Ben, Maysey, and I began installing Parts to the Whole yesterday and got the majority up.  I went for a long run this morning in a beautiful Memphis park, and am waiting for Maysey to get back from yoga.  We'll head over to the Medicine Factory and finish it.  It looks very, very good, and I feel very, very good about it.  Images to come.

On another note, my family lost one of our dearest and oldest friends last Saturday, Joel Chinman.  It was sudden and hit us like a storm.  Rest in peace, Joel.

We (me and the work) leave for Memphis Thursday afternoon to install and celebrate Parts to the Whole.  Back in August, as I was sending Maysey images of the sculptures, I got this comment from her on the work and want to share and preserve it.

I know they are tiny, but they have a monumentality.  The ones toward the end that are starting to spread horizontally are really interesting, and a nice foil to the ones ... which are more clumping or dense.  It is like there is a magneticism happening, a way they are drawing themselves in, because, they don't feel singular.  Each piece feels like a gathering.  A gathering of fragments, of little souls, of voices, ideas, perspectives.  And each one presents a different conversation/outcome.  I'm SO excited about this show.

Well, me too.

GO Brooklyn

I am On The Other Side.  GO Brooklyn was a thoroughly positive experience.  Having real people walk into my real studio and engage was affirming beyond anything I could write.  I needed this more than I knew, and got more from it than I anticipated.  What a gift!  A circle of people who are motivated to experience and understand what I am doing and talk with me about it!  My confidence in this work is confirmed, and my understanding of the necessity of this studio is complete.  These sculptures have been waiting a long time to be made.  Next week they (and others, plus three drawings) hit the road for Memphis.

My God, the anxiety - about the work, GO Brooklyn open studios, the Memphis exhibit, other demands present and upcoming.  It feels like a full-time job to manage it.  No wonder I keep constricting the studio, to try and keep from being overwhelmed.  While I managed to overcome the last spasm and have been letting each piece evolve on its own terms, I've simultaneously been holding the expectation that I would "turn the pieces into something," that I would use them as material for more complex work.  I've translated having the large space in Memphis into a requirement to make site-based installation, and have been trying to force-fit these small sculptures into a collective form they don't want to have.  I saw this today, and gave myself permission to have a sculpture show.  These sound like small things in the writing; in the living they are exhausting and upsetting.

I need to become intimate with these works individually, not treat them as puzzle pieces.  That's the only way I will be able to see what each needs and how each should be presented.  The relief in this is terrific.  I have about 30 pieces, and each reverberates for me without any help from the others.  There may be more work on some of them, but that's their individual evolution.

I love this one.  It's like a hinge.

Wood, paint, about 2 x 1 1/2 x 2 1/2"

After my run this morning I went to the Brooklyn College fish and turtle pond to cool down.  It's my latest ritual, and makes running on the street when I can't get to the park more palatable.  It's peaceful and intimate.  This tiny baby turtle was sleeping on the back of another turtle, and a toddler-size turtle was hanging out on a lilypad.  They have no concept of body space, just march all over each other.  The ridges on their shells serve as footholds (flipperholds)?

By the time I got to the studio my anxiety was up.  After I worked through the procrastination and started, I saw how many more rules for these new works I'd made than I'd realized; they were stifling.  The initial works (most are in the posts below) had been really satisfying, and I was trying to sustain that; it backfired.  In the limited choices I was allowing myself, I'd stifled the work's becoming.  Seeing that was like the clouds parting.  I started taking each piece on its own terms, and the work is moving again.

I'm battling this tightness.  Try as I might to forget the Memphis exhibit and just accustom myself to working again in a dedicated space, September is not far away and my time will tighten well before then.  I've made many of the small wood pieces and continue to be in love with them, but have been narrowing my options with them and, knowing that's not a good idea, trying to be expansive without abandoning them (to what, anyway?).  It's hard to put into words, and it's certainly hard to experience.  I have to get so frustrated in the studio that I do something/anything, and then I start to work in earnest.  It can take hours.  Right now the key is to get there every day, or as close to that as possible, to give myself less time to tighten up again.  I like to leave the studio when I still want to stay.

Wood, paint, about 2 x 3 x 1"

I'm settled into, and loving, my studio and between-semester studio practice, and again see how long, long, LONG it has been since I have been engaged this way, whether for reasons of time, space, or mindspace.  And now that I am, some fundamentals are changing and I'm working to process them as much as to make work.  It's exhilarating to be struggling for the right reasons.

