LAAW 2020
Field Lab #3
Petroglyph National Monument / Petroglyphs
Geometric symbols
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>geometric symbols<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<living artifacts>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>sacred/accessable<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<donottouch>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Los Volcanes / The Volcanoes / Three Sisters / Tres Sisters
11.6.20 // Alameda Open Space + Los Poblanos Open Space
I am so exhausted. I’m finding it impossible to ignore all that is happening right now, to think deeply about my work, what I’m doing here out by the river, and in general. I’ve spent time reading through writing from the past few months—I am interested in this:
10.14.20
Where is our oppositional energy most needed now?
Where / when is it ok to surrender, disperse, and fade into the edges for rest?
Can there be too much rest?
I’ve found it very challenging to hide the reality of all that is right now. I can’t pretend or fool myself into productivity. So for now, I am chasing texture—viscerally absorbing anything that doesn’t resemble the contours of my couch or computer screen. Waiting prone in the leaves, ribs and heart to the ground, there is time to witness the subtle vibrations of the river and distant indiscernible movements.
—
11.7.20 // Upper + Lower Montoyas Arroyo
I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t want to. I decided to start following the residual movement pathways of the last water to mark the sand in the arroyo. I walked for at least a mile before eventually finding a detour distraction of attempting to trace a water drainage pipe back to its origin somewhere in the Loma Colorado neighborhood—I never found it. I couldn’t stop thinking about how all of this neighborhood is obscuring the truth of the ground upon which it is built. It’s very challenging to hide the reality of all that is crumbling.
I walked about 5 miles through the arroyo and felt relieved to experience the texture and resistance of the sand against the soles of my boots.
—
11.8.20 // Volcanoes
Today I have been thinking about the practices that have kept me present with myself and my work throughout the past few years—hiking anytime and anywhere away from the city of Chicago was such an escape. I knew I could get up before dawn, drive somewhere and disappear for a few hours into a landscape that felt healing. Three days into our weekend now, I can finally think more clearly about what I am working on and why. The wind is intense, but somehow my mind is finally still—the first time in weeks that I have been able to focus enough to meditate calmly. The distance of the horizon here provides a counterpoint to my presence in my body—I am not there, but here. I am a guest in this sacred place, and I am grateful.
Thinking about my process in general is complicated. I feel like art is life and everything I do is somehow in process of creating this life. That being said I do recognize that when I consciously devote time to art making it can look very different from traditional art practices. I am a mover, a dancer, a singer, a skater, a mother, a mudder, a sculptor, a skilled seamstress and builder. My art practice includes all these things and more, things like research that I am just learning to recognize as part of my artistic process.
These past few months I have been researching and reimagining the Manhattan Project and the creation of the first atomic bomb. I have been fascinated with the secrecy and determination it took to build the town of Los Alamos and in turn the weapons that changed the world and ended World War II.
In the process of making the model I travelled to Los alamos and spent the day investigating the museum that is located on the site that was the Boys School before it was the Lodge where the physicists bunked. I learned that the land was chosen for it’s ability to be secure and defendable up on top of the finger like bluffs of the Los Alamos mesa. This inspired me to try and build a base for the model that might represent these finger like land formations. I started by making adobe bricks formed in seltzer water boxes. When I stacked them up I found they were not exactly the right fit for the model and their appearance was quite pleasing aesthetically with the bright color combinations. I ended up making more water box bricks and building a wall as a barrier on a private road in my neighborhood.
I originally began the Trinity quilt thinking it too could create a base for the model and represent the many invisible women who worked behind the scenes to support the men who built Los Alamos and the bomb. I often use sewing and stitching to convey feminist themes and soft sculpture as a means to soften a masculine concept like I am doing here with the theme of national defense. For this project I was visually inspired by the gadget from the Trinity test. I created the quilt and the sculptural patches to reflect the gadget before it was activated with explosives and covered in patches. The wires, once plugged in, promoted activation and lead to detonation. The stitching on the quilt and the blue and gray wire sculptures are coiled and stitched in response to these patterns of detonation wires.
All of these investigations were fun to create and ended up being a good place to draw inspiration for a socially engaged project. I kept thinking, how could I take what I learned about the making of the first atomic bomb and transform that into a work of art that promotes change?
I live rurally and one thing that stuck out to me as I travelled to the city for this class was the increase in the visibility of people living without permanent shelter. The opportunities for art to function in this marginalized community is limited.
With these things festering in my thoughts I began to conceptualize a temporary tent like shelter shaped like an atomic bomb. This Bomb Shelter could function as a sculpture to bring awareness to the nuclear history of New Mexico and it’s struggling population of folks without permanent housing.
My process began by moving through all the previous research, embodied and otherwise, then making the model, the quilt, the wheat paste and soft sculpture responses. I don’t think I would have arrived at this final idea without processing all that other work.
Field Lab #3
What do you see? What do you hear? Are they the same? Are they different? Can you see everything you hear? Can you hear everything you see? Who are you? Does this affect the attention you pay?
Our field study occurred on lands of the Pueblo people—the true stewards of this place. I was/am a guest.
I keep thinking about the drinking-water facility beside the Rio Grande,
“built to resemble a Spanish mission church to better blend in with its surroundings.” I stood beside it, hearing and feeling its industrial hum; it sounded like no church I’ve ever been to.
The past few months have been an awakening to the pipes and wires and tracks that uphold my life. I’ve been following lines and flows, realizing I walk by a natural gas pipe there, drive by a generating station here.
Why didn’t I see the infrastructure that supports me? Why is a pump station masked as a church? Are we ashamed of the cost of our living? What would it mean to create infrastructure meant to be seen? Something to be celebrated? Something not weighed down by costs we wish to forget?
Fences or distance, innocuous facade or duplicitous facade—all ways we keep infrastructure at bay. But it’s easy to witness effect.
I’m interested in where control lapses—where humans are reminded other forces and life have a say.
It’s like trying to hold a feather still in the wind.
For now, I’m working on seeing what I’ve been blind to.
I keep returning to these displaced trees, now standing as transmission poles.
I keep thinking of the years they collected and hardened sunlight, inch by inch. A height aimed at reaching light above a canopy. That height now holds wires, carrying energy at the speed of light.
So I can scroll.
For a brief moment I wanted to playfully yet systematically create parameters for myself in the landscape. I constructed vestiges of my moving body using vinyl flagging tape to map the temporary artificial boundary I placed myself within. Curious of what the natural environment would look like as a briefly constructed form, I used the spaces between branches, trunks of trees, the bottom of the arroyo to it’s top and the stones buried in it’s basin. I wanted to, if only for a moment, demarcate my passage, revealing it through my mark making with the graphic vinyl tape. I then dismantled and left the space to document the seemingly absent and erased trace of my past self. I was curious as to what the visibility of subtle distance may have been between the growth of two trees , between a stone or to the top of an eroding arroyo, making apparent the scale of a natural space through feeble and inconsequential attempts of mapping my movement through the landscape. These constructions were like minimal drawing exercises to try and reveal unseen distances I climbed or walked within these moments of occupying a space.
My interest in using vinyl flagging tape comes from seeing it left about in the landscape. Used as trail markers, and by land surveyors to mark a point of measurement, as well as in other forms of demarcating boundary lines. These pieces of vinyl tape left by someone are often used to help guide another through a particular area, to assist in their orientation. They read to me like small messages, seemingly unimportant, but may hold some meaning to the unknown person’s profession, a small trace of conversation from one to another in the land. I find myself photographing them often when I am hiking, biking, etc.
