On Holiday

Poetry Wednesday

Molt

My mariner,
in sum loveliness
and piecemeal disappointment:
I have been finding your baked-clay-coat,
powder-fine,
crushed into the carpet.

It will not come loose
for me:
I lick my palms, I bow low to it;
After the harvest, I wet it down.
I try to make something sea-worthy.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Untitled poem from The Western Borders

by Susan Howe

To Travel Alone: The Photography of Ryan Hancock

A few months ago, I saw one of Ryan Hancock's photographs--the one of the three glowing Magi lighting up a Berber carpet and Pepto walls--and I hated it. But it's also kind of a fantastic picture, and so I looked him up. I hated a lot of his images, but there were a few that I'm warming to, that do something interesting with multiples (or, conversely, with objects or creatures in isolation).

Hancock did an interview in 2011 that I also hate and love in equal measure. He praised the mid-century painter Giorgio Morandi who, he claims,

manages, in just a small arrangement of two or three objects, to show the predicament of something infinite being bound up in something temporal. His paintings flicker between being a particular group of objects, during particular hours of daylight, and through the artists’ translation into paint, of being terrifying reminders of the incredible vastness of non-existence surrounding us. Reminders how much easier it is simply not to be, and the grace by which anything actually exists. I’d love to do something similar in a photograph. I’m always trying to solve that problem.. how to address what I feel are the biggest and most basic issues (why and how do we exist, rather than not exist) without becoming heavy and boring and cliched and precious and… any other of the infinity of ways any work of art can fail. In fact, I’d say my relationship to my images is to give up hope of succeeding in a way I’d like, and then shooting it anyway.

The vast majority of his pictures seem, to me, exactly cliched and precious: Twelve peaches in a porcelain sink crowned artfully by a bunch of green leaves; two dozen firecracker nubs, burned-out and scattered in an oil stain. Is this a failing?

Hancock seems to appreciate things in bunches, or as nebula. Even when a single subject draws our attention, there is something multiple in the picture (and it's probably more interesting). There is a naked and moon-pale man wading in a goldfish pond, but I can't stop looking at the tree whose reflection he has entered and split, separating its highest and lowest branches.

I'm put off by the romanticism with which he describes his background and practice. Speaking of the trees he slept in while growing up in Flintstone, Georgia, he sounds like a prose poet, or a scholar writing on Gordon Matta-Clark. Describing early adventures, he becomes Dean Moriarty, watered down and lukewarm:

When I was 18 or 19 I packed my Civic Hatchback full of rice and beans and a small propane stove and drove all over the country one summer. I slept in hotel parking lots and saw all but three states. This was before cell phones, when you could actually feel alone, and I've never been more lonely in my life. It was such an essential experience. I generally like to travel alone, maybe because of that trip.

The artist becomes the "eye in the sky" whose height allows him to observe the bunches (and the nebula), and to draw meaning (or perhaps make it?) from their arrangement. When the subject is singular, its framing becomes a confrontation, and multiplicity happens between the viewer/artist and it. We are drawn into the nebula, and it is left to some higher eye to draw meaning.

Poetry Wednesday

The May Bed

First was a blue bed, earned and made
and framing both
with fingertips matched overhead, and morning
glories growing
Offering not shade, but sustenance,
satisfying something in me, impossibly,
with hunger, making me
unashamed.

I cannot explain this adequately;
I cannot tell this to you if you do not already know it.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

(Back to) Life Updates

Hello little houses! It's been too long, but I'm done with my penultimate semester of PhD coursework, and human upkeep type things (grocery shopping, sleep, exercise, hugs, etc.) are reentering my life. Hooray! 

Expect new posts soon!

Poetry Wednesday

The Wreck 

I named the brown-small ghost of my childhood love
after a flower, a matted stray and
I would have married this, pulled from my
pockets the soft baleen,
drawn across the edge of things to the hoary limit
where we gather ourselves to gather
(debris and the sight of things)

Pinioned by the mast you look
like a child, and your hair
is curlier than I have ever seen it.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Red Cloth

by Jean Valentine

Red cloth 

I lie on the ground 

otherwise nothing could hold 

I put my hand on the ground 

the membrane is gone 

and nothing does hold 

your place in the ground 

is all of it 

and it is breathing

"I wanted to kiss you hello."

This is truly inspiring. Here is the kind of love we should all be building:

Eleven Years Later

Last week Annie McClanahan came to the UofR to give her a talk based on her current book project, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture”, which, according to her website, “explores how cultural texts have been compelled to account for the expansion and collapse of a financialized credit economy.” Analyzing foreclosure photos and horror films like Drag Me to Hell (2009) and Dream Home (2010)—both which center on the housing market--

Normally, deciding whether or not I want to hear a talk is simple, depending exclusively on my interest and availability. Other factors were at play for me with this particular talk, however. Having experienced foreclosure at twelve years old, it’s hard to imagine anyone explaining or intellectualizing that which, for me, will always be duly ineradicable and impossible. And mine.

