How am I for sound?
Is this working?
Thank you, Ellen.
That was wonderful.
I always-- whenever I do anything with my mother,
I start to tear up, and it started happening already.
So hopefully I can get through the first five minutes
without crying for you.
So just to give you a sense of how the evening is going to go,
what our plan is I'm going to share some work,
do basically an artist talk for about a half an hour,
then we're going to have an impromptu dialogue
about a collaboration we've started in the last six months.
And then we'll conclude the evening
with a reading from my mother and her new book Rope.
So before I start talking about these images,
I'm essentially going to share the five
bodies of work or excerpts from five bodies of work.
And I'm hoping that in sharing some
of the narratives of that work with you
that it'll start to unpack and unfold for you a little bit.
Ellen articulated very well what my concerns are,
and I'd like you to be able to see the trajectory of my work
that's brought me to that point.
And before I do that, I just want
to make a couple preliminary points.
One is that even though I work in traditional media
often in painting and drawing and collage,
I consider my work to be collaborative,
and I don't think that's a natural way of thinking
about work that you often have to isolate yourself
in your studio to create.
I'm going to share some of the conversations
I've had with artists and thinkers and colleagues
I teach with at Union, and hopefully you'll
get a sense of in spite of this isolated aspect of my practice
how committed I am to dialogue in how understanding
and looking at my work through that lens of collaboration.
I think it'll help you to understand
what it is that I care about.
The second point is this is just--
it's a little random but related to the idea of collaboration.
And the idea is that I wish as a young artist that I had
understood how much power I have to create a public life
for myself, and whenever I have to talk about my work in front
of students where they're going to be young people, I just--
maybe it's different to now-- because now--
today because it's like the DIY--
do-it-yourself-- DIY nation.
But for me it took me many years of doing my practice before I
realized that the richest, most satisfying creative exercises
that had a public life were those that were coming out
of dialogue with people in other disciplines,
with other artists, and hopefully I'll
unpack that a little bit for you as I describe some of the shows
that I've been involved in.
So this first series--
can you see these images OK?
Do we need to dim the lights, or do you
think this is going to work?
All right.
Dim a little maybe?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, OK.
That'll be fine.
So about a year and a half ago, I
was involved in this alternative festival
called the Sacred and Profane Festival on Peaks Island.
Anyone ever been to Maine?
Do you know that Casco Bay territory?
So every October, there is something
called the Sacred and Profane Festival where
30 or so artists or artists collectives
are invited to come out to this military battery
and essentially transform it into an alternative artist
space.
So about a year and a half ago, I
did a collaborative installation,
and this is a detail.
It was called the jellyfish cave.
It was a collaboration with an artist Rebecca Fitzpatrick
whose practice is primarily collage.
And so to get to the site, one has
to take this half an hour ferry ride
and then basically hike a mile into the center of this island
where there is this military battery that
was created in the early 20th century, a battery still--
I think it is the biggest one created in the United States--
in time for World War I, and then
it was expanded for World War II,
and essentially it's just moss covered,
dripping walls, very spooky, covered with graffiti.
I'll give you a sense of that in a minute
and show you some before and after pictures.
But essentially one of the most powerful parts of this piece
was just transforming that formerly military space
into something much more ethereal and magical.
Let's see.
So here we are on Peaks Island, and what I want to do
is just set some context.
So Peaks Island is part of the Cushing Formation.
Minerals from the Cushing formation
date 471 million years old, which
means that the volcanic eruptions that
produce this geological formation
occurred before the Himalayas, the Alps,
before the Atlantic Ocean, before dinosaurs,
and before the first land plants evolved.
25,000 years ago, Maine was covered in a glacial ice
sheet 1.5 miles deep.
Something like 12,500 years ago, woolly mammoths lived in Maine.
12,000 years ago, the first humans lived in Maine.
And just as a general fact, jellyfish
were among the first creatures to evolve on Earth.
