style like you

Tavi's Stylelikeu interview grabbed my attention.

I love this girl:

Tavi Gevinson Closet Interview for Stylelikeu.com from StyleLikeU on Vimeo.

Copper

After a year of working in metals I caved and bought a 10' sheet of copper today for an intaglio series in process. The copper is also the perfect gauge for use in sculpture, and I've been admiring Danh Vo's We the People, currently part of The Ungovernables. All pounded copper.



Based on the dimensions of the original and its copper weight of some 31 tons, Vo had a replica of the Statue of Liberty made which forms the main part of JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI. He calls the gigantic sculpture WE THE PEOPLE, reciting the first three words of the preamble to the United States’ Constitution of 17 September 1787. But the monumentality of the statue is immediately qualified: the sculpture is dissected into its individual parts and thus abstracted. In his recreation, Vo concentrates on reproducing the thin copper skin (the iron scaffolding supporting the figure is missing), which gives WE THE PEOPLE a special fragility. The broken icon, the destroyed allegorical figure of Libertas, forms a strong counterpoint to the massive materiality.

Via Contemporary Art Daily

Also now posting mobile shots of the studios I work in here.

February

This has been a really busy month; I have work in two shows right now. One (flyer above) at Hotel Renew where I have a small installation of ceramic pieces and a framed lithograph. I also have a piece in the 84th annual exhibition by the Honolulu Printmakers juried by Prawat Laucharoen.

advanced style

The blog is already worthwhile, but hearing the voices of these lovely ladies is just plain delightful. A trailer for an upcoming documentary I can't wait to see.

syrup

In a new semester with three studio courses (30+ hours a week in the studio) and two other intense courses on Japanese film genres and Star Trek and Political Theory. I am also taking part in an annual Japanese festival as a contestant, more on that soon. Today also marked the beginning of a collaborative portfolio exchange I'm a part of with BYU's printmaking program.

░▒░▒ VIDEO SYRUP ░▒░▒ from Spectacle Theater

I love this little trailer. I miss weird New York. It isn't Star Trek related.

via MAGGIE LEE.

also Blood Orange

Blood Orange Documentary Special from Alan Del Rio Ortiz

Wonderland ruins

Outside Beijing, photos from the unfinished construction of an amusement park built over a decade ago.

Via Reuters

womb work, 2011

from Ingeun Kim on Vimeo.

March 5, 2003

This is the stuff of the everyday in this world.

In this never-ending twentieth-century world.

This burning, this dirty air we breathe together, our dependence on this air, our inability to stop breathing, our desire to just get out of this world and yet there we are taking the burning of the world into our lungs every day where it rests inside us, haunting us, making us twitch and turn in our bed at night despite the comfort we take from each other's bodies.

Juliana Spahr

in the treehouse

This week I transformed my treehouse into a gallery space for some recent work.

Currents

+ Are You A Pacifist? Oakland Liberation Front fighting fire with fire

+ An Interview with Judith Butler on Anarchism (!)

Turbulent

Shirin Neshat, 1998

3 locales (1 roll)

WAIALUA (NORTH SHORE OAHU)


SAN MATEO BRIDGE


LAVO NEW YORK

EAST WEST CERAMIC COLLABORATION V

IN PROCESS

TEMPORALIS e/v

lithograph proof

Wall Street to APEC

Nothing like this ever happened while I was living in New York. I would have been in that crowd, but the truth is, I'm occupied with locally grounded activism now.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is coming to Honolulu in a little over a month.
So is alternaAPEC.
So is World Can't Wait's APEC protests.
So is Eating In Public's ANTI APEC campaign.

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT

In Hawaii. Tomorrow. I have spent the last few months organizing with the University of Hawaii chapter of NOW to put on a Take Back the Night. It's important to us as students, feminists, and activists to create a network of safety and awareness about violence perpetrated against women. It's important that this network involve not only the student body but support from all reaches of the institution. We have labored to include everyone from the Chancellor of the University, campus security personnel, the Women's Studies department, local youth slam poets, and advocate organizations like ACLU and DVAC... and provide food catered by local organic vegan chefs. It takes working together with the entire community to articulate a message grounded in positive, progressive ideas.

