I know he sees the blank surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone

I've always hated Art Museums. Something about them always reminded me of Medieval pilgrimages to see bodily remains of long dead saints - mostly taken from recent graves. There is kind of this psuedo-religious implication that the work on the walls was made by geniuses in touch with the divine, in the same way the humans who wrote the bible were considered to have been speaking God's words - I wonder if that is a hold over from Royalty as patrons - since they served as politicians who ruled by 'divine right' and similarly to own art or commission it implied a value that lower classes were allowed to look at but not touch. Even my grandmother, back in my college days when I tried to talk about/show her my work would fan her hand in front of her face and refuse to look while saying 'I don't understand any of that art stuff'. 

My very pregnant friend and I ventured into the tourist crowds on Friday to see the Guillermo Del Toro/Pinocchio show @MOMA before it closes - in part, I brought her because of her background in film as a member of Local 52 - I was curious to see how an exhibit like this landed on someone who's day to day (often very shitty) job entailed the work being upheld as high art at this institution. It felt horrifyingly like being at Disney World, spending all day waiting in lines for a ride, only to be shuffled along by the masses and at the end of the show in about 20 minutes. While it was all laid out in a clean and easy to understand fashion - I think the most valuable aspects of what media has to offer seems to be misunderstood - but I think the problem has existed since the beginning of museums, and even in what I imagine @MOMA's attempt at inspiring new, younger, more culturally plugged in audience members to come to the museum - I feel like I see a deeply unfortunate lack of curiosity in the curation about WHY anything comes in to being. We can't learn math by looking at the final answer - understanding math requires engaging with the process, feeling out which routes we respond to better and supports we need to get to that final answer. Pythagoras was a philosopher who imagined abstract philosophical concepts about space and how we navigate it - but one of the languages he focused on to communicate about his understanding of how we perceive space happened to be mathematical. There are so many languages for human experience - but they are just that. We cannot forget that they represent real things, lived, embodied curiosities from human beings. This is where we have gone wrong in economics - forgetting that those graphs and numbers refer to human beings living their very real lives, so we play them like a casino full of games that might spit money at us if we 'win'.

I watched Del Toro's Pinocchio on Christmas and was underwhelmed and uncomfortable most of the time - a similar feeling to my experience of his other recent film Nightmare Alley. Both are based on preexisting literature and deep familiarity within a broader cultural context, and I am even reminded of Pan's Labyrinth (a pretty perfect film AND story) when I realize that Pinocchio also engages with fascism that threatens our magical reality. I can't say I enjoy his work very much, but I find myself increasingly compelled by directors who are unafraid to work through their internal machinations via such a public format. To bring their curiosity to the masses and see what comes back to them. That feels to me like the kinds of stories and ideas that really have something to say, a space to take up in our cultural development as a species - not just media aimed to please, to distract, to talk for the sake of talking. That's just capitalism baby.

When I teach Aaron Douglas, I start with asking what students know about the Harlem Renaissance. To my constant frustration and dismay, I always am told that it was an explosion or resurgence of Black art, music and writing. There are only about 50 years between the complete abolition of slavery and the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance - Aaron Douglas is part of the first group of Black Americans to have no experience of slavery in his lifetime (when it had also been illegal for black people to learn how to read) and he not only obtained a Masters Degree, but taught at Ivy League Columbia University. The Harlem Renaissance was the first time Black Americans could even fully imagine, let alone have the freedom to create an identity for themselves- what a ferocious, intense, huge huge task, to invent an identity that had never existed before, out of hundreds of years of trauma and being told you were sub-human. I'm not going to just have students cut out silhouettes and layer them and call it a day. This is not just a theme, a style, a time period, a technique. Examining a form of expression without excavating what was trying to be expressed is no different then teaching someone how to use a gun, but having no framework for exploring why or when it might be appropriate to use it, or how it has impacted others in the past or may impact us in the future.