So to let you think about that as you look at this piece,
I'm first going to say, we'll get to the piece in a moment.
I just want to describe this as an event,
because part of what makes it so incredible
is just the process of getting there.
And there's always a sort of theatrical entrance.
This year it was the great white elephant
with this male drumming group on the roof of the transformed RV.
And everybody piles on to these ferries.
I mean, so many people.
And they're led back basically back to the site
by this great white elephant, and this theatrical performance
that had many crazy parts.
They were throwing large golden bricks out the back of it,
if you can imagine.
Put it together.
Figure out what that means.
So, basically everyone is led out.
Then they're given candles, and then they
have to walk around in these tunnels finding these art
installations throughout this old military battery.
Now when Becky and I first started this project,
this is what we found.
We had to wander through these spaces
and basically find a room that spoke to us.
And as I said about 30 artists, that's a little hard to see,
but you can see our room was right around the corner.
There was another one here, and it just
goes on for like a mile.
You know, it's like, making art is such a crazy thing.
Something I think about when I see this picture is,
I've got a family, I teach full time, my life is crazy busy,
and we came up with this idea of creating 50 jellyfish out
of really ordinary materials.
We didn't want to use artist materials.
We wanted to get wire and thread and spray paint
and just make something magical with it.
And when we finally, after about a month of working,
designed a prototype, you know, we were very excited,
and then of course, we had to make 49 more
of them, which I can't tell you how long it took us,
and we're very good friends.
We can basically say, OK, I am going to sew three things.
I'm going to go to the bathroom.
I'm going to get us a snack, and I'll be back.
And the other one'd say I'm going to.
And we were like that for a month.
But I bring up the craziness of art practice
because my mother-in-law has Alzheimer's right now.
And while Becky and I were manufacturing
these many jellyfish, this is the entryway to the finished
piece, I'll just tell you this story
so you can see what the finished piece looks like.
We were having a little family retreat
on Swan Lake with my sisters-in-law
and their families, and my kids, and my mother-in-law.
My mother-in-law with Alzheimer's must have come over
and asked us what we were doing like every 20 minutes.
And she was mystified, and would kind of chuckle to herself,
and then come back over in 20 minutes.
You're making what?
And we'd explain.
We had like piles of fabric and spray paint and wire
and, it was just a great kind of mirror.
Like, yes, we're obsessed with making these 50 things.
And we're going to you know.
This kind of wonderful window into what
it takes to be an artist, and someone
with a fallen rich life.
So here you see we sewed these curtains
so that you would walk into the space, which
was about 20 feet deep.
It looks a little foreshortened here.
We filled it with candlelight.
You saw from those first images what it was like.
We're in a military battery.
We had to drill holes in the ceiling
to try to create this chicken wire
armature to hang the jellyfish off of,
but it really had totally transformed the space.
So you saw what it looked like right outside the door.
You have this sort of decaying military structure.
And then you really did sort of passage
through into this magical space that fell.
I mean I share all that geological information
just because for me, it's the context of information
like that up against just the desire
to create something magical, sort of the meaning of the work
unfolds in those things jutting up
against each other, the juxtapositions.
And again, really, there was something about using,
and this is from the back looking out,
something about just using ordinary materials that made
this a really special piece.
Yeah and then it sort of developed this virtual life
because people, by the end of the day,
were coming back to have their pictures taken
with the jellyfish.
And the next day I got all these little links
to little YouTube clips of people
with the jellyfish, and very, just funny.
All right.
Now I'm going to make a little jump.
Just really briefly talk about another project.
I'm going back several years, and I'm
going to try to move through this really quickly.
I'm just going to have something to drink [INAUDIBLE] waters.
This was from the Exposing Scarlet show, which
was installed at the Boston Center for the Arts,
And really came out of another collaborative dialogue
with sculptor Cynthia Atwood, and a Native American print
maker and installation artist, Ed Burnham.
And Ed had had the idea that he wanted
to have a group of artists read Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet
Letter" and make work in response to it.
