Cedric Tai's Blog

5 websites I would be a part of if they existed:

2012-02-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

1. GoodQuestion.com

Using current news headlines as an anchor, the public can create and vote on the most critical questions burning in our minds and tracks the kind and difficulty/complexity of questions created over time. A Socratic approach to find out what questions do we share?

2.StealThisIdea.com

With our minds firing on all cylinders rarely are we actually creating interesting projects that would be the right idea for our own artistic practice. This site built on open source software destabilizes the private nature of creativity and offers a way for people to share how they would go about a project if they were the right one to do it. A lost and found perhaps of clever strategies.

3.Urawaza.com

Supposedly this site site already exists in a way on Mixi.com as a Japanese website and there were many more that were featured on a show called Ito-ke no Shokutaku, but it's about time there was a single database and we can all benefit from each others household wisdom.

4.WhatWeWantIsFree.com

Inspired by the book of the same name title, a database of community-based organizations and artists to communally discuss lessons learned, share resources, archive and track past and future inspirational models.

5.GotServicesNotMoney.com

A skill sharing site that works like couchsurfing.com where people can vouch for people that barter or give services out for free that can be requested or offered. Dentists who will do dental care for art, rich men who want to take out girls to help pay for their student loans exist so why not for getting home cooked pies in exchange for helping someone learn how to code in JavaScript?

Homesick reminders

2012-02-05T06:24:00.000-08:00

I was depressed this morning and talked about it with Rachel as we were just getting out of bed at 2 pm...

What is it that makes being in a new place, in Glasgow, that is so difficult for me to find ways to have fun/meaning that seemed so easy in Detroit? I boiled it down to the feeling that you had a place to chase opportunities the way you wanted to go about it. There are people passionately working towards social justice or creating a community of ones own, and in many more ways one felt needed. And the pay off was always apparent, it was more than rewarding, you got access. Access to rooftops, to space to work, to people that are famous in their own right, access to get involved either more in depth and a lack of pressure to keep doing it out of guilt or need.
Friends didn't just share struggles, they shared joys of making, the joys of challenging work and the joys of doing it on your own terms or to show that you don't care what others think. Actually the biggest part was that you could prove to yourself that you could do it. You could be celebrated as an introvert and celebrated for doing things that don't make you any money and celebrated for still doing it even though you really needed the money. There just wasn't any commercial pressure, just lifes pressures, no expectations that you have to worry about anything other than your own survival, not worrying about if you got invited to a party. You were proud of the weirdest dorkiest things that you did with your friends and you didn't have to go to far or wait that long to hang out with those people. You were proud of who you could associate with because someone in your close circle of friends gave you hope and you knew that nothing in particular is your responsibilty. There was comfort when you wanted to only be among friends and excitement was just around the corner if you were bored and adventure if you decided to go somewhere on your bike. The funny thing was that as a city something really exciting didn't happen every week. If anything, really fun magical days of non-stop fun happened in 2 unexpected days out of the year, and usually in the summer. There was too much to do when all of the other days were awfully slow and uneventful, but life seemed to go at the right pace and I got to know so many amazing people that I can't believe we were all in one place and I was appreciated for exactly who I was, not what I had accomplished, but what I wanted to do. I miss you friends in Detroit.

But I also reminded myself of two things this morning/afternoon.

1. I came here to challenge myself in ways that takes away all the supports that I made myself and all the support I took advantage of in order to try something different for a little while, because even if I hated it (which I don't I'm just lonely), change is inherently a good thing. The biggest problem I have right now is not knowing what I like to do here for fun, because at least the solution to that is just figuring it out and it will take care of itself.

2. This is the best time I could have with Rachel. The difficulties I'm finding here are only equal to what Rachel had to put up with in Detroit, as a city it seems to take at least a yer and a half to get settled. So maybe it's not about pushing myself to achieve anything new here, but to just enjoy my time with Rachel because she is having a great time here.

Ok, stop putting so much pressure on yourself Cedric, just do the work that needs to be done, let it fail like it inevitably should if it's a bold new risk and enjoy what you know is working out just fine, the rest wasn't meant to be. A little pep talk never hurts.

Verbatim from a recording of Rachel to me...

2012-02-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

So I got a great explanation from Rachel about what my art practice may be like after I suggested that I haven't been able to express what it is that I'm interested in since I thought it was generosity, but most of those conversations steered towards economies and models where I was possibly more interested in keeping myself feeling present, as if it's normally a struggle to feel like things are real and that I can have conversations with people to the point where both people feel like there's a real moment. But I was having trouble picking apart what it meant to consider what is 'real'.

Here's a transcription of the audio that is here: 1 31 12 12 54 PM

"So you might want to think about the terminology you use to describe the things that you are interested in, so last night we were talking about how you're interested in generosity but generosity doesn't have to deal with honesty or vulnerability, it has a bit more to do with exchange, which you might even be more interested in something a bit more personal than that. So we came up with the word, the 'real', but then we realized you weren't really necessarily interested in the 'real' because that can be conflated into ideas that come through in cliche films like the Matrix in which other people are asleep and only one person sees reality as it really is and it posits that there is one truth to our lives and there is one reality, and for example that could be, right, a nihilistic person trying to get all the religious lemmings to wake up and realize that there is just no existent of god, so you're not interested in that, you're not interested in someone being prophetic for others, you're interested in the complexity of human emotion through experience and relationships. Because you're interested in what makes people vulnerable and where those vulnerabilities come from, so it makes me think of good films where there is a complexity of humanity that is shown, and by complexity I mean that usually there's no morality or one morality that's posited, the characters are not simply good or evil but there is an entangled situation in which you realize literally the nuances of... and often the fact that morality is kind of shit, really in a way, and there is just no right or wrong and that situations are more complex than we often portray them to be. And I think I kind of mentioned how this makes me realize also why I love Anthropology, because it looks at patterns and ways in which our societies create ways of working for us that allow us to survive and how structures allow us to survive, but how structures are also those things that kind of keep us from often expressing those intimate vulnerabilities we have , but when we get vulnerable it's a show of how us acknowledging the chaotic nature and the uncertainties we have about life and our acknowledgement that life is made up of this things that we do repetitiously to survive and to make it in this life and to stay sane. And vulnerability comes down to those moments where we do feel like a lack of control and realize that our structures can fall apart. And those are very beautiful moments where we're honest with ourselves and yet we make choices to be the people we want to be so that we can continue to be vulnerable in a way that we find fulfilling, in a way that allows us to be intimate with others."

"...it's interesting that structure I think is very important to you, and your paintings could about structure, and that you're interested in vulnerability because you're someone who's very aware of the fact that you need particular structures in order to feel normalcy in your life and to feel like your life isn't chaotic or upsetting or depressing or out of control whereas other people those things come more naturally to them. Like, memory or they literally just don't worry about being fulfilled in a way that you have high expectations of life and so you want those things to be immediate. I also think it's why you don't really do drugs. You know what I mean? You don't care to lose yourself, which is what I love about you because you don't seek that kind of escapism in a similar way, you very much so want to know what these things are that confront you. But yeah that goes back to you needing particular types of structure in your everyday life that also makes you interested in generosity but also in these moments of vulnerability and intimacy with others because it's something that's always very immediate to you. And others don't keep those kinds of things so immediate to themselves and I think that might have something to do with their expectations of life and of themselves and just their personalities, but I think you very much have... it's part necessity for you that fuels a desire in others, you need that structure to live your daily life and then you want to experience and have these types of conversations with others to feel fulfilled."

No pretenses, what would be fun to do:

2012-01-18T02:33:00.000-08:00

I was talking with Tessa yesterday and I was ecstatic to hear that both of us not only make work to make ourselves happy primarily, but also we had a lot of similar ways that we are frustrated, numbed but also excited and hopeful. What started as a way to get ourselves to read things that we would like to force ourselves to engage we ended up talking about the program, how we're getting on, and more importantly how do we get what we want from the program.

I've made my list of favorite things to do before, but I'm not sure if I've ever listed "things that I think would be fun to do (without worrying about what it all means). I could easily combine this list with another list of "ways to direct, focus and jumpstart the creation and completion of projects" which actually right now looks like I'm primed on taking that list very seriously as I have in the works a 365 day calendar. What do I do that I am passionate about, that I should celebrate and focus on which really means that I enjoy it so much I couldn't actually kill the joy if I researched it extensively, or worked on finding its most suiting context and implications or

But back to the list of fun things, I've actually have quite a few started, but I think that I haven't been clear with myself about what do I genuinely enjoy doing and what could produce some beautiful, meaningful, engaging work that is based on what I can sometimes do better than other people, have fun.

It's always time to kill the fear.

Knit / Crochet anything (check)
Make colorful abstract paintings that combine the graphic edges of impossible textures to make by hand and uncontrollable forms that are made by hand that also create textures not possible to make on a computer, layered and combined to create... uh... um... magic. (check)
Eat dinner with people and learn new ways to make food (check)
Learn how to bind hard cover books through a workshop led by a friend (check)
Watch movies, read comic books, watch TV series (check)
Make my own painted version of settlers of Catan (check)
Make a toy art tool (check)
Make relationships with technicians and learn how basic processes work and through hanging out with them, learn what they think students should try and should appreciate, who else has this kind of working knowledge of what would be going beyond the norm or nailing a technique? (check)
Read good fiction (check / pending)
Find out what other people are watching, reading, enjoying (pending)
Work with ceramics (pending)
Learn about Marx by taking Rachel out for coffee (pending)
Create something that uses sensors (pending)
Make a gigantic spiralgraph that takes a lot of engineering (pending)
Make a video in collaboration with Corrie B. back in the States using friends over at the school called "Bauhaus at Home" where I combine learning about the Bauhaus to creating a Bob Ross-like platform to make it fun to learn art theory. Bob Ross would quip with anti-government messages which I hope to also include even that delightful detail, but have it be about a Independent Scotland. (pending)
Metal Pour (pending)
Make a reading group where instead of a dialogue specifically about the readings, people have to produce ideas for a work of art as an exercise (pending)
Join/make a collaborative that produces fun things
Have plants that work within a work of art that have to be taken care of
Direct a movie
Direct a music video
Dance in my own production or someone else's
Make something 10 feet by 20 feet made of small things
Hang out and find a way to display or interview talkative/excitable taxi drivers of Glasgow
Blow thousands of dollars on hookers and coke
Talk with people and enjoy their company as the art show
Make a gigantic paper-mache version of myself learning against a wall holding a beer, and other version of myself passed out on the couch
Create my own version of "Improv everywhere"
Setup drums/an impromptu Talent contest on Sauchiehall street
Completely analyze the accent of a particular part of Scotland and attempt to dress up, wear fake facial hair and try to blend in
Change the ways that an orchestra could work, such as giving headphones to all the musicians and letting them see the conductor but only playing one note and only when hearing through the headphone a particular musician in the orchestra, to create ripple effects
(I'll add more later, things hit me when I see someone else having fun)

Perhaps this could be a list for potential relative aesthetic works, or perhaps, it can just take the pretention away from what it means to create my 'practice'.

And here's where it gets really tricky in grad school. I already know I like doing these things SO, I know I'll probably do these things if I wasn't in grad school, the question is what can I do that would be out of the norm for myself since I should assume that grad schools is both a safety net, a place for instant feedback with respectable professionals and a place to play WITH other people. Being in graduate school implies that I know how to get things going and that I am willing to give an institution wads of cash and probably that I have something interesting worth investigating.

Also I just thought of something, really I need to make a list of things that I find fun that others might not find fun normally, another list for another day.

My art heroes of fun:

Maurizio Cattelan
Allora and Calzadilla
Erwin Wurm
Tom Friedman
Judy Pfaff
Miranda July
Oliver Herring
Pierre Huyghe
Yayoi Kusama
Wayne White
Pipilotti Rist
Jacque Liu

The funny thing is that I wouldn't necessarily feel like it would be a lot of fun to have all of these guys in one room and to have a party, but actually, I envy their working methods, whatever they are, that causes them to produce works that have sincere levels of serious play and their work looks good to boot.

I will refocus on what it means to feel alive and to make work that is weird, exciting and not possible out of grad school while at the same time finding fun new ways to force myself to do the things that would create a means for having an even more meaningful practice. I was making good work when I left for Detroit, and gawd as my witness, I WILL take new risks!

Coming up with a new artist statement

2012-01-13T04:43:00.000-08:00

How do we acknowledge the moments and days where we feel the most alive? Being present gives me clarity to choose what to do with all of my free time. I think this kind of space scares people normally, or offends people as if I am not pulling my weight in society.

But I do believe that there are simple ways that I try to live by that are profound.

Trying not to work too hard,

trying not to be satisfied,

trying not to lose time to mindless tasks unless I want to,

trying not to master something to the point of where it becomes mindless,

trying to avoid small talk,

trying to avoid competition,

trying to avoid irrationality,

trying to avoid being the only one who can get something out of my art practice.

trying to avoid doing anything just for the sake of it

trying to avoid being stubborn

There comes a time a point where you adapt a strategy that you don’t know how you got started, but you start getting exactly what you want and you find yourself sharing a moment with another person, or with yourself, or with time.

Before graduate school it was the realization of the kind of social capital that artists have and being able to demand free time without judgement, to become part of a subculture. I would navigate the world in ways that would allow me to join other people's journeys or bring people with mine and to achieve every kind of success on every level without having to compromise my sanity.

So what am I doing in grad school?

I’m watching a lot of movies

I write things like this that are somewhere between a diary a manifesto and a shopping list

I’m sharing meals with new friends

I’m getting to know new technicians and learning about new processes

I’m spending as much time as I can with my partner Rachel

I’m making mockups for artwork that isn’t possible to make just right now

I’m reading books that have topics that are so interesting that I don’t feel the pressure of reading them as research

I'm expressing everything I think I know with the tutors that come in to my studio

I'm bidding my time for an opportunity to flex my abilities on an in depth scale

I'm trying to figure out what to do with all my free time.

Everything I've just written is a precursor for my artist statement that almost seems too short to be real, I don't think that I'm simplifying my practice as much as I'm realizing through some of the tutors that almost everything I do comes to a desire for genuine exchanges and subversion.

This is probably all I really need to say:

Having a good relationship that makes one feel alive is everything.
Even if we give with the knowledge that there will be a return, we can do things
in a way that doesn't require a hierarchy or make others passive; making something
so that other people feel free to express themselves.

5 movies that tried too hard to be edgy or subversive, so I hated them.

2011-12-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

Why am I picking on these movies? Because some of my friends recommended these movies to me and I can't give up the argument that these movies astound me that they were received so well. Even though it's kind of like decrying that Larry the Cable Guy makes a ton of money doing a bad shtick, I refuse to give up my arguments just because we leave the bar, or the restaurant, or wherever we were that I caused a scene when I slammed my fist in distaste. I cannot on moral grounds allow you to tell other people that this movie was amazing, praising that it is heroic in a way because of its use of... (I continue below for each movie)

1. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

The one thing I don't want to hear about this movie: "a powerful female lead! She's a bad ass!"

You see looming rape scene around the corner and find yourself yelling at the screen "use the buddy system!" But there's no real explanation for the sex scenes or the fact that every loophole tidies itself up quite nicely other than that the director is trying to play to the nerdiest audience possible: A thin brooding girl that can kick ass, has a photographic memory, hacks, has a job, and happens to be incapable of normal emotion so she has to have sex with a writer to learn what it's like to be in love.

Why am I so negative about this:
What starts to possibly be an interesting case of a lesbian heroine that actually does her job and someone else's at the same time, this ends up being a mash-up of cliches from
Inglourious Basterds (revisionist history by imagining ourselves torturing Nazis),
Hackers (Seeing the tough sexy inner hacker subculture by drinking pop and hanging out with friends, except this newer movie is more like an MacBook Pro commercial),
Red Dragon (showing tattoos during coitus and setting things on fire),
Scoop or Angels and Demons (just any awful movie about being a slueth)
With the oh so perfect anti-corporation ending of The Saint.

Not all of the movies I'm listing above were bad, at all I just wanted to give some background to how easy it probably looked to turn the posthumous novel into a movie because we can give it a catchy title, the evil doers are Nazis/big corporations and everyone loves an emotionally damaged girl. Basically take something that could have been complex or inspiring and flip it to be commercialized and numb the audience to believing that justice will be served on all those evil people out there.

One last complaint: And c'mon there's no local hardcord bands in Denmark to get music for the soundtrack?
One good thing I could say: I've never seen any of the actors or actresses before so that's a nice change of pace.

The Cure for this disease of lower standards of female roles:
Lina Leandersson in Let the Right One In
Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone
Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

2. The Hangover

The one thing I don't want to hear about this movie: "Zach Galifianakis' funniest movie, hell funniest movie this year!"

I'll just put it this way, it was a like an attempt at Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for this years' generation of college students, but they played to the lowest common denominator. You know that glazed look you get when some guy is telling you an epic story about how they just barely got out of this situation alive had it not been for their cunning intellect and daring maneuvers? This movie bumps along with songs that you would imagine at an all-white suburban prom and leaves you unable to think about the jokes because of how over the top the movie is trying to be.

Why am I so negative about this: This was many people's introduction to Zach Galifianakis. I also think that they told him to talk as loud and stupid as he could, he doesn't do this in any other movie, his best roles are when he's toned down quite a bit, or even in Fiona Apple's music video. I can't help but be bothered every time a movie like this tries to keep it funny in extremities to call someone gay or a faggot to get across that buddy X is just your average Joe. But somehow the movie also seems to take all the edginess out of decent comedians to deliver so-so one liners, I can't wait until Jeffrey Tambor is playing the Dad in Arrested Development again instead of a watered down version in this bro-universe.

One last complaint: Ken Jeong is the new Long Duk Dong and it was embarrassing to realize that people all around me were laughing at this character because he was weird and Asian. When will weird Asian people be respected for being the beautiful people that they are...
One good thing I could say: At least the crowd they were pandering to were more likely to illegal download and watch the movie than pay money to rent or see it in theaters. No, that's still negative, let's see... It did contain genuinely funny people, but that's as much as I want to say.

The Cure for this disease of lower standards for a buddy comedy, an exciting narrative inside of a hotel or Zach Galifianakis see:
Better guy-banter in The Trip
Better guy-relationship in I Love You Man
Better unbelievable moments inside of a hotel in Four Rooms
Better Zach Galifanakis in Visioneers

3. A Serious Man

The one thing I don't want to hear about this movie: "Well, did you get it?"

Sometimes movies are awful because of having high expectations, that's why this is also on this list. To be quite honest, I thought that people were telling me that the amazing movie they watched was "A Serious Man" only to find out later they meant "A Single Man". But either way, the Coen brothers have made such better films and this one got such high reviews that many believe it beats Fargo and O Brother Where Art Thou and The Big Lebowski, to that I say NAY!

Why am I so negative about this: The movie has that feel that someone should pat it on the back for being a recreation, an update of the book of Job and how it plays with absurdity and being between a comedy and a tragedy... I didn't want to pat this movie on the back, call me a wuss, but this movie just scared me. I thought it was a horror movie the way it started off with the stabbing, all the way to the end where I imagined that all the kids die because of the weather turning sour like a follow up to an inconvenient truth. Although to be honest it wasn't as bad as The Ladykillers (2004) but I won't debate that here since it seems like most people didn't like that remake anyways.
If a movie is supposed to be interesting in how it makes up its own rules (The Coen brothers for example enjoy hating the fictional characters they create) then we should be able to make judgements of whether or not they are successful within their own guidelines. Perhaps this movie was just falsely advertised, I would have liked it if it was described as a cerebral suspense, but when it's described as black humor similar to Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, it just can't help but be compared to things that are laugh out loud funny.

One last complaint: To be fair, perhaps I saw a worried person within myself and I continued to wholeheartedly worry throughout the entire film, but I don't think it's far fetched to say it would suck if you went in to see a comedy and came out scared for your life.
One good thing I could say: I actually like when movies depict Asian people as flawed characters. In this movie an Asian students attempts to get by through cheating (bribing), I think it's an interesting reality to put out there that describes a cultural expectation of success that I believe anyways is accurate.

The Cure for this disease of lower standards for movies in which the main character has a bad dream about someone else having sex with their wife/girlfriend:
Office Space
High Fidelity
It's probably a comedic tactic used quite often, but I could only remember 2 movies that were good that did it.

4. Despicable Me

The one thing I don't want to hear about this movie: "It's the first time a villain is shown as the hero, it's funny and brilliant!"

It's really simple why I hated hearing about this film being oh so good, the flow of the humor was awful. On top of that I didn't like the main character's accent. The film is unbalanced between trying to have as many yellow people moments as they could while having the little girls doing cute things be funny. Quality over quantity... The little yellow people are trying too hard to be funny random oompa loompas, or rather something like the extra characters in Sponge Bob Square pants, but more violent. Actually I really love the extra characters in Sponge Bob, so maybe they're more like thousands of little slapstick comedians that impersonate the three stooges with missiles.

Why am I so negative about this: It overshadows the much better take on the villain as hero: Megamind which is much like Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. Both the one with Neil Patrick Harris and the one with Will Ferrell deconstruct the idea of the hero, whereas Despicable Me relies on gags and feel good moments. I would rather go on to describe how much I loved Megamind, specifically how jaded the superhero became. It was amazing character development throughout, and the celebrity voices weren't altered.

One last complaint: The trailer I saw showed all the funniest parts in one quick package, comedy surprises ruined.
One good thing I could say: The parts where Gru is acting like a jerk to the general public is pretty good fun.

The Cure for this disease of lower standards for an animated comedy that are meant to make you feel good:
Megamind
How To Train Your Dragon
Kung Fu Panda
Ratatouille
(ok so those last 3 aren't accurate replacements, but I love animated movies for kids/adults, this one was just so awkward compared to the flow and pace of these other gems)

The worst of them all...

5. District 9

The one thing I don't want to hear about this movie: "it's really savvy political story about racism in South Africa"

District 9 was attempting to address the ideals of racist ideology while using metaphors of race (using aliens to represent oppressed slaves) that failed to address the complete and utter dehumanization of blacks in the film. Generally when creating a sentiment of some group of people being the "other", they are characterized as violent, dumb, cannibalistic and incestuous. But hey this movie's got 3/4 stereotypes covered, and they replaced incestuousness with just being prostititutes. Don't believe me about the cannibalism? What about the fact that there's a scene of ritualistic voodoo where the gang leader wants to cut off and eat the man's half alien hand because it will give him special powers. Let that sink in for ya.

Why am I so negative about this: Alien movies are usually about uniting the world's citizens against an alien intruder and so in subverting that genre by having white people unsure about "prawns" they are attempting to show that the unknown isn't necessarily evil (the aliens), but what's posited as a greater evil is the demonic black people.
The moral is that we shouldn't fear the unknown, but hey, we know that these particular black people do evil things, so we should still fear them, and it's alright if they get killed because in reality they really are evil and they had it coming. Also for a movie trying to combat discrimination, the hero is still a white guy, that turns fully into an alien, so um, that must count for something since the movie is trying so hard to portray aliens as minorities. The aliens are portrayed in much mores specific instances as clever, sharing, having a sense of community, advanced technology that puts them in touch with the universe in a way that modern man is devoid of and they also can show their emotional side, they just happen to look like icky cockroaches. This is similar to the romantic notion of indigenous people kind of like Avatar.

One last complaint: If you really think about it, this director must really really despise Nigerians, because they're violently blown up and shot at and killed at a rate that far outnumbers the aliens actually.
One good thing I could say: The special effects are pretty neat, there's a alien-mech-robot-suit that looked cool.

