where we belong

What does it feel like to be at home? That's something I've questioned lately. Is it a feeling of safety, comfort and freedom? Or is it a sanctuary for people to be together and protected from the nasty world out there? I have called every type of place home. Home with my family. Home with my friends. And now, home by myself. What I've learned by now is that there is no formula for the perfect home, nor is there the right to make presumptions about the way other people choose to live. Home is exactly what you need and everything that you want. It's the only factor in ones life which is okay to be selfish about. Your home should be your imaginary utopia.

I want to live in a place that provokes an automatic sigh of relief just by seeing it in the distance on the walk home after a long day. I want it to be full of colour and reminders of the other things I have or had in my life. I want to not care about anything matching or making sense. I want to burn 14 candles, eat fried chicken all day and know that it will be exactly as I left it when I wake up in the morning. I want to invite people into this visual, liveable slice of my universe. My home is a fingerprint of the life I lead--it pieces together the journey and the present. It represents the person that I am and is full of clues of the dreams buzzing in my head. 

To live alone is a strange thing to get used to. Maybe its a metaphor for everything that has happened in the past 21 years. Today, on the third anniversary of the worst day of my life--the day that my father took his own life I can't help but wonder if my desire to live alone comes from the comfort and security I've found in loneliness. Over the past two years I've learned that it's impossible to live without family in a foreign country without that loneliness. But what I've also learned that it's not the melancholic thing we make it out to be. Loneliness allows us to understand ourselves and be at peace with that. It is unrelated to sadness unless you choose to draw the line between the two. We are human beings and we need love and we need human contact but we also need to know that those are things that we have control over. This whole thing revolves around the equilibrium of the two components of what our lives really amount to in the simplest terms: a series of decisions and a series of events. Control is something we could all learn to accept, utilise and also let go of better. 

I don't live in a personal utopia. That personal utopia is impossible. What I do live in is a container of evidence of what that utopia would be. I have a colour coded book case with my vintage toy collection and trinkets from my travels mixed in with my miniature library. My window sills contain my best friends cacti, a metal plaque my dad made as a kid that says "DREAM WEAVER" and a little american flag. My wardrobe lives atop sheepskin rugs and consists half of my own things, half of things that belonged to friends who have come and gone and old things from the closets of my grandmother or my parents. There are no window treatements and few photo frames but rather a stack of hand-made photo albums chronicling my entire life. My kitchen is full of tools I only use one a year, but which mimick those that my mom keeps in hers and probably uses more often. For me, this is a dollhouse and I get to be the doll.

Nobody can live in a dollhouse forever. I long for Sundays in my mothers house with snow outside, thick socks on our feet, CBS Sunday Morning on the television, the smell of coffee and my mom and siblings who still and probably forever will never really sleep in late on weekends. I would give anything for one more weekend with my dad at our weekend home in the mountains, the fireplace on and dad in flannel pyjamas standing at the bottom up the stairs hollaring absurdities to wake us up for the famous Kean Weaver breakfast. I can't have any of those things. I will go back to America, I will buy an apartment in New York City, I will run away to my family when I want to and I will have a fresh start in the country where I belong but which haunts me every single day. I will be content and that will be home until the end of my life. 

What we need to do is be less afraid to allow ourselves to seek exactly what we want and be more accepting of the things we can't have. We need to allow ourselves the time to feel something. We need to fear not what will happen ten years from now and come to terms with the things that have happened in our past. All we really need to know how to do is wake up in the morning and face the day ahead with vigor and passion. 

when growing up is easy

This is too good to keep to myself. You need to know. LUSH makes lime-flavoured lip scrub where the exfoliator is--ready?--pop rocks!

If that's not an incentive to keep your lips soft, I don't know what is. 

LOST AND FOUND

Is it possible to be a master of all trades? The answer to that question is probably no. Am I the only one who is lying to myself when I choose to believe it's possible? Also, no. If this is the predicament that some of us are in, how do we cure ourselves? How do we save ourselves from disappointment and distress? How do we at least become at one with what we're doing?

We have to find the answer. We have to close our eyes, point and walk in that direction. We have to move forward. 

photo: Me doing what I do. 

sight optional

Frieze Art Fair. I've written about it both of the other years I've gone...and now, the third time around, it's an entirely different experience. 