So essentially, we curated this show together.
And this is another thing.
We had the idea.
We created, you know, had a conversation,
decided which artists to include in that show,
and then tried to find a venue.
And we were so excited about what
we'd created that Boston Center for the Arts, that just
happened really organically.
They were really excited.
It was this complete product that we brought to them
out of our own enthusiasm, you know,
which was one example of the point I
was making at the beginning.
I don't want to say a lot about this work,
but because it will help you to understand the current work,
I just want to say a little bit about my process.
In reading the novel, for me what happened,
my work is often a sort of process of condensation,
and so I sort of condensed my reading and my notes
of that novel to four themes that
seemed to me that course through it, which were hunger,
vengeance, love, and truth.
And then for me, there's a huge amount
of invisible process, that isn't part of the final piece that
gets exhibited.
So it was about developing these icons that
would speak to each of those themes,
and then could be created in a simple gesture.
So this was hunger, love - love, that was
a hard time in my relationship.
I think if people look at that image - vengeance, and truth.
And again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time,
but I could unfold these for you in a number of ways,
and I'm often trying to create work that will unfold.
And as, you know, Ellen made that point so clearly,
it's like, there is that social concern in my work.
I'm very much engaged with social issues.
But there's also a personal narrative.
There are all sorts of ways to unpack
these very, in this series, kind of simple iconic images.
And this one, I was thinking of that scene,
if people are familiar with the novel, that scene when
Hester and Dimmesdale are in the woods,
and the illegitimate daughter Pearl is watching them.
And that, to me, seemed so profound
and spoke to me in so many ways, but one
of the ideas that came out of that, that stayed in my work,
is this idea of sort of, what's wild and uncivilized
and outside of the institution as witness, that
could be like nature as witness, but it could also
be this illegitimate child, hiding in the woods,
in a way has a sort of freedom that those characters who
are sort of bound to the institutions didn't have.
That led me to this crazy little character,
which was obviously this illegitimate daughter combined
with animal form.
Just really briefly, show another piece
that was in that exhibit, which is an antique box that I sort
of, reconditioned, and then created it
as a sort of traveling installation space.
I was thinking a lot about how Hawthorne
was kind of nomadic in his life, and how
I yearned to be nomadic.
Staying put is a challenge for me.
Anyway, so I did these altered postcards dealing
with some of the same themes I just described, and then
in the drawer, open to the order of snakes
was a natural history book that had been published a hundreds
years after Hawthorne's birth.
Just some details of the altered postcards.
And again, here that nature as witness, that sort of imagery
comes up a lot.
This is the dirtiest drawing I've ever made.
But I love it, and I really wanted to push that.
I was thinking like, what if I wanted
to deal with these issues, and it was like an eighth grade,
you know, girl's notebook or something.
And at slowly as this work moves on,
you'll see it's like these issues of play,
and sentimentality, and cuteness, beauty,
with a sort of undercurrent of sadness
that I've gotten better and better at that.
But here I was just starting to realize
that that was the tone that I wanted my work to have.
So these were for a show that was at Century Piedmont
Community College.
I did a lot of these drawings.
I'm just showing a couple of them
where I was taking those same themes.
I've read a lot of Foucault. I think I was having a discipline
and punish thing when you see the A has been internalized.
We still have hunger struggling with itself,
but they're self surveillance now.
And these were, as I said, the show had another manifestation
at Central Piedmont Community College,
where six of those original artists,
there were 17 in the original show,
were asked to revisit it a few years later
and see how the work would shift.
That was love, and truth.
Let's see, I'm going to just show
a couple of transitional pieces.
We didn't start exactly on time right?
Please tell me that I don't have five more minutes.
I started working a little larger.
This is about like 24-by-24 inches.
I have a big vinyl record collection.
I think I like everything in squares feels right to me.
I wanted to start experimenting with having
more happening on the page and these issues of place,
questions of place.