The Cure for this disease of lower standards for movies about realizing you are within a group of disenfranchised people
City of God
Ratcatcher

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
All of those movies have characters that are 999 times more complex than District 9.

So to recap, I hated in this order: District 9, The Hangover, Despicable Me, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and then A Serious Man, and all of the other movies I mentioned were better than these movies, with the exception of Avatar and whatever I said also sucked.

Thank you for your time, let the arguing begin.

Inventions that I wish someone could make for me:

2011-12-21T05:02:00.000-08:00

A 4 mm thick see-through plastic ruler that had a metal edge for cutting with an exacto knife, where the numbers are printed backwards to be seen through onto the other side and the metal strip on the edge has a nice lip making it less easy for the blade to slip onto the ruler...
A scanner that's as thin as the iPad that can slip between the pages in a book without having to bend down its spine that can scan in detail two opposite pages at the same time clearly. Flatbed scanners would be a thing of the past.
You know how you can rent a tux for a nice event, what if you could rent beautiful art frames that would cost too much to own for a month and a half, the length of a show, I don't even mind if it has fake pockets, but I'd love if I could walk into a store, get it sized and walk out with a tailored wooden frame.
A DIY kit for making a steadycam holder for an iphone to take video
Pants with built in or insert-able wool leg warmers near your ankles
This isn't so much an invention as a business plan, but what if there were bars (restaurants would be pushing it) where you could only stand, but booths and everything else was still the same? As annoying as it may seem, most of us do that in crowded bars anyways.

Yeah, I just want stuff that will help me do other stuff.

Also, I just learned about the Xcode environment that uses PhoneGap to make my own apps, both are free!
But you may just need a developer account for $100 a year.

More wishful thinking, what if there was a reference guide for MFAs?

2011-12-17T20:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Teachers-Book-Lists-J-B/dp/0787974242

I think I love making lists, something to represent the opposite of how my mind actually works, tangible, orderly, something I can reference.

So just like the list of lectures that I wish existed, here are chapters for a book I wish existed and some of the people, places and things that might be listed in them. Seriously look through the Artists Book of Lists if you ever get a chance, it's fascinating to see all of that information in one place.

Main chapters:

Getting rid of baggage and pushing new boundaries for yourself

Top twenty-five of the most radical and experimental art programs (including graduate schools, low-residencies and others)
All of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies
Constraints that artists use to distill or direct work

Oubapo

Top art libraries and resource centers by country
List of Experimental Films from 1920 - 1980 by country
Archives/museums that allow artists to interpret their collection
50 myths of the lives of artists as portrayed in popular culture
Artists and their alter-egos/pen names
A list of all the people who were involved with Black Mountain College
Important writing reflecting on having the confidence to make art

Letter to a Young Artist

Sustainable practices

The different types of artists and their different audiences/venues
The wheel of diversifying the ways of supporting the production of work

grants
residencies
low-overhead
fiscal sponsorship

Top 50 most prestigious artist collections private and corporate
List of artists who died young due to their materials
List of artists who quit going to college and started a band or another interesting field of work
History of artist lawsuits

Shepard Fairey
Whistler

Concepts

Books and quotes that reference how fictional memories are as important as notated history in getting the feel just right (and reference it directly by breaking the narrative while telling the story)

The Things They Carried
Girl Interrupted

Artworks and quotes that references the infinite or feedback loops
Different ways that artists understand and use the term "The Body"
Names of philosophers and philosophical ideas important to the changes and development in art
Artworks referenced in philosophy or by scholars

Walter Benjamin referencing Paul Klee's Angelus Novus to describe history's relationship to progress.

Materials and Techniques

List of painters who became installation artists
As of 2011 a list of most useful and newest manufacturing techniques and mediums
Companies that hire artists to promote their new art products
50 different ways to frame a single work of art
Art materials that are banned in California but not yet in other places
List of resources to fair use free archived sounds
List of historical and non-graffiti forms of defacement
Artists who use humans as a medium
Works where the medium was the message

Attaching art to other causes, issues and topics

List of TED talks that combine art with another social science or hard science
Artists who started off at a high level in another profession before turning to the arts

Anthropologists who wrote fictional novels

Names of artists who engage in a social practice
Organizations/Residencies that seek artists for creating social works
Artists who have been censored and the list of the institutions that censored them
Scientists and mathematicians who collaborated with artists or did art themselves

Buckminster Fuller

That would be a start...

Possible newspaper headlines if Dads wrote the news:

2011-12-15T02:48:00.000-08:00

My Son is Awesome! (Probably Because I Helped Him Out Quite a Bit)

The Government is Stupid and Inefficient and Doomed Because of This One Thing They Did Wrong In My Opinion

I Know She Just Said She'd Leave You Out in the Street to Die, but You Know, Your Mom is Sensitive

This Just In: Everything Will Work Out in the End

My fears and my ideals

2011-12-15T02:32:00.000-08:00

A theme in my work:

Tension between optimism and my observation of the inherent flaws in how we have tried to move forward so far…

I seem to employ 2 natural modes working that produce something naturally, organically:

1. Pointing out/investigating the inherent philosophical and rhetorical flaws in education because we know that there’s a problem, we know the problems in addressing that problem and given the ability to have a kind of clarity we might actually just have a chance at changing something in our lifetime.

2. Producing an art object that has no purpose than to be enjoyed for its aesthetic value.

I am interested in making a kind of “activist art” or even “utopian art” (for lack of a better word) that questions, makes someone reflect, and is possibly a catalyst for change, a la Mel Chin.

Right now I can image a body of works titled "The Best Education" all based on my distaste for what's called "The Mcdonaldization of Education" There is my one digital poster and then there's the book that counts everyone that opens the book (currently having a mockup finished) and then there's the idea at the bottom... But I feel like this is the start of my series of works about this topic.

Healthy skepticism of my own practice (similar to my agnosticism in life) My Fears:

· I do believe that there is a right way as long as you don’t imagine that there’s one right way, but that’s a kind of utopian paradox…

· I fear that everything might collapse because of the nature that I do believe in a kind of utopia, I have faith in a better society (I’m a big believe and staunch advocate of “fake it until you make it”)

· I have fear of being caught for doing the “fake it until you make it” tactic, because I am in a graduate program for making art, am I still faking it? (My art definitely fakes something, but reveals a kind of reflection that changes how we might see reality, but doesn’t faking something to reveal the truth debunk conflict with my other sentiments, that trying to exercise our "truth" onto others is problematic?)

· Much of my confidence comes from “fake it until you make it”, what if this is taken away from me? It's the only practice that has ever worked for me!

· I fear that I will be lost trying using my “fake it until you make it method” if I compare myself to others (just had 3 anxiety dreams last night about other people in my program making really interesting work and feeling excited for them but also feeling extremely intimidated)

· I fear being misguiding or misguided

· I fear producing quantity over quality throughout my art practice

· I fear getting caught up in trying to make a statement will create disappointing results that no one will care about

· I fear being discounted for having more privileges than others

"What do you fear?" - Sarah Tripp

The art concept that launched the thinking process:

(I woke up this morning from a dream that I was struggling to pay attention to a movie that was being screened in Detroit, it was very important and it had everyone's attention, but I kept meandering around, trying to find something to eat or drink, casually talking with whoever wasn't paying attention to the movie. When I woke up I realized that whenever I create a social critique, it starts with imagining the ways that I am part of the problem.)

The work would be people sitting in a room watching themselves sitting in a room watching a documentary about global warming. Titled “Living with our investment in the environment”

This work is about questioning, if environmentalism was so important to people, why is this the way that most of us become aware that there’s a problem? Why aren’t we taking field trips to dumps, questioning the censorship of these kinds of field trips? Why are we distancing ourselves from seeing the trash in the landscape and opting for a stroll through a park to “get it”? We are constantly mediating our experience of what is truly important to us rather than coming up with ways to have more one on one experiences with each other and with an issue, if something is deeply personal it needs to be addressed this way. Americans show how much they care through their actions, this applies to a lot of other issues, from consumption to relationships between us and other people.

(I would probably use that technology that superimposes images inside of a video, but is there something like a live Adobe after effects to do this?)

Following Radical thoughts to radical conclusions.

2011-12-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

I have been having flashbacks now and then to Dr. Puhek's courses including Society and the Individual and War and Revolution.

Here's an excerpt:
"It is through this intelligence that the god of religions is present to and in us. The error of religions is to conceptualize god as an external object that directs life from the outside. God is not an alien being who rules on lives. God is not a thing to us and we are not a thing to god. This false image of estrangement is implicit in any and every positive concept of god. No concept can capture god for god is infinite and must remain ultimately nameless, but so is the second side of the universal intelligence we possess. At our core is the chaos of our nothingness and god is the Nothingness it knows. This infinite divine is the ground that all life rests on – the source of inspiration and the heart of what we humans take to be our individual and personal self."

Those are the beginning and last paragraphs of a short essay: Life, Intelligence, & Fringe Ideas

But I was just thinking about his talk about Justice, law and order...

"Just as physics is under the illusion that the opposite of matter is anti-matter, so we are under the illusion that the opposite of law and order is lawlessness and disorder. Nothingness as the ground of being is neither law and order nor lawlessness and disorder. It is, indeed, the source of both. Singularity and nothingness are that out of which all things their order and disorder arise. It is the greatest of the errors to think that something cannot come from nothing; there is nowhere else from which something could arise.

Let us learn how we can about life from physics. But let physics learn what it can only learn from the direct experience of life."

I agreed with Puhek on almost everything, with the exception of his take on art, but I kept thinking about his way of debunking how we go from A to B, or specifically how good intentions paved the road to hell so to speak. I've always wondered what kind of conclusion I could draw theoretically if I followed my own thoughts about certain topics. Justice is definitely one that I think is particularly revealing. Here are some of the truth that I hold evident that dictates the following thoughts:

1. Every moment is a good moment to face yourself, and to learn. (this comes from a kind of philosophy that my dad espouses, his other ones I'm not to keen on such as "it always works out in the end")

2. Choices are easier to make when there are less of them, unless it's down to two which in reality is extremely rare compared to how often we're told that something is binary, only this or that.

3. "Terrible or not, difficult or not, the only thing that is beautiful, noble, religious, and mystical is to be happy." - Arnaud Desjardins

4. "We work to become not to acquire" - Elbert Hubbard (or at least this should be the point)

5. You can't force anyone to learn anything, you can only present models, opportunities, support, structure, placebos, expectations, and feedback.

So I'm going to throw out 5 examples of according to my logic, what would be my idea of appropriate Justice having the kinds of assumptions that I have.

Serial Killer or school shooter: Confinement away from people and psychological treatment with loss of having media attention privileges. Their access to having their words or viewpoints published in the media would be abolished for their own privacy. The death penalty only ensures that their idea of immortality will last forever, all theatrics would be stripped down to highlighting moments when this person was considered well, and not sick.

Running a red light: Work as paid traffic police for a week for the minimum wage with a vest that distinguishes this person from a cop as a person who ran a red light.

Accidental killing: Depending on the ability of the victim's family, the accused would be enforced to produce a gesture of good will (such as making dinner) and live with the family for the period of a month to help with errands and attend grief counsels.

Taking bribes: Besides a fine in the exact amount accepted, paid every 5 years, the funds would be transferred to a charity/non-profit whose mission matches the victim of what went unregulated. On top of this, like a hacker, this person would lose all privileges to use a computer for a year.

Corporate Greed: Death Penalty. Due to the nature of a global economy where money can be moved or extracted at an astonishing rate, this crime must have a consequence that deters mass stealing over 500,000 dollars. It will send the message that acquiring this much wealth illegally is not worth your life. Those who are accomplices in the crime but may not have made this much money will have to watch the proceedings. There would be no warnings if the amount stolen is over five million dollars, the death penalty would be scheduled within the year. Money that is among family and friends can be raised to delay the death penalty, but the same amount considered stolen would have to be raised every year to put it off a year. The money raised would also go to a charity/non-profit whose mission matches the victim of what went unregulated.

In a sense reading back over these, I can tell that I believe that consequences should highlight experiencing something from another perspective, and that somehow what I would consider fair deals with distributing the money to where it belongs not to the agency enforcing the laws but to people and organizations that may have been wronged. It's also seems to touch on cultural ideas of what is taboo or moral and how societies might account to preventing such actions in the future... I think my conclusions are interesting, but difficult to implement, but only possibly because they don't fit today's idea of what is culturally acceptable.

I have no idea what I'm about to do...

2011-12-07T17:35:00.000-08:00

What if secretly I want…

to be…

making the best artwork I could possibly make, something that would not make me envious of anyone else’s method, tools or style, a message that can’t come from anyone but my loudspeaker. Boom. A cult following, a folk hero, an anomaly against all odds, part of a lineage of bad-asses.

What I want is nothing short of changing how you, me and them inhabit and experience reality from every point forward. Imagine that at stake is that we’re all going to die and we won’t know any other present or future that we don’t make ourselves, right-fucking-now. There’s no breaks, no balance, no regrets, no second-guessing, no dancing around it:

Gut Roulette.

Epic-ness will not be measured in size, scale, money or documentation, it will be felt like an orgasm, it will leave you gasping for breath, needing some hydration, but hungry for more.

Pleasure, Ecstacy, Total awareness

We will become what we thought was beyond us, what we thought was the job for someone else, we will be confidently achieving our demands, we won’t just be heard, we will be running the show and letting everyone know where to go if they wish to volunteer.

We’re not building permanence, we’re not building comfort or satisfaction, we’re building change in ourselves through everyday moments of revolution that can take a shove, fire a gun straight and maneuver deep cuts like a razor.

If you’re scared there’s a good chance you’ve got your head on straight, if you think you know what I’m talking about, you wouldn’t be smiling, I’m talking about meeting a side of you that you don’t let out because it can do a lot of damage if it's not focused, it can make you want to kill yourself if you’re left alone with it for too long.

I’m talking about the confidence to achieve your own high expectations, the ultimate life you can never quite describe, like drugs without the taking anything into your body, it’s the nuclear core in you,

burning clean.

Make your plans, plot the points, because tomorrow could be the first day you forget how you used to live.

Face your fear, break a leg, whatever doesn’t kill you, was meant for the other guy that was right next to you. Every obstacle is meant for you for leverage, so bid your time well, calculated risks. Goodluck. Have fun.

(I'm attempting creating writing stream of conscious text based on whatever I'm feeling at the moment, which currently is that I'm not taking as many risks as I'd imagine I'd try in grad school... but I think I know what the feeling is, and I want it.) This text is dedicated to a fond memory of being around Duke Greene, Graham Hannah, Walt (shop tech) Janine Surma and David Blunk.

2 of 7 projects at the GSA, #1 and #2 in preparation for my first graduate school crit

2011-12-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

Here is verbatim what I am thinking of presenting at my first graduate school crit:

This semester I took advantage of the printmaking studios and have created two bodies of work that have always had a relationship.
1. Work created out of an interest of mine in another field (In this case bartering economies, behavorial economics, and Mauss' concept of "The Gift")
2. Work made intuitively out of the research that occurs when trying to make that, an accidental product that is just fun to make.

(There will be probably 32 total clips holding prints and some prints will have been obviously replaced with written explanations of what the prints were traded for, namely: shared food, people who providing a writing sample for this project and one for someone who helped me transport my work that got into the RCA Open show in Edinburgh) There will be 2 groupings of 16 because I get 16 prints from one sheet of this paper.

The set of prints you see here are half lithography (top two circles) and half silk-screening (bottom two circles) that have the words:
Zen, Flow, Acceptance, Low Expectations, Absurdity, Love, Sharing, Generosity, Investment, Trust
See where those words originated

I meant to have editions as I thought I would be printing multiples of different versions, but actually each print is unique due to the number of handwriting samples I collected from some of the other MFA students.

The title of the works are called "Defining Happiness" although sometimes it changes depending on if all 4 circles are present. I believe that the works are "complete" when they are handed to someone to thank them for a favor they have done for me, they were meant to be used in barters but they in actuality have served as Thank You manifested into something of a bank note (especially since the detail from a Lithography stone print is impossible to replicate)

This started as an experiment with the idea of the cultural value we give art works since I became much more interested in how art and artists have cultural capital when I bartered my works on acrylic and Plexiglas.

3 hours preparing stones
2 hours preparing a silkscreen to the stone
2 hours testing mark making on the stones
3 hours to get 16 good prints off of one stone (times two if the prints have both litho prints)
2 hours adding silkscreen to the
So far I have about approximately 64 prints which is from 16 prints that I can get off of one sheet, the goal perhaps is to have about 250 printed by the end of the year. Which should only take about 93 more hours of work. Or 23 days in the print studio for 4 hours at a time)

40 pounds for the fees to use the printmaking facilities

24 pounds in buying scrap paper and final paper
20 pounds in buying ink for silkscreening

137 hours will be put in total, where I pay myself 15.625 pounds per hour: 2,140
(I will have to pay another 40 pounds for next semester and probably pay 25 more pounds for the paper...)
Plus I might as well add in the cost of part of graduate school, I see this as one seventh of the work I'll be doing at school so that makes it possibly 1/7th of 22,560 (tuition for 2 years) which is
40+24+20+2,140+40+25+3,223+ pounds... 5,512 divided by 250 prints: Means that each is roughly worth 22.048 pounds.

If these were actual currency or even sold as art works in a commercial gallery, I would apply the formula of material costs + time + and take in account the number of editions, at market value they would each be worth about 22 pounds.

However at this point, I don't know how I would sell them, but they do look good in multiples as some can be harder to decipher than others...

My most recent transaction went like this: An old man waiting for a bus (that never came) offered me a bag of crisps, which I kindly took and talked to me about how he was becoming a minister and was currently 2 years or so from retiring from being a firefighter. After eating the chips I gave him a print to which he replied, "Which church do you go to, do you go to church?" after we talked about what the print was about he folded it and set it down next to him on the bench, I ended up walking home before I ever found out if he ever took it with him. December 4th. 2:30 am.

What happens when I give these away are unexpected on my part and sometimes I have to remember to fish them out so that someone can pick one that they like.

So I wouldn't say this was a failure, but it is a bit "preachy", a little too cold to be used in bartering since it lacks the individual quality that my paintings had, it has an audience of one which makes it much more difficult to represent it to a larger group of people for the work to have meaning, it's a bit too complex for what is there to be admired, and it can come off as a kind of branded corporate logo... all of which I understand how I have come to make this kind of work, but it is lacking a kind of beauty and mystery that the other prints have... that I'll show you next.

Printmaking project #2,

A close up of the silkscreen on top of the lithograph print

This is a black and white print, there is a photographic quality to this work that is interestingly similar to my other paintings. (Not to mention the same use of silk-screened imagery)

Usually in the process of making something that I'm dead set on, I figure out works intuitively since many things go wrong in the process of doing something exactly the way you want to see it. In the case of the lithography, I wanted the words to be clear, while achieving marks that can only be achieved with a litho stone, what I figured out was to silkscreen gum arabic onto the lithography stone to create a resist to make the letters and the circle. (Also I found out that you can't add litho ink to a silkscreen print because the water-based silkscreen ink sticks to the stone ripping the paper, but at least with my method of using a stencil, it embosses it a little, which is a nice touch.) So what to me was the next logical conclusion was to make the biggest silkscreened image on the biggest litho stone and see what fun could be had!

this is a print that has watercolor pencils and a silkscreen added to it to bring in color to the piece.

I just wanted to play around with the process that has probably never been done before because it's quite confusing, although it does allow for tonal ranges within lithography and graphic edges that are created through silk-screening... hybrid printing processes are very interesting to me, although they only serve an aesthetic-of-clever-design function right now.

This is the biggest stone that they have

Conversations with Rachel

2011-12-06T12:04:00.000-08:00

After talking with Rachel, it is in my best interest to pad people's expectations and to let them know that I am prone to a couple of conversational problems:

I rant and meander with my thoughts
I usually only want to have deep meaningful conversations one on one.
I love absurdity, if I can go there I will, it holds a special place in my heart
I like to push people to think critically with me but it's a fine line between being rude and upsetting and using conversation as a journey, being rude is the farthest thing from my mind.
I let loose whatever is on my mind, especially in that moment
I start thoughts out with broad generalizations that only at the end of a conversation reveals what I really meant to say
I have a short attention span and a terrible memory
If edited, I may actually come off as intelligent, otherwise, I am what I am, unedited.

I made an interesting metaphor today that I wanted to remember. It came after we made-up and became friendly again after antagonizing one another in the middle of each of us trying to get our point across.

When we realized what both of us were doing, I laughed that it was like I was building a bridge out of mines. I wanted her to get to the other side with me "come on, just go with me on this!" but she was well aware that most likely while trying to cross that bridge, it will blow up in our faces. (You know that feeling where you want someone to ignore the fact that you both know that in the moment you're not making rational sense, but that there's a gem at the end of that train of thoughts that requires going through the whole bit?) In our case specifically I wanted her to ignore the gross over-generalization that was part of my premise of an argument.

It was great.

I described to her that she does the mine-bridge when talking about people we know as examples of human behavior, and I do it whenever I'm talking about the society I'd want to live within.

oh well, back to being the best and worst person for each other to talk to. Tauruses are stubborn.

It's official, I've hit the slowest point in grad school...

2011-12-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

Just finished level 80 on A-breaker on the iPhone... let me tell you, I've just hit a new low.

In this time I just dreamed up 20-odd ways that my wishful thinking reveals extreme procrastination. (Procrastination if you didn't know is just one of many symptoms of a perfectionist dilemma)

Imagine... Every Tuesday and Thursday evening at 8 pm there is a 1-4 hour lecture/workshop, here is my dream programming:

"A holistic interactive guide to learning complex art theory from the 1960s to today"
"The artists' guide to navigating Glasgow through collaborating with an expert in performance/contemporary dance/book making/clowning/composing contemporary music/directing film/computer programming
"The beginner's guide to successful and challenging interactive art, it's boundaries and its future"
"Silence, storytelling and, historical reenactments: useful methods to start and stop time within a narrative structure"
"Genuine exchange and subversion: a critical look at the economy today and why your consumption not production makes all the difference"
"Radical Art Education today, everyday"
"Given a choice... choosing the calculated risk and how to make your dreams bigger, bolder"
"Minorities, women and the dirt poor: the best artwork/artists you probably missed because you were paying attention to the gigantic gold swinging dicks."
"50 disruptive artists: artists whose sole mission is to destroy the art world as we know it."
"Things that stopped being subversive 20 years ago: How art has expanded, while the definition has stayed the same, trends that became irrelevant through commercialization and the alternatives we still have"
"Becoming a butterfly: how to digest your entire body from a pupae state and materialize into something that can take flight"
"Artists connecting Artists: a comprehensive program pairing artists with MBA candidates, technicians, assistants and interns who share common interests and goals"
"Computer Programming Today: some useful websites that give you the basics of interactive designs and a look at some of the insane new media projects that took advantage of them, with a follow up workshop to work with designers, programmers and coders that might be able to help you make a small piece."
"I'm just glad it worked: astounding jigs, tricks and ingenious designs that famous artists have used to organize their work-spaces and create work efficiently albeit unorthodox"
"The Future is Now! Conspiracy theorists, artists and science fiction writers that predicted activities, leisure and dilemmas that came true"
"Delicious Glasgow: 20 secret foodie treasure troves that offer such things as: 24 hour salad bar, grocery stores that sell entire dinner ingredients that fit in a single bag and feed 6 people, and all you can eat organic soups"
"Do whatever you want, we need it bad: 100 cities around the world that have the best offers to attract artists, you might be surprised where the money is"
"You can do that? A case study of 17 of the most varied art practices and art jobs and the ways that they are all equally sustainable, unpacking the baggage of 'the successful artist'"
"Now that's impressive: curating through the eyes of technicians, acts of craftsmanship in historical art and artifacts that evaded scientists that only became understood in the last 10 years that were discovered by, you guessed it, craftsmen"
"Where's the money go? An interesting infographic on the breakdown of every dollar from every student in the Glasgow School of Art and the new postgraduate programs, construction and calculated use of each workshop on campus"
"Here for now: A sneak peek into art collectors who collect the ephemeral and conceptual art and how they manage their collections"
"Frames: a simple breakdown of the philosophy behind the concept of frames and the history of the frame as used in visual art and a guide to 10 under-appreciated ways to frame work that look better than the traditional method."
"Anthropology for artists: 10 of the most useful tools that are used in the field that can help you see the world through power relations"
"Wrapped up: Contemporary artists who utilize the storing, packaging and shipping aspects of artwork and the most elaborate new practices in shipping, protecting and releasing packaging as well as a hands on workshop on the best packing practices on the cheap.
"Layers, filters and the invisible: nine experts from different scientific fields lecturing on what is visible, how they make things visible, and why they need artists"
"You don't need that, in fact, you don't need anything: A history of artists creating profound work from barest of materials and the spiritual practices that have inspired them"
"Existentialism Lite: How popular movies represent this way of living and the ones that get it (that didn't meant to) and the ones that don't pass the test."
"Give Up: The psychology behind how everything good happens when you least expect it, comprehensive steps to how to let go and even enjoy failure."
"Tenure adjuncts and disfunction: a look at how the higher education system is a bubble ready to burst and the new schools that have formed in resistance since Black Mountain College"

Ugh... I just keep coming up with these... and it doesn't really help any...