A basic rhythm in my practice and work is the same but different.  Now there's a zooming out:  the context is expanding into a thematic shift and things have come out of focus.  The new space and time are catalysts; the Medicine Factory show in September is another.  The exhibit space is vast and active and a long-awaited chance to make site-based work.  Yet for now I'm trying to stay more focused on the internal changes than the exhibit.  I need to make some preliminary sense of them for new work to have a footing; I just know that focusing on the exhibit prematurely risks the semi-resolution of May 24, 2007.  I don't want that.

Five years later, processing the weaknesses of that piece is one of my starting points for figuring out how to move forward.  The relationships among the collage fragments were too arbitrary and illustrative; I couldn't resolve them (though I was trying; thank you, Susan) because I wasn't ready to see or explore the very basic tensions the work was alluding to but not confronting (and even avoiding).  Now, allowing myself to spend time in the studio writing, looking, and just thinking are starting to reveal those tensions.  They're familiar and new:  the same but different.

Realizing this shift is disorienting and anxious-making, and at first raised fear that I have to change everything to accommodate it.  That high-drama moment passed, thankfully, now replaced by a sense that it's the credibility and depth of the work that will change, and what that looks like in practice is simply unknown.

Wood, paint; 1 3/4" x 3" x 1/2"

The positive trajectory continues.  The new studio is an incredible opening.  I spent the first five weeks patching, painting, schlepping, and organizing, and all that prep evolved into the start of new work last weekend.  I share some new pieces below.

I began reading and working with Mapping the Intelligence of Artistic Work, by Anne West; the book was edited by Katarina Weslien, who directed the Maine College of Art MFA program when I was there.  Maysey introduced me to the book and let me carry it around when I was in Memphis; I've been waiting for the right time to dig in.  I'm in.  It is powerful.

On another note, starting in July I will be full-time faculty at LIM College, where I've been an adjunct since 2005.  This development has several long stories behind it, but what matters here is this sea change at exactly the right time.  I've not wanted an employer until now; now I have one.  To enjoy stability in a community I know and love and that makes the right demands on me and gives the right things back is a game-changer.  My semesters will be fuller than full, but my off-time will be plentiful.  Residencies will be possible.  I need to continue freelancing to make it work, and even more to keep the studio.  I don't know how it will roll out, but what is rolling out is a keen awareness of a long-term change.  My work at the College feels different, and surely my work outside the College feels different.

I don't want to say anything about these new pieces yet.  The first piece is from last weekend (a dark cell phone shot), and the next four are from this weekend, in the order in which they were made.

Wood, paint, fabric, thread
About 6" x 3"

Wood, paint; 2 3/8 x 3"

Wood, paint; 5 x 1 1/2"

Wood, paint; 2 3/8 x 1 1/2"

Wood, paint; 2 1/8 x 1"

Liz Sweibel, Untitled (Draft), 2012
Wood, paint, wire (Maysey's studio)
About 1 3/4 x 3/4 x 2 1/2"

I so often want to write here yet am so pressed for time that priorities often have to lie elsewhere.  Still, I want a record of how things are unfolding, for myself and for whoever checks in on me here.

The breakthrough I wrote of five weeks ago continues to evolve - not as a sudden production of latent work, or noticing that work was being made to my left while I was focused on my right, but rather through productive experimentation.  It continues, spurred on by a series of openings and opportunities.

1. In mid-February, I went to an artist event initiated by Heather Cox, where 20 strong artists talked, ate, looked at each others' work, and talked some more.  It was terrific.  A second event is in the works.
2. When I walked into Heather's space, I saw a studio was available.  No longer!  I will have space in the Gowanus area starting April 1. It's a big stretch (understatement) in financial terms, but I can't afford not to take it in every other way.  All signs point to this being a good decision for now.
3. In mid-March I visited my dear friend from grad school, Maysey Craddock, in Memphis, and spent some of our time together working in her studio.  It was exhilirating, and my new studio came through while I was there.  Maysey introduced me to her friend Melissa Dunn and we visited her studio, where nine paintings destined for a museum show and the Golden Mean are in full force.  I also met Terri Jones, whose work feels like extended family.
4. I'll be exhibiting at the Medicine FACTORY in Memphis in September.  This invitation to do site work propelled me into a way of thinking and looking and ruminating and being that I have so missed; it infects me like nothing else.
5. A practice that melds with my teaching and other responsibilities arrived.  I have a subway drawing series underway.  When one thing opens, it seems the fences around the rest give way.

Liz Sweibel, Untitled (Draft), 2012
Wood, paint, wire (Maysey's studio)
About 1 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 3/4"

The being and thinking and doing are opening up.  A breakthrough.  Protecting my time (and 24 million other things) has opened up to new ideas for work.

