Slate Arts + Performance proudly presents CONNECT, a new-media group exhibition featuring works by the following artists:
Joshua Eby Robert Fowler Erica Gressman Joo Young Lee X. A. Li Sarah Leuchtner Jackie Mantey Sara Alexandra Pelaez Christopher Riggs Christopher Marc Ford Andrew C. S. Rui Sha
The opening reception is from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at Slate Arts in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood.
Dropping off my artwork!
Gallery statement
“Connecting requires at least two points in which a link or attachment of sorts can activate. As human beings, our livelihoods depend on how well we build and maintain connections. Relationships. Neural networks. Sound waves. Internet speed. Fibers of one’s clothing.”
Artist’s statement
I have three individual pieces in the show, a triptych entitled “Good Things And Death Come In Threes.” (Three embroidery and thread on historical imagery in 14″ x 17″ wooden and pink frames, one inch between each frame: “Red Line,” “Yellow Line,” and “Blue Line.”)
The images in “Good Things And Death Come In Threes” were sourced from the public domain of the New York Public Library’s digital archives and selected for their visual representation of tools Americans have used to send a message, themselves, or others from one place to another; interestingly, these are also tools we use to disconnect ourselves from wherever we’ve come.
The title is a nod to the folkloric connections we often make as we search for answers and try to connect our existence to something bigger than our individual selves. The finished embroidered work reminds the viewer of photography’s ability to connect us to people not of our time or place, as well as the working class inheritance of thread as a means to weave historical narrative into making a modern point. That each embroidery has similarities is a representation of how we are all connected, whether we are together or alone.
The past few months I’ve been grooving to
a morning routine that’s 100% helped me get 85% focused for each day. It
involves some variation of tea (I’m that person now… tea drinkers are to blogging
about being a tea drinker as marathon runners are to 26.2 bumper stickers),
journaling, reading, and watching a meditation or an affirmation
video. I know, affirmations seem so corny, but I swear to 20-something granola
Jesus, they have helped me out of many a morning funk.
While I try to watch the meditation or
affirmation videos ~mindfully~, I sometimes—almost all the time—end up getting
distracted and, instead, mindlessly scroll through Pinterest (I figure my
subconscious is picking up on whatever’s audibly streaming at me in the moment,
so all is not lost). Pinterest is one of the few (two) social media platforms that
don’t make my blood pressure rise (the other being Instagram). I end up pinning artwork the
most. It’s such a visual platform and has helped me discover many artists whose
work I really enjoy or feel inspired by. Or, the best, feel rapturously in awe
of.
Genieve Figgis on being a mother, the challenges of being an artist, what she loves about painting, the darkness in her experimental work, and who she finds inspirational.
Genieve Figgis was one such morning scroll find.
The Ireland-born and -based painter creates
murky, dramatic scenes that are at once recognizable but elusive. They
continuously capture my attention and then do something with said attention that’s
increasingly impossible in an oversaturated visual culture—hold it.
“Not doing what was told would be my future, avoiding that, was just so fantastic”
Painter Genieve Figgis
Her work makes me feel like I’ve been in
it before. Not just seen it; known it intimately. Like when you see, for a
split second, a face on the street and you do a double-take because it kind of
looks like a kid you used to know in high school. And that kid definitely died
three years ago.
The familiarity I feel toward her acrylic paintings is partly easy to explain: We’ve all seen some crisper version of it, as she often uses 18th century paintings of aristocratic life as her starting point. But her work also feels familiar because of its ability to evoke the kind of primal dread that is exciting and addictive. The kind of dread you can’t turn away from. The kind of dread where you don’t understand you’ve sauntered into something deadly until the teeth around you have already closed… you were just stunned by the beauty and sipping your Earl grey and then BOOM, you’re falling down the throat of the beast.
The dramatic danger, the warning, her
paintings seem to emanate is made fully clear after you spend more than a scroll-click-Pin
with it. In fact, the more I look at her paintings, the more they seem to melt
before my very eyes. I find that darkly exciting too.
“If you’re really enjoying something you don’t need to see the end of the road, the finishing line. That’s not always going to be the ultimate triumph, you know? If you’re not enjoying the journey, the end result will be no good.”
