Asterisk*

Here are some highlights of my work in our end of the semester show for Viza631.  And in case you're wondering, yes, the pictures of pieces that have fallen off of the work is indeed intentional.  My work is designed to degrade slightly over time, as the changing surfaces mimic the fluctuating nature of memory and perception

Dysmorphia

4'x6' (wax, salt, acrylic, powdered charcoal, plaster, plaster sculpting clay, playsand)

 

 

Today I completed my final piece for the semester, titled "Dysmorphia", in which I address specifically my struggles with body image, my diabetes, and gay culture.  My original plan was formulated in a previous post, but as you can see there have been some significant changes, all of which were discovered by accident.  There's a lot of talk about process here, but if you want to get straight to the meaning of this painting, you can skip to the blue section near the end :)

I began the way I normally do, looking at the intuition drawing to reorient myself on the emotional memories, and then letting my body intuitively express them on the canvas.  Next  I next began painting, using water to mix the paint with the charcoal, after which I began constructing the gash in the center with a mixture of plaster and (though I didn't intend this) plaster sculpting clay with I though was another carton of lightweight plaster and tossing around salt and powdered charcoal.  At this point I was feeling lost.  Everything seemed arbitrary and contrived and did not carry the emotional weight I had obtained in the intuition sketch.  So, I went to a crock pot in which I had been melting blocks of paraffin wax, and, since there were no handles to prevent me from burning my hands, i had use some oven mitts to lift out the pot.  Generally speaking, the pot was ceramic and therefore slippery, and this in addition to the lack of friction with the mitts its no surprise that I dropped it on the canvas and spilled wax across almost the entire surface.  Obviously, there was immediate horror, but these things do happen and I have learned to move with the situation.

So, I let everything cool down, meditated, and play with the new surface, discovering it was impossible to paint on but also froze everything underneath the wax which was awesome.  So I took it further, pouring on more wax, throwing n more charcoal, getting a knife and carving into the surface, spraying on a clear matte primer which allowed me to paint again, but what was this telling me?  I had done all these things to the surface but had not discovered anything.  But of course, this is when the revelation came.

When I first started dropping the charcoal, I had gotten a water bottle and sprayed water on to see if I could freeze the powder to surface with it without blowing it away.  Here I did the same thing, and unintentionally created pools of water that drifted across the surface, picking up particles of paint, wax, salt, and charcoal and depositing them in the cracks and crevices of the wax.  Unintentionally, I had discovered a way to reveal every mark and scar in the surface. 

How does his relate to dysmorphia?

Glad you asked!  I came to the realization that in this piece, the wax becomes my body, and every element that I added to alter the surface becomes a reflection of what I feel I need to change about myself.  These efforts destroy and alter the surface in ways that are mostly invisible to me, yet an unintentional element reveals the truth.  The water washes away the surface, picking up the superficial materials and redepositing them into the traumas that I have inflicted beneath the projections, forcing me to acknowledge not only the fact that they exist, but that I am accountable.  In many ways I do not see myself as I am, but only in terms of the environment in which I am placed.  This relative identification is corrosive because those elements are not inherent to my body, placed, instead, by the cultures of which I construct my identity.  The images of male models and masculinity are merely simulacrums of perfection, yet for me they have become reality and I am a deviation.  

You may wonder about the significance of the scar in the middle of the image.  Well, to me, the flaws in my appearance are the only things I see.  They become magnified to extreme proportions, though in reality they are mostly unnoticeable.  This scar is a side effect of my diabetes, called lipodystrophy (the deterioration of fat due to frequent insulin injections).  On my left thigh, I have developed a small dent where the fat has deteriorated, and though it's barely noticeable, I obsess over it enough that it is perfect for a representation of how I see myself.  

2nd Pass of a Final Piece

    Completed a 2nd pass on this piece today.  I added blown up printouts of a journal I kept during my undergrad, and let me tell you how terrifying it is for me to put them there.  I literally had panic running through me as I read the entries, some of which contained detailed descriptions of my darkest thoughts that are more in depth than the posts that I put on this blog.  After placing them on the canvas, I immediately began a process of burying them and concealing them once again from view. However, eventually I was able to realize that hiding and concealment has been such a huge part of my life for so long, that I needed to excavate it and reveal it in order to accept myself and past.  Therefore, I began to wipe away what I had buried and reveal the texts (some of which the ink had begun to bleed and distort from the moisture, which is interesting).

