have Oktoberfest festivals in America we also become the target of cultural stereotypes in the American Festival outside of the Berlin main train station. Themed sections including New York City, Western, Las Vegas and Florida segregated parts of the small beaten up theme park. They even had a store where you could buy imports such as Pop-Tarts, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and more.

Work in Mystique

The visceral material of the environment is the medium with through image, material, sound, and text the installation questions what which constructs the identity of place. The images in this series of photographs are the first impression, they are the visual mapping of many places and become the copy of the real. The assemblage sculpture, title is an accumulation of material from the photographs. The text  is handwritten copy of found descriptions of Magdeburg (i.e. from Newspapers or online historical records). The sound was collected from the inside of the room and increases volume as you get closer to it. Projections of Magdeburg are taken from the world wide web, around the city, and the very room of the installation. 

Tate Modern

I had an eight hour layover in London on my way to Magdeburg for Mystique. I had just a couple hours to do what ever and I went to Tate Modern on what happened to be International Museum Day. I was able to check off a huge bucket list item; seeing Giovanni Anselmo's work in person.

Adorno. Minima Moralia. Mammoth.

Mammoth– Some years ago, the report circulated in American newspapers about the discovery of a well-preserved dinosaur in the state of Utah. It was emphasized that the specimen in question had outlived its species and was a million years younger than any hitherto known. Such reports, like the repulsively humorous craze for the Loch Ness monster and the King Kong film, are collective projections of the monstrous total state. One prepares for its horrors by getting used to giant images. In the absurd willingness to accept these, a humanity mired in powerlessness makes the desperate attempt to grasp the experience of what makes a mockery of every experience. But this does not exhaust the notion that prehistoric animals are still alive or at least went extinct just a few million years ago. The hope excited by the presence of what is most ancient, is that animal creation might survive the injustice done to them by human beings, if not humanity itself, and bring forth a better species, which finally succeeds. Zoological gardens originated from the same hope. They are laid out on the model of Noah’s ark, for ever since they have existed, the bourgeois class has been waiting for the Biblical flood. The use of zoos for entertainment and instruction seems to be a thin pretext. They are allegories of the possibility that a specimen or a pair can defy the doom which befalls the species as a species. That is why the all too richly outfitted zoological gardens of major European cities seem like signs of decline: anything more than two elephants, two giraffes, and a hippopotamus is a bad sign. Nor is there any mercy in Hagenbeck’s layout with trenches and without bars, which betray the ark, by masquerading as the salvation called Ararat. The more invisible the boundaries become, the more completely the freedom of the creatures is repudiated, whose gaze could be ignited by the longing for the wide distance. They relate to proper zoos what botanical gardens are to palm leaf gardens. The more that civilization preserves and transplants unspoiled nature, the more implacably the latter is controlled. One can afford to encompass ever greater units of nature and to leave the interior of such tracts seemingly intact, while previously the selection and domestication of particular pieces still testified to the necessity of conquering nature. The tiger which paces to and fro in its cage, mirrors back negatively through its confused state something of humanity, but not however those who frolic behind impassable trenches. The antiquated beauty of [Alfred] Brehm’s Animal Life rests on this point, that it describes all animals as if they were behind the bars of a zoo, even and precisely when citing the reports of imaginative researchers on life in the wilderness. The fact however that animals in cages really do suffer more than in open layouts, that Hagenbeck in fact represents the progress of humanity, attests to the unavoidability of imprisonment. It is a consequence of history. Zoological gardens in their authentic form are products of 19th century colonial imperialism. They blossomed following the opening up of the wild regions of Africa and Central Asia, which paid symbolic tribute in the form of animals. The value of the tribute was measured in terms of its exoticism, of its rarity. The development of technics cleared this away and abolished exoticism. The lion bred on the farm is as domesticated as the horse, which has long since become subject to birth-control. But the millennium has not dawned. Only the irrationality of culture itself, the nooks and crannies of the city, in which the walls, towers and bastions of zoos are crammed, are capable of preserving nature. The rationalization of culture, which opens a window to nature, thereby completely absorbs it and abolishes along with difference also the principle of culture, the possibility of reconciliation.

Images from Magdeburg

Mystique auf Magdeburg

I have now been in Magdeburg for 4 days. As of yet I have been wandering and exploring as well a meeting wonderful welcoming people. I am a small part of a huge event titled "Mystique" where over 100 artists will each be assigned a room to install work in an abandoned brewery.

This is my blank slate, more posts to follow with progress.

GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Coco Pebbles and wax

Tell me true

Dr Pepper and popcorn too.

Heard from you the other

night

Tell me wrong or right?

Paint and polish

craft and art

Roses that match

Bind our heart.

10-4 Over

May 3, 2013-6-9 PM-Groundfloor Gallery -427 Chestnut Street

Taking inspiration from a poem found among the missed connections on Craigslist, Girls! Girls! Girls! highlights a variety of female artists reflecting on matters ranging from teenage heartthrobs and relationships to female role models, manicures, and memory – all with a sense of wit. Artists include Emily Clayton, Kellie Bornhoft, Rachel Growden, Sarah Growden, and Hannah Taylor, with additions to be made.

Curated by Rachel Growden

Write up in the Scene:​

http://www.nashvillescene.com/countrylife/archives/2013/04/30/girls-girls-girls-friday-at-groundfloor-gallery

What's Next

The change of this website and start of this blog is a marker of change to come.

In the next to weeks I will be:
-moving out of my house
-graduating
-exhibiting two separate shows
-hosting in-laws and parents from out of town
-moving to Germany
&
-installing a show in Magdeburg

The intentions of this blog are to track my travels and experience related to my practice, to create a dialogue in response to my work, and to announce news.

Stay posted
-

Thesis Exhibition

To view the work in this show, click work>Nothing is Unnatural Everything is Degenerate