I think this is one of the first pieces that
started to be a sort of central, underlying issue in the work,
sort of these questions of environment,
both psychological and actual.
And the other sort of formal issue that started to come up
is, I was trying to find ways to combine
more literal representation language with abstract forms,
and have a real reason for doing that.
And so the narratives in these pieces
sort of gave me a reason for combining those languages.
Just going to again share a couple of transitional pieces.
Around this time I was working on one of my altered books
series.
I'm only going to show you a few of those,
but I've done a lot of all book series,
where I'll take a book that I find in the dump.
I'm not damaging any valuable books.
I'll take those apart and use the pages in various ways,
as drawing surfaces, and for collage elements, and whatnot.
But, I was having a really hard time
engaging with the piece I was doing then,
called "Lessons in English," because I
had lost a few people close to me,
my young aunt and my father-in-law,
and in my inability to focus on that work that felt more
cerebral, and there were many layers
to the process of the "Lessons in English" work,
and I just couldn't access it.
I just started playing in the studio,
and first started drawing these ostrich forms,
just really focusing on different animal forms.
I was thinking here is sort of birth
of life as birth of death.
And I'm sharing this, there are a lot of these.
I did them for a couple of years.
But then in this piece and a few others,
it was like I'd gotten some distance from that loss,
and they started getting funny.
And then that I realized, OK, I'm on to something.
This is actually - this one was called "Ostrich Examining Her
Gender."
Very silly piece.
But I realized that humor was a way to actually access
and sort of open people up to the content that
was important to me.
I'm not showing you earlier grad school work where I was really
turned on by French feminist theory,
and I was making big juicy like angry body women paintings,
and they're wonderful, and I love that,
but it took me years to sort of understand these other.
Actually that was in the feminist stuff,
too, with the whole theories of the laughing mother,
and whatnot.
So maybe it just took me a while to reach that point.
So here this new language starts to emerge.
This was obviously "Rabbit and Armor."
I think that one speaks for itself and I don't
think I need to say much else.
But you see this sort of new tone emerging in the work.
OK, so with this I had to explain not only to my family,
but everyone in the studio building, why
there were condoms pinned all over my studio walls
for a month.
But this is Bunny with Condoms."
This was for a piece at the Center
for Maine Contemporary Art, called The Naughty Bunny
Series.
I started doing these wall drawings where again we
have a bunny licking itself, smoking a cigarette,
and then running away.
Just trying to be like playfully speak to aspects
of the human experience.
This is a detail.
And then I did a limited edition.
You know I've been very interested
in this whole postmodern critique of the marketplace,
and what it means to create a commodified object,
and so I thought I'd play with that.
And so for this exhibit I made a limited edition
of 20 naughty bunny pin sets.
They sold within the first 10 minutes of the show.
Pretty hard to get your hands on.
I think my mom has one though.
All right I want to say a little bit more about this series.
So that was like transitional work.
I don't have much time so I'm trying
to show you a lot very quickly.
There's a wonderful science and art
center called The Garthwaite Center for Science and Art.
Let's see.
I can't remember the name.
Cambridge-- Cambridge School of Weston.
And I have a friend there, Todd Bartel, and again you know,
Todd is a wonderful artist and someone
I've been in dialogue with for a long time.
We had a critique group for a couple of years
where, once a month, we'd all get together and share what
we were doing, and we trusted one another enough that we
actually could save each other years of sort of processing
stuff, and just cut right to the point
in critiquing one another's work.
So Todd was curating a show called "Sublime Climate,"
and it's sort of this point where
my work, after some struggle, became a more overtly engaged
with ecological and environmental issues.
So Sublime Climate Show obviously
was about climate change.
It was a group of, I don't know, maybe 12 artists
or so invited to make work for this show.
And for about a month, it was like the show was so didactic.
I struggled so much with, obviously I care about.
That's an issue that's come up in my work.
It's something I'm really passionate about.