    Overall, I was finding it difficult to tune into my memories today, so to experiment I took the painting outside while it was dark and continued to work on it in very minimal light.  Just enough that I could find my tools.  Since the concept of this piece is the blind search for self, I figured I might as well try to do it literally and see what happens.  The result?  A very intense emotional recall of some very specific and terrifying moments of anger and frustration connected to my inability to connect with others due to my fear of condemnation.  The passage in the upper left of the painting is where this took place, and in some places my brush strokes became so violent they stripped the layers of plaster underneath off the canvas.  Eventually, I got to the point where I threw the brush out and literally applied paint through my own hands, clawing and wiping at the surface as my body became tuned to the frantic search for form and structure that my memory was surfacing.  As usual, I'm not sure how I feel about the results, but currently I don't think I can observe the piece until the residues of disgust and frustration are washed away over a night's sleep.  You can also compare this iteration to my previous version here.

Body Casts

 There are two things I would like to talk about here that contribute to the conceptualization of this piece.  The first is what I had mentioned in this earlier post about wanting to incorporate a more physical presence to my body's influence on my photograms.  The second is the concept of Marxism, which I was assigned to research and apply to a piece.  I'll post the finished image of that later today after I present it, but this is what went through my mind: 

Anytime I am asked to look into a particular theory, I read up on as many sources as I can in the time I am given, and then begin to digest it by examining how my work fits into it.  This helps me understand both the theory and my position within the context of art history which is definitely  something that's being pushed for in the MFA program here.  Marxism, as I understand it, is the an idealized utilitarian concept of society, in which most indulgences, such as fashion, art, and expression, are minimalized as because they have no direct and immediate usefulness in terms of benefiting society.  I do not agree with this from any angle, and this piece can be seen as a criticism of it.  So, imagine a white sheet covering this form like a funeral shroud.  The white is for the purity of a Marxist society that is placed over the individual.  While the form provides structure and some identifying human attributes, it is truncated at the knees, elbows, and neck, which erase the form's identity and ability to move.  This is the effect I believe Marxism would ultimately have on the internal psyche of the individual: personal stagnation, the inability to progress in personal or expressive pursuits, and the erasure of individual identity.  More to come on this in the next posts :)

First Test of My New Series

 

    Here is my first test piece related to my new series of photograms for this semester.  It is definitely a work in progress, since I am attempting new methods with the projection of images as opposed to just silhouetting my body in addition to the sculptural elements, and I feel like this may take a similar path to the beginning of last semester: I try to assert myself and tightly control compositions with this new and intimidating methodology until it ultimately breaks down and reveals something truer than I could have purposefully created.  

    I attempted to project words from my journal onto this fabric, but due to the luminance limitations of the projector nothing appeared in my first attempt, so I tried a double exposure and ended up with a gray mess (although there may be something profound in that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the words onto the fabric).  I then took the cloth and attempted to mold it to the plaster hand I created last week, and ended up with a faint impression of an object beneath the surface, which is what I wanted.

The piece is raw and unrefined, but I think that's okay.  Whatever I create from this point could not come into existence until this piece had been let out of my mind, and it is only the first step in what promises to be a frightening and illuminating journey over the next 15 weeks.

A New Darkroom!!

So, to accommodate the needs of turning my photograms into paintings/sculptural objects, I will need to make changes to the darkroom in order to overcome the fairly large space issue.  Even when solely producing 2D imagery I was hindered by the amount of space that I had to work in, especially since the photograms were so large.  The solution is a small construction project that will take the priority of the first few weeks of the semester.  We have a garage that has been used for very garage-like things, as in the storage of tools and the laundry machine and drier.  After measuring the space, we decided that we can consolidate the tools into 1/4 of the space towards the laundry machines and wall off the front to make a new darkroom that will be roughly double the square footage that I currently work in.  There will need to be a small amount of electrical work and the installation of sheet rock and insulation, and possibly some flooring, and an air conditioner so that I will be able to work comfortably and safely when the temperature inevitably climbs into the 90's and 100's.  As of right now, the materials for the room have been purchased for under $500 (thanks to my access to financial aid I'm able to do this!).  I expect the project to take the next two weekends, but fortunately I still have access to my previous space so I can continue to test new processes while the room in under construction.