Brain Frame 8

Brain Frame 8 is tonight. 9pm this time, that's a first, also, a keg. I am not performing. I was planning on reading the rest of Recent Days at this show, but then I realized that it would be almost impossible to finish a 150-ish page book in two months at the same time as organizing another Brain Frame, and planning a performance. The stress leading up to Brain Frame 7 was almost unbearable and incredibly unhealthy. So, the reading and release of Recent Days will now occur in January, at Brain Frame 10.

I've reevaluated a few big goals in recent months. Ever since my third year at SAIC, I've been planning to apply for a Fulbright to Iceland. I've wanted to visit Iceland since I wrote a report on it in sixth grade. I would like to make a film there, and I think, if I really gave it my all, I'd be a good contestant for the Fulbright award. My plan was to apply this fall, and then next fall, perhaps from Iceland, apply for grad school.

Of course, when I made that plan, I had no idea that in the fall of 2012 I would be running a compelling, successful comix performance series, or that I would be getting paid to teach filmmakers I respect how to optically print their footage, or that I would be receiving more and more requests for design work, or that my social and creative community would be so alive with passionate ideas and productive energy. So, I'm not applying for the Fulbright. Not right now, at least. And there's a good chance I will apply for grad school soon, but I don't need to think about that just yet; right now, I'm committed to Brain Frame, to finishing my next book, to producing more films. That's more than enough.

It was my birthday last month. Thorne Brandt made this gif for me. Tyson and I traveled to California for ten days. I shot five rolls of S8, which you can see soon, if you care to. Mark invited us to the Academy to a private screening of a new 35mm print (with stereo sound OMG) of Water and Power. Pat and Beverly O'Neill were there, with George Lockwood, and Kate McCabe. I was giddy to meet Pat, seeing as he's one of my favorite filmmakers. He and Beverly know me from Facebook, and, incredibly, they were excited to meet me too. We all hung out on the roof and everybody sang happy birthday, and then we went back downstairs and watched House Fuck and The Mystic in the small screening room. It was the best birthday I've ever had.

Last night was the opening of Afterimage, a show featuring and influenced by the Chicago Imagists, at the DePaul Art Museum, open until November 18th. This sculpture is an exquise corpse cobbled together by Trubble Club, including myself. I painted one of the faces: the guy with five rows of teeth. There's a wall of books curated by Trubble Club, as well. It's a wonderful exhibit and you should go.

These are photos of me on a boat, filming a wedding with my Super 8 camera. The film footage in the above video is what I was shooting. The video was edited by the glowing bride. If anyone wants me to film their wedding on a boat let me know.

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REMAINING POINTS OF INTEREST FOR WHICH I DO NOT HAVE INTRODUCTORY PHOTO/VIDEO DOCUMENTATION:

1) One of my two jobs is as a project archivist at Kartemquin Films. Kartemquin is the social documentary production house that brought you Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, among many other incredible films. The archivist team (or A-Team) has started a blog, and you can read my first entry here.

2) Hey, people in Hawick, Scotland, are you going to the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival? Cause you should. I wish I could go. And, if you show up at the Tower Mill on Kirkstile at 1:45pm on Saturday, October 27th, you will witness the world premier of my film The Mystic. It's a digital projection, for which I apologize, but it's also the world premier.

3) Hey, what's up Victoria, British Columbia! Are you going to the Antimatter Film Festival? You should. I wish I could go. And, if you happen to catch the last screening of the event, at 9:00pm on Saturday, October 20th, you will witness the Canadian premier of my film House Fuck. On film! Somebody buy me a ticket from Chicago to Canada to Scotland and back to Chicago. Oh, wait, somebody buy me a passport first.

Brain Trubble

This upcoming weekend, the 16th and 17th of June, is the first annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE). I'll be tabling with Lale Westvind, Ian McDuffie, and Ben Bertin, right next to the Trubble Club table... wait, did I just mention Trubble Club?! It just so happens that Brain Frame and Trubble Club are joining forces to hold the opening night party for CAKE, a special edition Brain Frame featuring all Trubble Club comics, all Trubble Club members, all the time! How serendipitous! You'd think that we're all friends who live in the same city or something, and respect each others' considerable and multi-varied talents. Or something.