I think it's an urgent concern.
But given a task that specific, I just
couldn't bring myself to create work that was decent.
I made just awful drawings for a month.
And then I started going into the woods, and onto roofs,
and taking my little bag of those wonderful realistic
small plastic animals, and setting them up and shooting
Polaroids of them, bringing them back to the studio,
and using those as drawing sources.
And again, did some awful drawings for a couple of weeks.
And then was looking at the Polaroids
and realized that, it never occurred to me that this
was photographic work.
It was more interesting as photography.
So then did a bunch of digital images of the same,
with the same process, and finally came
to these 35-millimeter images.
And this was "Exodus One," "Exodus Two,"
"Exodus 3," and 4.
And there are all kinds of mythological and religious
narratives that get evoked here, but I'm messing with it.
They don't make any sense.
And again, it's the sort of sweet language of play,
you know, but they're sad.
They're not like playing the game of the original myth.
They're not living out the narrative
as they're supposed to.
And actually with this work I've just
received a grant from the Maine Arts Commission
to experiment with some animation.
I'm on sabbatical this spring and I'm
going to be playing with that a little bit.
So we'll see what happens.
So just to briefly say a little bit more
about this idea of whether this question of whether one can use
sort of beautiful sentimental language,
I keep covering this with my hair,
whether one can use a language of beauty,
and have it be engaging enough, and content rich enough.
Can I get the depth of my concerns.
I really want those to come across in this work.
Maybe, have anyone read Dave Hickey and his book
"Enter the Dragon" where he sort of makes
this defense of beauty.
It's a kind of an interesting idea.
I won't go into it too much now, but I
think that relates to what I'm trying to do in this work,
and it feels courageous to make sort of work that
could be silly, that comes out of a sort of act of play.
All right, so I just want to share with you
a dream that generated a lot of this work that's
in the Poetry Center.
And I'll show you a few more things and try to wrap up.
But this is a wonderful dream, which my mother stars in.
So in my dream, I was coming out to visit her
at the University of Arizona, and we, I think,
were going out for martinis.
Something we occasionally do.
And she said to me, I can't believe
I forgot to tell you this.
We talk on the phone almost every day.
She said, I can't believe I forgot to tell you.
I quit my job at the University.
And I've taken a job as poet in residence
at the local hospital.
I was thinking, I can't believe you didn't tell me that.
That's crazy.
And she said, OK, we just have to go over there
because I need to meet with the head nurse,
and have a little conversation before we go out.
So we walked into the hospital in my dream,
and it was this just cavernous space with you just bodies
and injured people, I mean everywhere.
Piles stacked up, just piles of them like a refugee camp
or something.
Didn't look like an American sort of city hospital.
And then as we're standing there,
and I'm sort of dismayed at all the people,
I look down at a coffee table, and it's
covered with like kitten-sized deer,
but look just like that, with these little bloody bandages
all over them.
I looked up at the nurse, and in the craziness of dream life
said, you take animals here too?
And literally, in my dream, she went on
to explain the technology to me.
They've developed this technology for miniaturizing
animals, and then when they were going to actually work on them,
they could expand them again, and you
know I'm embarrassing myself, so I'm going to stop now.
But literally, this is my step-by-step dream.
And so it became a sort of visual obsession
and this idea of bandaging.
And as I've explained imagery that,
at first in that transitional work,
began a sort of personal loss and injury,
really transformed into something bigger.
And I think something that speaks more directly
to social concerns, and the personal stuff
is still in there too.
So with this work, which is across the way,
I'll just say a couple of things.
I think I mentioned earlier that I'd
been looking for a sort of opportunity
to combine abstraction and representation,
but I wanted a sort of narrative reason to do it.
I didn't want to do this very contemporary kind
of pastiche way of painting.
And these sort of meditative drips
seem to provide a way, a reason for doing that.
And I also am a lover of art history,
and I have a degree in art history,
so whenever I can slip in art historical quotes,
I love to do that.
