Progress Report

I have been in Dallas for a couple of weeks. What have I accomplished in this time?

-I’ve been taking photos of the neighborhoods I visit; at some point I will post some little photo essays.
-I’ve unpacked my sheets and made a new site-specific work in my space, along with a new chair piece and some shelf pieces for the San Antonio show.
-I’ve had Taco Cabana 3 times.
-I went to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Transcendent!
-I went to the old Neiman Marcus store downtown. Decadent!
-I’ve been doodling around with some small works on paper.
-I (finally) finished Infinite Jest. The end left me repulsed and dissatisfied, like all good postmodern fiction should. Hey!

Allison Schulnik at Marty Walker Gallery

Yesterday I visited some Dallas art galleries. I was really impressed by the architecture of these spaces. They rivaled the expensive art temples of LA (I’m thinking of galleries like Acme or the new Roberts & Tilton), with their white floors, vaulted ceilings, and grand foyers/front desks. For me, the art took a back seat to the spaces this time around, except for a stop-animation video by Allison Schulnik at Marty Walker Gallery. (The video can be viewed at these links.)

Schulnik is a native Californian living in LA, it turns out, though I don’t think I have encountered her work there before. So, I was happy to find her Hobo Clown on a loop in this Dallas gallery’s project room. I was mesmerized by her characters’ rainbow tears and watched the video several times through as the clowns’ eyes excreted color after swirling color. They seem swamped by the beauty of the world around them, almost sorrowful at their inability to take it all in.

It occurred to me that the clowns’ tears could be a metaphor for my experience as a visual artist observing my surroundings. As my work has become more influenced by place over the past few years, I notice that my eyeballs often feel overwhelmed by the world around them, at the effort of taking in the details (such as when I travelled back to Arkansas in May and was shocked by the green). I want to capture everything around me with my internal camera so that I can accurately reflect a place and my feelings about it in my work. However, that internal camera is never fast enough, and its memory card is filled too quickly, so that I am often left with just fleeting impressions of a color, a pattern, or a shape. The paintings and installations that I make later are highly subjective products of this faulty memory and eye of mine.

So my sympathy went out to the poor raggedy claymation clowns in the video; sometimes I wish my eyes could regurgitate all that extra too.

(Image is a still from Hobo Clown, from the artist's website.)

Centraltrak Set Up

I live in Unit #3 at Centraltrak. Here it is.

Notes on a Texas Return, Day 3

I am feeling a surprising and deep appreciation for being back in Texas. The oaks and grackles and horsey drivers rise up to greet me.

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All the weird and funky nooks and crannies are out for everyone to see and seem to be appreciated by everyone. I feel that maybe Angelenos miss out on large swaths of their city; there, we are separated by freeways, but here they corral us together in loops and pens.

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Though the air shimmers above the blacktop, the heat just gives folks one more thing to talk about; it dampens foreheads and backs of knees, but not spirits. Everyone is just in search of a good time, a cold beer, or a margarita and happy to let you have yours.

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When I talk I can hear that my accent has come back. It feels like talking with big blown roses falling out of my mouth. It feels good and lazy.

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I notice that women are different here than in California. LA women are facially subtle, keeping their features still and cool. Women here talk with their whole faces. I wonder if I do this?

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Men here are different too. They automatically hold the door to let me go first, never stopping to consider if I might be a radical feminazi and therefore offended by their politess. They are chatty like the women, and lean on things with one arm, and probably think I am a bad driver in an oh-shucks kind of way. But I'm actually a very good driver, since I can drive a standard and have only totaled one car ever.

A Whole 'Nother Country

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1980s and 90s. I remember thinking of cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Dallas as distant metropolises full of glamour, neon lights, and general excitement. These were the places where my well heeled classmates would be taken by their mothers to shop for new school clothes or one-of-a-kind cotillion dresses, or would accompany their fathers to attend action-packed sporting events. Dallas had a special place in this starry constellation because a picture of it entered my family’s living room every Friday evening (in the form of J.R., Sue Ellen, and company on Dallas) and sometimes, with luck, on New Year’s Day (in the form of an Arkansas Razorbacks appearance at the Cotton Bowl). To my mind, Dallas, with its distinctive lit-up skyline and Neiman Marcus catalogs, was the epitome of a city; New York might as well have been on another planet.

Well, now I have the chance to learn about the real Dallas, to replace this childhood picture of it in my mind. For the next two months, I’ll be living and working at UT Dallas’ Central Trak artist residency, in the neighborhood of Deep Ellum. I’m looking forward to learning about a new art community and reconnecting with my Texas ties. I’ll be posting about my adventures here. Stay tuned!