progress shot

Progress shot of another Airing Dirty Laundry sheet.
Hoping to hang these in next few weeks in public.
I'll keep you posted

Progression in waves

It is very difficult to read the newspaper articles as they are so devestating. The judgemental part of me stirrs up anger. What does one do about this non sense?

I worked hanging some drawings and reworking the painting above in a Seattle coffee shop today. The canvas is stapled directly onto the wall. The image will continue and morph into Women in Black which will directly confront people walking into the cafe. (considering Victims Stop! for the new title) The interaction with people who come in and out is extraordinary. From someone fostering a boy in Kenya to folks who demanded to sit outside. (Have a feeling their decision had to do something with the images.) Overall the responce was positive and stirred folks. Will be showing there for a month and half as well as painting in the wall of the cafe once a week and documenting the process.

I hear what you are saying about uncertainty- I have been in personal limbo this past year, anxiety filled in the blink of an eye. Work is the sustaining element. I received an acceptance letter to start my MFA this summer at Vermont College. I'm thrilled and at the same time overwhelmed with this new responsability.

I would love to see a shot of Airing Dirty Laundary intalled. This work needs to be out there.

sending you some tulips.

Bringing the wolf back, and then killing it

BILLINGS, Mont. - Tony Saunders stalked his prey for 35 miles by snowmobile through western Wyoming's Hoback Basin, finally reaching a clearing where he took out a .270-caliber rifle and shot the wolf twice from 30 yards away.

Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies have been taken off the endangered species list and are being hunted freely for the first time since they were placed on that list three decades ago, and nowhere is that hunting easier than Wyoming.

Most of the state with the exception of the Yellowstone National Park area has been designated a "predator zone," where wolves can be shot at will.

For Saunders, killing that wolf was a long-awaited chance to even things out because he has lost two horses to wolves and blames the canines for depleting local big game herds.

"It's hard for people to understand how devastating they can be," said Saunders, 39, who ranches at Bondurant, Wyo., 30 miles southeast of Jackson, Wyo.

Since federal protection was lifted March 28 and states took over wolf management, 37 wolves have been killed, just over 2 percent of their population. Since 66 animals were transplanted to the region 13 years ago, an estimated 1,500 now roam Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Environmental and animal rights groups plan to file a lawsuit Monday seeking an emergency injunction to block the killings and trying to put wolves back on the endangered list.

They predict that if states continue to control the animals' fate and proceed with public hunts, wolves could be driven back nearly to extermination in the region.

"There will be opportunistic shooting 365 days a year. This will become a continual black hole for wolves," said Franz Camenzind with the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, which is joining the lawsuit.

Despite the removal of wolves from the endangered list, killing them in the Northern Rockies is nothing new. Last year, a record 186 were shot, primarily by wildlife agents, for killing and harassing livestock.

But since the beginning of this year, 59 wolves already have been reported killed in the three Northern Rockies states, about three times the 19 killed over the same period last year — most of them just in the month since they lost federal protection.

State officials blamed this year's increased hunting in part on heavy snow, which kept wolf packs at lower elevations where sheep and cattle range.

"That's the reality of managing wolves in a modern landscape. Some of them are going to be removed," said Eric Keszler, spokesman for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

In fact, entire packs have been legally killed off in past years because of livestock conflicts, according to biologist Mike Jimenez with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

With public hunts planned this year, federal biologists project the three states will maintain a population of 883 to 1,240 wolves at least for the next few years — well above the government's goal of maintaining a population of at least 300 wolves.

But wolf advocates say the states could systematically cull the population right down to that minimum unless a court intervenes.

Idaho and Wyoming in particular have a "hostile legal regime" that is stacked against wolves, said Doug Honnold, the Earthjustice attorney preparing the lawsuit.

"If anybody can kill wolves, you have no way of ensuring wolf killing isn't excessive," he said.

Honnold and other advocates say a minimum of 2,000 to 3,000 wolves is needed to protect their genetic diversity. They contend the government was on track to meet that goal when it caved in to political pressure and stripped the species of endangered status.

Some state officials and ranchers, including Saunders, acknowledge a lingering hostility for wolves, which had been exterminated in the region in the 1930s.