Saturday I visited  the Reanimation Library Midtown Branch at MoMA.  I found I used it like a library rather than a workshop, and settled into The Rural Studio, a book on the architecture of Mockbee.  His work and impact were (and are) profound, how he integrates creative work with layers and layers of helping.  Paired with The Power of Limits, architecture has come forward without any real intention on my part, and helped me push through.

I know what to do, and it feels like it will absorb and move everything important I've been struggling with, hurt by, and pissed off at for years now.  Thank God.

I'm uncomfortable with how I left this journal, as I've muscled myself out of that flatness (no exaggeration), largely thanks to daily writing - using pencil on notebook paper.  It suits me better in some ways, including and maybe especially the physical experience, and of course the privacy.

Daily writing is impossible with the semester under way, but I've set better limits to protect weekend time from student e-mails and, to the extent I can, schoolwork.  I start my Saturday mornings with my paper, pencil, and coffee.  Today I want to capture my handwritten words here, exactly as written on page 41, and align my public self  more closely with my private self.  I wrote:

Just opened my new book, The Power of Limits.  Scanning, flipping through, I arrive at The Greatness of Little Things (p. 123).  Of course I stop, and in reading, "bump into" Zen Buddhism, Golden Mean, music, haiku (this, in two pages).  Drew me back to Introduction to Architecture at UF, where I learned about the Golden Mean and have never forgotten that (or recalled anything else from the course).  I have been telling students about carbon paper.

My trajectory has felt so meander-y, and to the extent it has been, I pay the price (e.g., no PhD).  At the same time, the patterns and connections all point to something coherent (or at least coherent in its vagaries).  My struggle, which has become increasingly clear in and since art school, has been to locate ways to integrate in my life what is integrated across the universe.  Or, to find an existing coherence (which I seem to be doing) and get it out of me into the world.  It's so subtle, yet I'm wanting to make it powerful.  The subtle mark is too easy for me, even though it does everything I want.

Some backstory:  Last weekend I took a keyboard apart (thanks, Mo and Adrian) to make a collage for my nephew Daniel.  That opened the floodgates (mine are small, of course), and the ideas that started coming are very much about integration - not in the universal sense of the journal references but in the possibilities for my work, which should connect with the universals if the work achieves what I'm after.  (I'm sure I'm drawing distinctions that don't exist, in my endless restating of the obvious to get to what's just beyond my reach.)  I've been researching and attempting haiku.  My other new book is The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (thank you, Justin); her stories have the economy of haiku.  All this to say that I keep bumping into a collection of objects, ideas, and processes that is all the same, or leading to the same.  It is a relief and a comfort, and explains my frustration at making work that gets at what I'm after.  I do have ideas, so now I'll turn to them and hope for the patience, the time, and the tenacity to pursue them.

The flatness of last night's post troubles me; just as my work escapes flatness, I seem to be embodying it.  Despite my self-cajoling, I'm struggling to summon enthusiasm for much of anything and instead am acting as if.  It's more or less successful in that I'm meditating, running, in the studio, and accomplishing the necessities.  The imposed structure of teaching may command my time and attention, but it also helps me stay psychologically organized.  With less time to slosh around in my own thoughts (or slosh around at all), I seem to have more energy and a more positive outlook.

The semester finished before Thanksgiving, and once again the break has enabled me to get back to work.  I'm making new sculpture for the first time since 2007, before the Troutman Street loft vacate.  I'm using painted wire discards from 2007, which is a nice piece of continuity.

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint

(It must be said: I gave it away last semester - gave too much of my time - and am resolved to set better boundaries.  Reading and answering college e-mail on weekends is self-sabotaging, and something I entirely inflict on myself.  The experience of being needed is so seductive!)

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint

My friend Lisa Tubach visited last month and posed the right challenges.  Much of my work, including the pieces above, cuts right to it rather than remains in question for long.  It's opened and closed in a single session, avoiding extended uncertainty and discomfort.  So I began a more open-ended exploration:

Liz Sweibel, Untitled, 2011
Thread, wire, paint, paper, graphite

It doesn't feel so pat and I'm not even sure I like it.  I know I don't recognize it in the same way as I do the two above.  Extending the materials (even just to paper and pencil) opened the process to more possibility and anxiety (I'm so easily overwhelmed!), but I see that willingness as a good sign.  I'm not dead yet.

Also important:  the most authentic, realistic strategy is for me to prioritize exhibition opportunities outside NYC and residency opportunities around NYC.  It's a relief to see that clearly.  I've again made my home studio more functional and engaging.

