ps we were fighting the elements...that's a good point

we made a party

A collaborative piece, and a first attempt at some sort of happening...a lot of nice things happened. So we made a party that was about a birthday party, and a slip n slide out of clay. and it came with all the normal anxieties that having any party does.

It's interesting that it was a completely forced and fabricated event that was totally self-supporting. We set up this sort of controlled environment, and everyone ran with it and discovered all the things we set up for them/situations/opportunities we gave them. I wondered what our guests expectations were before they arrived. They had several actions to participate in--there was eating, singing, game playing, crafting, sliding, and it all went down like any party would. So back to the idea that it was a forced situation that turned into this group effort to keep the situation going.

Something I hadn't expected was the transition from making mode to participation mode. One minute we were preparing this situation and the next it was taking place. speaking of the making, it was a process that also contained a lot of great information. The efforts we went through to create this environment, like moving a big tent, or cutting up a watermelon were nice moments on their own.

I questioned the idea of why/what we were making, how this stands between an art piece or just a party we threw for the heck of it. We created the event with some specific goals in mind, we imagined the image of mud-covered people in this strange birthday party setting, we achieved many of our desired results but also had a lot of nice surprises, it was so much like a real party, even though it was kind of a fake party.

It was nice to see everyone that participated getting excited about it. Everyone was really into being blindfolded and spun around for pin the tail in the donkey/pinata, which was cool because none of us could probably pinpoint the last time we did those things/is it ever nice to be disoriented in front of a laughing crowd? It was funny though.

about a video

This is a work in progress. It basically started building itself through searching on the internet and documenting those searches, even though I was doing this all for the sake of making this record. I wanted to follow the intuitive process of what would come next, but now I'm wondering what intentions might have been there along the way. looking at it I see patterns things going backwards and forwards...there is a lot of water and space (as in outer) for instance. Things were chosen really for their straight visual appeal. I started with google earth, seeing how the weather, and other information was represented through this interface. Each element I thought was just part of a moving composition. It was constantly changing and becoming more complicated so I was just keeping up with it. From there, the content flowed into other videos on the internet sort of sticking along a theme of strange phenomena, I suppose disaster and place. The connections that were initially visual became overwhelming, frenetic and very sad. Seeing it all together/the creation of this meaning makes me think about how this piece was really made, and how all this was constructed while I thought I was going just with the flow, but maybe not really?

This installation was created as a reaction/interpretation of another artist's work. I chose Sarah Sze for the way she interprets space, language and narrative through objects. When I see her work/read about it It made me remember how I would organize my things when I was a child--the way I constructed relationships between objects that I felt were necessary , what had to go next to what and what that meant. Those objects had much more meaning however than the objects I used here. Have I made each of these objects very personal to me by organizing them?
At the same time, the temporaryness about how she organized objects appealed to me...a paper cup sitting on the ground that should/would be moved soon? Her pieces contain pathways, stairways etc that often lead up into the air. The building up and trailing off into nothing is a nice moment, and again made me think about childhood/constructing an imaginary space or necessary order. Each object becomes meaningful because of the objects that surround it--they become connectors, support systems or focal points. All at once where things are placed seem important and intentional but also just sort floating. The meaning of each individual object is then shifted to what it means as part of the whole. The objects she/I mostly are utilitarian, ephmerel fairly banal parts of everyday. This allows each individual element not to carry too much existing meaning/metaphor.

I think there are moments of warning, escaping and anchoring. Could it be considered a still life, or sort of the freezing/preserving of a moment in time or some kind of shrine?

http://www.sarahsze.com/