"There's times I'd like to get rid of all of them, but that's not realistic either," Saunders said. "And I'd like for my son one day to be able to hunt them, too."

working through

I have bought so many books that are in storage I can't wait to unwrap them like Christmas presents when we move.
I'd like to tailor some of my old clothes but don't know how yet.
Making kitchen utensils and domestic objects transparent.
Learning from my own work.
Envisioning difference and making that happen.
Why am I so hard on myself?
I really love the notion of "women's work" and bringing it to light in public.
I love making my morse code pieces.
I love embroidery and Airing Dirty Laundry. I could do that forever.
I want a representative to do all the business of art for me, so I can just concentrate on making my work.

DADA manifesto, 1918

dada manifesto
by tristan tzara
23rd march 1918

The magic of a word - DADA - which for journalists has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance.

To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3, work yourself up and sharpen you wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God. His existence had already been proved by the accordion, the landscape and soft words.

* To impose one's A.B.C. is only natural - and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a naked leg being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring. The love of novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it's evidence of a naive don't-give-a-damn attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity - novelty - we are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and vibrant n order to crucify boredom. At the lighted crossroads, alert, attentive, lying in wait for years, in the forest.

* I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles (quantifying measures of the moral value of every phrase - too easy; approximation was invested by the impressionists). *

I'm writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; I am against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, I am neither for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I hate common sense.

DADA - this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story. *

Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated. Whence the sorrows of conjugal life.

To be plain: The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls.

DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING

If we consider it futile, and if we don't waste our time over a word that doesn't mean anything... The first thought that comes to these minds is of a bacteriological order: at least to discover its etymological, historical or psychological meaning. We read in the papers that the negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA. A cube, and a mother, in a certain region of Italy, are called: DADA. The word for a hobby horse, a children's nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Romanian, is also: DADA.

Some learned journalists see it as an art for babies, other Jesuscallingthelittlechildrenuntohim saints see it as a return to an unemotional and noisy primitivism - noise and monotonous.

A sensitivity cannot be built on the basis of a word; every sort of construction converges into a boring sort of perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp, a relative human product. A work of art shouldn't be beauty per se, because it is dead; neither gay nor sad, neither light nor dark; it is to rejoice or maltreat individualities to serve them up the cakes of sainted haloes or the sweat of a meandering chase through the atmosphere. A work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.

Criticism is, therefore, useless; it only exists subjectively, for every individual, and without the slightest general characteristic. Do people imagine they have found the psychic basis common to all humanity? The attempt of Jesus, and the Bible, conceal, under their ample, benevolent wings: shit, animals and days. How can anyone hope to order the chaos that constitutes that infinite, formless variation: man? The principle: "Love thy neighbour" is hypocrisy. "Know thyself" is utopian, but more acceptable because it includes malice. No pity. After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified humanity.

I always speak about myself because I don't want to convince, and I have no right to drag others in my wake, I'm not compelling anyone to follow me, because everyone makes his art in his own way, if he knows anything about the joy that rises like an arrow up to the astral strata, or that which descends into the mines stewn with the flowers of corpses and fertile spasms. Stalactites: look everywhere for them, in creches magnified by pain, eyes as white as angels' hares. Thus DADA was born* , out of a need for independence, out of mistrust for the community.

People who join us keep their freedom. We don't accept any theories. We've had enough of the cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Do we make art in order to earn money and keep the dear bourgeoisie happy? Rhymes have the smack of money, and inflexion slides along the line of the stomach in profile. Every group of artists has ended up at this bank, straddling various comets. Leaving the door open to the possibility of wallowing in comfort and food.

Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.

Here we really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening. Drunk with energy, we are revenants thrusting the trident into heedless flesh. We are streams of curses in the tropical abundance of vertiginous

vegetation, resin and rain is our sweat, we bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is strength.

Cubism was born out of a simple manner of looking at objects: Cezanne painted a cup twenty centimetres lower than his eyes, the cubists look at it from above, others complicate it appearance by cutting a vertical section through it and soberly placing it to one side (I'm not forgetting the creators, nor the seminal reasons of unformed matter that they rendered definitive).