I'm the official host of this event, along with Sackley, the lovable dog with unfortunate testes, appearing in puppet form with great effort from Bernie MacGovern and Jeremy Tinder (it takes two men to drag that sack). Gabrielle Bell, Leslie Stein, and Mike Taylor will also be coming on stage to do live drawings during the event. Jeremy Tinder, Aaron Renier, and Grant Reynolds drew the poster. Attend: Friday, June 15th, 9:00pm, at 1542 N Milwaukee, 2nd floor. Free, donations suggested.

OTHER NEWS:

1) Brain Frame got reviewed on Make Space! Thanks Kelly Parsell!

2) I have a small gallery wall goin' on at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in association with the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF). My CUFF poster and the original drawings are on display, as well as some other family-friendly screen prints and the front and back cover of Compiled. The Film Center is open starting at 2pm on weekends, and 5pm on weekdays. I look pretty happy, right?

Color Tests and Obligatory Self-Congratulation

You guys like color tests? Huh? Yeah?





Color tests are how you figure out what filters you need on an optical printer in order for your finished print to be the appropriate shade. These are a couple tests for two of the four films I'm currently finishing (you may recognize The Mystic and House Fuck.)

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OK SO IN OTHER NEWS, I uh, I'm graduating after this week, which means three things:
     1. The URL for this Blogspot will no longer be correct (currently it's I am an art student what am I doing, but I won't be an art student anymore! Should I change it to I was an art student? Or leave it, in anticipation of educational purgatory such as graduate and doctoral studies? Does it matter? The answer is no, ergo the URL (while factually inaccurate) will remain the same, no need to update your bookmarks.)
     2. OMG I'm going to be done with school what the hell
     3. I can't remember the third thing because I'm completely exhausted, up to my old shenanigans (see bottom of linked post) again.

ALSO GUESS WHAT
     4. I won the top prize SAIC Excellence in Student Leadership award, which is pretty cool. They're going to feature me on the SAIC website, and interview me for SAIC Student Association's new website as well.
     5. I am also the recipient of one of the SAIC BFA Fellowship Awards, which means I submitted a portfolio and artist's statement and resume and a bunch of important people who run prestigious schools and museums were like, "yeah, this girl is alright," and then they gave me a bunch of money. So I can actually fund the films I was planning to make this summer, now. Thanks SAIC!

I'M STILL SHOWIN' STUFF
     6. On Monday night, May 23rd, ExTV will be airing the second of two (identical) episodes of work by yours truly. It's playing on CANTV, Chicago's public access station (channel 21!) at 11pm. They wrote some nice things about me on the poster; I'm honored.
     7. This is not really an official event, but Ross and I will be showing several finished 16mm prints for our family and friends at 8pm on Friday, May 20th, in room 1307 of 112 S Michigan Ave. Anyone is welcome to come, just tell security that you're there for a screening and they'll let you up. Both Ross and my families will be there (it's the night before graduation) and it will also be the unofficial premier of a buttload of stuff I've been working on for years.

AND FINALLY
     8. Here are some pictures of me installing Llama Man and Night City in a glass case at the Flaxman library. The show was called Object Relations, and featured three artists (including myself) who work both in film/video and the physical realm. He lives!

Accordion Book

Actually this is a double accordion. An accordion book is one sheet of paper, encased by two book board covers, folded like an accordion between. For this little experimental book, I took two folded accordions, slit each page vertically to its midpoint, and then scissored them together to create this diamond effect. The book can be opened from both sides, and has the additional awesome factor of an inside space, kind of hidden pages. The covers wrap around and clasp at either end to make a nice package.