A microcosm of my working method.

2011-11-27T05:25:00.000-08:00

I just did 11 quick exercises in composition that really highlight my current artistic practice:

The premise:

Find a large scan of someone's sketchbook that is posted on the internet.
Open in in Photoshop CS5
Use the selection tool in areas you want to make new shapes, where you want to fill negative space
Hit Delete and choose Content-Aware (this is a tool meant for filling in a realistic image)
Continue as much as you like, you can even hit delete again if you don't like the composition that it created as many times as you like, it will generally go back to 3 main compositions (I don't know the algorithm used, but it's very fascinating)

Before Content Aware

It's easy enough to do (not many steps) that I reveal how it's done with an interest in having others try it themselves, like a set of instructions
The ability to create interesting products still remains on the part of the creative individual to make it have interest or starting from interesting material.
Misuse a tool from its original intent to reveal something about how the tool works
It was made when I thought a little about what I have access to and what I can do right now
Something is automated
Something is generated that is organic while at the same time appears calculated
It fulfills a subconscious desire for instant gratification
It involves stealing/referencing/remixing of existing work
I can do it in a series to discover the range of possibilities and therefore create a new language and rules
The format of its presentation matches that of its origin (taken from online portfolios in a set)
It subverts an aspect of how most people think about art (in this case mark making with other people's marks to subvert the idea of the artist's hand while still achieving this quality)
It's inspired by information I just encountered or just read (Everything is a Remix)
I created as many as I could until I felt bored or that I wouldn't find anything new before things looked too much like each other
The whole exercise took me around 2.5 hours
I come up with ideas and then only act on them when something 'hits me', in this case, I stumbled upon sketches and thought that work could be better, and that there's something that I didn't like about other sketches that I found that seemed to highlight style or cultural cliches in graphic design over any conceptual concerns (I am aware that it's a sketchbook, but the fact that sketchbooks are put on display on the same level of finished works makes me want to critique them in a similar way)
I can use them to consider different new works that might not involve aspects of the exercise that I didn't like.

1 of 7 projects at the GSA. #3: A rug for the "office" (the gallery in Jay's studio)

2011-11-25T19:36:00.000-08:00

Large mockup spiralgraph from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.

I am charting territory that gets murkier the closer one gets to the center

2011-10-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

I felt compelled to make this for a presentation about why I make art and the theoretical concerns I have about my art practice. This diagram was up for only about 5 seconds while I moved towards explaining the context of my work in terms of other artists, but now I think I want to make a four color litho of this, where the words are white (clear) and each circle is a different layered color... anyways we just learned today how litho works so I'm excited and this is the only diagram I feel like is worth printing over and over right now.

Top 10 unexpected places to see impressive art in Detroit

2011-07-23T23:38:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm leaving I'm even getting nostalgic about the tours I would give people to see what kind of interesting art happens in Detroit. This definitely takes far more than a day to see all of this (and to get a proper tour) but here's my list!

1. Belle Isle (if it's winter, show them the ice fountain/sculpture)
2. Heidelburg Projects
3. Hamtramck Disneyland
4. Dabl's African Bead Museum
5.The houses on Klinger facilitated by Mitch and Gina
6. The Poloroid Liquor Store
7. Hot Wheel City
8. The People Mover Stations
9. The Dequindre Cut
10. Motorcity Brewing Works if it's a Wednesday night

11. My Brixels

Notice most of the links go to the Knight Arts Blog? Matthew Piper's been doing a kickass job.

I'll try to post my favorite things about Detroit once every other day before I take off...

Environmental Art...

2011-05-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to have dreams about gradschool!

I just had a dream where for the first show, I filled two entire rooms with mushrooms that grew faster if they get cut down, (almost like whack a mole?) they were as big as columns, but light.
And so for my first piece, I created a bunch of what looked like rooms whose walls were Doric columns with inflatable furniture inside (all made of this secret type of mushroom) and while people sat inside of them, I kept throwing cds to cut the mushrooms, which would make the structures topple but also instantly grow underneath them. It looked really cool.

I turned into an asshole at some point though, when I started yelling at people for tearing the things down by hand without using the cds and screaming at my dad to keep filming even though he was trying to talk with some people...

So that part sucks, but now I have to figure out what made that so interesting and to try to make it myself!

Wow... again.

2011-04-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

Finally Art X is over and now I'm back being busy making new paintings, working on commissions and getting back on thedetroiter.com horse, making sure I catch seeing Bruce High Quality Foundation and band practice... all of this kind of being 'busy' seems like nothing, it's so easy compared to Art X Detroit...

I had a really good day! Had great interactions one after another... Josh-Zeb-Mike-Adrian-Crystal-Daniel-Simone-Dooligan-Chazz-Lou-Sean-Cassidy-Dorota-Dan Tartanian-Rachel-Corrie-myself

It all began with me sitting in my room staring at my iPhone realizing that I needed to get out of the house, especially since I wanted to write my thank you letters to everyone who helped me with my Brixel project. (I imagined a fantasy studio where other people were busy working on their own projects and some of them would bring up their heads to see who just entered as Caribou softly plays in the background... Large open tables are still available although many are covered in projects that have to be finished before the end of the week. There are many tools, rulers, various neatly organized pencils, watercolor pencils, pens, replenished as they become used or tucked away in someone's pocket. To the side of this warm area lit entirely by the sun coming in is a closed off area that is practically sound proof, where people can relax and talk with each other, there are no TVs, no microwaves that need be cleaned, but there are various snack foods, kale chips, hummus as well as veggies that are in a deep round orange plastic container, three pizza slices are also left, not to mention the unhealthy snacks there too... ) I have to get out of this house and FIND THAT PLACE!

I immediately called my Vitamin Water boss Josh and arranged to deliver the trophies I had made for the Music Awards, we talked about meeting in an hour, easy enough, but somehow I was still 10 minutes late... I just hope I'm not going to be like Aero Saarinen who was practically late for everything and hated being early.

Once out of the house I had intention to get into my ritual which involves sending off Netflix in the hopes of getting it back to copy it onto my computer to watch it in the future. It is one of the few routines I actually have in my life.

From there it was a whirlwind of chance encounters in this small town and enjoying every second of not getting any 'art' done but definitely just being in a 'Detroit' moment.

Chatted it up with Zeb about how much can 500 dollars pay for in terms of a sign for 'HATCH'

while he downloaded and we played Oregon Trail on his iPhone, turns out he's an expert at what things will cost... everything. 500 dollars is feasibly a good amount for cutting out 2D letters out of marine grade plywood painting them and then sealing them, and affixing them to the building. Ideas of making a full on sculpture out of the word 'HATCH' or a birdfeeder or making them a neon sign... not so much...

This makes me very aware of how much of a novice I am as an artist in this aspect, I'm losing about 300 dollars from taking on the Art X Detroit project from my original 1,500 dollar budget, no one got paid enough... although it's not like everyone wanted to be paid a bundle, I definitely didn't get paid... I should've actually asked for 5,000 in order to accomplish what I actually am about to 'finish', 3 large murals in Midtown. Me and my friends have put in so many hours that I don't want to calculate because it will just remind me how much money I didn't budget for... But then again I think about how crazy my expectations were.

from one brixel to another from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.

Imagine yourself and a slew of your friends and you're all asked to make the best work of art you can with a loose budget of perhaps 2,000 dollars and it will be put on display in a museum, you have 1 month to make it happen, 4 days to install and 3 months to plan it. If I was to ever do this again, I think I'd shit a brick... it's so stressful, it doesn't seem like nearly enough money and on top of that imagine not having enough time to see all of your friends work when everything actually opens. And yet it doesn't really seem like it's all over...

[To remind myself of what I would've done differently I'm going to take a moment to rewrite my own budget.

Pay myself $25 an hour when I'm 'working' and $10 dollars an hour when I'm just figuring shit out. Keep track of my hours somehow, perhaps tally it up every two days.
Pay for an assistant to keep me on track where I need to be at any given time and what needs to happen and when.
Pay for a coordinator to keep people on track for where they need to be and make sure everything's running as smooth as possible.
Pay for people to hang out in my 'Research Studio' and show people how to get involved.
Pay 2 professional painters to give advice about the best locations, color schemes, how to apply the paint the best, how to get supplies at the best price and lastly pay them to help organize the paint job

And if whoever worked for free/very little would have gotten every penny they deserved.

That would be on top of what I actually did pay for, but in the end this whole project reminds me of what everyone was willing to give me... for no cost, just for wanting to help me with my project. It was like I was given $2,800 worth of favors from friends... I don't know what the hell I would've done!]

Leaving MOCAD to meetup with Mike at the Dagleish Garage I stepped inside immediately setting off the alarm... That building is a perfect location for Brixels, but also once we went up the stairs, bringing scaffolding to hang off of the roof there seemed practically impossible. I realized... the only way I can get it done is if I actually have a cherry picker... poop.

I happened to run into Adrian Hatfield bringing his class to MOCAD. It was a great happenstance because I got to bring in the largest group yet at a given time to see my Research Studio.

The best hairstylist in Detroit is in that class, Crystal! So I talked with Crystal and Daniel about making them crepes and having them see the cat, but they have to bring what the crepes will be filled with! Daniel's getting new glasses and hopefully a class to teach in the Fall... funny to me how changing your hairstyle, or glasses will change how people perceive you, how you navigate the world, it can change your life!

Walked with them over to Re:View Contemporary where shortly after Adrian's class and talked with Simone for maybe an hour about the realness of forming a relationship between an artist and a gallery that represents the artist, but also the realities of what Detroit means for us as artists and the dreams we have for what it means to be an artist and how we really need to alter how people think about Detroit as a place to get art on the cheap. She said I made her realize that she's a cross between Barack Obama and Leo Castelli, but that's part of a larger conversation that you're not privy to, you just get the amusing one-liner. From there we went on to tackle the fresh concept of putting artwork in the hallways of Willy's Overland lofts and went to see the amazing views of Detroit from the 5th floor's unfinished development...

Willis overland lofts before dividing it into manageable spaces from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.

We share a very strong philosophy: Have a goal but be flexible. It's taking us so far and now that it's worked so much for us we are just taking bigger risks and digging deeper into what we truly believe and who we are and trusting our instincts.

Walking out of there I remembered that at a certain time loaves of bread are half off at Avalon Bakery and who's at the front of the line about to order and pay but Mike Dooligan getting his usual, a loaf of bread and a peanut butter brownie. He kindly walks and talks with me even though his bike is parked just outside of the place. We talk about how great Dan and Duke are as a couple and it make me so happy to imagine and pretend that it's has something to do with Miriah Carey.

We break off once I got back to MOCAD and I remembered that there's people I still need to talk to... open ends that need tying.
So I call up Chazz Miller and he happens to be ready to meet up with me and grab a poster from me that I used in my 'Research Studio' and I realize how badly I want to make him a Prezi presentation to talk about what he does because I want to imagine him doing what he does well, community art, and not having to worry about having to keep pitching the same thing over and over without engaging people visually.

He takes off just as Lou Casinelli and Sean Hages and their friend Sid and I can just feel the excitement that they all have hanging out with each other... And then it forced me to figure out when Lou, Vanessa, Andy and maybe even Piper can meetup and talk again about Access Arts... It's so odd that I saw the e-mail and worried that I wouldn't get in contact with him soon enough... I had that awful feeling that I was going to forget completely and here he was with that half-cocked grin and his sleepy eyes that match his voice so well. Some people seem to have wider mouths when they're mouths are closed, Frank Pahl is like that, actually sometimes he reminds me of a muppet.

So at this point I've realized that I've spent way too much time in that parking lot now so I finally figure I should start going somewhere... so since I'm on a really good 'not doing what I planned on doing' kick, I remember picking up the 944 magazine and seeing my paintings in the background so I decide to drive over to Mike and Kristin's place to pickup paintings from that Detroit Young Professionals party, since I'm in the area, and gas is high, I might as well try to see if they're around.

As I arrive right at their place I get a phone call, from an unknown number, some girl who is pretty surprised that I actually answered the phone and she quickly hangs up. She calls me back, to let me know that she's nervous because she's never talked to a 'real artist' before and she wants to help do the Brixels project! Part way through the conversation Dorota walks by! We chat about doing a performance on the people mover on Sunday and getting artwork ready to be in Team Detroit's building before I leave for Glasgow.

Wow another person I didn't think I'd run into, but it's a good thing that I did, clarifying things, moving forward... That was easy.

On my route back home I thought about stopping by Halima's place to drop off a check to her but she didn't answer her phone but I did notice that Showtime had its doors open! I stopped in and it was a quick hello and a 'so whaddya think of the brixels!' turned into a long talk about what it means to be present, what are the perspectives that we have way beyond just being in Detroit, what does it take to survive in a place that has seen the rugged days into today with the eventual push out of crime out of Midtown into areas just outside of Midtown... At some point we were talking about how he truly embraces not buying anything foreign, especially by not shopping at any generic chain stores, and then the importance of meditating, how to tell people's motivations and the funny stories that happen when you keep your wits about you.

I think I got there around maybe 6 and I left around 8:30? Time flies.

Back at home I find out that Rach has somehow realized her calling, she too had a great day, she feels on top of things, she's feeling she has a grasp on what she 'does' as an artist, she's interested in storytelling and depicting stories about the fear that we go through and the fears that are unique to particular people. It makes so much sense. It then also reminds me of Leon Johnston's artist talk about the conglomeration of objects and works in the N'namdi gallery as dealing with 'Masculine Fear'... I imagine his voice saying the word 'pleasure' and think about how wonderful it is to see all these interconnections playing out in a single day from one person to another to another, remembering what its like not to sit in front of a computer running to keep up with people but actually getting in contact with them... and even with new people... Adrian's students, friends of friends, unknown callers, what busy day I've had... not doing anything.

I have this bucket list of things to do now that I know I'm going to the Glasgow School of Art, everything seems like I'm just a tourist in Detroit, I'm understanding how much I'm going to miss everything spontaneous about this city, this house that I needed to leave so badly, the constant contact with the friends that like being around... It reminds me of the routines I begin tomorrow... walks once a week with Rachel as soon as we wake up, making a Tumblr with Corrie to keep in touch, Rachel reminding me to Skype Andy T... Checking on my studio and finding out how insane everything is changing at the Russell Industrial Center...

Testing Prezi.com with as much as I could come up with in 5 hours...

2011-01-28T08:37:00.001-08:00

Most of everything I know about Art and Education and Art Education on Prezi

I'm writing this post on a plane!

2010-12-25T18:13:00.001-08:00

I'm very happy to find out that there's free wi-fi on this plane for the holidays! (although typing on my iPhone i'm sure will produce god-awful typos due to autocorrect) I am coming back home from visiting Austin and San Antonio. Honestly SanAnty was my favorite because we got to walk to every single art institution alongside the river! There is still construction going on, but regardless how commercial the downtown area may seem, I think a lot of cities are going to be jealous of the ease tourists and locals have making their way around. One can walk or water taxi from their school of arts and crafts to the museum and then a longer but worthwhile trek to the repurposed warehouse art areas (awesome folk art gallery in that Blue Star area) and Artpace San Antonio (They brought out two large volumes of articles on Maurizio Cattelan just because I asked!).

Leigh Anne Lester's show at San Antonio School of Art and Crafts

Also the 'Natural Bridge Cavern' was AMAZING.

Yelp told us that this trailer has the best Asian food in Austin, you can't read it, but it says Me So Hungry.

Austin was very comfortable as well, less cowboy hats, more beards and a lot of delicious food from trailers, we ended our trip with kickass barbecue that was more than we could finish. My highlight of the trip however was a tarot card reader in the 'Weird Museum' that was more of a historical storyteller than a hack and I enjoyed hearing about the stories behind the illustrations, the story of the swords cards involves a lot of manipulation, someone could easily make a movie about the story that runs from the two of swords up to the king.

See? A Scott Hocking piece just sitting there.

As usual I had my eye out for any michiganders and found quite a few traces! I saw a photo by Scott Hocking on the ground and leaning against the wall at Champion gallery and found a postcar for D Berman gallery that had some of Beili Liu 's work. They were kind enough to show me a wonderful layered burned paper piece and give me some postcards as well!


Beili Liu's work on vellum

Shawn Smith's work also at D Berman Gallery, all of his work is pixelated, this one is a great rendition of human lungs.

He knew how to get sh*t done, even how to bring the country back together as his approval rating rose after pulling out of Vietnam and not seeking another term. Stupid Vietnam war, can you imagine what he could've got done if that hadn't overshadowed everything else?

We didn't have enough time to see as many art museums in Austin but the Lyndon B Johnson museum was possibly one of the most inspiring places I've ever been that was political in nature, it really capped off a conversations me and my dad were having about cooperation in politics (my stance is to unite far left liberals with tea partiers by having both sides realize that the common enemy is crony capitalism, which should be taken care of as a priority. Kuchinich vs. Ron paul 2012!) while he believes Obama just needs to grow a pair of moderate balls and ditch Pelosi and Reid... But some things just baffle me about what we complain about politically. Although liberals are all about climate change and eating organic foods it's an ultraconservative that created Whole Foods. While inside the flagship it seemed like a total vegan liberal heaven... I wanted to eat everything! Also the city was celebrating that building the nice trails next to the river was built on time and under budget... Go figure, reminds me of republicans angry about 'socialist policies' like regulations on clean air and Medicare and giving to the poor (welfare) when they actually donate a ton to charities (currently more than democrats) and are sometimes in dire need of or making good use of those very policies. It just makes me feel like sometimes the things we love might very well be run by or are a product of those we think we're supposed to hate. So I for one am more open to looking for the good in republicans, Christians, liberals and others as long as we don't just rely on 'good intentions'. Be critical of everything, but be open to any possibilities of hope because I'm sure they can come from ANYWHERE.

Kind people in Texas, or is it just simply southern hospitality?

I have my moments... (warning do not open if you visualize everything you read.)

2010-12-06T22:27:00.000-08:00

So I just came up with my 4th grossest idea for a work of art...

1. To learn mold-making, create intimate, detailed and realistic molds of animals from roadkill.

(I really was plotting how to do this out of porcelain... it still may happen someday.)

2. Find really disguisting imagery applied decoratively to a novelty plate and have food served only to reveal the imagery underneath when the food is finished or scraped away.

(I came up with this idea a long long time ago and then told someone else to do it instead.)

3. While in a sculpture class thinking about reality television and the internet, I was going to make a Plexiglas box with fake furniture in it and some walls with a couple of web cams setup in the corner so that it looks like cockroaches and spiders are in 'The Sims'.

(The big concept was that 'nature' was far more interesting to watch, but I think that cockroaches are possibly one of those things that makes me nauseous just thinking about them)

4. For some reason I became curious what the hell '4Chan' was, only to find that it's an easy way to find porn and other ways to waste time, so I just imagined drawing myself or hiring someone to illustrate a hentai comic where their entire dialogue is either "The Investment Answer" by Daniel Goldie and Gordon Murray so that banal useful information could be disseminated to a wider audience!

(Our band the He-Bops keeps my mind thinking about mash-ups all the time)

Also I realize that putting these art ideas out there make it so that someone may steal these ideas and make the piece... but I really want someone to make it, so I don't have to. Anyone else have any really revolting ideas for an art project they need to get off their chest? Set it free!

Getting into gear for teaching!

2010-12-01T21:14:00.000-08:00

Well, I can trust that I'll be inconsistent with this blog since I've got 3 big things I'm juggling right now, working on theDetroiter.com website, preparing and thus far psyching myself out for teaching and keeping my head around where my art is... which is... all over the place. And I had to even cut out 2 shows I planned to do... I feel a little stupid. Stupid because I'm having so much trouble with doing Less with More, working on quality instead of quantity...

The one thing going well right now though, is my teaching! I had my first class (albeit co-substitute teaching) but it went AMAZING! I was trying to not to overthink everything so I kept repeating to myself, all good college classes involve only two elements: Structure and Inspiration.

I don't know how exactly I came up with that simplification, I'm sure it involves a whole lot of ability to understand 'flow', how long things take, knowing how to test their comprehension, being honest with the them, balancing their needs and expectations, balancing what is a challenge for each of them, when students are attentive, when they're waning, when to take a risk and do something completely different, when to just relax!

So I told myself to relax and take many many deep breaths and make sure the apple cider is hot.

This is a glimpse from Dylan Spaysky's workshop which was 1/3 of the whole class, but badass nevertheless:

Dylan Spaysky Workshop from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.
During Time and Digital Media Class

So that part wasn't what I planned, I just took everyone on a little adventure and tried to keep a structure and flow to everything and I'm just happy that it seemed all so natural to get along with Mike Smith's students.

It really makes me feel like I'm getting what I've always wanted: mutual research for bigger dreams and quality work.

Ok, coming up next is my performance art workshop where I channel the inspirational Guillermo Gomez-Pena workshop I had at Michigan State! I also prepared for this class and the upcoming one by having a riveting conversation with Aku Kadogo from Wayne State!

Experimenting with slow, fast slow.

2010-11-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

Trying to read more and finish a lot of quick color exercises... so far so good.

Experimenting with the limited capabilities of iMovie from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.
Thinking about viruses, time, recording, gradients, interactivity, self-organization, rhythm, discordance, flow, splitting atoms, speed and gestalt theory.

But on the whole, just wasting time.

Happy Halloween

2010-10-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

I made this new piece for Rachel. I got bored and began rehashing an old way of working since we went to a dollar store and found colored hot glue sticks! This is was basically routed first... then some other stuff... and then I was done because it was finished and it looked cool.

btw, there's a sweet interview with me here

(oops I think it's upside down or sideways or something... or maybe it's fine...)

this is my attempt at trying to make this color blue that Rachel really likes, I almost got it.

also, I'm still in the midst of coming up with some interesting Fine Arts class proposals at CCS, I have a really fun formula I'm going with right now.