* The futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects side by side, mischievously embellished by a few guide-lines. This doesn't stop the canvas being either a good or a bad painting destined to form an investment for intellectual capital. The new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means, a sober, definitive, irrefutable work. The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionistic reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, rocks, or locomotive structures capable of being spun in all directions by the limpid wind of the momentary sensation.

* Every pictorial or plastic work is unnecessary , even if it is a monster which terrifies servile minds, and not a sickly-sweet object to adorn the refectories of animals in human garb, those illustrations of the sad fable of humanity. - A painting is the art of making two lines, which have been geometrically observed to be parallel, meet on a canvas, before our eyes, in the reality of a world that has been transposed according to new conditions and possibilities. This world is neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator.

For its creator it has neither case nor theory. Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation - negation: the supreme radiations of an absolute art. Absolute in the purity of its cosmic and regulated chaos, eternal in that globule that is a second which has no duration, no breath, no light and no control.

* I appreciate an old work for its novelty. It is only contrast that links us to the past.

* Writers who like to moralise and discuss or ameliorate psychological bases have, apart from a secret wish to win, a ridiculous knowledge of life, which they may have classified, parcelled out, canalised; they are determined to see its categories dance when they beat time. Their readers laugh derisively, but carry on: what's the use?

There is one kind of literature which never reaches the voracious masses. The work of creative writers, written out of the author's real necessity, and for his own benefit. The awareness of a supreme egoism, wherein laws become significant.

* Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, eternity, or because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. On the one hand there is a world tottering in its flight, linked to the resounding tinkle of the infernal gamut; on the other hand, there are: the new men. Uncouth, galloping, riding astride on hiccups. And there is a mutilated world and literary medicasters in desperate need of amelioration.

I assure you: there is no beginning, and we are not afraid; we aren't sentimental. We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition. Preparing to put an end to mourning, and to replace tears by sirens spreading from one continent to another. Clarions of intense joy, bereft of that poisonous sadness. * DADA is the mark of abstraction; publicity and business are also poetic elements.

I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven's hand into hell, hell's eyes into heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.

A philosophical questions: from which angle to start looking at life, god, ideas, or anything else. Everything we look at is false. I don't think the relative result is any more important than the choice of patisserie or cherries for dessert. The way people have of looking hurriedly at things from the opposite point of view, so as to impose their opinions indirectly, is called dialectic, in other words, heads I wind and tails you lose, dressed up to look scholarly.

If I shout: Ideal, Ideal, Ideal

Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge

Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom

I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books in order, finally, to say that even so everyone has danced according to his own personal boomboom, and that he's right about his boomboom: the satisfaction of unhealthy curiosity; private bell-ringing for inexplicable needs; bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions on to life; the authority of the mystical baton formulated as the grand finale of a phantom orchestra with mute bows, lubricated by philtres with a basis of animal ammonia.

With the blue monocle of an angel they have dug out its interior for twenty sous worth of unanimous gratitude.

* If all of them are right, and if all pills are only Pink, let's try for once not to be right. * People think they can explain rationally, by means of thought, what they write. But it's very relative. Thought is a fine thing for philosophy, but it's relative.

Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it deadens man's anti-real inclinations and systematises the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case. Do people really think that, by the meticulous subtlety of logic, they have demonstrated the truth and established the accuracy of their opinions? Even if logic were confined by the senses it would still be an organic disease. To this element, philosophers like to add: The power of observation.

But this magnificent quality of the mind is precisely the proof of its impotence. People observe, they look at things from one or several points of view, they choose them from amongst the millions that exist. Experience too is the result of chance and of individual abilities.

* Science revolts me when it becomes a speculative system and loses its utilitarian character - which is so useless - but is at least individual. I hate slimy objectivity, and harmony, the science that considers that everything is always in order. Carry on, children, humanity ... Science says that we are nature's servants: everything is in order, make both love and war. Carry on, children, humanity, nice kind bourgeois and virgin journalists... * I am against systems; the most acceptable system is that of have none on no principle. * To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own pettiness to the point of filling the little vase of oneself with oneself, even the courage to fight for and against thought, all this can suddenly infernally propel us into the mystery of daily bread and the lilies of the economic field.