Saul Leiter was a pioneer of American color photography. His painterly images of 1950s and 1960s city life are so wistful. His work makes me see bad weather, stinky streets, and the humans who inhabit it all — differently. Better. More lovingly.
“A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.”
Here are five of his most lovely snow-filled images that might make this seemingly never-ending winter snow a lot more bearable. At least more beautiful.
On my recent interview with The
Unruffled Podcast, I listed the “DBT Skills Training Manual” as one of my
essential/most helpful tools for getting and staying sober while increasing creativity.
The skills in DBT, which stands for dialectical behavior
therapy, are deceptively simple and designed to help you learn to cope with
overwhelming emotions. Its creator, Marsha Lineham, compiled these skillsets to
help patients with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I have found them
really useful even though I don’t have BPD. In fact, I think they’d be helpful
for any human, really. Especially humans
who are deeply sensitive. And of that I can definitely be accused. 😉
The skills have helped me learn how to be more mindful of
what I’m feeling and, from there, address that feeling immediately. Addressing
it sometimes just means acknowledging it and letting it go. Sometimes it means
reframing the emotion toward gratitude. And sometimes—most of the time—it means
just admitting that it’s there.
I know. Eureka! But seriously, how many times have you experienced
an uncomfortable emotion and just pushed it down and then wondered why you feel
gross two hours later? What she prescribes after seeing that emotion rolling in
is some good old radical acceptance. Radical acceptance is that totally unsexy
thing in which all sexy solutions can be found.
In this video Lineham explains how, “Suppressing what you want is not the way to go. You have to radically
accept that you want something you don’t have—and it’s not a catastrophe.”
And once you get used to the fact that not
having what you want is not a catastrophe,
you’ll be better equipped to start a plan to get that thing you wanted OR get closer
to being a peace with not having it.
“Radical acceptance would transform everyone if it’s a regular practice,” Lineham says.
In terms of creativity, I think that’s a really powerful tool. I’ve been struggling lately with taking the time I need to make new work. I feel like I’m not getting enough done quickly enough, and as deadlines I’ve set for myself just cruise on by undone, I feel worse and worse.
I know I’m not alone in this. Writer Anne Helen Petersen’s
recent Buzzfeed article “How
Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” went viral for a reason. And it’s
not just Millennials. We are all so
used to moving so fast—for financial survival,
social validation, “self-preservation,” and a million other reasons—we’ve never
learned how to get used to taking things slow. Taking things slowly makes us uncomfortable.
It seems misaligned with how we’ve always lived our lives, achievement- and
extra-curricular and pleasure-chasing culture that we are.
Plus, for me at least, going slowly also seems to be a direct
affront to how much we recognize we have. As we are exposed more than ever to
the injustices of this world, we feel gratitude for the unfairness we do NOT
face. With that knowledge constantly top of mind, it feels like a waste of all
of this privilege if we don’t do a million and one things with it; to do “nothing” with the advantages we have
feels disrespectful to those who don’t have them. On top of all that, when
we feel so ultimately powerless to change the world, “getting shit done” seems
the least we can do.
But what, truly, are we achieving by burning ourselves at
both ends? What do we avoid accepting? What real or powerful change do we avoid
making when we go for the quick hits instead?
Personally, I want to take more time this year taking my
time. I want to practice acceptance. And accept that I need to practice.
Practice is progress and progress is better than perfection.
Perfection might get shit done faster on the surface. But usually everything is burning underneath.
Little Rock-based illustrator Sally Nixon illustrates colorful scenes from everyday life. Their bright colors pull you in, their keen observations of human movement make you stay a while, and their dynamic characters keep you coming back.
One of my first-favorite Sally Nixon illustrations (I now have too many to call it my favorite-favorite) was an illustration of a girl taking a shower and absentmindedly making shapes out of the strands of hair on her shower wall. I totally do that, too! I imagine a lot of us with long hair do. But it was the first time I had seen that private moment shown to me by someone else.
Observation and relentlessly relatable documentation is Sally’s art super power.
She draws all kinds of people but mostly women. Women eating. Peeing. Hanging
out. Thinking. Not smiling, but not not-smiling. Women just being ordinarily ordinary
people—which is exactly what makes her work so extraordinarily compelling.
Well, that and all the bright details in her backgrounds. I wish there was an Airbnb with rentals composed entirely of Sally Nixon apartments and rooms.