McClanahan gave an excellent talk and, I think, an important one. But I’m full of anger when I think about photographs of my old home enlarged and projected for the scrutiny of graduate students and educators. There were moments in the talk when McClanahan quickly showed stills from Dream Home, apologizing for their gruesomeness before moving onto a more pleasant picture. But she lingered over the photographs of gutted and vandalized interior spaces, remarking during the question and answer session that those responsible for the damage must have been “incredibly angry” about their eviction to have acted so destructively.

For me, the foreclosure photographs were infinitely more traumatic than those film stills of spilled intestines and blood-spattered floors. In fact, they might be quite similar, showing, as they do, different forms of absolute carnage. I’m not sure someone who hasn’t experienced the incredible anger of foreclosure can experience its photographs as truly traumatic—and experience their anger again as a result.

It’s strange to be reminded of the ways in which my past will reappear and challenge me in my academic life.

Poetry Wednesday

White and Other Things

Snow makes its minimal monument:

The shape of what was done to me, but not its color

(remains, still) Recognizable

to me, underneath

an impermanent pigment

that will alter as it rests/

weighs upon and wets

//corrosive, I point and

point again

to the blooming salt crystals.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Water
by Pablo Neruda

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble
pricked and the green thread
nibbled away, the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself.
Water is another matter,
has no direction but its own bright grace,
runs through all imaginable colors,
takes limpid lessons
from stone,
and in those functionings plays out
the unrealized ambitions of the foam.

Poetry Wednesday

Wash 

Imagine the ocean, raised
and growing porous.
Abandoning the fishes,
to sputter and dry at sea bottom, like
dregs.

I can inhabit this tender colloid,
such a distance from all things.
I know of and fear no ledge;
only dissipation and an emerging
World. A panic of brightness where,
beyond this safe field, color shines
and wants only to shine.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

(Ok, technically this is an instructional performance piece, but it reads beautifully as a poem, and maybe it can be a poem too)

The Photography of Viviane Sassen

Nungwi. From the Parasomnia series.

Recently I stumbled across the photography of Amsterdam-based Viviane Sassen, and quickly decided that her work is the most graceful expression of sculptural sensibility that I've ever seen in photography. It doesn't hurt that the pictures are gorgeous, or that Sassen treats color like sustenance. While there are definitely some troublesome "otherizing" tendencies in the work (Sassen is a white European artist photographing East African landscapes and black East African bodies), there are also some extraordinary things happening in the pictures formally.
A press release for an Irish exhibition of Sassen's pictures last fall explained that "the title of the series Parasomnia alludes to sleep disorders and occurrences of anomalous and unusual actions....[the images] are playful and skillful manipulations of the physical body to symbolize moments of ambiguity and disorientation...Within the images resides a latent force of sculptural stasis: the power of the body and the world it is held in. In Sassen’s Parasomnia, as with dreams, we are left in a place of uncertainty with an insistence on our own imaginative response."

Parasomnia. From the Parasomnia series.

Ivy. From the Parasomnia series.

I love this idea of photographing the body as a sculpture in space. It seems like a simple one, but Sassen's execution is marvelous. She locates unfathomable edges and--in water or in night air or in clean blue cotton--submerges her subjects as if to collect the impression of their bodies later on. As her press release claims, there are moments of disorientation. But there is also the sense of a profound "settling in", a habitation of self and setting that is hard to distill in a photograph.

Hundred Years. From the Parasomnia series.

Belladonna. From the Parasomnia series.

Winter Playlist

Snowfall, long nights, bright lights. Mellow tunes.

Great Lake Swimmers.............................I Could Be Nothing
The Colour.............................................Silver Meadows
Bat For Lashes........................................Marilyn
Iron and Wine.........................................Cinder and Smoke
The Chapin Sisters..................................Digging a Hole
Kelli Ali..................................................The Savages
Isbells.....................................................Heart Attacks
Mumford and Sons................................Ghosts That We Knew
Margot and the Nuclear So and So's......Broad Ripple is Buring
Gossling.................................................Heart Killer
Grizzly Bear...........................................Foreground
Fleet Foxes............................................Your Protector

Poetry Wednesday

Somniculous

We drag our bed wherever we go. Without it we become
monstrous:
Our teeth ache
and our moods swell and we cave inward,
loving nothing so much as our ball gown skins
(which stand quite well on their own).

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

You Have to be Careful

by Naomi Shihab Nye

You have to be careful telling things.

Some ears are tunnels.

Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.

Some ears are flat pans like miners used looking for gold.

What you say will be washed out with the stones.

You look for a long time till you find the right ears.

Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,

a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,

and the slow, gradually growing possibility

that when you find such ears

they already know.

Life Updates

Laser tag! Dirty board games! Fire pit! Copious amounts of liquor! All of these things made Christmas with my family in Wadesboro, North Carolina, oodles and oodles of fun. I brought Moody home with me this year, and he managed to take all of the zaniness in stride (although, as it turns out, he is not very good at laser tag).