Ok, so let's say you want to make a really interesting holistic art class. In such a class let's pretend that there are always 2 teachers, a facilitator and an expert technician.

Make three bubbles and connect them to each other (trifecta!). Now fill them in accordingly: one contains an everyday activity that if practiced would enhance ones quality of life, another bubble is a particular art discipline and can be as specific as you'd want to get, and another bubble connects both that concerns a specific research topic to get content for art. This third bubble is about ideas not derived from experienced reality necessary, whether it's history, or anthropology or a specific topic of interest. Picking which ones goes with which becomes the art of finding what activities would balance each other out so that it makes a totalizing set of skills. I even tried to start with the balanced skill set instead of a bubbles and it got me into some interesting ideas. (Please keep in mind, this is actually an activity I've been going through to get a place to start, these are not actual classes that I may be teaching... however you'd bet I'd love to be in that theoretical class)

What if in a single class you were learning and tying in together ideas mashed up of...

Printmaking, Chess and Grant Writing

Methods in teaching special education, Urawaza and Painting

Singing, Cultural Anthropology and Architecture

Yoga, Strategies for taking notes and making Frescoes

Textile Design, How to make handmade soap and other common cleaners, and Science Fiction novels

Industrial Design, Music improvisation and Biology

Death rituals, Learning how to give an elevator pitch, and Performance Art

Silk screening, History of Sexuality and Learning how to write clearly

History of Chaos & Randomness, Sculpture and Baking Bread

Woodworking, Occupational Therapy and Social Theory

Entrepreneurship, Photography and Physical Anthropology

Nano-Technology, Glass Blowing and Fixing Your Car

Art Education, Wine Tasting and Tufte's efficient diagrams

How to teach kids games, drawing from life and tending a farm

Ethnomusicology, Metalwork / Jewelry and Ethics & Citizenship

Curator, Raising animals, and the history of industrial agriculture

It's hard to describe how I'd envision the class running... perhaps one person was knowledgeable enough to do two of the concepts and the other person being able to handle the third, or it maybe it would take three teachers. I'm not even sure exactly how they would all work together in a single class, but just imagine what your life would be like if you could've taken a course like that!

I need to take a better picture, sorry.

Thinking about Teaching...

2010-10-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

I am awaiting it to become final, but I was offered to teach a course at the College for Creative Studies!
Concepts and Images.

I was first invited by Chido Johnson to give a lecture to his Seniors, which I was very happy to do, since I could talk about anything I wanted. I thought about how I wanted to recruit for thedetroiter.com and also help them think about how they're going to make the transition from art school to real life. Since I've never gone to an art school, I decided to just talk about what interested me in the moment, so I talked about my 'To-Do List' and my 'Stuck' list and about placebos and went on to explain how CCS is like one big placebo. One in which they payout lots of money and the more money the more it helps them believe that they are getting the best education in the world and if they truly believe it, they'll be something like 60% more likely to be successful in whatever they decide to do!

Well, I am REALLY glad no one told me that the new fine arts chair, Leon, was the one having some fun back and forth conversations with me the whole time. I politely asked that if I came back to talk about my work that perhaps I could get a free lunch out of it because I'm a sucker for free food and they said they'd be definitely interested in seeing if they might possibly be able to wrangle some money to possibly pay me an honorarium to talk next time as soon as I got back from Glasgow!

... insert Glasgow trip here ...

When I returned I got a mysterious e-mail from Gilda Snowden that there was rumor of having me teach a class and to talk to Leon as soon as I get back, couple minutes later an e-mail showed up from Leon about if I had 30 minutes to talk about something...

So now I'm thinking about what I've always wanted to teach, which is surreal, because I've always wanted to teach on a College level and here it is, possibly even competing with my idea that I just needed to go to graduate school! So my mind is running with possibilities! On a core level I will present what I think I could offer and what CCS students need more of with these ideas:

In order to teach inter-disciplinary practices one must engage with people outside of CCS, outside of Art. Or at the very least mix the rigid disciplines so that there is the possibility of hybrid works! Then again, this just may be the aesthetic that I'm personally drawn to...
Everything is simple, nothing is easy. Committing to a lifelong art practice requires finding those things that you can easily do everyday, that's the definition of sustainability. However it does require practice, and students will need to be able to identify how they can push themselves into making what is difficult but important to them, into something that's easy.
Students need to OWN their curriculum. An example: I foresee students being allowed to scour Detroit for events, happenings and locations, and then they get to make the rest of the class (professor included) an assignment, Miranda July style. This is inspired by a teacher I liked a lot, Robert Watson, now the principal at Northville High School, who had us write our own tests, and although they could be really challenging, it was such a great spin on the idea of what it means to learn in depth when you are the one making the test.

I have all these other ideas to prepare myself, like giving myself fake assignments to make captivating and interactive PowerPoints that deal with

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and finding meaning (where am I coming from, where am I going, why?)
Bell Hooks "teaching community" and racism vs. privilege
Flow - happiness - inspiration - creativity - ideas

Everyday I want to be able to:

Create a comfortable studio environment where they feel like they bring something to the table.
Engage at least 5 students 1 on 1 for about 20 - 30 minutes
Shake up all of their thinking and preconceived ideas so that they find themselves in a heightened state of awareness. Facilitating what it means to think critically, to look at things in a critical way...
Exchange images, ideas, artists to check out and events
End on a positive proactive note!

"Teaching is all about managing expectations" - Andy T

Cartoon slipped in from the web comic: xkcd

Wait! Did I ever tell you about the time I got stuck in customs for 5 hours?

2010-10-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

So, me being lost in Balloch for 5 hours has a partner story back in the states!

Two days after coming back to the U.S... I got stuck for 5 hours trying to transport artwork to a three person show in Sarnia.

Day 1: Unpack, edit my Fulbright's Project statement and personal statement then send my finished Fulbright packet to Michigan State. Also finish my application to the Glasgow School of Art (technically I hadn't finished either of them, but I pretended the whole time that I had finished it!)
Day 2: Bring artwork up to Sarnia for the show at Susan Kristjansson Gallery, easy show, mostly older work. Refinish some of the frames and re-frame some of the works... And when I get a chance finish getting letters of rec.
Day 3: Finish a new work of art for District VII, and meet up with my 'intern' to go over what to do next.
Day 4: Work for Vitamin Water, possibly put up my first thedetroiter.com pages in a while,

So perhaps I was trying to do to much? That's when this happened:

(Doo doo doo, got my passport on me still... hopefully traffic into Canada's not too bad)
What brings you to Canada today?
I'm going to a gallery!
Is that your artwork?
Yup! I'm an artist.
Will you be selling it?
Well, not me, but the gallery most likely will, I mean hopefully.
Ok, do you know how much all the artwork is worth?
Um... I don't know, I'm bringing a friend's artwork too, I think like $10,000?

At this point the border guard's eyebrow raised, which begins the sinking feeling in my gut that didn't hit me before even though one of my paintings was so big that it was resting on my headrest, partially careening over my head as I drove, probably it's own kind of safety hazard.

Wait, do I have to claim this or something?
You're doing it right now. (hands me a yellow piece of paper with notes scribbled on it that I have artwork worth 10,000 dollars.) Go over and park over there, they'll tell you whatever you need to complete the claim.

Um... well, ok.

First I parked then was told to talk with customs, they told me some crazy forms involved getting a 'bond' or something that even they doubted I would be able to get since I was an individual shipping artwork, blah blah blah, you're not supposed to be here, talk to S. M. Hewitt, they could help you.

This would allow me to leave my artwork unattended and for sale. At this point it was too late to say otherwise... Like, oh never mind it's not for sale... and oh... no I don't plan to leave the artwork in Canada.

I don't even really know what happened, but this one lady who perhaps oversaw S.M. Hewitt, figured that I didn't know how to help myself so began getting out some gigantic binders to look some things up. During this time she sighed a lot and gave me these long looks that seemed to say, you have no idea what your getting yourself into kid. She summoned me into her office after I had to call and get Ian's inventory for all of his artwork to come through the mail, more awkward waiting...
It came through and she begins clicking and typing blazing fast. She was clicking the calculator, downloading forms, typing things in, re-checking numbers, getting things photocopied together, then stapling packets together and said to me very simply:

This form is what you will give to the U.S. side.
I'll show you where commercial goods come in, you give this to them on the Canadian side they'll know what to do with it. Also I'm kicking you back to the States to get this form filled out because otherwise they'll hassle you on the way back to the States for having a bunch of artwork in your car that you didn't have before. You're going to need to get this stamped before you get back into Canada. Goodluck.

The commercial customs officer all decked out in a bullet-proof vest, replaced my yellow tag with one that said I was being told to go back to the States due to incomplete paperwork and thus began an hour of waiting in line to get back to the States and back in. He let me know that he'll probably be gone by the time I get back and that I should drive in the truck lane (which is much slower) so that I'm right by their office to get everything cleared. Here's the kicker, when I come back, I'll be expected to pay 10% of the total value of the artwork as a deposit. The artwork at this point has been figured to be valued at 14,200.

Just so you know, it makes no sense, you have to TELL the lady that you give your 3 dollars to or whatever that you're trying to get to Customs. She'll then tell you to park your car right off to the side (there's only like 4 spots so that seems a little strange.) then you actually have to cross the lanes that the trucks use to get to the building. She radioed the people over in that building that I was on my way over and then told me to make eye contact with the truck drivers first to make sure it's safe to cross. It's 5 lanes wide, no kidding. I nervously mumble to the officers standing around that I have to get something stamped and they let me get in line. The line takes about an hour to get through with just 4 people in line, but I'm reading little bits of information, like how on an average, the homeland security intercepts 40,000 or so pounds of drugs. I'm watching a couple argue with an accent about how they didn't realize that the girlfriend had overstayed and wasn't allowed to come into Canada let alone be in the US. I just sat patiently in the room once it was my turn to sit and wait. It is something I feel like I've been training myself for years, accepting fate rather than getting upset. Another officer has my keys at this point probably counting the paintings and possibly trying to assess my ability to price my artwork? He gives it a little stamp and I'm back on my way on the bridge only 3 1/2 hours later! I get into Canada, I've paid to go over the bridge 3 times now, I get a new yellow note (they guy even recognizes me and my car and says, weren't you just here?) and I get stopped by a guard because I got out of my car too quickly and after she scanned the many documents over that I had been given over these few hours, I was allowed to go in and... wait with the other truckers. Handed off my paperwork when someone realized that I was standing in their lobby, I waited until my name was called and the same guy who said he was going to have left already, was still there.

I thought you were going to get to leave?
Well, I went to go do something else and so now I'm back.
Ok.
Let's talk a walk, where's your car?
This one over here on this side.
Is this going to that new art center?
No, this is actually a new gallery in Sarnia, the one you're talking about is still being built.
Oh ok, well, I like art and you probably don't have thousands of dollars on you, so let's just say that it's great that you're bringing artwork into Canada and I don't want to cramp your style, and there's all these new tax laws that are changing so, you did all the right paperwork, but we'd have to do even more, so let's just say that it's not in either of our interests to go this route, ok?

And at that, he wished me good luck on selling a lot of art, took my little yellow piece of paper from me, and waved me goodbye.

Here's where my life lessons are shared with you! Read carefully and let's compile tips for easily moving art across borders without hassle!

Don't bring artwork that looks like artwork or like weapons or like... anything valuable.
If your artwork DOES look valuable or if there's too much to hide like in my case, print out a Certificate of Registration from the Department of Homeland Security, CBP Form 4455. Attach a sheet of paper that has all of the information about the artwork (this is important to prove that you did not 'purchase' the artwork while in Canada but you're just bringing it back so that you don't get hassled on the way back to the United States.)

Do not say that your artwork is for sale, if anything, call it what it is, priceless artwork, in other words: Cultural Exchange.
Do not say your artwork is leaving your supervision. It's going to stay in your car, right?
Call ahead to find out what appropriate forms you'll need, I can't find them right now because I wanted to put all of this behind me, and so I don't have all the specific forms I was given to give to the Canadian side of the border.
Have your gallery arrange the acceptance of the artwork, if they have to pay a deposit, it should be their money, not yours. Large galleries probably have a broker of some kind.
So perhaps... Ship the artwork if you can. Or appraise your work at a very low price, hell, get it notarized or approved by some kind of appraisal professional to help legitimize how cheap it is.

Even when all is said and done, I did all the appropriate steps and it really comes down to the fact that you either get someone who doesn't care that you have artwork in your car, and someone that is easily suspicious and has this idea ringing in their head that your artwork is cause for alarm. It's possible that had I not been so calm, I would have had to put up that 1,420 dollars or the show would not have happened at all.

Unsure?

2010-10-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Gut Roulette!
Gut Roulette!
Gut Roulette!
Gut Roulette!

"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target."

-unknown

trying to figure out what constitutes my 'best work' for a very important upcoming show... I played a little bit of 20 questions at work today.
is it an animal, vegetable or mineral?
does it involve layering?
is it transparent?
does it come in units?
does it involve a projector?
would it be able to fit in your car?
would you need a cherry picker?
can you install it in four days? (oh wait, I have to...)
is it new or is it part of a new series of works?
does it continue onto the floor from the wall?
will it connect to another work of art you have?
will you need the vinyl cutter?
can people take something back from the experience with them?
will some part of it be outdoors or in other public spaces?
will it be in the background of performances?
would it help if you collaborated with others?
does it involve a fire extinguisher?
do you need paint?
will it go in a corner?
does it need to be contained in it's own room?

I know what you're thinking... you can't beat me...

It's a ________________ that ____________________ and represents your way of _____________________ !

Is this correct? Yes/No?

Who would you want to film a movie about Detroit?

2010-10-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

This blog post from David Byrne really helped me decompress my thoughts about what I want to tell people about my trip to Glasgow...
http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2010/09/092310-dont-forget-the-motor-city.html

Why am I so interested in Detroit and Glasgow connection?

Both are gritty post-industrial cities that once brought immigrants together in one place to build great machines and became symbols for their output. Today one city is doing quite well and the other we are hoping will follow in its success but along its own path.

Toby Barlow's New York Times Ops --> "Glasgows Miles Better" campaign?
Cranbrook and architect Saarinen --> Glasgow and architect Mackintosh
Kresge Fellowships --> I can't find a specific name for it but there is a general high amount of support for arts organizations (although there was word that they are trying to fight to keep it that way because there's a good chance that 30% of the governmental budget to support cultural programs are in the works of being cut!)

Humble artists from both cities cite that being on a form of unemployment gave them the means and time to create work everyday may have been the REAL catalyst to rethinking the city as a cultural center. Although I do not believe that artists solely need 'just enough to live off of' in order for a sustainable arts infrastructure to go into place, that idea just assumes feeding off of what artists naturally do (community development etc.) in order for everyone else but the artists to become sustainable and paid for doing what they love.

For artists in both cities, try as hard as you might, most of everybody is working a minimum wage job.

I'm sure there's much more, but that's my homework!
I picked up 3 books I'm really interested in:
ARCADE - Artists and Place Making about "the role of artists in the context of urban environments... central to both art practice and urban planning... using the recent regeneration of the notoriously deprived neighborhood of... Gorbals as a starting point"
Who Belongs to Glasgow?
Glasgow Museum's towards an engaged gallery - Contemporary art and human rights: GoMA's social justice programs

Where we are lacking what Glasgow has:

Ann Arbor is no Edinburgh...

That city provides even more outlets for artworks and another art scene that has just as much to explore, still a decent amount of artist-run spaces and feels very connected.
We don't have a cheap train that people expect to take to enjoy Ann Arbor for the day or vice versa.

Consistent Critical Writing about Art and Life

I have about 14 publications / written articles from different galleries that I visited (in two days and two cities!) and six of them have catalogs or available critical writing about the shows. I don't want to get into how many paid writers we have in this city that write on a consistent basis about

We don't really attract international artists when we have art festivals. At least not massive art installations unless it's at MOCAD or well, let's be honest, Grand Rapid's Art Prize is closest.

Radiohead will play to a crowd of like 120 people there.
Tourism there is very easy, and they're mastering something I'd like to see develop in Detroit, "Artist tourism" As a city it provides many avenues for the kinds of tours artists would really want, do some couch surfing, go check out a band play here or there, be able to walk anyone you may want to go... Also you can actually run into Belle and Sebastian or Jim Lambie or whoever you fancy is the top artists of our day.
Other things that people in the UK are much more accustomed to that aren't just in this particular city: it's affordable to get multiple degrees or a PhD, there's healthcare

How we have more than what Glasgow has:

All that Glasgow has left of its previous industry is one small steamship building plant... we still have GM, Ford, Chrysler/Fiat trying to rebuild their empire probably through people producing or buying fuel-efficient cars, but can't we just not try to 'buy' our way out of problems?

(sorry that was secretly negative)

Public Art is powerful, i.e. Heidelberg Projects, and when the lights that said "Everything Is Going To Be Alright" drastically alter the psyche of the people that live here, so in a sense, artists are more powerful in this city than in others to create a commotion, set an idea in motion... less red tape...

But we do have a kind of cooperative feeling that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. This would be a good time to drop that I just got offered to teach a class at CCS! I was offered it by the new chair of the fine arts department after I gave the lecture I've always wanted to give and once again by putting myself out there doing, there's a new line that I found: Chance favors the connected mind. If there's anything more exciting than being in an incubation of creativity, it's being a part of the creation of such things! I love my talented friends, I look forward to all of us doing well together in a wonderfully non-competitive way.

It's not just about the arts too, the DIY scene is mainly made up of social activists, urban farmers, educators, musicians and young entrepreneurs. The more disciplines that get in on the fun, the better I say!

I like our food better. I like being able to get authentic Mexican food on one day and then authentic Japanese food on another.

I personally enjoy how small Detroit really is, there's something I've always enjoyed about the how much we can pack into such a small scene, and still there's tooooo many cool things to go do in a given night. Hopefully I will make it to some tonight.

Lastly, anyone notice how hard it's getting to keep up with all the movies about Detroit? There's Palladium Boots Johnny Knoxville one, then there's Requiem for Detroit, and technically if we want to include it we can say that Matthew Barney is making a film about the city. I want to hear who you'd love to see direct a movie that is filmed and about Detroit.

My vote goes to Bernadette Corporation or the Coen Brothers.

Lucky Unlucky

2010-09-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

I officially had the worst 'adventure' I've ever had trying to get to Loch Lomond...

But to start off on a nice note, I tried couch surfing for the very first time and it was AMAZING! Although I did make quite a few friends at the Hostel so it's a toss up between having 1 person show you around that is a very thoughtful person, and having 3 or 4 people that check in with how you're doing periodically and share their wide amount of experiences about where they're coming from and tips for things you can do to make your life easier. I stayed with someone named Willem who came in at the last hour when the original person I had been in contact with stopped contacting me! I probably e-mailed Willem as a backup (my only smart pre-planning of the entire trip honestly) and he even gave my photo to the bouncers at the club that he was hanging around that night so they would know to expect me! He treated me to beers, showed me around, talked about this and that and then I had a great time going back to his place where we ate cocoa puffs, played his synth drums that some band used when recording at his house and watched stuff on youtube about British comedians I didn't know.

Before that however, the same night, I saw one of the funniest things I have ever seen. But first I have to introduce you to Guillaume and Audrey. So I met up with Rachel Timlin's (Aaron Timlin's sister) friends earlier in the week. Guillaume's from France and Audrey's Irish and those three first meet some odd 12 years ago and we inseparable from what I hear for that year. Guillaume is a manager at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut and he's seen some of the most-well known bands ever to have played that small venue. Audrey that week was busy putting together an exhibition with Sense Scotland which was basically an art opening celebrating the work from the result of workshops created by sight, hearing and mentally impaired residents. The second night I was in I got deep friend Haggis, talked at length with both of them and then went on to talk with Guillaume for even longer at Variety about the politics of Detroit and Glasgow and in general what it's like for people to get around in these kinds of cities.

But the funniest moment happened a couple nights later when I was invited to Audrey's house and was introduced to a doll that Rachel made of Audrey. I thought it was store bought because it had a really nice box, it was handmade but with an insane amount of detail. Captions all over the box like, 'I like potatoes!' (she's Irish) and the best part was another caption that says, Squeeze my Butt and I'll Talk to You! but that's not all, there's an embedded recording where Rachel tricked Audrey into leaving a funny voicemail message which was unknowingly put into the doll. It had so much love put into the accessories including a wee camera (Audrey's a photographer) a wee cell phone, and a wee book, all about Audrey's love of potatoes. To top it all off they fed me and my phone was dying all day and they had something to charge my iPhone so that I could get in contact with Willem... thank god. I was actually thinking I might have to sleep in the streets for Plan C.

Let's see... before that in the morning I accidentally saw a sneak preview of a show at Transmission (they forgot to put a do-not-enter tape across the door, I inadvertently met the artist but have nothing to show for it.)

Before that I was in Edinburgh the day before seeing ALL of their galleries too. I got lost... a lot and probably saw all of Edinburgh, which is exactly why I like the city. You can get lost as all hell, but it's so small that it doesn't really matter! You can always use the same landmarks to figure it out. I went to a tiny ceramics gallery/studio because I got lost, but I also found Embassy gallery which wasn't on any of the art maps I had been given. Just through word of mouth I was able to find a lot of artist run galleries! I saw these poor artists who had to sit at their own show in order to have it open, but on the upside the visitors can meet the artists for sure that way!

Before all that it was even MORE amazing, I basically got to sit in and listen to all of the presentations by all the 2nd year and 1st year (except maybe the first 4 the first day I got in) students that are going to Glasgow School of Art and I must say, I can totally imagine being a part of that group. Some of them already have prestigious gallery shows and for all I know museum shows, tons of awards... they throw the word biennial around like how we through around house party.

Ok, so the bad day that happened today...

"Full Blown Crisis" - Photographs, acrylic paint, spray paint, and cloth on acrylic plastic mounted on oak.

I'm not going to go into it. Anti-climatic huh? I pretty much didn't get anywhere for 5 hours straight of walking. That's the short story, if you ever really want to hear it, buy me a pint and I'll go through it all again.

Being in such a sh*tty situation (and calling my girlfriend Rachel freaking out, missing her, bless her heart) made me really focus on what I needed to do, which includes some slightly impossible acts of determination.

1. Rewrite Fulbright application in 1 day and drive it up to Lansing to be edited more.
1b. Read portions of the 3 books I bought to help support my Fulbright statement.
2. Refinish old work and bring 14 pieces to Sarnia
3. Finish my application to Glasgow School of Art and send it on with letters of rec!

4. Talk with people about secret collaborations and finish a proposal.

5. Figure out new works for District VII

6. Put up 2 new pages for thedetroiter.com artist pages
7. Paint sum bowls with DIA staff at 555 Gallery
8. Find artwork if I have any to put into Art Detroit now with Hatch
9. Respond to e-mails about commissions / where to get gallery space

10. Figure out what my intern can help me with!

All within the next week or possibly before Oct 1st...