DADAIST SPONTANEITY

What I call the I-don't-give-a-damn attitude of life is when everyone minds his own business, at the same time as he knows how to respect other individualities, and even how to stand up for himself, the two-step becoming a national anthem, a junk shop, the wireless (the wire-less telephone) transmitting Bach fugues, illuminated advertisements for placards for brothels, the organ broadcasting carnations for God, all this at the same time, and in real terms, replacing photography and unilateral catechism.

Active simplicity.

The incapacity to distinguish between degrees of light: licking the twilight and floating in the huge mouth filled with honey and excrement. Measured against the scale of Eternity, every action is vain - (if we allow thought to have an adventure whose result would be infinitely grotesque - an important factor in the awareness of human incapacity). But if life is a bad joke, with neither goal nor initial accouchement, and because we believe we ought, like clean chrysanthemums, to make the best of a bad bargain, we have declared that the only basis of understanding is: art.

It hasn't the importance that we, old hands at the spiritual, have been lavishing on it for centuries. Art does nobody any harm, and those who are capable of taking an interest in it will not only receive caresses, but also a marvellous chance to people the country of their conversation.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist, and because at this moment I enjoy mixing this monster in oil paints: a paper tube imitating the metal that you press and automatically squeeze out hatred, cowardice and villainy. The artist, or the poet, rejoices in the venom of this mass condensed into one shopwalker of this trade, he is glad to be insulted, it proves his immutability. The author or the artist praised by the papers observes that his work has been understood: a miserable lining to a collaborating with the heat of an animal incubating the baser instincts. Flabby, insipid flesh multiplying itself with the aid of typographical microbes.

We have done violence to the snivelling tendencies in our natures. Every infiltration of this sort is macerated diarrhoea. To encourage this sort of art is to digest it. What we need are strong straightforward, precise works which will be forever misunderstood. Logic is a complication. Logic is always false. It draws the superficial threads of concepts and words towards illusory conclusions and centres. Its chains kill, an enormous myriapod that asphyxiates independence. If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail, which still belongs to its body, fornicating in itself, and temperament would become a nightmare tarred and feathered with protestantism, a monument, a mass of heavy, greyish intestines.

But suppleness, enthusiasm and even the joy of injustice, that little truth that we practise as innocents and that makes us beautiful: we are cunning, and our fingers are malleable and glide like the branches of that insidious and almost liquid plant; this injustice is the indication of our soul, say the cynics.

This is also a point of view; but all flowers aren't saints, luckily, and what is divine in us is the awakening of anti-human action. What we are talking about here is a paper flower for the buttonhole of gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, our white, lithe or fleshy girl cousins. They make a profit out of what we have selected. The contradiction and unity of opposing poles at the same time may be true. IF we are absolutely determined to utter this platitude, the appendix of alibidinous, evil-smelling morality. Morals have an atrophying effect, like every other pestilential product of the intelligence. Being governed by morals and logic has made it impossible for us to be anything other than impassive towards policemen - the cause of slavery - putrid rats with whom the bourgeois are fed up to the teeth, and who have infected the only corridors of clear and clean glass that remained open to artists.

Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materialises after we've gone through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of a world left in the hands of bandits who have demolished and destroyed the centuries. With neither aim nor plan, without organisation: uncontrollable folly, decomposition. Those who are strong in word or in strength will survive, because they are quick to defend themselves; the agility of their limbs and feelings flames on their faceted flanks.

Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have grown like elephants, planets, which people call good. There is nothing good about them. Goodness is lucid, clear and resolute, and ruthless towards compromise and politics. Morality infuses chocolate into every man's veins. This task is not ordained by a supernatural force, but by a trust of ideas-merchants and academic monopolists. Sentimentality: seeing a group of bored and quarrelling men, they invented the calendar and wisdom as a remedy. By sticking labels on to things, the battle of the philosophers we let loose (money-grubbing, mean and meticulous weights and measures) and one understood once again that pity is a feeling, like diarrhoea in relation to disgust, that undermines health, the filthy carrion job of jeopardising the sun. I proclaim the opposition of all the cosmic faculties to that blennorrhoea of a putrid sun that issues from the factories of philosophical thought, the fight to the death, with all the resources of

