What I've been oop too

Hey y'all!!!

I am very excited as I am gathering my stuff to go out to California to start my life over as a twisted and bitter east coaster on the sunny slopes of Berkeley. A snake in the grass, a wolf in the hen house. EASCOAS! Oh - I'm just satirizing the differences between the coasts here. I'm not actually going out there to start trouble. Well...

I have been quie busy this week preparing a proposal for a two-person show at PLAySpace Gallery in SF which is affiliated with CCA (The super-cool art school out there that I came this close to going to...). I am working with Dina Danish, a woman I was introduced to by the head of the MFA dept at CCA because he thought there are many similarities between our work. And there are - but mainly excited because there are a lot of differences in our working methods as well and I think I have a lot to learn by working together.

We put together a proposal for a show called "Howwa we ana - However we wanna." The first phrase is Arabic (Dina is a native-speaker) for "you and me" and the second is my misunderstanding or mistranslation of that phrase. If you've ever written a proposal for anything, you might know that it is a lot of talky-talk; a lot of putting vague ideas into words. I actually quite enjoy this - it imposes a rigor and demands that you find solutions for every aspect of the project. But I also find that it can limit the meaning of the project; I believe that if an artwork does not go beyond the words used to describe it, then it is NG - no good. It was a demanding week for me, but fun! In the end, it remains difficult to describe what we are going to be doing...

The project's main focus is the process of "getting to know" someone. It specifically looks at methods of knowledge - how you learn about who another person is, the initial innaccuracies, vague impressions, and fantasies, and then the process of correcting and refining your impression of the person through rational understanding of their personality, habits, life story, and way of thinking. There is also something more subtle at work in this process, a sense of identification, of compassionate and sympathetic innate knowledge, of love, and perhaps something more mysterious than all these things. Although I'm not sure about that last one - I think there's more than enough mystery to go round without recourse to ectoplasm and PSI waves.

Oh - I reserve the right to completely change everything I just said. Course.

There is a lot more to this project - I have really left out the main conceptual concern as well as any description at all of what the project will end up looking like - is it painting? Video? Topiary? And I didn't explain how it makes sense within the context of my earler work, but I do think it is a logical extension of the concerns with the viewer that show up in "R.E.L.A.Y." and Preceival - though can't say how right now. That's cause I want to hook y'all to tune in next week. Seriously! This project is going to be super-awesome and I feel confident that I am taking a giant step fwd. Yay!

Dina also has a blog, one which is much more interesting than this one. I think you may be able to see that we have some interests in common, so I don't need to spell it out for you. In my imagination, dear readers, you are all hyper intelligent. And I think you are! You are! In real life you are!

Dina's blog

BTW - The Perceival project is going swimmingly. A lot of people have watched the videos and the feedback seems mostly positive. I am a little disappointed that people have not written more, but I knew from previous experience that it is diffucult to get folks to spend their time doing such things (there's still lots of time before the exhibition...). Besides, the pleasure I am taking in reading people's comments overwhelms any negative emotions - people are absolutely brilliant and fun! If you left a comment - THANK YOU!

I have not had time this week to work too much on the new animations. But there are two under construction. I am very much enjoying writing the music as well. I am only going to make a few more - I won't be able to once I move to CA. But it's been fun!

I may drive down to Georgia tomorrow. Georgia, USA, not the former Soviet. Wish me vroom!