Videos

So, what an amazing week it has been. I apologize for not posting before now, but when it rains it pours! And this week was there was A LOT going on. So this posting will be extra beefy (although I'm not a meat eater, so lets just say its full of protein) because I have been thinking about a lot of things that I have wanted to add. Also, I have been trying to figure out exactly what type of Blog I want to have. I feel like it should have some goal, whether that be academic and discuss scholarly subjects, or personal so I can offer a form of contact with the family, friends and peers that I don't have a chance to speak with all the time. I guess the question is, can it be both? Right now it is resting somewhere in between with me, which I am comfortable with, for now. I would also be nice to know who is reading, so please feel free to leave me some comments so that I know I am interacting with someone out there.

Ah well, so besides my week of running around because my car was broken into and several things destroyed and vandalized, I have been putting together research to decide what type of work I want to make for my studio practice. I've been thinking about the body, and it's reaction to stress in the form of reactions to the organs. Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, and even getting a cold can be a result of stresses placed on your body. I am interested in how these symptoms are related to organ function and I'm in the process of making adornment that functions as protection devices against the symptoms, or at least that is what I am working on now. These things always tend to change and I don't have an official statement yet, so I won't say too much about it, but I found this amazing video of another artist dealing with something similar.

His name is Ralph Borland and he is a South African Artist who together with Margot Jacobs and Jessica Findley collaborated to make "Front," a pair of sound-activated, ceremonial conflict suits that expand and contract in response to auditory aggression offered by the wearer. Only the first 2 minutes or so of this video talks about the collaborative project, but it's very interesting.



Borland also has another project that was part of his thesis exhibition at NYU that he called "suited for subversion" which is a suit created to protect the wearer in large-scale street protests. The suit itself is amazing. It just looks like a big red shape on the top half of his body, but it has a heartbeat monitor inside and an amplifier which amplifies the heartbeat, so when the wearer gets excited everyone knows and hears that. You can check it out on his website.

http://www.ralphborland.net/

He thinks of this work as playful, but it makes me think as an activist and think about politics and the ridiculousness of the media which reminds me of another amazing video someone showed me last week by Omar Fast. Omar Fast works with film, video and television footage in an investigation to discover how we all communicate with each other.



In thinking about how we communicate with each other I am brought back to this Blog and how this is my means of communication with you, my audience. I know that I will become a hermit soon and as it gets colder outside I will lock myself up in my studio, only coming out for food and occasionally for sleep. I will continue my quest for deciding how much or how little information about myself and my work I choose to reveal here, but for now I think this blog will serve as a documentation for me to archive what I am seeing and what I am interested in at this critical stage in my life.