Post Christmas-pre New Year

A season of major change. I have realized that my house was a penance project. It functioned as a kind of punishment for the insensitive way I treated those those who loved me when I was in my late 20's. I maintained it as a combination shrine to by broken dreams and a reminder of the suffering I thought I deserved.

Now that is over.

Also the move to Wendy's house. Many difficult choices about what to take, discard or leave behind.
I felt a kind of authority during this transition that I don't often feel. As if I was determining the way my life would be going forward.

New courses and teaching collaborations represent new, never before projects that will carry into the summer.

Volumes of experience and inspiration from the recent film conference in Colorado... Leading to more film ideas than I can write down or draw.

The house in Downingtown Pennsylvania where six years of Thanksgiving dinners took place. This is also the house where my mother died in 1966. I moved through this house in my teens and the beginning of college. The leaving of this place set the pattern for my leaving places. I walked away from what I didn't want, leaving treasured things behind. There is lots of regret left in this house.

How to best cope with the emotions and tasks of this season.?

Life will be getting more difficult, for  a while.

Vibrant Matter

Borrowing a title from Jane Bennet's book on the political ecology of things...

I am moving around and through the house and studio at 10 Cedar Street. Looking at what I have saved and what I have built. I am under some pressure to keep moving, keep making choices. I put things here and leave things there, deciding their fate (as if objects have a "fate"). What is apparent as I do this is how I am still fascinated by this process of spreading things out and grouping them together. Tools here, electrical bits there, hardware over there, until the piles are boxed up. I have not let go of the idea that simply documenting the objects will make some meaning apparent. I imagine simple shelves on which the objects are placed to be changed at intervals. Not a game like Duchamp but more like the pictures posted on  the fences near ground Zero. An ongoing installation of sorts. Do you know this object? How do you know this object? Where is this object? How do you know they way you know this object?

I will make a place for this to happen and be documented here.

SO MANY BOOKS

As part of the move to Wendy's house,  I have set up a small library is a shared office space in Salem. This space will house the overflow of books coming from my studio that just cannot fit into Wendy's house in Beverly. I like this idea of having a place to go and read that is not in my house surrounded by the other work I have to do.


In order to mark the occasion, I am having the first in a series of conversations in the library with my friend Brian Pellinen. Brian is an educator and a writer who is a brilliant conversation person.. He listens and knows how to make connections to what is often a larger conversation. He also really enjoys just playing tennis with ideas. There is no agenda or plan for these conversations just a starting point from  some common interest perhaps.. Maybe a series of questions or projects to be discussed.

 I plan other conversations with lots of other friends and colleagues. I trust that this will turn into an interesting project and make The Library a valuable source for ideas and a fun place to go.

The Slow Tornado

I have been moving this month from a house and studio I have owned for 35 years. There is a long story about this but the short of it is that I have been married for three years now and have been managing two houses, lawns,  snowplowing and  everything else that comes with an old house. I also feel that in the past 12 years of being in a relationship with Wendy that I feel like I have moved into a period of time where I must measure my energy wisely and focus on getting the work done such that my gifts allow. Right now this means being a good partner and making films.
Yes, I will make some kind of film about the move. It has been hard to do the work and be reflective at the same time about what it means. I have found myself just sitting and looking at things that I remember, marks on a table or shelves built for a specific project and spinning the images of those times in my head, over and over.
I have discovered a lot and will discover more. Things that I thought I had lost, thing I didn't know I owned. I see that as I move this stuff to another place or storage and leave some of it behind that I have generated a very slow kind of tornado. In the way that a tornado scatters things far and wide I have removed these things from places far away and moved them with me until now I am moving and leaving behind and moving so that the things are scattered in the same way,  just slower.

New works from the film "Velocity"

"Velo Collages" 12x18" archival ink jet prints.
Frames from " Velocity" a 20 minute black and white 16mm film.

WORDS, UPDATE

Words at the end of January

Gravity, Fullnesss, Abundance, Comprehension, Apprehension, 
and Dwelling.