So what I've learned from all of this... travelling helps me write, but otherwise I don't find any reason to do it alone again. Sh*tty moments help me clear what it is that I want, as opposed to just thinking about what I want. More concretely what I learned: Do more research, leave earlier, ask better questions, get offline maps for the iphone (that way you can still use the location services via wi-fi when you can find it)

Also in case you were wondering, I didn't eat any non-deep friend haggis, it rained three days, chinese food in the UK is different but still good, I was suprised by the number of people I met from Estonia, I like when people say cheers or Brilliant! and gar-ige instead of gah-raj and... lots of other things that I had to ask what people were talking about... What other crap would people want to know... Oh you can get a flight to Glasgow for just under 500 dollars including taxes if you plan ahead. I must admit though I am a bit afraid... I'm flying back through Heathrow (London's and possibly the world's worst airport) and I have been told that even though I have a 2 hour layover, if they can't check my bag all the way... and I have to pick it up at baggage claim, get through security a 2nd time, find the right gate and which concourse, and if the board on the screen says it takes 20 minutes to get there, (which means approximately 1 mile of distance)... RUN.

Ugh...

2010-09-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

I take that back, Glasgow is still great, but I SUCK at travelling, at least I'm learning a lot of new things.

Woke up really early, though I didn't want to because... well, i'm in a hostel and everyone had to get up early, I thought that I'd at least be able to sleep in until 12:30 but I got up at 8 am instead, you know a decent 4 hours of sleep. Right after that I thought I better make sure I have everything so I went downstairs and got myself some soap and a towel thinking that I'll go and eat (since I bought vouchers) just before it closes at 10 am. Well... I got down there, OH I FORGOT, i'm really really high up, climbing up and down 4 sets of stairs really takes it out of me... but it turns out that it closes at 9 am... So I said to myself that's fine...

man, I just need to go to sleep.

to make a long story short, looked up a cheap place to get food, turns out it's 45 minutes away (which was hell carrying back 45 lbs of food for that long...) and it's not so much cheap as it is... cheaper versions of expensive things, like a Trader Joes, except imagine you have no idea what anything really is... fruit squash? lamb mince?

Here's the kicker, I bought about 1/2 frozen foods and got back to the hostel only to realize they only have a refrigerator.

Yeah, I cooked 3 meals pretty quickly this morning just so I didn't have to waste it all.

And then I found out why everyone wakes up at 7 am and takes showers early... no more hot water after 10 am...
fml.

Wow longest best day ever!

2010-09-21T18:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine waking up from a only being able to sleep about 4 hours on a plane ride with very little wiggle room to realizing that your plane lands at 3 am and you have a interview/tour at 5 am. That's how my day started.

I'm in Glasgow reading Simply Separate People by Lynn Crawford, listening to music given to me the day before by a guy named Aaron. My favorite artists on his crazy playlist that only spans from bands beginning with the letter A to bands beginning with the letter B include Aavikko, Afro Celt Sound System, Arvo Part...

I was greeted with a couple of the best travel suprises you could imagine, first Scotland, my destination, for some reason or another allows free baggage claim. As I was getting off the plane I was told to go in a separate line because I had a foreign passport, it just so happened that it was a shorter line and I got to get in front of about of 100 people and got my little Scotland Stamp. Even though I was the first one out of the plane our bags were rotating on the little turnstyle thingy, and my bag was sitting there just waiting for me.

I met with Dr. Glyn Davis and I thought he was surprisingly young, I spent a little bit of a ridiculous time trying to get dollars exchanged for British Pounds so I could get a coffee, I must say I got some crappy weak coffee, but I made the mistake of travelling to far to try to exchange my money and so had to run up some steep hills to make it back in time. I made it just in time to the Mckintosh building and stood around a bit thinking about what possible questions he might ask me, I kept coming up with what I considered really weak responses: I'm here in Glasgow because someone told me that it was similar to Cranbrook, (which it is in that it is a tight knit group of artists that have a wide range of abilities. The work is distilled to its basic elements while giving their old work an experimental twist.

I got to sit in on some of the 2nd year students' work and I thought to myself that there sure were a lot of images surrounded by a lot of white blank negative space around the subjects, as I got outside during breaks I noticed how the overcast clouds seemed to become like a large lightbox... I felt like the environment instilled a kind of calm upon some of their work, letting them know, less is more, less is everything.

I feel a little embarrased but I tried a range of very abruptly interuptions to patiently waiting in plain view of current students in order to talk to them about their experiences. One student had an awful time getting his Visa, but he did let me know that Rachel could apply for the common-law partner VISA as long as we could prove that we've lived together for the past two years. I made sure to mention that it was my first time travelling alone and that I was here from Detroit and that it's nicer than the stereotypes. For the most part people would say that their news had recently and often talked about the very urban farming and other art projects that were underway in the city. It made me feel like I had a bit of cache behind me, some real credentials of DIY.

Other parts of the talks included someone quoting Samuel Beckett ''try to fail better'', another artist Katie talked about how she tried to get all the copies of 'Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith and only was able to secure 30 some, another artist worked with implanting blank books into the library so that one had a space to open a blank book and settle the mind. All of this reminded me of the other great part of the school's partnerships which included that I had full rein of the art libray, University of Scotland's Library and even the gigantic library in Edinburgh where I could find any book. Any Book! Suzie's work really appealled to me, it had to do with being a printmaker but it was really beyond printmaking since it was so about the process of printmaking... one of her projects was giving people unique coins with a kindof woodgrain looking thumbs up on it that she gave to people for their favors, work for art. I learned that Paradelia means common things such as stains or decay being thought of as extremely important, especially when you think you see the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on a wee crisp. That means small potatoe chip, but you knew that.

Regardless of the fascinating artist talks I really had to focus on staying awake as we were reaching the 4th break in the day...

I'm looking at my notes in a datebook that is a Mike Spradlin wedding presents and it's already filled with nuggets of great advice: Think about your relationship to the other students, what are you able to actually accomplish in 2 years, what would you be interested in exploring? what are some technical, conceptual and material concerns for your work?

Later in the day I went to the hostel (because they don't open until 2) and grabbed my backpack and headed straight to a computer so that I could contact Rachel and find out what I could do about my really really really bad timing for my Fulbright application. (it's due the 23rd and involves sending images via a cd, I'm in Glasgow right now so that should tell you how organized I am to get that hard copy to them... I just found out I got an extension though *phew* now all I have to worry about when I get back is driving to Lansing to drop off the application, dropping off a three person show in Canada that's an hour away, getting ready for my artist talk on the first, as well as put together a proposal for another big art show possibly in six months... What have I done to myself? I apologize to myself right now, by taking this trip TO GLASGOW!!! HOLY SH*T I'M STILL IN GLASGOW! I'M TRAVELLING BY MYSELF IM FUCHKIN DOING IT!

So at the Hostel I was able to ask about walking Lochlomond which the cabbie on the way in helped me pronounce it (lock-lemon) and as I asked him about what non-artists think about all the art, he simply replied, the other residents don't seem to mind. I waited for a bit for Rachel Timlin's friends, one who invited me to something called Sense Scotland, which I later found out were art workshops made for people who are deaf or blind or impaired mentally and was about experiencing materials in new ways. Her other friend Guillaume happened to be a manager of the CBGBs of Glasgow and was having a hard time getting around without having to say hi every other second, but he really gave me all the attention for a real good hearted conversation where we basically described the history and future of two entire nations, US and UK over a pint of beer. Tomorrow I might ask someone what's with the protestant and catholic soccer team rivalries. They also treated me to the greasiest dinner and I was able to get away without trying a deep fried Mars bar. I really seemed to crack up the 2nd years when I asked if it was 'legal'. Hanging out with the Glasgow CBGB manager and making a ton of 2nd year MFA students crack up has seemed to help me get my foot into the door of this art scene quite quickly and easily. Who knew travelling would come this naturally for me? Who knew that everyone would reschedule so that they could meet me on my very first day in Scotland, on my own, on my journey towards discomfort and getting lost within the smallest amount of space possible... I look forward to sneaking in into more MFA talks...

Quick teaching advice

2010-09-14T23:03:00.000-07:00

Andy T: "Teaching is all about managing expectations."
Me: "Maybe, but I think we should trick students into learning. Or maybe there needs to be a class called 'Fake it until you make it' where we teach them different methods people have used and talk about their goals and how to achieve them in as many creative ways as possible.'
Andy T: "I know what you mean, but I don't like that term 'faking it', I like the term described as a 'state of becoming' which, described by B******** (was it Bachelard?)...

He went on to explain it, but sometimes I'm a bad listener, at least when it comes to names.

I obviously haven't taught in a classroom setting in a while now, (unless you count those kindergartners at Cranbrook) but I may be giving a lecture to some CCS seniors about.. well, what I think they should know. I'll probably spend the beginning portion talking about my exploits in how I've faked it until I made it, and how I continue to keep going. Also I probably will talk about my current interest in public art, the need for better writing about art going on in the city and exporting the products of our talented Detroiters while investing locally.

In general though, I think it would be a really fun activity to actually have them list 5 things they wish they could change about this city, pick their top 3, and then make a new list of 5 things they are interested in doing, and then choosing their top 3 and seeing if we can mash together something from those two lists and talk about it as a group. This was an activity I was learning about in an professional development meeting about teaching social justice through writing activities when I was a student teacher. It's not that activity specifically, but it does simplify the overwhelming process of: what do I do now?

I think I could easily also bring my 'stuck' list and my new 'to-do' list, because I think it's generally really helpful, but every time I've really enjoyed hearing someone is was either because it was very interactive, or because it was just a very well polished and entertaining presentation, and I don't think I have time to do the latter, but I don't think I'm getting paid anyways, and I really just want to practice my public speaking skills to some promising students! To make it worth my while though, it might be really fun to actually have them write out a list of 5 of the wisest things they've ever learned or wrote me a story along those lines while they were at school and I'll take those as payment... The odds are I'll receive one comment that is mind-blowingly awesome.

Also as a side note, I gave up looking for an intern... and then one day during the People's Arts Festival he showed up! And after that he e-mailed me and I told him he could help me setup for my solo show and he was a huge help, I even bought him dinner. After that he mentioned his school might be able to figure out how he could be my intern...

The list in really rolling thinking of all the fun things I have for an intern to do...

I'll list them in another blog soon... maybe not before I go to GLASGOW!!!

good news scaryness good news

2010-09-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

Here's all the good news lately:

* My fellowship is officially over, but I am still a Kresge Fellow for life! The rest of the funds are being saved up for graduate school in the fall. Who knows, I could be going to Yale, RISD, CalArts or even Scotland. There are a couple more I'm thinking of too we'll see...

* I won 1st place at a juried show in Canada, I'm officially an international artist! I will be showing some older work (new to Canadians) on Sept 30th. They are seeking artists to represent by the way... for more infos: www.kristjanssongallery.com

* I was recently interviewed by Sublimotion.eu, Metrotimes and Detroit Make it Here (which is part of Crains, which I'm sure is short for Crazy Brains) And Simone DeSousa who operates the gallery also has been featured in quite a few things, including Fortune 500's most influential business people I believe. Oh by the way, Re:View Contemporary is representing me! I don't know if I've ever written in down in public before, but she is GREAT to work with, once, I dropped off 6 new pieces and she sold 4 of them before they went up on the wall that week, this besides the fact that she is a good friend and good person.

* Rachel Corrie and I hosted Not Blood Paint after they hosted us for four nights when we went to New York, they sounded awesome! They were recently dubbed the band 'most likely to start a cult'. We all look forward to collaborating with one another.

* We made about 600 bucks at the People's Arts Festival (which comes to the same I made last year, but this time I sold less pieces and was able to pay Rachel for her help!) It was probably also our last year for a while since I may be in grad school this time next year... bum bum bummmm

* Speaking of us, the awesome couple we are, we are going to be performing for the first time as Chorus of Aahs with Sir Andy Thompson from the He Bops from 7 to 8 to draw people to come to my solo show at the very beginning of when it opens, especially because we need to lure people in from Dally in the Alley.

* I never posted a finished photo of my floor! So here it is!!! See older blog post about how it was going to function

* Lastly, the scariness, as I put it in the middle of the headline. I have bought my ticket to Glasgow, Scotland. I will be traveling for the first time by myself... With the hopes that I will find out if the Glasgow School of Arts is not only the place for me, but if I'll find someone who can help me write a recommendation for a Fulbright to study there. I . am . so . freaked . out.
Let the feeling of real life begin... NOW.

Me and my friends are going to take over the world...

2010-09-03T23:11:00.000-07:00

...because of strategic planning and being genuinely cooperative people. Take that world!

I'm seriously interested in creating an online skills bank that is SUCCESSFUL, I will be working on how exactly that would work, but that's my project for the next couple years... I can feel it!

Theses are notes that I was making up when I was talking to Mike Han about what kind of community we would be excited to be a part of. It's a strange bubble map for sure, if you have any questions, feel free to ask, and I'll make it up the best I can as we go along.

More thoughts about Graduate School

2010-08-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

Top 5 reasons I will be going to grad school:

1. Get out of my happy bubble that is Detroit, if only for a little while.

2. Forced to stuff I don't naturally do, like reading a lot, in depth, for research. Make critical artwork that requires risk and forethought.

3. Be able to teach at a University, I tend to like most of the professors that I've met, even if it's a 'bad time to teach'

4. Improve my chances of having access to great opportunities from overseas residencies to funding.

5. Surround myself with a different kind of supportive environment, I've never been to an art school, I've never had to define my 'context' within art, and I've never had a critique so critical that it really made me think about changing everything.

So I've decided to help me make my decision about the Glasgow School of Art I will be flying into Scotland on Sept 20th and returning on the 28th!

I found these nice quotes tonite that I think are pertinent.

Before I travelled my road I was my road. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. ~Matsuo Basho

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. ~Edward Albee

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. ~James Thurber

Alice came to a fork in the road.
"Which road do I take?" she asked. 
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. 
"I don't know," Alice answered. 
"Then," said the cat,
"it doesn't matter." ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. ~Henri Louis Bergson

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. ~Henry David Thoreau

When the student is ready, the master appears. ~Buddhist Proverb

Money for Artists!

2010-08-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I do not run Soup, nor have I attended one yet, and I didn't hear about it from the New York Times but through a coworker at the DIA, but this idea is GREAT for Detroit. I am posting this picture because I've been waiting for the moment to talk in a positive and excited way about artists and money.

I hope that this will be the first in a series of blog posts about commonly misunderstood concepts about art that I would like to rectify through my personal experiences. One of the first myths being that artists don't need money... (believe it or not there are those within the art community, I will not name them here or in the future that artists in fact do better work when given no money.)

This entry is about how there needs to be more grants and funding for artists. Grants make an artistic career a viable lifestyle. It supports something that is undervalued.

First, I want to get out idea of how I believe money works for artists, as a tool, not an end in itself:

Money makes more money, which is to say, imagine a tool that can be used to build an even larger tool. There are some projects that can only be made using these tools, sometimes we envy how large someone else's tool is, but it should be known that it in the end, it as a tool, can only be used to make certain kinds of projects. Can you think of other projects that require no money that would actually be made worse if one tried to use it?

I wanted to say that money is better defined as grease, but I think grease can be broadly described as a tool anyhow.

Next, I feel like there is a tendency to avoid 'profiting' from one's art or 'Selling Out'. But then again we have plenty of tendencies to avoid business strategies that don't relate to money directly either that we hold as a stigma. Take the idea that some people don't like how 'networky' I am, they are very turned off when I get excited that I know someone who they should talk to.
But money does not come from networking, opportunities come from networking and opportunities beget the opportunity to get attention and business people and companies and corporations all love translating attention into sales, so they will use your abilities to get attention to help them sell something, and thus give you money as part of their 'marketing strategy'. This is basically how people make money off of their websites who don't sell anything, they could even tout something completely different from the advertising that is placed on their sites.
Sure, we'll take your money, but we'll remind our readers who are smart enough to know the difference not to buy into your sh*t.

Also I will say that there is a limit. Creative Capital or Creative Time did a study and found that giving artists too much money can freak them out and they'll stop doing... well, anything. 20,000 dollars at a time they found was the optimal amount of money to siphon to an artist.

Chapter 2: Artists used to be really really important in society, so important they were privileged, which includes money. Arts funding reveals our priorities as a nation, and if we disagree with them (see total military budget and bank bailout compared to arts funding) we need to work towards vocalizing and changing that ratio. It also helps that we have much more freedom as an artist than there has ever been.

I don't care how much someone tells me that Damien Hurst's art sells for too much money, people are complaining about the art market, not about the sustainability of a diverse number of artists. The art market takes care of itself, which is to say, when the economy collapses over and over again, you'll be happy to say you never got involved in buying a work of art for millions of dollars. It's not that artists are privileged people, it's just that certain artists came from privilege, and some have figured out 'the game', good for them, so what? it's not for you. There was a reason that they were held in such high esteem, artists have historically held the crucial role having the 'critical outsider perspective' or as the romanticized wise poet that will inspire. Nowadays art is simply part of the bigger picture for many people to be an ends to a means of 'being happy'. I think all three are still valid means (and there are much more) for making art, but giving artists money seems to be a HUGE point of contention for many.

inflammatory!
ambiguous!
hostile!
useless!

These are just of the few descriptions that are used to attack arts funding, usually by Republicans for some strange reason, although overall interestingly enough, Republicans donate more money to charities than Liberal people do. But here are others that we rarely think about how misdirected they are:

The best most authentic art happens without funding!
Good art will eventually be funded just because it's good!
Stereotypes! Complacency!

Even some people in our field don't think much about how often they relay the stereotype of a romantic starving artist or as part of something where one would not necessarily expect to get paid for what they do.

Here comes my big point about how I think about how money (grants) affects art:

I assume that artists know they do not work in a bubble and for the most part create work with an audience in mind. When given just a little more money than they need, artists act like they have a hole in their pocket that goes straight back to the community. The more money given to artists, the more the immediate public benefits. Funding today is about trusting artists with their ideas, ideas that may be beyond present day common sense. With a little extra cash in their pocket artist 'A' can finally take that risk and do that outdoor art project they've been wanting to try, and this time with the support of their neighbors. They may feel needed especially if the money is given to them from the community itself, they feel obligated and generally put in more work than other workers are paid hourly. It's not blown on lotto tickets, even when it's used for travelling, people who have ever gone on vacation with an artist know that artists are constantly 'researching'. It's extremely annoying to those who just work hard and play hard and keep it separated.
Artists are holistic, in that it's not about a 9 to 5 job, it can be about integrating everything that you do in your art practice and work into a lifestyle.

Part 4: This is actually all besides the fact that art actually does something. It has a detectable role!!!

Here is the definition of art that I liked a whole lot that I found in Rachel's anthropological textbook:
Although difficult to define, art may be understood as the creative use of the human imagination to aesthetically interpret, express, and engage life, modifying experienced reality in the process.

Now someone tell me how money could affect this process in a negative way...
Isn't it possible that if more money were given to artists for projects they would be able to have more diverse ways to aesthetically interpret, express or engage life.

It is necessary to fight against a cultural view of the artist as a maker of things that are exclusively aesthetic. Artists lead the way. Artists question flaws of what is considered 'normal' and create an abundance of alternatives, innovative ideas and everything that cannot simply be reduced to monetary value.

Idea #5, Case Studies: So then why do we find artists in poor neighborhoods making great art? Don't the arts thrive within having 'nothing' to work with it? Isn't creative ingenuity more likely to happen to have when all you have is your creative energy?

If we replace the word artists with 'optimists' there is far more that can be said about a good fit. An optimistic person sees plenty to work with in the most challenging situations and many opportunities for creating something that has never been tried. When an area begins to develop and good things begin to happen, new optimistic people move in, making it so that... well... the original optimistic person may not be the MOST optimistic resident. They in a way, they may not be needed, and they would know it first. So they move on, in search of a new challenge.

This may explain why a building designed to house artists end up housing people who enjoy the lifestyle of artists and may even paradoxically be the type that normally supports the arts but find themselves part of the gentrification of a particular area. Now if the art is good or not that comes out of this area post-gentrification compared to the 'original' artists, this may be a matter of cycles. Who's to say that the kids of the gentrification generation end up going to art school and being inspired since living in such an art-laden city. Should we tell these kids, sorry, someone famous has already put this place on the map, everything you make will always be second rate. I believe this may have more to do with another romanticized notion that the artists overcame so much to create REAL art.

If you want to start an interesting case study, we should look at the amount of artists that come from dentists that work in the Midwest. Why do so many of their kids become artists? They need to be studied! And when we crack what the secret is we can produce more artists, instead of the conditions that make great art.

Here are some links that have inspired this post:

http://katedaughdrill.com/home/about/
http://www.zpub.com/notes/black-work.html

I hope to get quoted for the Poeple's Arts Festival this year! Big Plans.

2010-08-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

From the first year at the People's Arts Festival

"This will be my 3rd year at the people's arts festival, this is the only festival I do because it's in the parking lot of my studio and the cost to setup a booth is really good.

I am primarily a painter and plan to sell smaller more affordable paintings as I do every year.

I expect at least $300, but I'm sure I do a lot of bartering with many other artists which isn't included in that number.

This festival for me really is about networking and practicing talking to people about my work. I think the crowd is unique because there are so many people that work in and around cultural organizations of Detroit that come to this. I have a particular social worker in mind that I am fond of that became a collector of my work because of this festival. People have come by and told me that they have been watching my progress and admire my work, which feels great because I don't know if I would have heard from them otherwise. This year, the timing works out so that I can use the festival as a kind of advertising and sneak preview for my solo show on September 11th at Re:View Contemporary. see:
http://www.reviewcontemporary.com/

The only part I dislike about the festival is that I don't really like the selling aspect of it since I have had people try to haggle with me and it makes me feel like some people would rather haggle then own my artwork which is already priced really low. This year I plan on sharing the booth with my friend Kimberly Lavon from Grand Rapids so that I don't have to sit for so long alone and we plan to do some interesting things such as a raffle to get people on our mailing list for the chance to win free works of art from both of us.

Let me know if you would like anything clarified or have more questions! Thanks for the opportunity!"

Stopping at a rest stop in the Appalachia...

2010-08-03T22:39:00.000-07:00

On a very fun roadtrip with Rach to test the idea of 'going to grad school, and after watching the lives of others as she drove, a peculiar thought struck me...

I'm no friend of discomfort but it's not my enemy either, nausea is what's the worst, and even then, without it we wouldn't be human if we weren't disgusted at some point by some thing.

Grad school doesn't scare me as much as not knowing who I'll be and if I'll live up to my own expectations of making work that is not necessarily revolutionary, but rather work that is not something I would have even recognized a year before, something personally new, (it's alright if it's nieve), but the feeling of risk should secretly pulse beneath the surface, which in the reality of the process ebbs and flows with each decision.

Also the film made me think about how directing works, how defiant I should feel when making my work and it also made me think that the lady in the movie had a
pretty staged suicide... But it didn't take away my enjoyment of thinking of the metaphor of movies as voyeurism, which is always fun to realize the moment you realize that every film that goes beyond just mere entertainment leaves small entrances
For those payig attention to the fabric/substrate of reality. I hope that idea gives me some momentum to figuring out how to talk about my upcoming solo show...

Don't be mad at me... or whatever, this is MY list.

2010-07-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

This was going to be my reply to this gallery in Sarnia, Ontario that was asking who I would recommend for some shows... These are all Metro Detroiters btw. (48 of them!!!)

For some reason it was easy to come up with names when I paired them into categories in threes.

Favorite romantic artists (for the love of making, not knowing what we're doing):
Nate Morgan
Ben Teague
Cedric Tai (can I be on my list? I want to be in a show with both of them!)