DADAIST DISGUST

Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and good manners: DADA;

abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every hierarchy and social equation established for values by our valets: DADA;

every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the precise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA;

the abolition of memory: DADA; the abolition of archaeology: DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the abolition of the future: DADA;

the absolute and indiscutable belief in every god that is an immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; the elegant and unprejudiced leap from on harmony to another sphere; the trajectory of a word, a cry, thrown into the air like an acoustic disc; to respect all individualities in their folly of the moment, whether serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, decided or enthusiastic; to strip one's church of every useless and unwieldy accessory; to spew out like a luminous cascade any offensive or loving thought, or to cherish it - with the lively satisfaction that it's all precisely the same thing - with the same intensity in the bush, which is free of insects for the blue-blooded, and gilded with the bodies of archangels, with one's soul.

Liberty: DADA DADA DADA; - the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and all contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE.

* in 1916 at the CABARET VOLTAIRE in Zurich

3 NYPD detectives acquitted in 50-shot killing

Not so inspiring.
The Sean Bell shooting has made me question yet again the legal system of this country. Brings to mind Rodney King, OJ Simpson, Enron execs, etc...clear obstructors of justice, all acquitted.

3 NYPD detectives acquitted in 50-shot killing

By TOM HAYS, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Three detectives were acquitted of all charges Friday in the 50-shot killing of an unarmed groom-to-be on his wedding day, a case that put the NYPD at the center of another dispute involving allegations of excessive firepower.

Justice Arthur Cooperman delivered the verdict in a Queens courtroom packed with spectators, including victim Sean Bell's fiancee and parents, and at least 200 people gathered outside the building.

The verdict provoked an outpouring of emotions: Bell's fiancee immediately walked out of the room. His mother cried.

Outside the courthouse, which was surrounded by scores of police officers, many in the crowd began weeping as news of the verdict said. Others were enraged, swearing and screaming "Murderers! Murderers!" or "KKK!"

Bell, a 23-year-old black man, was killed in a hail of gunfire outside a seedy strip club in Queens on Nov. 25, 2006 — his wedding day — as he was leaving his bachelor party with two friends.

Officers Michael Oliver, 36, and Gescard Isnora, 29, stood trial for manslaughter while Officer Marc Cooper, 40, was charged only with reckless endangerment. Two other shooters weren't charged. Oliver squeezed off 31 shots; Isnora fired 11 rounds; and Cooper shot four times.

The officers, complaining that pretrial publicity had unfairly painted them as cold-blooded killers, opted to have the judge decide the case rather than a jury.

The judge indicated that the police officers' version of events was more credible than the victims' version. "The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that each defendant was not justified" in firing, he said.

A conviction on manslaughter could have brought up to 25 years in prison; the penalty for reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, is a year behind bars.

The case brought back painful memories of other NYPD shootings, such as the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo — an African immigrant who was gunned down in a hail of 41 bullets by police officers who mistook his wallet for a gun. The acquittal of the officers in that case created a storm of protest, with hundreds arrested after taking to the streets in demonstration.

The mood surrounding this case has been muted by comparison, although Bell's fiancee, parents and their supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, have held rallies demanding that the officers — two of whom are black — be held accountable.

Still, a phalanx of police officers, some uniformed and some in the department's community affairs polo shirts, was stationed outside the courthouse Friday. The building was ringed by metal barricades. Some in the crowd wore buttons with Bell's picture or held signs saying "Justice for Sean Bell." After the verdict was read, some in the crowd approached officers but were held back; the jostling quickly died down.

After the verdict, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that some people were disappointed with the acquittals.

"We don't anticipate violence, but we are prepared for any contingency," he said.

The nearly two-month trial was marked by deeply divergent accounts of the night.

The defense painted the victims as drunken thugs who the officers believed were armed and dangerous. Prosecutors sought to convince the judge that the victims had been minding their own business, and that the officers were inept, trigger-happy aggressors.

None of the officers took the witness stand in his own defense. Instead, Cooperman heard transcripts of the officers testifying before a grand jury, saying they believed they had good reason to use deadly force. The judge also heard testimony from Bell's two injured companions, who insisted the maelstrom erupted without warning.