Sorry updates have been kind of slow and all book-related recently. I usually try to mix up the mediums that I write about for interest's sake. Right now I'm working on a backlog of photos I took last semester, since the school year ended in May. I've been pretty busy with summer fun and trying to find a real job while scraping by on part-time or one-off gigs. I still have a comic in the works, as well as a couple things I haven't scanned or photographed yet (including - yes - more books!) And just this weekend another project of mine came into fruition. I had a series of works about Llama Man installed at the IASD Dream Art Exhibition, including Llama Man himself (the costume posed on a freestanding armature I created for the exhibit). My film, For My Psychopomp, was installed as a loop on an old TV I got at a thrift store. I got a lot of really great feedback from a community I was incredibly happy to show my artwork to. People were really interested in the dream and how I've worked with it over the years, as well as in awe of Llama Man's towering and terrifying figure. Sunday night was the reception, and I won first prize in the Nancy Richter Brzeski Dream Art Awards! Now I have some money to buy more film to make more creepy movies. Yes! I am so excited and honored to have been recieved in such a wonderful way, and win such a great prize. Thanks IASD!

Scroll

In the spring of 2007, in my Intro to Fibers class, I conducted my first experiment in beading in approximation of organic material.


I can't clearly remember, but I think that the only guidelines for our first assignment was that we had to bead or embroider something, and also incorporate felt. I never got around to the felt part, because beading an entire scroll takes a really, really long time.



To start, I took a 22'' x 30'' sheet of thick soft etching paper, roughly scored and tore it into strips about 3'' in width, painted in watercolor pale yellow lines down the length of the strips, laid them out on a wooden board, soaked them with water from my kitchen sink, and began scraping and hacking at the non-watercolored side of each strip until they had been satisfactorily decimated. I then stitched together the ends of each strip with a zippered blanket stitch, as well as sutured the most gruesome of my inflicted wounds.



After drying, I then attached old chopsticks I had covered in fabric to either end of the scroll, and began the decorative/decaying process of beading around the stitches and open holes in the paper.


I started at the left end and worked my way to the right, progressively darkening the color of the beads I was using, from whites, silvers, and yellow, through oranges and reds, and then to purple and black. I also increased the amount of beading, the spread of the mold.





The stitches that healed the paper were white, but the thread which bound the beads was gold. On the opposite side of the paper, you can see all of the stitching, and when the scroll is wound, the layers of beading and thread peek out.


I was thinking a lot about religion and spirituality that semester (as usual). I was interested in the boundaries between artificial and natural, and organic and inorganic, and the place that human religion and language take within those differences. What does it mean for us to worship documents created by our ancestors, and how does that practice compare to the worship of the natural world? When it is understood that all Bibles will eventually rot and turn to dust, all Torahs eaten by worms, and all our Qur'ans mold and disintegrate, what then is the highest power? As a species so inspired by beauty, we represent the holy in gold leaf and complex geometry; is there a better way? All of our most sacred documents are reproduced and represented in text. I find this to be limiting and unnessecary.

For class, I first suspended this piece, unfurled, in front of a light source, and then took it down to be laid on a long table. When light shows through the paper a completely new texture is revealed. You can see the ravaged fibers and the beads stand out like dark growths around the sutures and gaping holes.

Lace

My most recent project for Fibers was to research a textile and interpret it.
Lace is about two things: sex and death. Secondarily, it is also about delicacy, wealth, exploitation, and ruin for the sake of beauty.

The How:

My roommate Molly (pictured here) and I made stencils of each other lying on the floor.


Using one piece of lace (6 yards long) I cut out the figures at opposing ends of the material, leaving them connected by extremely long legs, and died Molly's half black.



Lastly, I screenprinted specific parts of each figure with cardboard from some box I found in a dumpster and hung from the cieling of the critique room with fishing wire.

Hare

These are some pictures of my second Critique piece in my drawing class. The pictures of the balloons are flipped so you can see them more clearly. I blew them up, drew on them with sharpie, and then deflated them... There are five of Aesop's more fucked-up fables on the backs, and illustrations for them on the fronts. I drew the hare on the wall in charcoal. She's about five feet high. Her dress is butcher paper (some gessoed white) tacked to the wall. All the fables have to do with hares.