Favorite younger sculptors:
Ed Brown
Daniel Sperry
Vanessa Merrill

Favorite Abstract female painters:
Kathy Leisen
Lauren Rice
Amy Sacksteder

Favorite Artists that describe their personal connection to culture through their work:
Chido Johnson
Shiva Ahmadi
JenClare Gawaran

Favorite Figurative Realists:
Richard Lewis
Kristin Beaver
Taurus Burns

Favorite Photographers:
Andrew Doak
Lauren Semivan
Cyrus Karimipour

Favorite small works makers:
Gream Whyte
Laith Karmo
Sarah Berger

Favorite installation artists:
Andrew Thompson
Megan Heeres
Matt Shlian (he fits multiple categories a little better actually but this show would kick ass)

Favorite large sculpture fiber artists:
Abigail Newbold
Rod Klingelhofer
Kate Silvio

Favorite tinkerers:
Ian Swanson
Bethany Shorb
Andy Malone

Favorite LGBTQ artists:
Isaac Richard
Ed Fraga
Gary Eleinko

Favorite artists due to their tight execution of their materials:
Corrie Baldauf
Ben Kiehl
Sharon Que

Favorite Curators (and they make great art):
Jack Summers
Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert of Design 99
Bryant Tillman

They're in a league of their own because of how awesome they are:
Nicola Kuperus
Tyree Guyton
Mike Smith

Women in East Lansing that kick ass too
Jae Won Lee
Michelle Word
Janel Schultz

I don't really know them very well, but I like how I can always tell what work is theirs:
Scott Hocking
Cyrus Karimpour
Emily Duke
George Rahme

And everyone else just sucks, just kidding, but seriously if you think that if someone's not on this list it's because i'm a jerk, it may be, but in my defense, a lot of the people on this list I know personally which taints my view of their work being my favorite. actually I take that back, I don't know many of these people very well, but in my imaginary world, they're my best friends. ALL OF YOU LOVE ME BACK!!! YOU'RE MY BEST FRIENDS!!!!!!! see? I'm crazy, so why would you take this list seriously?

Over time, I'll try to populate this post with pictures and links, I mean wouldn't that be awesome? well, I don't really have any time, I take that back too, so if you have any favorite works by these artists, reply with the image so the rest of everyone else can see what I mean by, I love these people's art.

On the brink of something really exciting (finally)

2010-07-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

I really believe that being upset is an extremely important part of life. Yesterday was very frustrating, and last night Rach and I seemed to resolve almost all of it to think about what we can do together to make things happen. So... she's decided now that she's quit small plates, she's going to help me in my studio as well and even do promotions like I do to make monees! This about to be one insane awesome team.

My goals still:

1. Work towards finding the right grad school fit: surprising myself that I'm fearlessly heading towards 'pie in the sky' dream schools and knowing that I'll be just fine with whatever happens.

2. Work on artist talk: I finally have the basic outline done, but I'm still missing one critical component, I want to have it end with a really interesting discussion, taking the pedestal away from me and back to the audience so that something much more substantial can be gained...

3. Find a really good studio assistant so that I can do even more of what I wish I was doing, more research and development for work, more higher quality products, helping me forward in general. BAM, just destroyed this goal, besides all the people who are gearing up to revitalize the database of thedetroiter.com, Rachel my best friend, is going to test the waters of being a studio assistant. (Makes me wonder how Tyree Guyton and his wife make things happen, they seem pretty 'on' independently to get sh*t done.)

This is such a memorable moment right now. For the first time in a long time I'm really excited about the fact that I'm really working towards the goals I set for myself, the big goals that I normally avoid.

And more excitement to come today!!!

- baked crispy zucchini patties for breakfast
- studio visit
- treat Andy T to dinner
- imagining Rachel and I biking to the studio early in the morning.

Wow, I just realized Monday is going to be busy... cooool.

I'm only waiting for like 1,700 dollars...

2010-07-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

Everytime I worry about money, I'm surprised when there's a check waiting for me.
It's hard to remember what payments are late and which ones are just on the way when you're running around hustling this hard. My heart goes out to all the people in Detroit that also have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet. I don't know if I'd want it any other way though. Today was pretty great. I ate for free, so it must've been a good time.

But really I think my life breaks down into 4 fairly equal chunks:

1/4 pure art making time
1/4 Rachel time
1/4 working as an educator whether it's DIA, MOCAD or 'other' and otherwise working for Vitamin Water
1/4 of the rest of my time, freaking out and finding new revenue streams / volunteer for whatever I can find to do that week / total loser time.

which looks pretty similar to this other list I have...

would do - time with gf
should do - art
could do - make money
reward - more freedom

Look a new piece!

Cedric Tai starts his own self-made artist residency, again!

2010-06-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

So back at Michigan State I asked the program I was in (ROIAL) if I could start my own artist in residency program because well, I lived in the same place that my classes took place, and I earned myself control and access to the darkroom that was in the basement of where I lived. Therefore I thought, I can teach others to use the darkroom and I can do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To my surprise at the end of ROIAL, I was handed a certificate that solidified what I had done, it read, Cedric Tai, the inaugural artist-in-residence. It was official, I faked it, and it worked.

I'm stealing this from my friend Quetarshe's blog (her daughter is so professional look at how well designed that website is!):

"Amazingly restored, 71 Garfield apartments and lofts in midtown Detroit has gone through a wonderful transformation – it’s has gone green. This 1920’s historic building in the Sugar Hills Historic art district is comprised of recycled, re-purposed with old and new fixtures, geothermal heating, solar power, and all the things that other buildings green with envy!

Not only has it gone green - local artist were asked to design on the first level an apartment/ loft, their own style, look and feel."

See the PDF invitation here

My 'dream studio'

Ok, so my deal is that I really wanted to make something permanent (like a public work of art) so I designed and installed my own floor! It's a fairly simple design that is kindof like decoding abstract art. Once you see where certain shapes come from (hint hint, where they reflect from) then it makes sense why they are placed the way they are placed and you can imagine a 3 dimensional shape once your brain cracks the code! I was partly inspired by some of the murals in detroit* that are more geometric in nature and conversations with my housemate Corrie about floor installations that Sol Lewitt did. I wanted to have a design that also appeared to unfold... Like if Sol Lewitt were into Transformers?

(blue and green are much more grey than my mockup, also the yellow triangle is supposed represent a projection...)

So my space is meant to be a:

1. research / brainstorming space (a.k.a. charrette space, to help me with my upcoming show in Sept and my goals!)

2. collaboration space (hopefully I will be able to bring in other artists who will want to collaborate with me, are YOU interested?)

3. mini-ted talks space (I'm working on having Dabls from the African Bead Museum give a talk about whatever he wants, because he's awesome)

4. gallery space (I just want to actually give a couple friends a good local space to do a show and make new work that may or may not have similar goals to those that are being outlined right here.)

5. clean space (for photographing some of my work)

6. community space (for bringing in people to use for whatever, doing a film night, staging meetings, brainstorming what we want or what we need)

7. comfortable space (it has a couch!)

What did I gain, what did I lose?

I had a lot of fun putting this very minimal room together. Surprising enough I had a lot of fun installing the floor and have quite the story to tell. Corrie says I should write a short story about it. Also, my dream shelving has been built, I have no idea why, but all the furniture for kids that Ikea sells are some of my absolute favorite items. Perhaps, I just long for kindergarten. The main table in the room folds up to the wall, but I may remove it in case the wall space is needed for an art show, but I asked for a very high end sink and faucet, and I got it! I am a very happy artist. So far the only things that I've spent 'too much' on since they ran out of money in the very end are extension cables for the projector, a $125 dollar ikea couch and wireless speakers. What I got out of the deal is a sweet dry erase board table, 3 sweet cabinets, and use of a nice white space for 2 months.

As of right now, the last things I did were wax the floor myself, I've also been sanding the grooves of my cabinets so that the drawers slide easier, and I've also been weeding a vinyl sign that will ask people for their spare plexiglas!

The only thing that I think would be cooler would be if I designed my room to look like this:

Oh wait, that's just Mary Heilmann's, All Tomorrow's Parties, Exhibition View, Secession 2003

The last things that still need to be accomplished are:

1. dropping off the ikea couch that I bought that actually fits in my scion!

2. reformat my computer so that it can be used with the projector, attach the projector shelf to the ceiling and run a power cable from the light bulb in the closet to the projector on the ceiling and also test out my projection and wireless speakers!

3. have the sink installed and test washing a silkscreen in it

4. prepare for visitors which includes putting on a dvd on a loop of me installing the floor, having my book with my work in it out (and a sign that says do not take!), business cards to Re:View gallery, and possibly putting up one of my paintings in the hallway or in the room.

5. replace the wheels on the bottom of my cabinets with ones that don't swivel and cut a corner off so that they can be tilted back and moved around easier.

6. write the goals on the dry-erase board with things that offer interaction with people that will be coming in.

I've been telling people that I haven't been very busy, I don't know if I've been lying to myself or if it's just now starting to get busy and I just can't believe it, or perhaps, I really could be busier but I didn't plan very well ahead so it's past the point of 'getting busy' and now I'm just getting by. Either way, I do hope you stop by to see how well I was able to accomplish my little goals.

My little goals:

1. ~~apply to a juried show sometime this year~~

2. ~~apply to show work in another country~~

3. ~~try a new way of framing work~~

4. ~~create a space for collaborating~~

5. find people that may enjoy collaborating/using the space

6. ~~make a blog about it, or update thedetroiter.com~~

7. get someone to help me with my big sculpture for September

8. ~~work as an educator for MOCAD~~

9. ?

10. PROFIT!

*More inspiration: (from my photo blog on thedetroiter.com)

The book I could write, the iPhone app I want, and my art spliced in between to keep it from being boring

2010-05-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to try to put down everything that I think may be helpful to people who just want to know one person's (my) way of how I've been able to seemingly get around and get as far as I've gotten... um... so far.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, get an ego, but hell, I think you'd want to hear what I have to say about getting 25,000 from not much money but a little bit of privilege and strategic planning. I mean it's not like I'm really going to write something about how you can get a million dollars overnight if you study my plan, I just really believe there's a lot of wisdom that i've either stolen or gotten from other people.

Here's the first nuggets of wisdom that I take with me everywhere. If you're not willing to accept all of them, take your own path, you may even wind up getting your own big cash prize doing whatever makes you the happiest, but I'm telling you, this is how I did it, not how everyone should do it.

Things that I believe helped to mentally prepare myself for the Kresge Fellowship:

do something everyday that is part of your dream job, do it until someone realizes that you're a dedicated person and will hire you for some menial shitty work, remember the bigger picture even when you could just as easily convince yourself that you're going nowhere and eventually you'll find out where you were meant to be. Unless you work really hard at something you won't really know if it was a necessary failure or the first step of many. Not trying very hard doesn't leave you with very much information to go off of whether it was right for you or not.
find the weirdest, goofiest, honest peers and make friends with them. they won't necessarily be someone that will always fulfill all the different kinds of relationships you need in life, but whenever I've wanted to have a deep conversation about the big questions in life they are wayyy better to talk with than someone who thinks even the littlest bit that they are cool. These people in my life have been technicians at my college, elderly people in my community, my girlfriend, past roommates, but they come from every socio-economic class, really weirdos are everywhere if you know that they important and you need to seek them out.
give up trying to do the big important thing and just take the pressure off of yourself by thinking about how to live without ever doing or having the big important thing ever, in my case, I gave up on girlfriends and then the next month Rachel asked me out, that's a long story too. It's like giving up looking for something and BAM there it is buddy. Stop looking, it's somewhere that will find you in good time, when IT wants to find you, not when YOU are the most anxious.
it's usually a good idea to have no expectations or the greatest expectations, it's also good to be skeptical of comfort. On a street smarts level, do you ever wonder why certain people have been mugged and others haven't? Being able to be aware is a skill. It has a lot of complexity. for example, how do you know when you are 'not doing anything' because you are a procrastinating perfectionist and when it's because you need a break and need time to refocus? Many 'successful' people take calculated risks, but I don't know if we really expect that everything is going to work out all of the time. I believe we just work through the discomfort knowing there will be something to be gained even if we don't understand it at the moment and it takes a certain level of awareness to accept and deal with whatever comes.
live the kind of life that makes you feel ridiculously lucky to be alive here and now, because it's half true, your luck, is another way of saying that you are privileged. It's something that everyone needs to admit, not just because you probably don't realize how your sweet little life is built on the sweat of other people, but maybe it will also give you a good reason to go and volunteer somewhere or do something that means that you are thinking of other people first.
everything has a balance, if you feel sad, but you're not sad about being sad, then you're secretly content about it because you probably need to feel sad, you were feeling happy yesterday so it would make sense if you weren't happy the next day or the day before that. which also means that if you are about to do something AWESOME you are also on the brink of total collapse and deep personal failure. unless you're not as dramatic as some people, like me.
less options means greater more efficient creativity, but vast options may mean more diversity in the process

as an aside, this is my STUCK LIST, so when I go into fight/flight mode or something like that, I have something to refer to. Yes, this word for word is actually behind my computer for when I get depressed or don't know what to do with myself.

get AWAY from the internet. Away...
Pick 1 thing to do in an arranged list of would do, could do and should do (see bottom)
Have you checked/made your to-do list for today? (see bottom)
Suck it up and just clean up after yourself.
Some of your best work comes from wasting time artistically!
Make food for the next 2 days
Call a friend to hang out (use it as an excuse to dress up)
Go somewhere via your bike
Write a thank you / a note reminding a friend that it has come to your attention that a mutual forgetfulness about the friendship has occurred and can and needs to be corrected.
Go 100% in the wrong direction, hit bottom

I later added this addendum

11. Caffeine

Stuff that other people told me that are good ideas that I'm sure helped

know thyself, be true to thyself, accept your fate
writing down my goals on paper no matter how ridiculous, tell everyone your goals
fake it until you make it (someone else said there's a better term for it called a 'state of becoming'
love what you do and try to figure out how to get other people to pay for it
fear based decisions are usually bad
trust your instincts
know your audience

Ok now that you've suffered through reading all of that, here's way more tangible stuff that I did when applying for the kresge fellowship:

I took a whole month off to 'freakout' about the application, I went to the FAQ, I went to a free grant writing workshop and I also made a list of who I needed to contact wayyy before I had to think about when I would submit it. I also told everyone that this was my future, and I had no other plans so um... I guess I only took this leap of faith because I knew I had some stuff to fall back on, i.e. teaching certification, working promotions, having parents that wouldn't let me be homeless if it got really bad.
experts exist, you're not one of them, but that's totally alright, because you can surround yourself with smart people and that's a smart thing to do! I had 5 different people read my artist narrative (I'm probably going to share it with good friends, not strangers sorry) and made the best of my contacts that I had access to, at the time I was interning at MOCAD so I had a friend who wrote grants take a glance at it even though he really didn't have any time, so I made sure that he'd be the very last person to read it. I technically felt like I had a full finished draft 5 times, completely convinced each time that I was done with it and no more could be altered.
In order to cheaply find out if my digital colors of my images were correct I uploaded all of my work onto my website and asked people with different monitors, some expensive, some cheap to open up my website so I could see how it looked. I then wrote down notes like not contrasty enough or too blue and would make my image to be in the middle of all of those monitors.
All grant writing is restating that they are looking for X,Y,Z and you need to just be clear and direct and state how you do X, Y, Z and are the perfect applicant!
Do an art show before you even apply, that way you can think about all of your work in context of something more specific and really nail your artist statement and NOT do it last.

notes about how I use it (as copied from e-mails sent to other people):

explanation number 1 - first I separate everything i know that need to do into would could should, but it's a good idea to prioritize each list, overall I only expect myself to get 1 item accomplished in each list a day.

secondly I write all the distractions I know I enjoy doing in the rewards section and then figure out if any of them could be an appropriate reward for something I wrote in the Should column, whatever isn't already paired up in the should column, I try to come up with a fitting large enough reward.

explanation number 2 -

Every morning I print this little dude out and I organize everything I can think of into could do, should do and would do.

If I know I'm going to do it anyways, I put it into would do, If I'm avoiding stuff, that definetely goes into the "should do" and lastly everything in the "could do" is like a brainstorming list for working smarter instead of harder. I prioritize what's the most important in each category, because if you do the list honestly, you should be able to do 1 thing in each category a day and feel pretty damn good about yourself. What helps even more is that each item in the should do list needs to be paired with an equally appropriate reward whether it means taking a walk, calling a friend or treating yourself to a nice meal out in a new restaurant.

I'm still not sure why everything works so well for me, but I know that I found a system that works for me.

I use it to

A. help put things in perspective

B. prioritize my time better

C. keep myself from procrastinating

D. feel accomplished

This form of organization came from 3 combined sources: the creative capital workshops worksheet on rewards, Cezanne Charles' suggestion of would,could,should and advice from a friend to keep a to-do list. It was 'photoshopped' from a very pretty to-do list that I found at the Bureau of Urban Living. I even photoshopped out the quote and put in my own!

(Also this form is what I want to make an app for myself so that I don't have to print one off every day. If anyone knows how to make apps LET ME KNOW!)

Thinking about the power of images today... after a lack of sleep

2010-05-22T15:05:00.000-07:00

Ever feel a little loopy on a mere 4 hours of sleep? At the same time does it seem to give a kind of ability to dance on the surface of reality, as if having slightly more perspective on the hard work and lifestyle choice that gave you those mere 4 hours?

Today I was enjoying that encompassing fuzzy feeling and realizing how much I really love when I look at images from the past and think to myself, I have never seen this before. This picture in front of me is completely new to me. Just when I think that I know where I'm going, I realize I still have very little idea about history. Well, maybe this is more novel to me because I have this theory that everything we need to know we already know, we just have to remember.

So specifically what brought me to these revelations of realizing how vast what I don't know is even in such an age of information?

I am not embarrassed to say, Sister Wendy's the history of painting, a picture in the New York Times of the the Magna Carta and of course any conversation with Rachel pertaining to how much fun she's learning about stuff to teach her kids, errr students.

Like bonobos and their GG rubbing.

Geez, life is weird.

My favorite subject as usual: happiness

2010-04-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

I imagine that the work I will be doing in grad school will have a great deal with thinking about happiness, perhaps how it relates to occupations, learning, perhaps how we run public schools, but on the most part, I think I want to be happy while making work that may be about that issue as well. What form does the work take on then?

On NPR, the BBC version I was hearing about the happiness formula and on the whole how being richer doesn't make one closer to happiness and it may have been a mistake to consider GDP and other economic factors as a part of fulfillment. I've always appreciated learning about 'flow' but I also was having some caffeine and realized that that's all I need to at times feel... a lot better.

There were some other striking moments in the happiness special on the radio, one being the origin of the word happiness with it's two meanings, one being contentment, say after a long day of work, and another being related to happenstance, or luck. It went on to describe that particular form of happiness needed an appropriate trigger of risk, and if it worked out, you could be considered happy, and if it didn't, you would be unlucky and unhappy.

It also went into Ben Franklin's 13 virtues which coincidentally went against much of what is considered normal to other Americans my age, be sincere, avoid multitasking, everything in moderation, avoid uncivil tense talk, when you need to work, work... those kinds of things.

The host also brought up some great points as well against the optimist in me, describing how it is usually those with great jobs that seem to find people that find contentment in their menial job however the way that we ask someone in the service of us is entirely patronizing and we are in a great meaningful position to look down from at others doing jobs that are done for other reasons that are not solely in terms of the pursuit of happiness but actually to possibly set a good example for their children or because they are left with no other options.

I was also very interested in how it described how a money = happiness model has turned schools into a bland workforce and how many changes in happiness would require a different kind of togetherness that looked towards our communities strengths as opposed to sitting pretty in our individual homes... I feel like I've always been on to something, but I can't figure out when it occurred to me that the most rewarding life is one where I tire myself out when trying to prove something to myself, surprises along the way of mundane assignments, or the idea that I could learn without being in school and it being an exciting thing to have more there is to learn... If I uncover those stories of mine, I may be a little closer to creating that work I've always been interested in making.

Ranting about healthcare

2010-03-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering if I have been obsessed lately with reading the news about the healthcare debate possibly because i'm displacing my responsibility about what really needs to happen with MY health. I've lowered my standards from even just reading the news to reading the comments about the news. To be honest about the health care bill, I want something that perhaps I don't understand in its entirety to happen because I feel like it'll make a lot of things ok. Maybe I'll worry less if it passes, maybe I'll go to the dentist more or the doctor more and be overall more preventative about a natural disaster that could happen to my body.

But there could be something sinister about it all too, would this give me less pause to consider the conditions of another person's life who has less than me? Would I pronounce that someone who doesn't take care of themselves is more proven to be ignorant because the healthcare is free and they could just as easily as me go and get help, but they won't, and they can only blame themselves?

Today I was having conversations with Rachel and Corrie about things seemingly unrelated, but related in that we were questioning what is at the core of the issues of our day that we rally behind? Stemming from how recycling and yoga is the beginning of creating a sense of community and slowing down we began to talk about what is environmentalism today really about (the conversation we had was about can we really curb consumption or are we doomed to employ some kind of overall band-aid). The conversations kept going between Rachel and Corrie and I stepped away for a second to watch a TED talk since Corrie had never ventured into that amazingly quick inspiring online world. I stumbled upon one about how does one nurture creativity. Elizabeth Gilbert's talk had this kind of tension throughout that was either because she had to cram pearls of wisdom into 18 minutes or because she really was in the moment struggling with trying to fend off the feelings of expectations from other people and herself of not being able to out do herself from her last 'freakishly popular book'. Her talk reminded me of how sometimes I displace my moments of 'genius' to reconciling it as being part of instinct, but not instinct from within, but instinct as a state of being that is in flux, one that can be nurtured as she said.

"Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work." - Rita Mae Brown

As we teach in education, you can practice to be able to do genius things more often but you won't always be a genius without practicing new challenging tasks that are just difficult enough, oh yeah, and doing so makes you happy. It's called flow.

Which brings me to the matter at hand. Flow is considered the psychological definition of happiness. (See: Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) And that's what missing from all debates that wrings it away from what I believe could be real change.

At least once each season each year, I would preach the importance of happiness. Even before I went to therapy and thought about other lessons I had to learn about myself, about how what is possibly most important is to know how to gain perspective, how to let go so you no longer judge yourself and remind yourself of how lucky you are that you have close people in your life that will never judge you because they like you who you are, regardless of what happens. I used to tell everyone that what was most important was happiness, and that if everyone had to go through some form of therapy with someone that they could trust and could just talk and talk and talk, there would be a new kind of normalcy, a healthy one, where people remember to work on being happier, and knowing how they are important and reflect on what has been good to them and what really bothers them, and where does that come from.

Can you imagine a world where everyone goes to therapy as if it's as normal as going to church and they get something out of it that they don't think twice about, because everyone goes to therapy.

And so back to the health debate. I get so caught up in the idea that there are two sides that I remember that everything has an issue that really does bother me in the mix, and the solution to it is usually the most difficult task that must be adopted on such a wide scale and on a personal level that it has more to do with a change in philosophy than a change in power. I want mental health for all, and doing what makes me happy is what I can do to promote what I believe is the most necessary change. It's something within my means, and at times is more difficult than I can describe to someone who believes that being an artist is exactly as it looks. Today, for probably about 8 hours I sat on a computer, surfing the internet, and now I feel like I figured out why.

--- --- ---
Other debates that can be boiled down to more important matters:
Pro-choice vs. pro-life, why are there so many unwanted pregnancies in the first place? Maybe abstinence isn't exactly the answer but why do we stress that we can change the world by deciding for others how they should deal with a personal nature that is in my mind an afterthought. We argue about something that has already happened, of course the debate will be heated, the point where you could keep a debate from happening is over. So there's that instead of stressing the importance of having sex with people you really care about, which I think it comes down to a matter of happiness again.