I’m also endlessly attracted to Bri, fab pizza-getting undercover spy queen. She’s got secrets and pepperoni up her sleeve! My kind of girl.
Even when your output sucks. Because it’s going to suck. For a long time.
I love this video by artist David Shiyang Liu.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish somebody had told this to me: all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s, like, this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good. It has ambition to be good. But it’s not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. You know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit. The thing I just would like to say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. It didn’t have the special thing that we want it to have. And, the thing I’ll say to you, is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, you gotta know that’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
2018 has been my favorite one yet! And one of its biggest moments was my gallery exhibition in September.
I finally started making the embroideries for “Gone, Country” (after, like, a year of talking about it as if I had already started…ha!…) the same month I quit drinking in 2016. I didn’t/ couldn’t allow myself to realize it at the time, but that embroidery work became a physical representation of what I was trying to make happen in my life.
It required humility and fearlessness to just make something, the same way it required humility and fearlessness to make such a huge change. I punched designs into paper one needle-hole at a time, the same way I didn’t drink one day at a time. I made those small incremental holes in the darkness of an image, the same way I slowly began bringing light to parts of myself I had long been avoiding.
Taking time to make an embroidery gave me something to do with my hands while I simultaneously took on the terrifying business of learning to talk to myself in a new way; it took the pressure off. It also proved to myself that I wasn’t just someone who talked about her dreams. I had the courage to try. And, in the meantime, I made some cool shit.
Creativity was means/space/outlet for healing. I recently spoke about this process to the awesome women of The Unruffled Podcast. It’s such an honor to be included in their interviews, and I am thankful for their efforts to create a community for women to talk about these experiences of making art while making a more compassionate way of life. (If you’re interested in creativity and overcoming the nonsense we put in between ourselves and our greatest potential, I highly recommend adding Unruffled Podcast to your pod roll!)
Here’s my episode! I love that it’s the last one for the year. I hope to embrace 2019. To keep getting better, braver, kinder, stiller.
Sending you all so much love into the new year. Thank you for being part of my story. I hope you have THE FUCKING GREATEST 2019 EVERRRR!
P.S. / FYI: I am co-launching Zero Proof Book Club in February with my good friend Shelley Mann. We read and discuss books about sobriety, self-growth, or surviving—and then thriving—in spaces that profit when we numb ourselves, from ourselves. You can go LIKE the page now and stay tuned for more in the future. xoxo
A friend was picking my brain this summer for places that I go to write. Now that I’m living that good good #giglife, I can pretty much work from anywhere, so she assumed I had a hundred and one places squirreled away in my work-from-all-over office catalog.
Rumor had it, she said, that this space was open to the public, and it was beautiful, and you could just go sit in there and read and write! And no one asked any questions about your right to be in the club! Or your preference of golf swing! Or if your Izod shirt was in the wash! Sorry, my club stereotypes are very late-’90s.
Nevertheless, there it sat gathering dust on my radar all fall. Like treasure I knew the route to but didn’t feel worthy enough to hunt down. I was intimidated by the bougey rep of an “athletic club” and “chic hotel” and, just, you know, the whole notion that this was a private place for fancy folks, with a shrimp cocktail concierge and warm towelette dispenser on each elevator.
Per usual, I was wrong. And I took the stairs, so I don’t know about the elevator.
My friend was right: This second floor space inside the CAA is open to the public, and reading and writing in it kinda feels like reading and writing inside a castle!
There are dark, intricately carved wooden beams, ornate leather chairs, a crackling fireplace, and snow globe-style views of Michigan Ave and Millennium Park. There’s no shrimp cocktail concierge, but there was a very friendly waiter who brought me water and coffee and snacks whenever I need it. I mean, you do have to pay for that stuff, but it’s basically a BYOB(ook) library with food and drink service.
These are 68 itty-bitty rooms built on a scale of one inch to one foot, and they’re decorated to look like European and American interiors from the late 13th century all the way to the 1930s. AND, right now some are decorated for the holidays. Eeeeeee!
I recently went to look at the Thorne Rooms on my lunch break (giggity #giglife… I was posted up in the Starbucks across the street). While there, I broke a record for “Longest Time Spent Squeal-Clapping and Saying Oh This Is Just Delightful Over and Over Again.”
