howcouldiknow

Date: March 18th 2004

Age: 17

Location: University of Cincinnati

Condition: Depression?

I haven’t been comfortable this last week

I haven’t fit inside my skin quite right

my sleeves rub me the wrong way and the strings around my wrists

suddenly appear to be too constricting

my hair will not settle in one place

the strands seem as impatient as my submerged brain

pull up my hair strong and tight, rearrange my sleeping limbs

try to figure out why

nothing feels quite right

I have always written, privately.  I have notebook after notebook squirreled away in my room starting from eight or nine.  I was never really one for drawing but I liked words.  I still like words, hell I like books and libraries and authors and still words.  And yes, I am writing right now, but writing a conversational blog post does not count in my mind as a creative work.  So I continue writing and I continue showing no one, even those closest to me.  I have no idea how to disconnect myself and become an audience to my own work.  With photography I have a gut instinct that tells me, “this is crap” or “hell yes, you have a winner”.  I want to fix this,  maybe I can not think critically about my own writing because I do not try hard enough and have not figured out how to disconnect my emotions from it.  I am going to start delving into my archive of writing and trying to post it here.  Maybe no one cares and that is ok.  It is kind of more a therapeutic action than anything else.  Maybe I can dig up some of my poetry by nine year old Jessica (I was REALLY into rhyming, haha).  Here goes.

November of last year,  things were not going that well apparently.

November 11, 2008

The plants my mother gave me are dead.

I stopped watering them.

It’s unfair that they had to get caught in the middle.

There is a watermelon rotting in my kitchen cabinet.

I bought it to take to a party.

I put it in with my dishes.

I had my windows open all summer.

The wind would whip through and tear the blinds down.

Eventually I gave up and stopped hanging

them back up again.

My pillow looks like it belongs to a child.  It does.

It belongs to me seven years ago.

I guess I don’t know how to let go.

When I first moved here I went through a phase.

There was a time that I always slept fully clothed.

Recently my toaster began burning everything, I swear I didn’t turn the knob.

I started giving up on the little things.  That make life more pleasant.

I know a small amount of html mostly based on trial and error and the help of w3schools.  This makes updating and tweaking my website layout very time consuming and usually frustrating.  But the exciting part is I FINALLY made the images from my new series a click-thru gallery instead of a side-scroll.  This gives you (the hypothetical reader/viewer) more of a chance to focus on individual images and for the images to be a little bit larger.  I am continuing this series this winter quarter and will be adding and subtracting images so it is very much a work in progress based around the libraries of Monroe County in Rochester, NY.   Go.  Look.  cheers to me on the shocking amount of time it takes me to do something so simple.  

The MCA’s “The one hundred and sixty-third floor: Liam Gillick Curates the Collection” was AMAZING!  It was great to see this after my class on conceptual art as well as my museums class that discussed alternative exhibition techniques.  Gillick chose objects from the MCA collection and displayed them in the salon format in  mostly alphabetical order.  The text panels were pulled from archive texts at the MCA that did not correlate with the image presented.  The exhibition encouraged the viewer to create their own interpretations and connections.  It reminded me of Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” though perhaps without as much racial and cultural commentary.

“Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution 1968–2008″ was really exciting new (to me) work.   I also got a chance to go by the Art Institute and see the new exhibitions.  I have now been to this museum every few months and I was really impressed by how strong their rotating exhibitions were and how much there was to see despite my familiarity with the museum.  I also felt differently walking through after what I have learned in the last quarter.  It definitely alters my viewpoint and I have developed new tastes and understanding.

There was a small Irving Penn tribute that I am sure will later turn into a much more extensive retrospective exhibition as they possess many of his prints as well as correspondence, files and contact sheets.  I would love to see an exhibition featuring contact sheets and the corresponding final prints.

“Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it would be.  These forefathers to photographic manipulation and scrap-booking were filled with humor and personality.  The often meticulously crafted pages turned out to be much more than the doodling of idle women living a life of luxury.

I didn’t buy any post cards though I should have.  I hate museum stores, they make me feel like a yuppy.  One day they will have a starbucks inside a museum store and then I will spontaneously combust.

So, leaving Chicago on the train tonight, back at school/work/class tomorrow.  Love you, see you soon.