Both sides were consistent on one point: The utter chaos surrounding the last moments of Bell's life.

"It happened so quick," Isnora said in his grand jury testimony. "It was like the last thing I ever wanted to do."

Bell's companions — Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman — also offered dramatic testimony about the episode. Benefield and Guzman were both wounded; Guzman still has four bullets lodged in his body.

Referring to Isnora, Guzman said, "This dude is shooting like he's crazy, like he's out of his mind."

The victims and shooters were set on a fateful collision course by a pair of innocuous decisions: Bell's to have a last-minute bachelor party at Kalua Cabaret, and the undercover detectives' to investigate reports of prostitution at the club.

As the club closed around 4 a.m., Sanchez and Isnora claimed they overheard Bell and his friends first flirt with women, then taunt a stranger who responded by putting his right hand in his pocket as if he had a gun. Guzman, they testified, said, "Yo, go get my gun" — something Bell's friends denied.

Isnora said he decided to arm himself, call for backup — "It's getting hot," he told his supervisor — and tail Bell, Guzman and Benefield as they went around the corner and got into Bell's car. He claimed that after warning the men to halt, Bell pulled away, bumped him and rammed an unmarked police van that converged on the scene with Oliver at the wheel.

The detective also alleged that Guzman made a sudden move as if he were reaching for a gun.

"I yelled 'Gun!' and fired," he said. "In my mind, I knew (Guzman) had a gun."

Benefield and Guzman testified that there were no orders. Instead, Guzman said, Isnora "appeared out of nowhere" with a gun drawn and shot him in the shoulder — the first of 16 shots to enter his body.

"That's all there was — gunfire," he said. "There wasn't nothing else."

With tires screeching, glass breaking and bullets flying, the officers claimed that they believed they were the ones under fire. Oliver responded by emptying his semiautomatic pistol, reloading, and emptying it again, as the supervisor sought cover.

The truth emerged when the smoke cleared: There was no weapon inside Bell's blood-splattered car.

inspiration

But then today is a new day
and anything is possible.

Anything is possible, nice air in your image

(this image, just happened in an instant- i love those moments)

Let's do this together- the list is very long certainly there is an energy in the city that one is wired to never relax, but this is not always healthy. What is really necessary? All you have to do is die, how you choose to live all the other moments is entirely up to you.

Studio Practice- describe your studio.

Mine is the last bedroom facing West- I get the last light of the day. I find scraps of time for myself (usually only once a day) and I do a lot more looking and color mixing (in my head- playing the game, what color is that?)

decribe your day- in detail (paint me a picture). I have highlighted the 'helps' that I think we can work with- sorry I have no clue about building ownership and development so those are out. Let's discuss these:

studio practice

communication

business partner who is also my husband

cooking, shopping, making the bed, remembering what it is to be a woman and not just a building developer

starting a family

financing my trip to the workshop this summer

help

What could it feel like to have the sound of eggs breaking under one's foot as an alternate to actually having the eggs break under one's foot? Could that be as effective for you? I still imagine hundreds of eggs, and the interiors being cast in plaster is great. Not so delicate after all.

As for me, I need help with a lot of things.

I need help with my studio practice
I need help managing my time
I need help with my patent application
I need help communicating that I need help
I need help coordinating with my contractor, following up with the bank, corresponding with our attorney, trying to not be bitter towards the engineer who stole from us, our first contractor that stole from us, our former architect who sanctioned our second contractor to steal from us, etc.
I need help with our sidewalk; it needs to be finished
I need help with the paperwork that needs to be submitted
I need help with the city that won't listen
I need help with the expediter who I can't understand,
I need help with my business partner who is also my husband
I need help cooking, shopping, making the bed, remembering what it is to be a woman and not just a building developer
I need help not feeling so scattered
I need help thinking about starting a family
I need help thinking about what am I going to do for money when this project is over
I need help applying to residencies to get out of New York
I need help financing my trip to the workshop this summer
I need help to stop being so hard on myself about everything

Cracking Eggs

The form is a superb one- an egg to me is perfect and each is absolutely unique. The other favorite part is that I can cradle it in my hands- I love holding eggs, there is something about that energy- of course it is also filled with history of working with eggs, cooking, eating (being the egg, receiving it's glow,) and loaded with meaning, produced by females in their bodies. It is also a recycled surface. All these and Czech Easter tradition started me painting on them.