Getting older - feeling older - is coming to feel like time is running out for me as an artist.  The distance between my daily activity (mental, emotional, physical) and my vision for myself (rooted in history, not fantasy) feels so great that bridging it seems ever harder.  Every day I push back against this thinking, with occasional breakthroughs, yet it's thick.  For instance, this summer I decided to sublet a studio rather than apply to residencies.  Actually getting to a residency is so problem-ridden that spending time on applications (especially with little new work) seems wasteful.  Better to get a space to make new sculptural and installation work, then use that to create opportunities down the line.  Another idea:  to build a miniature installation site I can develop in my home studio, and use the documentation to change the scale.  Like a maquette, but since I work small, who knows?  I do like this urge.

Obviously, I'm not without ideas.  What I am without is time.  This will shift with the end of the semester (mid-November), and I must shift everything else with it.  I've actually been wishing I were a writer!  I spend so much time writing and love it, but the gap between what I can say in words and what I can convey with my work is unbridgeable.  In "'Evidence' Revisited" in a long-ago issue of Art in America, Carter Ratcliff wrote about the impossibility of reducing art to words.  Nor can I elevate my words to art.

It's been hard to come here to write, not just for the usual reasons, but because I've been trying to find a way to express my disappointment with the exhibit.  It has to be said.  The gallery was basically unprepared, noncommunicative, and uninvolved.  It is a weak, uncurated show.  I did the best I could with minimal direction, a space entirely wrong for my work, and scarce time, and am eager for it to be over.  I'm not promoting the show, and am fighting embarassment because I feel responsible for the gallery's shortcomings.

While I was excited by the openness the opportunity seemed to offer, my dealings with the gallery turned that into a point of vulnerability.  The install time was so rushed by the gallery's delays in preparing the space that making work on-site became impossible; I ended up pulling older work into the exhibit. The work is fine; the presentation is not.  I could have done something new and exciting with the space had I any sense of the gallery's vision for the exhibit and some lead time.  A big, lost opportunity.

I've been deep in the semester since late August.  It's been easy to draw strength from teaching and so I've kept my focus there (and by necessity, given my work load).  But when I peel that back, I am again questioning how my work should go into the world.  While the drawings are still active, I'm thinking about video.  Having the freedom to make work for the Internet and self-curate seems like just the thing now.

Yesterday, on the street, I saw a woman hitting her son (or grandson) with her umbrella while she yelled at him.  He was about 13 and apparently had mouthed off.  Feelings I've been keeping at bay (or letting work blanket) surged up.  I was horrified and wanted to help.  And in the end?  I kept going, deflated by the tragedy and thoughts of this young man.  There's cultural differences operating, but I cannot understand how any thinking being could administer such abuse, and with such an absence of consciousness that its public visibility was a non-issue.

Revealing the Ordinary

Tomorrow I begin installing Revealing the Ordinary at Gallery Korea, amidst an enormous amount of busy-ness and tumult.  Natural disasters (an earthquake and Hurricane Irene), a bathroom gut renovation, and the start of classes (I'm teaching five plus a seminar plus mentoring plus an administrative role plus ...) have fostered a dense environment where all my energy goes to meeting my essential commitments.  Installing this show feels like - and requires - moving into another world, and I am using this evening to settle and open my pores.  One evening!

Turns out the exhibit is much more open-ended than I knew, as the curators have invited me to bring all the work I submitted and other work I would like to include for their consideration.  I will be designing the exhibit independently and able to do the site work that will help snap the exhibit into the present.  With only three artists in the show, I will have a generous space.  The quality and nature of this opportunity are sinking in.  Tomorrow I get to work in real space and make new work that will be seen.

Part of what's snapped me to attention is learning that my dear, dear friend Maysey Craddock has an opening the night after mine at Nancy Margolis Gallery and will be in town from Memphis.  She will be at mine and I will be at hers.  I only learned this yesterday, and it has drawn a quick line from my present absorptions to the time when my work had my full attention - in graduate school with Maysey and before and after those years.  That's not been the case in awhile, and her presence and faith in me is, for lack of a better word, inspiring.

Things are changing.  I've had some meetings with curators recently, and the fallout is as it should be:  new questions, old questions made new.  For the first time, I'm working with literal imagery, and it's a whole new set of problems.  Decisions need another kind of consideration.  And it's fascinating to me that this is happening.  Why, now, does working with anything but literal subject matter seem ... irrelevant?  That's not a comment on my past work (or my future work), but on today.  I clearly need fresh language, yet I can't quite tell what it's trying to get at.  My underlying concerns are the same in the ways they have to be, but seem to be expanding, taking more into consideration.  It's not just our relationships with one another, and those moment-to-moment decisions we make that add up to so much, but the entire system and its vulnerability.  Ultimately, everything can be swept away, whether by a lacerating comment or a tsunami.  I can't go further with this yet but the seeds feel right.

