weaving and its whereabouts

Really NEED to have this done.  but its not done yet...

here are some photos of the process, I have 5 warps, why are they not ALL yet off the loom!

you cannot speed up weaving, thats for sure... although as Miguel one of the janitorial nightstaff let me know in no uncertain terms, it only takes practice.  He was going on about the speed of weavers in his home country of Ecuador and making my tortoise speed really seem like nothing more than a lack of experience.  fair enough, though it isn't encouraging to hear someone tell you how slow you are in relation to professionals.

a quote

i've been lacking in visuals these days but not about to remedy that with this quote that spoke to me

‘the perfect symmetry between the dismantling of the wall of shame and the end of limitless Nature is invisible only to the rich Western democracies. The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countryside’s by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its people to abject poverty. Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything."

bruno latour.

not sure I agree with every word, but that end bit is quite on point…

thinking it through tupac

racism

Coming to Canada I continually notice how much to me the 'black problem' in the USA mirrors the 'Indian problem' in Canada. Non-problems, except that powers that be want the people to be gone for good. Maybe I view this parallel because I come from the East Coast where the Native population is not as large nor as visible as out in the midwest or west of the USA. Maybe racism simply functions in similar ways no matter where it occurs. Somehow the very beginning of this song by Tupac, about the breaking up of families, made me think of the ways Native women are incarcerated more than other women, how alcoholicism runs rampant and how strong some people truly are to continue against all the blocks pushed upon them by a dominant culture that uses its power to divide and oppress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvjkpPtK7NM&feature=related

language as song of the earth

The consonants of the language were considered the sounds of the earth
The vowels the sounds of the heavens

guillermo gomez-peña

this man has had me following him since I first heard of his work - he and a fellow artist had tied themselves to makeshift crucifixes in LA, one which was labeled LAPD and the other, I believe named after border control. They were up there until their audience finally got it that if they didn't intervene and get them off the crosses, they would perish just like Jesus is said to have done.
Gómez-Peña and his collaborator were saved from sudden death and suffered no more than dislocated shoulders, rope burn, and general trauma from escape of near death.
he is always doing crazy and amazing things, performing alongside Coco Fusco in a cage on display as the last Amerindians who had been left untouched by the outside world (Couple in a Cage) or simply swigging tabasco in one fail swoop in his instant identity ritual, fust before donning an EZLN pasamontaña, this man investigates identity, violence, borders, colonization and more generally, life in this crazy mixed up world of stereotypes racism vigilance and attempted control at all times, completely unsettling any sense of order that gringa culture may try to hold onto. I love it.

more to say about security

From this same article, entitled Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening, by Lisa Parks,
"As Patrice Petro and Andrew Martin suggest in Rethinking Global Security (2006):
In the twenty-first century, the politics of war, terrorism, and security can hardly be separated from the practices and processes of mediation, which continue to expand and intensify...Both fictional and fact based threats to the U.S. and global security helped to create and sustain a culture of fear, with far-reaching effects."
Understood in this context, airport screening involves a set of mediation processes that have been expanded and intensified to fit the prerogatives of an anxious state."

security

"In this essay, I treat the airport checkpoint as a discursive space where the state, the airlines, workers, imaging and sensing technologies and travelers converge to orchestrate and reproduce a set of protocols designated to ensure wha the TSA describes as 'freedom of movement'. Rather than confine my analysis to individuals and their private property, however, I treat the checkpoint as a site of biopower that represents the shift from a paradigm of 'national defense' to one of 'national security' described by Hardt and Negri (Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire). 'The notion of security', they explain, 'signals a lack of distinction between inside and outside, between the military and the police. Whereas "defense" involves a protective barrier against external threats, "security" justifies a constant martial activity equally in the homeland and abroad'...


the above is a quotation from an article one of my professors just sent me, the author, Lisa Parks, took all kinds of discreet photographs in airport security checkpoints, and is investigating them through the lenses of labor, the continuities between looking and touching and critiques the structures of surveillance that have emerged post 9/11...

9th floor EV studio

apartheid, walls, race, class and borders/boundaries

While I haven't seen the movie, the coffins displayed upon this wall as well as the graves being marked with piles of rocks looking like the cairns I grew up following on Appalachian mountain footpaths struck me. I was recently told by a professor that I was making work that was too conservative. That scared me. Now I realize I cannot shy away from what I have to say,
While I question the use of McCain soundclip speaking of knowledge of the human heart, this film looks like an interesting investigation of the absolutely murderous intentions of those behind this hugely expensive wall separating land from itself. Political boundaries are so fixed in our minds, but why? They are won through stealing and wars, and maintained in ways such as described in this videoclip. While Israeli apartheid week was taking place a week or so ago, I found myself wondering about the US version of the wall, different, so very different, but somehow much the same...

http://www.800milewall.org/watchatrailer.html

bananas and piñas

a 'discharge' process print on black linen...

pineapples printed and then removing color...

visages

some old prints that I enjoy, though my prof really disliked them at the time

founding fathers of terrorism

this is a find from 3 years ago, will have to post a photo of the finished work too, but I rather enjoyed these photos of work in progress, surfacing after 3 years today in an email search. I called it something like the 'founding fathers of terrorism,' or 'the original terrorists', seeing as most of todays so-called terrorist regimes have been or continue to be trained by the US military. Every US president printed in red and the use of color was meant to jar the eyes, at the same time as signify the colors of the flag...