The form is very strong, when held in the right way and at the same time of course very fragile- associating them with humans was a natural connection. (After all we all are (were) eggs.) I have wanted to make an installation with eggs from the get-go but never found the space. I wanted to cover the floor with them and have people actually step on them, feel themselves and their weight upon the cracking, (bloody feet would probably result and there goes the liability). I still need to find a space that will be up for it so let's put it into the ether.

Limits- somehow painting the surface (I also cracked the eggs and painted portraits inside) was only that, left on a surface level. I wanted to brake them open, spill them, spill the emotion and let it pour out, let it go. They were so precious however, I could not do it. (In paint however I could have all those options - I'm thinking of a whole body of egg paintings, replicas of those on egg shells with all these options, spilling braking, being walked on.) They also lacked space, the proper context; generating thoughts as I write.

The current (real) eggs suspend from the ceiling and hang at eye level- cast with plaster from the inside with a metal wire loop. At an opening people were confronted directly and at the same time some bumped into them or were starled to find the artwork in front of their nose. With the plaster they are much sturdier than perceived.

What do you want from each relationship? What help are you needing? The shift in perscpective after Alenka has been huge for me in this realm, I often wanted, needed to do things on my own and prove my strength to others and myself. My weakness, softer side was often hidden. After birth and all kinds of things pouring out of all body parts in front of others, the hidden part spilled out. Having help is immensely necessary to the human condition. It is also a gift to others to give help. I have to remember to be very direct in asking, even demanding help. What is it you are needing? Can I do anything throught these words?images?

I'm certainly not scared of you. (images are from our walks.)

eggs

I think it's interesting that you continue to use the same "canvas" but have moved through/with various images to place upon the eggs. One concern is that one can read too literally into the egg ('walking on eggshells', etc.) I'm sure I'm not saying this for the first time...what have your thoughts been on the literal and metaphor uses of the egg to paint/work on?

It's also interesting how incredibly well painted the images are on the egg; I'm wondering if a more protected way of displaying them could be considered. Could they suspend from the wall? Could they hang en masse in front of people's faces? I'm thinking of Cornelia Parker or Ann Hamilton...How could 1,000 eggs impact a space, arranged to confront but also fortify the concept you work with?

Another thing that comes to mind is one's own fragility. As of late I have felt incredibly worthless and devalued. I've been confronting the topic of self-worth with many friends whom I feel have taken advantage of me and have taken my friendship for granted. For so long, the idea of helping my friends has been second nature; but now it seems that pendulum of receiving help comes back to me empty...many fewer friends extending themselves for me.



I am often curious that so many people believe my exterior, defensive shell as being real. As truth to who I am. Don't they know it's just a defense mechanism? I need a lot of help and rarely get it en masse. Do my friends and colleagues just see me as having a great marriage, building my own house, and eating bon-bons all day? As summer approaches, I feel alienated.



As though my face needs to be on an egg! Or maybe there's so much egg on my face I can't see how my own actions have created the situations I'm in with certain people in my life.



I went upstate this weekend with Turu and raked leaves in my friend's backyard. We became friends last year and have similar issues regarding family and real estate, responsibility, and asking people for help. The raking became our rural Meaning Cleaning. It was such a pleasure to be in nature again. I feel I need more time away from New York.



I consider myself quite a happy person who unfortunately gets too easily gets affected by my environment. Am I really such a tough cookie that I scare everyone away?

Generating movement, Eggs haven't left

New Drawings

The eggs have been with me since '98. I've painted family members, ancestors, (I remember the beautifully decorated eggs and the whole tradition around Easter in Czech from childhood.) to politcal refugees and lastly folks from the Twin Towers.
I've dropped the physical egg but now find the eggs still floating - they are the seeds for my work. (thankfully they are also starting to take on a body.- will post tomorrow)

many compliments my dear.
Get those eggs out in the open!
are you still working with that series? it could be quite powerful...