To top it all off, I received the very good news that an essay I wrote about Chiharu Shiota (about whom I've blogged before) will be published in a Casa Asia book to coincide with the end of the artist’s first solo exhibition in Barcelona! I can’t wait to get my hands on it in March. More updates on this to come!

Overall, this winter break has been extremely restorative, and there are more good things coming up soon. In February, I’ll be returning to NYC for the first time since I interned for Ralph Lauren back in 2010, and I can’t wait to have adventures in my favorite city. There will definitely be reunions with a few beloved Vassar pals, and plenty of arty goodness at the CAA conference. As soon as I get back to Rochester, Moody and I will be goofing off at a Passion Pit concert, and celebrating our second (belated) Valentine’s Day together. So much good!

Walk it Off: The Photography of Nick Hance McElroy

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

You know those marvelously itinerant people who go to Iceland or Thailand after college and aren't afraid to ride a chicken bus around a mountain with no guardrails? Those people fascinate me. If I wasn't so PhD-student-broke and so prone to motion sickness, maybe I’d wake up one day feeling particularly ballsy and then I’d be one of them, boarding a train and a plane and a fishing boat and then riding a grizzly bear into the Alaskan tundra in search of Bob Ross's friendly ghost. But until that day, I'll continue to love photographers like Vancouver-based Nick Hance McElroy, who takes pictures the way I would on a tremendous adventure (whether or not he's on a tremendous adventure himself).

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

Most of his photographs are human-less, and the ones that aren't never allow more than a single road-trip companion or new-found friend to enter the frame. Dogs and ponies and snow-covered sheep populate his pictures, which are imperative or instructional, ordering us to "walk it off" or showing us "how to be alone."

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

The photographs aren't always beautiful. A metal pail full of severed doe heads becomes the aesthetic equal of a tiny white house with red flowers and a red roof, or a blue car on a snow-blown hill. Each friend, vista, and carcass is treated with the same loving, unhurried attention. 

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series

Untitled photograph from the How to Be Alone series.

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

Hello Again Friends

Following a wretchedly long paper-writing hiatus, All The Little Houses is back back back! Expect epic arts, dreary poetic musings, sweet tunes, belligerent felines, pleasing prisms, life updates, and other blather.

Poetry Wednesday

Settle/Content

You are no forest.

Your light is clear and without breaks.

There is a game, but you play it

Simply

(I am learning to play simply, too)

And I smell evergreens

When I am near you, I can smell them;

Not from you, but

      with you

                                An impossible

                                           sunlight.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

The Mermaid
by William Butler Yeats

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

My Knitted Boyfriend

Noortje de Keijzer's My Knitted Boyfriend is so lovely, and now I want to learn how to knit. 

I have a wonderful boy, but then maybe I could knit a dog for us.

Poetry Wednesday

Subsistence

A bully branch on the wind
took out the window, took out an eye and then
stilled
sensing above it
clouds
and weight
and weather.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Poetry Wednesday

Differential

we started the fire; it was our rite
increased in the shoal mirror and even without
it
all things compounded/
double and dual like the world was retelling
its birth//

forecasting.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Michael Flomen's Moonlit Photograms

Contact, 2001, ED. 4, 111cm x 88cm

As I mentioned last week, I'm TA-ing for a studio photography class this semester. It's completely uncharted territory for me, but I'm already reaping the benefits. For example, the professor I'm working with has introduced me to the work of Michael Flomen, a Canadian artist who does long-exposure photograms using the light of the moon and the flotsam and jetsam of the night.

The work is striking. Its recognizable forms (a bit of seaweed or the webbed transparency of an insect wing) inhabit topographies and cosmos that are entirely alien. The flashbulb of a firefly becomes a solar flare which--through the long exposure--becomes 40 solar flares. Strangeness multiplies, and yet an overall softness permeates the images and demonstrates that strangeness might coexist with benevolence.

Feeder, 2006, 122cm x 244 cm, U.P.

I'm also kind of enthralled by his process. The artist, whose images only quicken by the light of the moon, himself becomes nocturnal. Not a slave to the nighttime, but one whose moonlit activities border on ritual. I'm definitely going to need to track down La Nuit est ma Chambre Noire (The Night is My Darkroom), the film that documents that process. Here's a clip:

Untitled 41, 2008, 61cm x 51 cm, U.P.

Untitled, 2007, 51cmx61cm, U.P.

Fall Playlist

Sweet tunes for my favorite season : )

Sóley......................................................I’ll Drown
Sigur Rós...............................................Glósóli
Bat for Lashes........................................Laura
Wooden Sky..........................................Child of the Valley
Cat Power.............................................Metal Heart
CocoRosie.............................................Smokey Taboo
The Sweet Serenades.............................Die Young
Ramona Falls.........................................The Darkest Day
Carla Bruni............................................Quelqu'un M'a Dit
Bon Iver................................................Minnesota, WI
The Drums.............................................Down By the Water
Ed Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes........Kisses Over Babylon