Oh man that episode when Lindsey tutors Daniel...

2010-03-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

I don't have cable, but I still love TV...

Freaks and Geeks was probably the best thing on tv when it was on. It could have gone on for much longer, it was brilliant, but sometimes these kinds of projects are meant to be looked back on with pride as your first ideas in some of its purest forms. Even the actors who were on that short lived show had careers that seemed so fresh. Seth Rogen could not act, but look at him now! Some of these people after the show ended really took off and some we didn't hear much back from them again afterwards. What's amazing is that that idea of what happened to these actresses and actors in real life hits home, I think, with the politics of high school. If you were a 'minor character' in the high school popularity contests, you may have gone on to do some great things, maybe it was the new friends, maybe it was that you were finally challenged on your grounds. If you were at the top of your life when you were in high school, well then… that's kindof unfortunate to peak so early and for such a short period of time. Perhaps high school is meant to be seen as something that sucks but it's short and necessary, necessary in that you realize what you will never want to deal with ever again in adulthood. True blossoming happens once you get the hell out, because that's when you go from thinking about more than the light at the end of the tunnel.

(This is one of the few times I was interested in the 'where are they now' crap, but I mean, the cheerleader in F & G is going to be a stripper in an upcoming movie, doesn't that remind you of the moment when you realized that the girl being double penetrated in Requiem for a Dream was also in Labyrinth! I guess that's what happens when you grow up along with the people who are kids in those movies, one day both you and that actor/actress think to themselves, I bet someone would pay to see (insert actor/actress) in a sex tape. And then it happens.)

Thoughts before going to Hawaii

2010-02-20T09:42:00.000-08:00

My list of priorities when I travel:

1. read on the beach
2. exercise / explore
3. journal/reflect
4. eat and/or cook amazing food.
5. find places / galleries that may want to show my work

New priorities for the next 4 months: (my 'should do' list)

1. Read more, on the list TO FINISH, 'what we want is free', essays/interviews/etc from Judy Pfaff, Mikhail Bakhtin and 'work ethic' from a show at the Baltimore museum of art.
2. Don't do any personal art shows, but work in the studio every day for at least 2 hours.
3. Learn to listen for the upcoming collaborations, think about the concept of sharing skills and the creation and authenticity of trust.
4. Fail at least 5 times in creating something, which means, make the damn thing, and then talk yourself out of showing it, as opposed to talking yourself out of making it.
5. Make mock ups for locations for the guerrilla art project.

Things not on a to-do list that are upcoming (my 'would do' list):
a. taxes
b. artist webpages for: Wiley Macdowell, Mary Fortuna, Mario Moore and Andrew Thompsons
c. 'I don't believe in art, I believe in artists' show at Whitdel Arts in April
d. finish laser cut commission

For the sake of having a 'could do' list:
a. Find possible art shows for 2011 out of state
b. Find more people (interns?) to hand off my thedetroiter.com projects to
c. Fund raise for gradschool: make a series of postcards to sell? a book? posters/prints?

Past priorities from the last 4 months, how did I do?

Well... I lost where I put it, so... I guess I may have failed. I wrote it in September...

I think one of the propositions was to make 3 really large paintings... I may have failed at doing that one... oops.

If you would like to get postcard art from Hawaii, let me know.

Band Names, because Rach and I are starting a band

2010-01-26T17:41:00.000-08:00

I don't care what anyone says, these are sweet band names that me and friends have come up with

Bakhtin
Tokyo O'keefe
Arizona Drug Summer
The Overdraft Fees
Murphy's Law School
Chorus of Aahs
Secret and Racial
Andy Malone
The Hot Glue Guns
Literally
Everyday Language
You know what

The name we liked: Chorus of Aahs, pronounced (kor-us of oz) you know, like when the crowd goes wild. aahhhh.

Did you know about THIS community program? Have you seen it? Be involved.

2010-01-20T22:03:00.000-08:00

UPDATES courtesy Sioux Trujillo

So where were you tonight? There was a meeting about being on the Artist Roster for CPAD, Community and Public Arts: Detroit, so that people can contact you about helping creating artwork. Um, meaning, that you would have the opportunity for people to contact you so that you could be paid to make artwork. I understand if you haven't heard that there was a meeting, but you better be more keen with what's going on because they've been giving up to 40,000 dollars to community arts projects, 6 a year.

What I kindof like the best about the program is that these artists also work with an experienced artist as a mentor for creating meaningful public art as well as paired up with an emerging artist of their choice so that that person will be even more qualified for applying for the next round and can get an idea of what they would be getting themselves into if they were interested in public art.

Even though he was the backup speaker, Mikel Bresee filled in for Sioux Trujillo and I enjoyed a lot of what he had to say (keep in mind this is paraphrased):

"Who would you call in the city of Detroit if you wanted to do a public art project? A local foundation for public works? A department of cultural affairs or a non-profit devoted to it? We don't have one. If you had 1,000,000 dollars for the public arts, do you know what I mean? There is no one. We are stepping into the void."

"Once you are listed in the Artist Roster, a city official from Southfield can scan our files and pick you out because they'll see your experience and your work listed and they'll call you up. So Folks in Korea can look at the amazing project that you did! For example people from Japan are reading an article about Katie Craig's mural."

"We do it the opposite way, usually it starts with a funder connected to an artist then comes the project and then the location. [The way we do it] the community first figures out what their goals are, start with the people that are there and go to the community. It's about the partnerships."

"Out of nowhere these city officials tear down the abandoned building next to our project, and next thing you know greening of Detroit shows up. It's a catalyst for other organizations to tag along."

"Kresge artists get 25 grand and they get to play in the studio, if you get chosen, you'll work your butt off!"

"The best public art is generative, the same as all art" Good art moves us, so true. "Public art is really about scale and scale means money... ...money covers design fees, travel, participation in meetings, production costs, delivery, installation..."

His advice if you want to apply for the 20-30K?: "You better like to work with youth and have the desire to work with and learn from the community... ...Mix it up and be flexible."
Find more here: http://www.cpadetroit.org/

I'm not sure when CPAD's website will be up of the past projects but here are some great news tidbits about past projects (25,000 - 40,000) some of this stuff you can find on google maps!:

1. Trumpet Vines grew beautifully up a public sculpture by Vito Valdez, and for some reason the only reference to it I could find on the internet (besides being semi-unlabeled on Flickr) is here. Anyone know the school where it's located or where to find pictures of the finished installed sculpture?

UPDATE: (DIA) Detroit International Academy Located on woodward just north of east grad blvd. We are rworking hard to get C+PAD website up and running. We have a flickr page that is updated on a regular basis. http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpadetroit/

2. Realistic mural works by Lester Jordan & Wilbert Riser transformed an abandoned facility to go from drug activity to having a Jazz Festival held there A YEAR LATER!

3. Hubert Massey's work on Grand Blvd. and Warren has a plaque on the pedestal that will honor a different resident each year! The work year after year will bring the Chadsey/Condon area together to celebrate the great people that live there! He said that it took a while to get all the right permits but it all came through!

4. Mary Laredo Herbeck made wrought iron & ceramic benches that was praised by the seniors for having a place to sit while waiting for the bus. (Wait I know that face, Anahli! Her mom promised that she'd cook for Faina and I if we ever stopped by, we still need to take her up on that offer...)

5. Chazz Miller in Brightmoore made work with the community that stops traffic! Greening of Detroit comes in, plants some stuff, they just happen to show up.

6. Soh Suzuki's work on the Glory Supermarket was a great feat of showing how the best instructors really know how to let the community make the work. It's no easy feat because most artists probably find out that they're control freaks, also there are plans to continue to expand the murals, and then another and then another... (I believe Faina Lerman has one made...)

7. Donald Calloway's work is on a methadone clinic but you wouldn't know it! (Also Ben Wright is mentioned in this article! I worked with him when he attended a workshop at MOCAD with Jamel Shabazz)

8. Talking Fence by Design 99 is still in the works but so far it's inspired landscape artists from Germany to deck out the garden, U of M is buying up three of the homes across the street to be turned into green houses. Just try to keep up. I personally really enjoyed hearing Johannes Matthiessen (landscape artist from Austria) talk about the project, he's very inspirational and wise, if I call correctly, I may have asked annoying questions that kindof put off Mitch at the time. There's a cool photo somewhere of Wiley Macdowell working w/ Mitch Cope too...

9. Speaking of organizations that start to have bigger an bigger opportunities hopping on like a snowball effect, Faina Lerman and Graem Whyte's Calimera Park idea may be expanding into a line item that is going to be voted on to give the project a boost in the hundreds of thousands. Including orchards and something else... and their crazy-cool-ripple-land-art thing. See item number 86.

10. There's a photo mosaic of Cesar Chavez going up somewhere in Southwest... anyone have any more specific info?

UPDATE: Its going up on LA SED on Vernor this spring. Lisa Luevanos is the artist. SWAN is hosting a meeting in southwest detroit. COMPAS Center for the Performing Arts, 8701 Vernor at Lawndale Saturday, January 23, 2010, 11:30am

11. Another bench but in Clark Park as well as a bandstand are going to be mosacially tiled. Anyone know who's doing it... Something mentioned the Luevanoses (it was going by pretty quick, I couldn't jot down all the projects and the people who did them... eep)

UPDATE: it’s already installed on Vernor across from cafe con leche. She held workshops at Patton Park all summer that were free and open to the public. People came and made tiles for the bench. Patton Park art studio was closed and it was the first time the kilns were used.!! Right now they have alot more tiles and are thinking of ways they can be used in the community. Maybe tiling around the bench....

12. What! It's soooo bright, Katie Craig's mural on the north end got some press from Washington Post, but also I heard that she's managing a studio on the first floor after she got permission to do the large work from the same people that own the Russell Industrial Center.

UPDATE: Katie is still working out the mural. There is a whole horizontal component that will made of layer plexi-glass. She has some small scale demos of the project in the studio. Go check it out. Katie worked with young people all summer at Vanguard and the arts place. She is also turned the space itself into a community space. She is planning a fundraiser to help pay for heat in the building for a few months. Info below:

On Saturday January 30, 2009 North End Studios, located in the cavernous shell of what was once the largest insurance agency in Detroit, will host a fundraiser for the space. It is a project run collectively by a small group of artists and musicians to provide studio space and community arts center to the impoverished area.

The fundraiser will be a dance party with the dubious and topical theme of "air traffic disasterz." The event will be kicked off with a live performance by the eccentric nerd-rockers Kirtybird [myspace.com/kurtybirdboogeymen]. The beats will be provided by Tour Detroit DJs Steven Robert, Erno the Infrerno, and Joe Vargas and accompanied with videography by projectionist Anthony Cholag [anthonysdrivein.com].
Admission for the event is $5 at the door and donations to support North End Studios will be accepted throughout the evening. North End Studios is located at 2937 East Grand Boulevard, Detroit. Doors are at 9 PM.

13. Juan-Carlos Hern (who was talked about as skipping school to work under Diego Rivera to help make the mural in the DIA) with Nivek Monet to do the side of Prince Valley's Market on Mich. Avenue.

14. Larry Halbert did a 13' piece out of the same marble that adorns the DIA, here's a video of the unveiling. But there's also an official dedication ceremony to take place on June 5th.

Wait, that's 14... 6 artists each year... uh... I mis-counted somewhere. Actually, the thing that kept popping into my head was that after everything was said, "e-mail Sioux Trujillo at strujillo@collegeforcreativestudies.edu" followed it. I don't envy being her e-mail inbox right now, because I'm totally going to e-mail her again to get involved.

UPDATE: Actually there is even more project that were not mentioned like when you were at he meeting did you notice the bricolage when you came through the door. That is also a C+PAD project. Also we worked with community and a designer to create light pole banners for each neighborhood. They are up in all the N’hoods now.

Here are some facts about the C+PAD

Outcomes
2 Neighborhood Organizations have contributed financially

to the projects totaling 20,000.00 so far

19 public artworks will be created.

31 artists are creating the neighborhood public artworks

63 Youth Mentors are being engaged and given a stipend

153 youth in all were involved in the projects

190 meetings took place across the six neighborhoods

specifically in implementing the projects

16 public programs were held

(lectures, banner unveilings, events related to the projects)

9 articles and radio and tv spots occurred

Banner projects: 100 designs were created. 690 banners

were installed; 6 CCS students and one professional

graphic artist were involved

Artists received 148,833.00 in payment to create public

artworks

artists spent 122,727.00 in supplies, equipment, and

expertise in local businesses.

218 neighborhood people and 32 different organizations

participated in the projects (site and artist selection, creation,

organizing dedications) 46 partner organizations

participated in the projects

Aaron Timlin was mentioned as someone brought up the legitimacy of Graffiti as art for the CAID's work with the Dequindre Cut, as well as some other organizations doing good things like Kresge Arts in Detroit.

UPDATE: When the riverfront first started to talk about how graffitti and the Cut were interrelated they came to C+PAD

And as always, members of the audience were so filled with optimistic spirit that many had kind words to say to the Skillman Foundation, CCS, Kresge and everyone else involved. After spending the day watching over the Neighborhood Project and listening to volunteer's memories of Detroit at the DIA it has been a very good day. BTW I have brought in some of my own books for the public to peruse through, if you think you might have a good book to lend that has to deal with art/education/the public sphere or anything of the like, let me know and you can add to this amazing temporary library.

I love that tonight I'm thinking of things that are bigger than myself, like trying to put artist webpages up for local artists' favorite artists or having every art space in Detroit to have a comprehensive listing so that you can see what the space looks like, the kind of work that it shows and how you can contact them about having your work there... I met an energetic guy named Rodney who may be helping me with that very big project so I'm so grateful to think that in thinking positive thoughts about getting a collaborator, one showed up, someone who just wanted to volunteer to help out the arts.

Oh and by the way, if you're not listed here, e-mail me.

(Addendum: But when all is said and done, I believe that change in Detroit won't necessarily happen because we stop clinging to the auto industry and change to a creative industry with the arts funding to model after artsy places renewed like Pittsburgh/Berlin, but I think that shrinking the city proper first and then having the rest turning into farms and then investing again in the schools will really be what turns this city around. But! Not to put a damper on the power of arts, it still has a powerful role as it will be the catalyst that begins that processssss!)

My work in print and how the year will break down.

2010-01-18T16:28:00.000-08:00

I am featured in Studio Visit Magazine's 7th edition. I have 3 for sale for $15 and they are also on sale at your nearest generic corporate bookstore as well as Re:View Contemporary gallery.

3 upcoming shows (1 curated show in April, 2 shows in September)

January: I'm trying hard to keep myself from applying to any art shows, but I'm submitting work for the Kresge Foundation's Art in the Office Program: an arts on loan program that lasts until the end of the year. I'm also in a very experimental mode. Playing with a cnc router, silicon molds, small scale wood sculptures, laser-cutting, clear resins and and but not in one piece...

February: Going to Hawaii from a kick-ass bartering trade, a 4' x 8' painting for a free trip for me and Rachel to Hawaii. Also I will be attempting to visit some schools, and will be figuring out the logistics for art about the Detroit Public Schools... I also want to have put up people's work on thedetroiter.com before I leave.

March: Possibly going to Hong Kong? Will the Sugar Hill Residency be underway? Recording the next He-Bops album? We'll See...

April: "currently untitled" - A group show curated by Cedric Tai at the Ladybug Gallery in Southwest Detroit. Featuring work by Adrian Hatfield, Megan Heeres, Isaac Richard, Janine Surma, Justin Marshall, Ian Swanson and probably me.

May: My birthday and I will be doing an artist demonstration at the DIA on the 16th, which I also believe is the day that Nick Cave is speaking!

June - July -August: Yay summer, hopefully I'll either be teaching a summer class or working on a community project, we'll see.

September: Solo show at Re:View gallery! Two person art installation w/ Ian Swanson at Starkweather Art Center in Romeo, MI

October: Um... making a sweet halloween costume?

November: Deciding on grad school.

December: Applying to grad school!

Sometimes I don't know what to do about art

2010-01-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

Some days it's more fun to make art like a sculptor,
Sometimes I think I was meant to be a performance artist,
Somedays I just stare at intaglio etchings and wish I was a printmaker,
Some days I miss being a ceramicist
Sometimes I just want to learn from fiber artists and have the hours flow by,
Someday I want to teach painting,
Sometimes I just want to make interactive kinetic artwork with an innovative group of geeks,
Some days I wish I knew more poets,
Sometimes I wonder if I'd ever be able to compose a song to be performed by an entire symphony orchestra
Some days I feel like I'm coming up with impossible conceptual art,
Sometimes I feel like I'm just an updated form of abstract expressionism,
Some days I just want to work with lead or resin without having to worry about safety,
Sometimes I wish I could write as neat as an architect and draw like one too,
Some days I am really jealous of directors because millions of people see the message they want to put out into the world,
Sometimes I want to be part of a well-respected graphic design firm that gets to only do large scale fun creative projects
Some days I get a little bit closer to making the art I really want to make.

this year needs to end.

2009-12-30T21:48:00.001-08:00

So I end my year of realizing I've been way too busy, and promise myself as a new years resolution to do LESS with MORE!

here's today's day in a nutshell:
Number of times I saw people's studios for the first time: 3
Number of shows I retrieved work from: 4
Number of shows I made money from in the month: 3
Number of shows I participated in, in the month: 6
Number of Works of art de-installed / picked up: 33
Number of boxes of recyclables we took care of: 4
Number of phone calls regarding picking up a queens size bed: 7
Number of elevators taken (up or down): 3
Number of times I went into my studio: 3
Number of meals cooked: 0
Number of friends we haven't seen in months: 3
Number of times I sat down and ate a meal with someone: 2
Number of great ideas I got that I can use in my art practice: 1
Number of things that I was reminded of that I need to finish: 7
Number of times I wish I was doing something else: 0
Number of times Rachel was right: 2 out of 2
Number of hours slept: 7
Number of promises broken: 0
Number of times I physically worked on my own art: 0
Number of hours in my day (so far): 13
Number of photographs taken of bread: 14
Number of art pieces given via art trades: 4
Number of Works possibly sold: 3
Number of Checks cashed to balance my checkbook: 3
Number of Checks dropped off to pay for rent etc.: 3
Number of People I've made smile (including Rachel): 10
Number of boxes I used to move stuff around: 8
Number of People I've made laugh: 3
Number of People I probably pissed off today: 2
Number of hours spent on the computer: 1
Number of hours spent driving: 2
Number of hours on the phone: 1
Number of different locations I stopped by for errands: 8
Number of children I have: 0
Number of house chores finished: 0
Number of art pieces I put up in the house: 5
Number of DVDs watched about how to use your new appliance: 1
Number of to-do lists compiled into one: 3

Craziest Wednesday all year, 12-30-09

So far in Arizona...

2009-12-23T03:03:00.000-08:00

I was writing a really fun blog post but it got deleted when my computer overheated, so this is a dry boring version just to get it all down before I go to bed. sorry.

Travelling always helps me be in a good mind space for plotting art. I finally got to check out the contemporary galleries around Scottsdale and the people watching the galleries that I met were so nice and accommodating! We hit the galleries late so we only got to about 4 galleries, but that's a lot to some people.

We first stopped by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art because well, they do a great job of having multiple exhibitions that look like they took a long time to install, that's always something to look forward to, but I was a little sad that I missed Nick Cave's Sound Suits.

First stop was passing a lot of terrible paintings of horses (sorry, I only drool over realistic paintings of clouds and nature) and checking out Gebert Contemporary which was very pretty inside, but mostly I liked this piece. And the person in the gallery at the time told me that the best place for good contemporary art was to head over to Marshall Way.

Art One Gallery was one of the most inspirational galleries I had ever seen, just because their mission of educating students on how to make a career via the galleries was done on their terms. My mom thought it reminded her of the Neutral Zone in Ann Arbor, but I felt like it had a lot of tough love due to how realistically grounded it was in the art market. Not to mention they had an exhibit of neon work. Get this, in this area they have the ONLY high school in the world that has a neon light art class, chalk that up with the other thousands of things I believe Detroit should have in my naive jealous mindset.

Lisa Sette Gallery had the most memorable work, I absolutely loved Mayme Kratz's work. I want to be her assistant to help her make large sculptures and to sand resin to a smooth polish. I was about to buy her book but it was missing like 4 or my favorite works of hers, so I guess I'll just have to wait. I also really liked Carrie Marill's works made with gouache which reminded me of when my fiber friend Sheila was telling me that in the world of high fashion you're expected to be able to master rendering your designs in gouache, a lost art in the states. And that conversation reminds me of watching Gommora, which reminded me of City of God... Oh yeah, and they represent Julie Heffernan, awesome.

We had just enough time to see work in the Bentley gallery, which I was bummed to have missed seeing Pat Steir's installation, but they were awesome and told me where to find these magnets that they were using to hold up some artwork and I was surprised with the range of work that was in the gallery. Maybe I've just never seen graffiti collaboration in the same gallery as large glazed porcelain wall pieces.

Usually the best part of travelling is actually travelling, you know, moving. We are almost an hour away from where my brother lives so there's quite a bit of highway driving. It's great, gives me time to talk with Dad and think about my art. We somehow got to talking about diversity after discussing if we thought that immigrants from 3rd world countries ever thought about if our country being in a recession really matters or not. Really the link was that we were agreeing that one of the best parts of America is its inherent diversity because of immigration. I can't help but think of that diversity in terms of land too as we drove through the cool desert night as opposed to slushy snow in Michigan. He was saying one good example was the immigrants that came to the US because it could offer the best education in the world. I can't help but think that could it also be that it was the best education in the world BECAUSE of the immigrants themselves? But I guess that gets into a what came first, the chicken or the egg kind of discussion.

So we were still driving and my mind was wandering to why do I emphasis diversity less than I used to? I really want to get back to one of my first artist statements I ever wrote, about how interested I was in diversity, and how I feel like I have an eye for it and want to help others to be able to appreciate it as well. I think that it really influences the way I curate shows, I always want to see work that fits, but comes from many different thought processes (which inexplicably somehow creates shows where the work relates to one another better the more you try to achieve the widest range of work). I also feel like it comes back to how I love using multiple mediums in a single work and I never seem to be able to do the same painting twice. The work I liked the most in Scottsdale were pieces that seemed new and bold, but at the same time it seems to come back to diversity because I appreciated such a wide range of works that seemed to come from earnest investigations, work that avoided looking like other work.

So thinking about diversity I've been turning these questions over and over in my mind:

Is diversity a privilege?

Has anyone studied if diversity has a monetary or other value?

Can diversity hurt?

Can diversity be created? (and not the kind where you Photoshop ethnic faces on white people's bodies)

How I would like to introduce myself...

2009-12-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

At the Creative Capital Workshop we did this thing where we said one-liners about our work, I liked Dread Scott's usually, Hi my name is Dread Scott, I make revolutionary art to propel history forward, and he said another artists' version, Hi my name is Dread Scott and I blow minds for a living" Wasn't that Jello Biafra?

So I'm going through peoples' comments about my work, and a lot of them tell me that they like my work a lot and that it's not often that they ever say that, so I want to say this to when I introduce myself to a group

"My name is Cedric Tai, and I make paintings for people with high expectations."

Upcoming Art Shows --> Re:View Gallery, Roy G Biv, D.I.P., Pure Detroit, 4731, & The Bureau of Urban Living

2009-12-08T20:56:00.000-08:00

Click the link if you need directions, or just want to know more about the event.