Yes, Virginia, that is a Christmas marzipan hedgehog the size of a thimble.
Every year, around this time, more than two decades ago, the first-graders of St. Mary’s Elementary School would gather into the first floor lobby of their brick school building, which was dwarfed, like a first-grader to a sixth-grader, by the soaring, heaven-scraping church in front, and sit their bony little bottoms on carpet worn down from more than four decades of Mary Janes, saddle shoes, Reeboks, and now Nikes.
They were, around this time, used to gathering in such a way, as there was an Advent something or another happening in these makeshift assemblies once a week every December, when the whole school of bony little bottoms would swim out from their individual classrooms and sit together on that same worn carpet and sing and read and light a candle in anticipation of Santa Jesus coming to town. Purple. Purple. Pink. Purple.
But this first-grader thing was just for the first-graders, which seemed very special. Both classes would sit down to listen to Mrs. Sinnot tell a story, whether she was your first-grade teacher or not, which also seemed very special; any shift in the natural school day order created a little baby-sized buzz of excitement.
Now, this Mrs. Sinnot (pronounced sin-ut, but it’s, indeed, very ironic to think of a Catholic school teacher named SIN-NOT… maybe I’m remembering the spelling incorrectly or maybe this is just another little universe miracle we can all thank baby Santa-Jesus for later), this Mrs. Sinnot was just wonderful, as so many first-grade teachers are. Her salt and pepper hair was cropped to the exact dimensions popular with fairies around that time, and she was about the size of the half-pint chocolate milk cartons I’d cup like gold coins in my palm each day in the cafeteria lunch line.
We were gathered here, like the first-graders before us and the first-graders yet to come, to listen to Mrs. Sinnot read aloud her favorite book: “Strega Nona” by Tomie dePaola.
Published in 1975, “Strega Nona” is about an old woman in Southern Italy who is a witch doctor (!) (which is rad but, mind you, she’s never called as much in this Catholic school setting) and she travels the countryside helping cure villagers’ maladies, like warts, because this is a kid’s book and the bubonic plague is some heavy shit.
She also makes pasta. A lot, lot, lot of pasta. Because… her pot is magic! And this magic pot can make as much pasta as Strega Nona ever wants, as long as she blows three kisses <kiss, kiss, kiss> into the pot after singing her magic, pasta-producing spell. (Today this spell is called Grubhub.)
All is well in Strega Nona’s softly lit world, where the colors are creamy and the edges are not sharp, until one day, a man named Big Anthony, her helper, overhears her spell but doesn’t see her do the three-kiss closer <kiss, kiss, kiss>. So, with good intentions but not enough information, Big Anthony makes a magic pot of pasta… but doesn’t know how to turn it off. So pasta grows and goes and grows and goes until it threatens to drown out the whole village in its doughy doom!
When Strega Nona returns, feet sore from a hard day traipsing the hills to bring kindness and, I presume, lavender oils to the warty townspeople, she stops the spell and makes Big Anthony clean up the mess by handing him a fork. Mangia!
… I love this Strega Nona story so much, especially because it’s tied to such a happy memory—someone lovely reading aloud, in a mysteriously exciting school-day kind of way. But even so, I completely forgot about Strega Nona and her magic and that there was ever a time when I was innocent enough to delight in nothing but the imagining of pasta taking over a whole town.
Then I saw a random headline somewhere about Tomie dePaola’s new book “Quiet,” and it wasn’t his name that alit me from within, but that unmistakable illustrative style. I saw the gentle outline of his characters, the thoughtful pastel colors from his worlds, and like the snap-pop of a lighter, my mind shot out “STREGA NONA” from the murky depths, and off I went chasing the clickbait. Finding meaningful stuff in such as way is modern day magic, yes?
“Quiet,” like Strega Nona, is also magical, with illustrations like a hug, but the magic is found in something we all have. No secret recipe here. No fated headline coming your way. Instead, the magic can be found in quiet. In stillness. In the <kiss, kiss, kiss> of shhhhh-ing that can stop, not pasta, but a brain from overflowing.
“Your mind is so busy. You have to train it to quiet down.”
Tomie depaola
Read the book here or the Kirkus review here. Related: This wonderful meditation on stillness, gifted to me recently from a new friend.