Spectacle is a word used too often to describe art. I have a love/hate relationship with the word. To Merrium Webster it means this:

a : something exhibited to view as unusual, notable, or entertaining; especially : an eye-catching or dramatic public display

 b : an object of curiosity or contempt <made a spectacle of herself>

But in art its connotations are vastly more complicated. This very art fair is a perfect example of a non-spectacle within a greater spectable. The work itself is nothing to gasp over--it's what's chosen as "sellable" in the current art market, the chosen ones from the contemporary art realm that have been deemed by whichever higher power as having the ability to float in the equilibrium of mass appeal and artistic merit. It's a poor representation of what exists within this little niche world, but the prime example of where it all ends: when a piece of work is actually sold and consumed. That triumph when the gallerist checks a piece off their roster and the artist breathes a sigh of relief. 

All of this is something the average student or young artists scoffs at, but it's actually the harsh reality of the universe we are commiting our lives to. Most of them refuse to pay the £20 admission price to witness that reality in person and move on with the nightmare lingering in the back of their minds. 

It's not all negative though. It's kind of an incredible thing. This past Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending the private view with an invited friend. Did I look at the art? Not really. What's more interesting is the people who are there to buy and the environment in which they do so. Never have I seen so many thousand dollar handbags going to work, nor have I seen so many bottles of Champagne being guzzled in such a serious setting. You could look at it in one of two ways: a celebration or a condemnation. Opportunities are given to the deserved, money is thrown at the damned and people like me are there to add to that impending checklist of future options and enjoy the ride for the time being. Most of all, what I've realized is that there are two types of artist: an artist, one who is happy just to be making and learning and paying the consequences of not selling out with the secret hope of being in those white and carpeted cubicles and circus clowns who make simply and purely to be in those exact same cubicles. It's a diffenence not dissimilar to that of a boutique hotel and the Four Seasons, or a produce stall and a supermarket. 

Maybe the joke's on us. That spectacle is really in the hands of the middleman--those people with glossy hair, dressed in black and behind the desk. 

Photo: A close-up of a David Altmejd piece at the Andrea Rosen (NYC) booth. 

leave it to the insiders

A certain percentage of culture to be absorbed in a city is art. You might be a person who doesn't care, but if you live in a city you'd understand--it's unavoidable. Exhibition advertising can sometimes rival that of blockbuster films and galleries sometimes seem nearly as plentiful as restaurants. That said, it's often true that it's the hidden ones that are the most exciting--hidden enough so that the artist or curator has an uninhibited freedom that a large instituion can't. This is the perfect example of something slightly in between.

Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario. It's exactly that--a scenario. But Ryan Gander isn't that new of an artist and the people behind the venture aren't amateurs or mysteries either. Artangel and the amazing James Lingwood have brought us Rachel Whitereed's House, Roger Hiorn's Seizure and now this. The thing these all have in common is that they were all widely talked about in the paper, in TimeOut or in the culture circuit. They theoretically weren't hidden at all, but when you experience them it only feels like you're the only one in the room and you've come across this thing as a gem in the average urban landscape. 

In this particular case, you will probably actually be the only one in the room. Ryan Gander has created a situation whose circumstances are difficult to fathom. The experience happens in stages, starting with a mandatory online booking, then a mysterious text message from an unknown number, then upon entrance in the east end warehouse space you first notice a bizarrely placed fold-up table and a normal looking man with a clipboard awaiting the restricted 8 visitors per booking session to stroll confusedly through the gate. Walking into the space is uncomfortable. Maybe not just uncomfortable but rather calmingly eerie. You know this is an art piece. You know the closed doors are probably meant to be opened. You know that whatever lies on the other side of those doors is as equally non-descript as the office-y environment. The atmosphere initially reminds me of walking down the corridor in my father's engineering office building at night, except then there were no disheveled postcards or strangely placed velvet ropes. Nor were there iPod listening, McDonalds eating teenagers blocking the entrance to the stairs. It's like playing Clue, except the version created for intelligentsia in the 21st century. 

In art it is a common, usually monotonous and stale endeavor to purposely make something seem unintentional--but this is a rare example that actually succeeds. Ryan Gander admits us into a space where every detail down to the things in the skip outside or the crumpled paper on the floor is intentional but so much so that the viewer is guaranteed to forget that what he or she is experiencing isn't real. Everything is accessible to the invader, that is, everything except the textbook definition of art--that stuff only exists in the locked room. 

What all of this makes me realize is that what makes contemporary art successful is its ability to make someone feel like they are intruding. We are indeed invaders of the think tank--the final product at the tip of the artists working fingers. The unknown makes us uneasy and the uneasy makes us curious. In actuality that's just it: the viewing of art is a process that takes a viewer through stages of intrusion, curiousity and at last, an open-ended conclusion. 

Photo: The work of one of Gander's fictional blue conceptualist artists, Rose Duvall