[currently up] My work is still up at Re:View gallery! I think that one of the pieces sold, so there should be a couple left. It's located on the same street as Avalon bakery in the first floor of those lofts on Willis (in Detroit). The work is going to remain there in the store part of Re:View after the exhibition comes down.
[currently up] I secretly made small mock-ups for larger sculptural paintings I plan to make and they are for sale at the Roy G Biv gallery in Columbus OH. I'm actually hoping they sell even though I kindof need them, just so that I don't necessarily have to drive back down.
[currently up] New paintings that I really like are for sale at the Detroit Industrial Projects, which plans to be open for sure, when MONA also has it's Jeanne-Claude and Christo show.
[Friday - December 11th] Then there's a quick show at the Magic Stick with the "Pure 11" Pure Detroit's Anniversary Bash where they are not taking any commission so the prices will not have to include any gallery cut! (scarlet oaks is playing, I believe it's $11 for 11 bands)
[Saturday - December 12th] The Ben Franklin Project, all the work is $100, I made 2 new paintings (one is pictured below) and put in 3 older pieces. Goes from 7-11 at 4731 Grand River, hosted by the one and only Bryant Tillmans.
[Friday - December 18th] My exclusive paintings for the Bureau of Urban Living will be unveiled in conjunction with a late night Trunk Sale at City Bird! It runs from 5-8, I will probably try to drop by at 5 to talk with people, but then I have a potluck at our house that I need to get back to!

and I'm excitingly finally working towards 5 goals that I've been planning for way too long and not actually getting on: collaborating with another artist for a two person show in about a year, getting a very nice table saw, learning how to make molds, learning internet language to build a interactive website/artwork, and finally taking a well deserved break!

Rach and I are celebrating our successes with a free trip to Hawaii the last two weeks of February!! (I bartered a 4' x 8' painting to stay in a big house on the big island, being an artist is sweet.) She's going to be done with her thesis and will finally take a break after... what is it... 13 years straight of school? And it will be perfectly time before she transitions into looking for jobs and what else she really wants to do in Detroit, and I will use it as an opportunity to congratulate myself on two hard years of work that got me to where I am today. So if you've ever been to Hawaii and have got an idea of something that we absolutely have to do while we're there, please leave a comment.

How can I do something positive?

2009-12-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

I just realized Christianity has 2 good quotes:
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions" and
"Do unto others as you would do unto yourself"
That's possibly all that is redeemable about that religion.

I've been having some nice conversations with Rachel about lessons we've learned in our paths of what we do. I realized that I would like to teach students somehow about how in life there are two important concepts that are both real and can possibly crash into each other head on and so require a kind of attention and awareness.

The first concept is that in order to find peace and happiness with ourselves, it is really important to be goal-oriented, work at uncovering what is true to ourselves, and to practice those things that we need to do for ourselves (to remind ourselves how we are important), to become passionate, fearless.

The second concept is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We inhabit a constantly changing world of luck and chance where there is a time and place for everything to explode or become stagnant regardless of intentions.
In addition to this, often we do not take the time to recognize our habits. For example, eating when we're nervous can not only make us obese, but the types of food we eat could very well be tied to a system of food production that is destructive when there are a vast number of people over consuming.

These are life lessons because they take a lifetime to work on, and it's how we define life. When shit happens or life's unfair we say well that's life. When you're surprised that you're able to work on your dream project? We say, "that's what life's made of!"

It's not about what's in between those two concepts, about walking a thin line or keeping them as far away from each other as possible, but rather, those who make the kind of difference they want to make in the world are always listening to themselves and everything around them, seemingly calm, alert and ready. To make a positive difference, one must be considerate.

I'm just thinking about all of this before I go into an interesting self-made residency...

Vacation was very good for me

2009-11-30T16:14:00.000-08:00

I think I can now finally do some strategic planning... thanks to going to Chicago!

Here's where all the inspiration came from:

The new modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago was amazing, reminded me of having the potential of being a mini-Tate museum at one point I walked into a room that had 3 of my favorite painters in one room, Sigmar Polke, Albert Oehlen and Ellen Gallagher, almost crapped my pants. Highlights for me were reading about the meaning behind Robert Gober's pieces, reading about the meaning behind Philip Guston's individual pieces, seeing a whole room dedicated to Gerhard Richter, a gorgeous gigantic tree by Charles Ray that was hand carved out of Cedar by japanese workers based an actual decaying tree that was removed and cast that this artist found in the woods one day.

I fell in love with the color transitions in Claude Monet's Branch of the Seine near Giverny, every time I saw a circle in Max Ernst's work, The cracks in Harold Sohlberg's Fisherman's Cottage, Gino Severini's Centrifrugal Expansion of Color, Matta's Psychological Morphology and I'm totally going to make these stools Konstantin Grcic made out of two tires and a circular piece of wood, and attempt to make his water/wine glasses (you just flip them over to change which one it is) they were totally what minimalist dreams are made of. Also memorable for me were Hella Jongerius embroidered tablecloth and staring at sketches by Louis H. Sullivan. Dear Art Institute of Chicago, please make postcards of all of these pieces, I would buy them right now, I have cash.

Saw a picture of the marble statues made by maurizio cattelan, loved it.

although still a little upset that I missed Cy Twombly, Olafur Eliasson, and Matthew Barney...

Watched the movie 2012 and Red Cliff on the big screen, both movies involved filling up a cup of tea way too much and then explaining a moral lesson while doing so. It reminded me that there's a bare bones screenplay I want to look at again and I really want to exercise daily in order to be able to fight for my life better when the time comes, I'd hate to be one of those people that die just because they weren't constantly fighting for other people to survive.

Visited galleries in the West Loop of Chicago, the best stuff I saw was Casey Riordan Millard's forgettable shark, Ann Worthing's untitled turtle, everything by John Delk in the Robertello Gallery, Deborah Dancy's abstract paintings in G.R. N'namdi and Frank Connet's resist's in the beautifully hidden Douglas Dawson gallery. I also enjoyed a postcard thingy I picked up of Zach Taylor's work from the Linda Warren gallery, and a postcard thingy of Ruijun Shen and Tom Van Eynde, so a word to galleries, you should keep all of your postcards out! Oddly, there were about 5 galleries that weren't even open... it was 3 o'clock on a Saturday, shouldn't they be open? For some reason seeing John Delk's work really struck a chord with me, the gallery reminded me of a place that would show Mike Smith's work, and the gallery owner explained how even very conceptual work is sold, however with a much slower process. He also explained that all the work had the underlying theme of how in this day and age of information, the more information over time, the more everything just kind of greys out, and he also described how John Delk worked in some kind of archiving for Jasper Johns and it probably informed his body of work. For seemingly no good reason, it just hit me that rather than thinking about what the ideal theme of my work would be, I would need to look inward unabashedly about what I actually do most of the time when I make art, not what is the statement I want to make, but where do I come from that informs my art making? It hit me on the ride back home on the Megabus. My work comes down to reacting and collecting... knowing that I can distill my practice to those two words make me so confident, I can't even explain...

Thinking about artists I like

2009-11-30T09:15:00.000-08:00

I was looking through art links and found this: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/mostpopular.html
If I had it my way, I'd educate students so that the list looked like this:
1. Replace Picasso with Duchamp
2. Vincent Van Gogh
3. Leonardo da Vinci
4. Henri Matisse
5. Claude Monet
6. Salvador Dali
7. Georgia O'Keeffe
8. Andy Warhol
9. Michelangelo
10. Replace Rembrandt with Helen Frankenthaler
11. Replace Alfred Stieglitz with Louise Bourgeois
12. Replace Peter Paul Rubens with Basquiat
13. Wassily Kandinsky
14. Replace Cezanne with Hiroshi Sugimoto
15. Replace Jackson Pollock with Cy Twombly
16. Joan Miro
17. Piet Mondrian
18. Rene Magritte
19. Replace Raphael with Mel Chin
20. Replace Renoir with Sigmar Polke
21. Goya
22. Edgar Degas
23. Albrecht Durer
24. Paul Klee
25. Marc Chagall
26. Replace Titian with Maurizio Cattelan
27. M.C. Escher
28. Edward Hopper
29. Frida Kahlo
30. Caravaggio

who would you replace?

woah, did I just get my first gallery representation?

2009-11-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

I think I just did, but I can't believe it! And now onto a pre-thanksgiving feast!

Checkout Re:Collect 2009, opening December 5th, 5pm - 10 pm

Re:Collect is Re:View Contemporary’s special end-of-year group exhibit showcasing works by 21 Detroit area artists. The works, which observe a size limit of 12" x 12" x 12", include painting, sculpture, and mixed media.This event also marks the celebration of the gallery’s first year anniversary and grand opening of its new extended spaces: a NEW Exhibitions Gallery and a NEW Design Store, showcasing art and functional items by local designers.

Thursday, 2 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Friday, 2 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday, noon - 6 p.m.
or by appointment.

Re:View Contemporary Gallery
444 W. Willis Street, Unit 111
Detroit, MI 48201
Tel: 313.833.9000

Maybe the trick isn't giving up, but getting a bigger dream.

2009-11-20T11:21:00.000-08:00

I am stuck, hit a wall, part of me is still winded from being awarded the fellowship, anxiety gripping me from doing what I said I would be interested in doing. At first I thought that I need to break this mental block about how I need to make even better work than I've ever done before, and in order to do that, in a way... I need to give something up, like I need to give up my belief in doing what has proven to work, or give up in my pursuit of an impossible goal, or give up on believing that I have to know what I'm doing... but after listening to NPR, an episode about people who really did things in big ways, I want to be doing the opposite. I need inspiration right now on overdrive, I need to be hungry again. I want to be dreaming bigger, thinking bigger.

crap it started and I didn't even think about it.

2009-11-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

so I guess now I'm blogging regularly. if I think about it long enough, it kindof sucks. Mostly, because everyone will know how much time I actually waste, there's a time signature attached to these things... I get sick for four days and next thing I know I'm making a blog, imagining a better blog, updating my bloated webpage with new thumbnails, adding new pictures of work on deviantart, creating a 2nd clean looking portfolio through deviantart, trying to get another recommendation on linked in, figuring out how to make everything get posted through tumblr to show up on facebook, getting confused about how many new programs there are and thinking to myself how to download a podcast or how to use wordpress, finding out what new gadgets the internet has to offer because people keep moving from one thing to another within 3 months, staring at other artists' webpages to dream about a world where I could literally steal how their website looks and is formatted by pressing command + F4... all because I'm avoiding doing the strategic planning workbook from the creative capital workshop... what was I supposed to do today again?

2009-11-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

ok, I'm already bored and discouraged with how this blog looks, I'm moving on to tumblr... I still don't know what the hell rss feeds are on any of this, but I'm going to get something that looks cleaner, similar to how vimeo has overtaken youtube as being the best way to post artistic videos

Grad Schools

2009-11-17T18:43:00.000-08:00

Grad schools I will be looking into shortly to pair down to just a list of 8... if you have any suggestions let me know!

Carnegie Melon
Cranbrook
Duke University
Glasgow School of Art
Goldsmiths School of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art
Minneapolis School of Art & Design
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
Ohio State
Pratt
Rensler
Rhode Island School of Design (thanks ian)
Roman Institute
Royal College of Art, London
Temple University (PA)
Tisch ITP
UCLA
University of New South Wales, Australia
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Virginia Commonwealth University
Yale

Finally figured out how to update my webpage easier... by not updating my webpage.

2009-11-17T13:39:00.000-08:00

Testing testing.

Very proud of myself lately, talked myself out of buying the Fein Multi-master because I just thought it would be fun to use, not because it's actually practical for what I need to do...

My new form of to-do lists makes me actually think I'm being more productive while probably actually doing less, but more directed... If anyone wants to hear about it, e-mail me, it's a culmination of 3 different people's advice mishmashed into one clean document!

Um, also there's a couple shows coming up if anyone finds this blog in time. (I swear, I never give ample time to let people know about my shows...) anyways, there's one at Re:View gallery, I'm trying to mull over having work at the Magic Stick, because although Pure Detroit likes my art, it is going to be shown on a pool table...

Also, while in the midst of being really sick, I quickly curated a show that will take place at the Ladybug Gallery!

And finally! I'm looking forward to a secret group show. With amazing secret artists! See you there when it's officially announced?

The beginning

2007-08-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

I am an artist and art educator in Detroit, I want to be a Detroit artist and make sure that art is at the forefront of revitalizing Detroit.

The mission statement: A sustainable, evolving, influential, uniquely Detroit, artist community.

The idea: to connect it all together for this generation, themed: "recycled city"

Beyond: Beautiful decay, shrinking cities, graffiti, art fairs and gated communities for retired artists. (stole that line from somewhere)

See: Heidelberg Projects, Michigan Theater, Readymade Magazine, and my paintings on used acrylic plastic. (reduce, reuse, recycle) As well as my friends that paint on found objects.

To do list:
create a manifesto/mission statement
collect artists
find communities that already exist that can help
research the history of detroit
research the history of art communities and their beginnings
make friends
find people who want to help who are marketers, business people, grant writers, organizers, art gallery owners, everyone who is proud of being from Detroit and wants to make it even better.
find space

Everyday I hear about someone leaving to another place, not Detroit, not Michigan, a place of opportunity to make art, meet people, make it big. Why not Detroit? Why have so many left and so many plan to leave?

When I grew up my parents took me to art galleries and museums around Detroit, I grew up with Detroit art, that is why I have to stay here, my love of art has grown here, I have to give back to the community, I want to be part of a community, I want to make this community as big as much of a haven for artists as New York in the 70s once was, without gentrification. We can use what we have here, and the characteristics that make it uniquely our home, our base.

In between, Chicago, New York, Toronto and... Sandusky, Ohio, Michigan is a good place to be in the middle of everything, but how do we attract people unless it involves cars, sports or gambling? Model D's unofficial art series was brilliant we need more of that, I would love to see zines that talk about the best places to get vegan food within 20 miles. My friend's collective, undercover eskimo had a poloroid trading club and played music and made clothes. I can almost see the artists bringing people in and getting them interested in what we have, in our festivals, in our music, in our collaboration, in our potlucks, in our homes.

Things most people don't know about Detroit:
Detroit's crime rate is lower than the national average and it has a wonderful farmers market and it may be the most photogenic city in the United States.

This is my informal call to everyone who is interested, I have the energy, I have the talent, I have the connections, I have the business sense, I have the space, I have the time, I have the resources, I have the friends, I have the support, I have nothing to lose and neither does Detroit. Let's make an art community.

Virginia Tech Shootings

2007-07-28T00:53:00.000-07:00

We battle fear when we watch the news.

This is how I talk about the situation, some Asian guy was really depressed and shot a bunch of people and he did it easily, no one is afraid of Asians because this happened, there hasn't been a rash of hate crimes, Asian people are not being put into secret prisons the day after this shooting occurred.

It is a time for reflection when we are surprised by our own nonchalant acceptance that the shooter was Asian. I consider this, the eye of the storm of school shootings.

The media tried but didn't know how to sell the story to us. Was he a psycho? Should we be afraid of people who might "snap"? Was it because of "rich kids"? Was he externalizing his hatred through video games and other violence? In the end we were left with a very depressed person who was completely and utterly intense and we were confused, then sad and then we tried to be scared, but something didn't click over, we didn't become immediately defensive, we saw something about him that meant that either it may never happen again or we think that it can be prevented.

I like to believe the latter, that we have a positive outlook on a tragic situation, because we have a lack of a negative response. Most times in life we are vocal about things that are negative, if something positive can come out of this, it's not going to parade itself around and blast it like trumpets, we will find ourselves in a positive situation that we setup for ourselves and wouldn't know we even changed anything.

So that's been a long rant with not much explanation...
Ok, here's my point. In a mass-killing with more disbelief than fear we have the opportunity to unravel the mystery behind how to prevent extreme situations much like this one. This is possible because fear muddles up rational thought towards emotional ones and variables multiply causing a polarization of precautionary efforts.

The teachers had all the resources to find out if he needed help and the university had all the resources to help him, or could show him where he could find more help. So what went wrong? Our system is built to handle even the most unpredictable solutions. I believe that that there is too much of a stigma built around expressing yourself, counseling and even reporting students that may be at risk. In other words we almost fear help as if it shows weakness and/or gives false promises of change.

I believe that talking to someone should be a part of education, if everyone in middle school had to talk to a counselor about what they should be doing for a career, then everyone should be given an hour out of every week of school to do one of two things, either create small groups of students to talk about anything and say anything without repercussion in order to vent, or talk personally with someone (someone who is paid just like we pay someone professionally) to just listen and help people ask questions with the highest privacy. I was elated when I first heard that none of heard that none of his writings would be released to the media, we were hungry to know how different he was and how violent his past, this would comfort us at least, but his teachers wouldn't give the news this kind of ammo. I think privacy can help establish trust, and when we trust that we can tell someone something and we think they will listen, talking/writing becomes our outlet.

The whole part of bringing in professional help is especially difficult, how would we pay a professional psychiatrist for every school in the nation? How would they get to every student? I don't want to go on a big rant about how if we didn't use money to pay for a war, we would have more money for education, not only is that obvious, but who knows if we would have actually put all that money to good use had we had a surplus. Prevention is the most cost effective way to approach this very expensive theory, think about all the people who may not have needed to go to a shrink later on in life because they knew what questions to ask themselves, knowing to ask the biggest questions, where am I coming from, where am I going, why? Imagine frustrated students who had an outlet, what if in this mandatory group someone who picked on students actually had to face the victim, and the victim felt empowered to be able to have a conversation with the bully about what it felt like and what it means. As opposed to what we have today, a reactive approach based on negative reinforcement to stop bullying.

(note: just in case it's not obvious to some, not everyone has someone to talk to, I think that fact needs to end, just like if we approved universal health care for children, there should be universal MENTAL health care.)

This personality of the shooter in the Virginia Tech Shootings is so unusual because people were all around him, there were so many opportunities to talk with him, to get to know him, to tell him that someone was there for him. I can't wait for a day in our society where we get past passive aggressive behaviors towards what frustrates us and not being in fear to tell someone exactly how we feel, especially to someone who we may feel has exerted power onto our being, but having conversation be such an essential part of life that we get past the awkwardness and the discomfort of talking to other people this way and DEAL with issues.

I don't feel like posting a huge rant about what could happen if we didn't do something along these lines, because that post is about 5x's as big and it's mainly negative and could give someone a sense that there is no hope. But there is hope, there has always been hope, we need to recognize the importance of education, the importance of talking, the importance of connection, the importance of love, the importance of expression, the importance of art, the importance of you, the importance of me, we need to be terribly optimistic that people can get help and that we can end school shootings, victims killing victims.

So here's where the hope lies, there was a shooting where the shooter wasn't pegged right away about why we should be afraid. And we shouldn't be afraid, to be afraid to have conversations about this issue, about depression, about what we can do to make it better, to make others not afraid to speak out about their own depression and their own thoughts. It's rare that we have an opportunity that is not defeated by fear from the get go and we need to take it to re ***** our education system.

(I put ***** there because I don't know what word to use to describe how everyone feels our education system should be handled, if it is blank, then it is up to you, the reader to find out your way to help schools and our youth.) revitalize-redo-revamp-reconstruct etc.

I feel just like Joe Natoli, movies making me think.

2007-07-24T20:38:00.001-07:00

Ratatouille and the Netherlands philosophy on Education.

I was watching that new movie and thinking to myself, this was the best movie about food since Kenan and Kel brought us Good Burger, which if you were not aware, was one of the best kids movies to talk about an extremely important topic at an extremely important time. It's all about genetically engineered food, and if you don't believe it, do yourself the most fun favor you'll ever have and watch Good Burger again.

But this connection is related to the only 3 questions that we ask ourselves before we die, where do we come from, where are we going and why? One question that is sometimes asked is how. In the movie there is a book called anybody can cook. Besides having the coolest background scenery in a digital movie (the kitchen) and the promotion of the culinary arts and the importance creativity to innovation, it leaves the viewer with some deep philosophical ideas to think about. Which is directly related to a conversation which I had with this dude:

He is a professor and director of American Studies at the University of Utrecht. We talked about the problems with the educational system in the US and I mentioned that I read a research paper in one of my education classes that when a school fails in the Netherlands they give the school as much money as it needs and when a school does poorly in the U.S. it's closed down. So I casually asked him if there was one thing he wished all teachers taught in the states, what would it be.

This was roughly his answer:
That people who are poor, hungry or struggling do not have as much choice in life as we think, circumstances dictate our position in life, no one chooses to be in the circumstances they find themselves in and should not be expected to perform under the same circumstances. The first example he uses is if we had a choice before we were born to be born into a family that is well off financially, good health and security and one without, we would without a doubt choose to be born into the privileged family. However because this choice doesn't exist and not everyone lives in such luxury, we cannot assume someone should just pull-up their bootstraps and get to work and they will all be able to be successful.

I asked him that can't we teach empathy in schools? And replied that it is not enough. It's not enough because why should someone understand someone else's circumstances, we are telling people how they should feel instead of fostering an environment that these ideas would naturally grow out of. He used the example of being an artist.

And that's when it became a heated argument. We had previously been on exactly the same page, if we teach children that in life most people don't have the privilege of having a choice about their future, they will be more inclined to help others and understand problems on a more personal level, the idea of selfless acts. He claimed that he was never born with the talent to become a great artist, and he will never be an artist and it is something he has accepted.

I vehemently disagreed. I read somewhere on Deviantart once "Talent is like a garden, the more you tend for it, care for it, and pay close attention to it, it will grow." So I believe that in fact he could be a great artist and there was no such thing as being born not being able to be a good artist. He said he may be able to make art, but he would never be able to be great. I questioned the idea of who is able to say what is "great". This is where our conversation hit a stalemate, and where Ratatouille picked up.

In the end of the movie, there is a great "moral" lesson, which I would say is more of a "philisophical" lesson. That what the book meant, not everyone can cook, doesn't necessarily mean everyone who begins cooking can become a great culinary artist, but rather regardless of where someone comes from, what they look like and the diverse backgrounds involved a world-renown chef can emerge. This makes me think about all the really amazing memoirs that have been coming out, usually hilarious.

So what does this mean for teaching art, even about happiness? In the movie the little rat love challenges and finds the most happiness in his working, not even about becoming a great chef, but simply the act of cooking great food. I think back to Hans and our conversation and I think about what conclusion we could derive from our conflict about what it means to be great. We cannot teach everyone that they will all be great but some people just have different "purposes in life", this can lead to false promises and pretentiousness, your background doesn't define you. Greatness is not entirely on being "Something", but in the successes in each small obstacle that lead to greatness. We can't promise you will be great, but there is no doubt in my mind that you will become something great if you can recognize it in yourself. It could be true that everyone has a paved road to success but you, but that cannot keep your from achieving success.

What a great film for art educators: "In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." We naturally will have to be critical, but on the other hand know that greatness is possible, which is where we are allowed to be blindly optimistic.

random tangent, slightly related... slightly.
It also makes me think about words: good, better, and best. When I think about it, the word "better" is always "better" than "best", because it's in a state of becoming, something can be better than the best, and then the best is just good. You can even be better than the best of the best of the best. Challenges are meant to keep us going, not to stop us, it can be the most fun you get out of life. Just like why sex has orgasms, there's a reason why there is a happy aspect to everything, happiness is a great motivator, it's why we are alive today.

p.p.s. another tangent. I just read that the tag line is "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can become great" and that totally works so well with my theory that we must defeat the culture of fear that keeps us from thinking about alternatives and dominates our minds to keep us quiet and obedient.