RE 9 11

Nobody stood up – in Congress, in the bright studios of our corporate media, in city hall – to make the obvious point that millions of people in other parts of the world live in a state of perpetual danger. And that the events of 9/11 might therefore require of us a greater empathy for those suffering elsewhere, might even nudge us toward a more serious consideration of our own imperial luxuries and abuses, and how these might relate to the deprivations suffered in less fortunate precincts.

That’s not what we talked about. No, we talked about our feelings. Americans were bloated with empathy in the weeks after 9/11. But something fatal was happening: as a nation, we were consenting to pursue vengeance over mercy. We were deciding – with the help of all that deeply feeling propaganda on our television sets – that the only human suffering that mattered was American.

***

The tragedy of 9/11, then, wasn’t that 2,977 people died. It was that 2,977 Americans died.

From this piece. In the comments section:

I rather stupidly stood in front of a crowd of university people several days after this event and pointed out how the phallic nature of the towers were oddly juxtaposed against the feminine, earthen caves in which our attacking faction were supposed to have hidden themselves. I have suffered no worse silence in front of any crowd, and I am a teller of bad jokes.

JUST A FEW

CLEARANCE

Keeping it simple. New semester, cleaning house, getting rid of even more things. Almost everything on clearance sale over at my Etsy shop!

MEANWHILE

In London (via socialism and/or barbarism)

Also read An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting (part one & two)

portland

Photos from my trip to Portland last month with my friend Karlyn. What a great city for foodies, locavores, vegans, being outdoors, public transit, progressive people and ideas...

Lost

Via the Huffington Post: No one wants to talk about this. An article published this weekend on the rise of the "educated class" using sugar daddies to, often, pay off college debts or otherwise finance their education. Definitely worth a read; I wasn't aware there's researchers from around the world doing research on the phenomenon (UK, Berlin). My reactions to the article and to this subject matter are conflicting--although at times I just feel that overwhelming weight that comes from finding yourself in a world continually both seducing and disappointing you. It comes as no surprise that NYU tops the list for the number of students registered as sugar babies on one of the 'Arrangement' websites (not only for living in NYC and being NYUers but for the audacity of using their school email account to register as a 'sugar baby'.

CGN vision

Currently in Seattle. About to head to Portland. But I'll be in New York for this!

cy twombly

1928 - 2011. Fellow Black Mountain College alum with my former painting teacher, Peter Heinemann, who passed away last year.

I remember seeing his work for the first time at MOMA, when I was much younger, before I moved to New York. It made me giddy with possibility.

the nut and the keys

recent castings

the dizziness

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

Kierkegaard

KUKL

KUKL, The Eye (1984)

the BIKILA

I've been running my whole life. I began playing soccer at six years old. I was never very good at sports, and when I ran on cross country and track teams I was never the fastest. It wasn't until I began running on my own, for exercise, did I realize that what I genuinely loved was just long distance running. I lost that side of myself when I lived in New York. I thought I was busy and I thought that was enough.

When I moved back to Hawaii, I had to go to extremes to counter the loss I felt from leaving a city like New York. I felt like my life was in a neverending detox program, one I would never escape from. Until I started running again. Really running. Not just fighting my way through lanes of traffic on Flatbush on my way to Prospect Park, dizzy and weak, ready to give up at any moment, but dedicating myself to regular 6-12 mile runs, to yoga, to cross training, to living in a state of awareness and robust health. My goals have always been lofty: marathons, ultra marathons, triathalons. But now they're real.

My beloved collection of boots is, literally, covered in mold. The clothes I used to wear don't even make sense to me.

I finished the North Shore marathon with relatively little pain in a pair of Asics and now I'm tackling barefoot science. Vibram Fivefingers have been on my radar for a while and generally considered big news in the running world, but my revelation didn't come until today, over a month after starting to wear Fivefingers. The Bikila LS model. These feel like heaven to run in--so lightweight they're almost non existent, but enough of an outsole platform to protect and support your feet. My running stride has improved dramatically, my step is far lighter than I could ever achieve wearing running shoes, my posture is much better, and my toes, well, they are gaining independence. In short, the Bikila has quietly reminded me that change is possible, tangible, and that style truly lies in the eye of the beholder.

(This post is mainly a reminder to me to write on a broader and more controversial concern I have about the state of Western footwear.)

Hey You

I couldn't help it. Wondering what songs get people through their daily commutes in New York was definitely one of my pastimes. I have to smile when I watch this. And it makes me miss the bustle of the city more than usual.

Posted on Thought Catalog a few days ago.

bodnath stupa