Eggs off to Oregon

A few weeks ago I sent off these images to a group show at University of Oregon. Today I found out that all three of my entries made it into the show! Above are my little eggs as well as a statement that goes with them.

The egg series was driven by the political climate of New York City post 9-11, a place where I made my first home, where I taught art to my first children (600 K-8th grade students), and painted. I was hooked to the images of daily papers and historical imagery of wars, current and past. I found myself unable to throw the papers into the trash. It was not one of those things one could just toss aside. I needed to cradle, hold these beings. Stay with them like one would stay with a friend in need. It was all I could do to help. These images need to resonate in the human consciousness until these events do not exist anymore.

I'm very happy that the eggs are continuing on- they do not belong to my mother's attic.

Very delicate work and at the same time very powerful- your laundry line- I love the subtlety of the text on the same colored fabric- subtle and powerful...

laundry line
"airing dirty laundry"
list of lists
obsessive and compulsive behavior
soft work vs. hard edges
the little drop of ink...

Making more embroidery today on more white sheets to hang from lots and lots of laundry lines.

Going deeper into things

reading , "Portrait of an Artist" biography on Georgia Okeefe. Inspiring- Vowing to create only those things that ring true...

Planted, peas, strawberries, broccoli, cabbage, herbs are well on their way, carrots, lettus, spinach, chard. We'll see what the seeds will bring.

every hinge and door

Details
Dimensions
Change orders
Lots of little things
Wanting to consolidate ideas
Go deeper into ONE practice,
my studio practice.
I see it in my work: scattered.
People are paying attention
I'm taking responsibility
I want to move in this month.

Stairs, patience, time

More progress on site.
Today I checked in and was pleasantly surprised that our private stair has more or less been installed. Huge exhale!


Cliff is one of the most talented craftsman I've ever seen. He personally hand carved each stair and installed it by hand. Things might be taking a bit longer than anticipated, but I'll be walking up and down these stairs for the rest of my life...so I can wait a little longer if need be.


Another view of Cliff, one of the best craftsmen in Brooklyn.


This is Cliff. I tried to get him to sit a little longer for a more formal portrait, but he only gave me a minute. Look at his gorgeous work! I'm really happy to have him on site.

another list

Working on the website
Thinking about collaboration
Trying to get through the dismal grey of April....I thought this is what March was for?
Making art.
Holding my breath.
Applying to residencies
Writing my statement.
Moving on with things.

Speaking of conversations, I'm going to have one with two other workshoppers later on today. I'm documenting my work and then having dinner.
It's interesting to document my work...so much of my "work" is note-taking and plans for future work. I want to consolidate all of the notes into more thought-out work. I want the drop of ink to penetrate the glass of water more deeply. The notes, the sketches, the random thoughts...consolidation and picking up the threads of the past has become a very clear goal.

Been reading Gablik's "Conversations" the one with James Hillman; they are talking of art serving something; outside of the current commodity god. Gablik asks the question "what could art better serve than the things it has been serving throughout our lifetimes?"

This passage resonates- to me art has always been a gift- my grandmother would often poin to the paintings hanging and refer to the friend that painted them. Art is a gift to me- I feel honored being in the studio, elated when I have the moments to work. It is the gift given to me by my husband each time he takes Alenka out for a few hours.

Tonight at the opening that was the energy in the space- continuous giving and receiving. It reminds me of what my therapist said yesterday. We were talking about a truck driving by a window. I guess the frequency of the engine speaks to the windows and they answer back. Sending you this frequency:

Exchanging Gifts

Studio

Starting a studio class no matter what coast we are on.

Also have to work on confidence- I'm getting thinner and thinner in my work, meaning that I started with clay, mass in sculpture. Moved in to the second dimension and have taken away stretcher bars just onto canvas- Now the work is moving toward paper. I am a little afraid of it disappearing, although of course that is where it eventually has to go. It is lovely, being this light however, airy.

It was nice to get excited through talking with my therapist today- inspiring actually. Prompted me to start proposing the studio classs here at the community center. Although we are not sure when we are moving (be it this summer or a year from now- probably Eastern Massachusetts, Northhampton is sticking out as a nice space to be, raise Alenka) I want to start sowing seeds. (The peas, lettus, spinach and strawberries are already in the ground.)