And I think it's very important to claim our precedents, art
historical precedents.
And so here, there are a couple for me.
A number of them, actually.
But I'll just mention Kiki Smith is an obvious one.
And then Brice Marden.
Just explain one thing about process
is that, you'd think that making - I sort of
created a game for myself.
I didn't let myself plan these drips out.
And it would have been much easier if I had.
And the game, the rule I created for myself
the sort of obstruction, was that I would not
let this get figurative, right, which is harder than you might
imagine, because you see all of a sudden
it's like Mickey Mouse is coming out,
and you need to quickly jump track.
I couldn't let myself get boxed into a corner.
So what happens is you want to reach this sort
of meditative art making zone.
And I had to sort of force myself to back up from that,
after about three inches.
And so it became this process of 3 inches of dots
and then just looking, and turning and imagining
and projecting on the white page where
the dots were going to go, where the drips were going to go.
And it's not a comfortable way of working for me.
I'm much more interested in gesture,
but there was something about that
seemed to sort of embody that idea of healing,
and sort of play with this idea of -
Well I was just thinking about that Brice Marden Cold Mountain
Series, and I never really understood that work
until I was trying to do something sort of repetitive,
and have it still work formally, and I
think in this process I understood that newly.
I'm going to try to finish up.
I'm represented by Whitney Art Works in Portland, Maine
and when Deb, who owns that gallery,
first saw the red and blue drips,
she had an idea that I hadn't thought of,
which was oxygenated and deoxygenated blood,
which I kind of loved.
It was a wall drawing with actual beads
that, when it was installed at Whitney Art Work,
I included that.
And you see this animal form.
Obviously I'm changing how I'm working with the picture.
Playing quite a bit.
And I just love these sad little, I mean,
look at that deer.
That's just like the saddest thing
I've ever seen in my life.
So just quickly say one more thing about this one,
because my grandmother Travella turned 100 yesterday.
And she's been really struggling this last year.
And as I was creating these pieces
that were really questioning sort of place,
sort of thinking about environment,
and these are sort of this ethereal in-between world,
where there isn't a proper place.
The relationships are messed up.
There aren't, they don't make any sense in terms of scale,
in terms of location.
I thought I'd sort of place my grandmother
kind of waiting to exit this world in that ethereal space.
And every my grandmother would come visit me,
she'd like be an hour until it was time to leave,
and she'd stand near the door with her pocketbook,
and so I thought that would be an appropriate way
to just of represent what she's like right now.
Kind of waiting.
And again, and these pieces are in the Poetry Center,
sort of back on the far wall.
And again questions of place.
This series, Atlas of American Wars,
again I need to finish up, so I'm just going to zoom through.
But I want to quickly say, just because I mentioned it earlier,
this was that Lessons in English series that had gotten sort of
disrupted.
And since it's appropriate to this venue,
I was taking this literal Lessons in English book
that was filled with grammar lessons and whatnot,
and essentially whiting out, reading each page,
whiting out each page with gesso,
and saving just a word or phrase on each page.
And so they became, when installed like this, really
a visual and textual poem.
There's another set of those pages.
Really trying to use unexpected sort of visual languages
with one another.
These are from earlier book pieces.
This was from "Strategies in Handling People,"
a JP Morgan book.
And I'll end with this one, which was from,
in each one of these was a series of 30 pages, just
trying to zoom through.
In "Diary of a Provincial Lady" again,
I was combining a lot of different drawing languages,
and this one was my son Raymond in second grade
was asked to make a list of memoir topics, potential memoir
topics.
They were trying to teach what memoir was.
And he had a list of 20.
It was missing number 4.
And I loved his mark making so much, I sized it to scale.
And you know, it's just, it's a heartbreaking piece, right,
that the terrorist attack was something
that my young son had in his consciousness,
and in his body as a memoir subject.
So I'll end there, and thank you very much
and invite my mom to come on up.