I have an exhibit opening September 7, Revealing the Ordinary at Gallery Korea, which will include some older work.  I've always made site work or shown very recent pieces in exhibits, so this is a first.  (There may be a site piece; I'm not sure yet.)  For months I've been questioning my ambition to show in traditional gallery spaces, yet when I saw the announcement on the gallery site and sent word out to my community, the process (and the responses) thrilled me.  I mean thrilled me.  And that made me laugh at myself because my flirtation with disinterest in gallery exhibits has to be in part protective.  More accurate is that they are not my only interest, but the visibility they afford is important and rewarding and desirable.

It's taken until my very last day out here for all the thinking, working, writing, worrying, reading, walking, looking, and the rest to congeal into the feeling I am going home refreshed.  I'm not sure a vacation has ever taken so long to sink in; then again, I've never been crushed by the particular challenges that have been crushing me.  (Or had to work so many hours teaching and editing while on vacation.)

I am so, so satisfied to see that the drawings are starting to suggest their next direction.  It's a feeling I've not had in a long, long time, and it is such a relief.  I'm luxuriating in it, allowing it to develop of its seeming-own accord while I work.

My students are expressing curiosity about the nature of inspiration.  (I actually detest the word.)  I've been sharing Picasso's perspective - that it exists but has to find you working.  It's a perfect description, yet I've not been living it.  In working steadily for just these two weeks, it has returned to felt experience.



Office of George J. Stretch, Ocean Beach, Fire Island

I'm wrapping up my time on Fire Island, ready to be going home.  The weather has been gray and rainy more than not over the two weeks, and it's starting to take a toll on my mood.  I'd rather be in Brooklyn at this point, back with my home and cats and Prospect Park, than with the beach a two-minute walk away, but not really available.  I have worn shoes less than a single day while here, and I will miss barefootedness.
I spent today on a new drawing and need to add a third word to my two-word statement:  essence.  Each piece needs to be built of as little as will hold it up. (And built is specifically apropos.)  Anything more dilutes, muddies, distracts.  None of this is new realization, but in returning to the studio after a period of absence or distance, it is a relief.  Like I recognize myself and can accompany myself moving forward.  The necessity is to keep working and defending the time.  The drawings have something, yet want something.  If I bring a freshened connection to the work home with me, and build on it, I'm satisfied.  The work is such a solace, yet equally a source of discomfort.

A teensy spider took a hike on my drawings, then up a spool of thread.

Spider, Thread, Planes in Japan Post-Tsunami
(thread, vellum)

The Ocean Beach Parking Lot

I've been on Fire Island now for more than a week - the most incredible gift of time I could ask for.  My intentions were for this to be a self-created residency; my applications were not accepted. The immersion of a residency isn't possible (so the word itself is a stretch), as I am teaching an on-line course and have other work that must be done, but the amount of time that I can call my own is generous.  I've been wanting to write here, but always finding the time better spent, whether working in my makeshift studio, reading, or just being on vacation.  I try to accept that I need to restock if I'm to produce, so have allowed restocking to find its form.

Yesterday I walked from Ocean Beach to the Fire Island Pines, with a detour through the Sunken Forest and the paths of Cherry Grove.  How often are we truly, truly alone without any sense of what the next few minutes will bring, yet not anxious?  It's early in the season here, and so I had long stretches of true solitude - on the beach, in the forest, on the town walkways.   Incredible!  I'm glad to be comfortable in my own company, while realizing I don't necessarily need to be solo for the rest of my life.

I brought materials to continue with the vellum and thread.  As it turns out, the 19x25" format hasn't worked.  I don't see them resolving and stored them away for awhile.  I brought the 9x12 pad and have completed (I think) two drawings.  While at first it was essential that the photos I worked from be my own, without thinking I moved to images from the Japan earthquake and tsunami.  I was amazed at how quickly this moved from the front page.  Our memories are so short; we move so quickly to the next thing

Making the drawings, I keep thinking of fragility and impermanence and see that those two words are as complete an artist statement as I may ever write.  Anything else I have to say is in reaction to - or layered upon - those ideas.

Other awarenesses:

• Unless I'm working for someone else (students, money), I always think I should be doing something else.
• By limiting my applied vocabulary to line with these drawings, I limit my subject matter to the man-made.  I don't know what to make of that.
• I'm not applying for anything until my studio feels active and I feel like I can argue on my own behalf.  My short-term goal is to work only.  I want to update my Web site by Labor Day to coincide with the exhibit at Gallery Korea.  C'est tout.

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and will write about that tomorrow or so, as I have much to say.

Cottage Walk