I was at a student event where an exploration on Surrealism was being explained to the audience as making up a fantasy world, somewhere that doesn't really exist - it pulled a similar string that resides between rage and hopeless frustration. A simple google search pulls to the top in a singular sentence that Surrealism is an attempt to articulate the unconscious mind. Any deeper investigation will clearly lay out how the first Surrealists were exploring developing ideas about psychotherapy and how the choices we make and stories we tell are expressions of the buried parts of ourselves. Dali painted a lot of his dreamscapes, and the recurring image of a woman is a specific refraction about his relationship with his mother and how that manifested in his relationships with other women. It began as a response to the emotional impacts of World War I, as a cultural need to process the experience manifested - some of the main players of the Surrealist movement worked alongside Freud as he was beginning to name and understand Shell Shock - or PTSD as we have come to understand it. I don't need a degree in art history to take a second and be curious about something and do the littlest work of looking it up, before bringing it to students and asking them to engage with it. To do any less then that is deeply irresponsible in my opinion to everyone involved, including the artists who's work is being referenced. I have also never seen any of this mentioned in any Museum exhibits, anywhere - and I went to the Dali Museum in high school. Cezanne, who inspired the Cubist and Futurist movements was trying desperately to represent in paint new philosophical and mathematical concepts like the 4th dimension - check out Charles Howard Hinton's 1884 essay titled What is the Fourth Dimension? I see Guernica in school hallways all the time - I hope whoever put it up knows it is an anti-war painting that had a huge impact, and that Picasso was communicating about the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's - which ironically is the same war that Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is taking place directly after. 

I heard an accidental admission from an intern that my work is being blown off as 'art therapy stuff' and I am taking a step back to reassess where my values and the values of others actually align - or, as I'm discovering, do not. The questions that I am asking, before getting to the part where we make decisions about media and images - would not be considered 'art therapy stuff' in a writing or poetry class, in character development for a theatre class, and being able to answer these kinds of questions is actually deeply essential to having a successful career in any kind of job that requires creative output, as a fundamental fact - the exact same as an accountant needing to know how to do basic math. When I ask my students about their identities and all they know how to do is draw a flag for countries that some of them haven't even been to, or when murals get made that have random faces of color but no clear story or message - we have flattened the concept of social justice and Art so much that it is meaningless. Therapy exists to support those of us who for a variety of reasons were unable to develop certain skills needed to engage as full human beings in society and in their own lives, but since those skills are as essential to functioning as any other knowledge or skill set, should be built in to all education. Knowing how to resolve conflict productively without losing myself is probably more functional then me being able to pass a physics test to be honest - and Art is literally a language of expressing the self, where skills around cultivating our personal languages are what every aspect is doing, all the time - if I am losing work because someone in power misunderstands the point of Art, the problem is much larger then me. 

I was told recently I would make a good Art Therapist. I appreciate the sentiment, but honestly - I'm not interested in healing people. I'm much more of a cultural anthropologist, and while I am deeply invested in pulling apart and understanding how we make meaning as human beings - I want to engage with the time scale of centuries - and I deeply believe that the notes I record along the way are the actual gifts that I will leave behind - because that is how we eventually come to understand each other, by telling you how I came to the conclusions I did, what I was feeling or thinking when I made a choice - the process is the Art. The piece at the end is just the residue of an experience. Proof it happened, but by the time you look at it and have your feelings about it, I will already be on to the next series of questions - getting lost with new people on a journey with a totally different destination. A common phrase amongst the visiting artists (working in the gaming and animation industry) for my character design class is "if you don't enjoy the process, then this isn't the job for you". Unless a museum is creating spaces to more fully engage with the process of Art Making, then it is just a Mausoleum.

the distinction between hypotheses and enchantments

HOW TO TRAP A DEMON with TAMAR ETTUN 

@PioneerWorks Second Sundays, 4/9/23

I step out into the sunshine filled garden

A jester type - silver body suit + crown of matches, a bouquet of wands bound together 

She announces the process, gesturing up a small hill with a stone slab pathway 

to a woman in bright colors, a yellow-rope headdress that reminds me of Medusa

The jester is some type of Demon, a time based one, maybe of Now

not all Demons are bad, she says

Explains different kinds of rituals, greek influences, lilith

a psychoanalytic approach that sees our shadows as unintegrated parts of ourselves 

looking for acceptance, an invitation to the party that is you

Her crown of matches slips down her brow

We'll burn it at the end of the ceremony, she says 

as I step past her onto the stone path

The demon-trapper (priestess?) watches as I approach

her stone seat caught in a shaft of light

She is as quiet as her jester is loud, but on top of that little hill, it is like a blanket 

has descended around us and I hear only her soft voice

I came just to see her, to see this, her process - but also I am a little nervous 

to learn what I'm about to learn

I hadn't slept well the night before, it had felt like I was being watched 

through a sliver of undraped window in my bedroom - 

I used to have night terrors as a child, and they whisper to me sometimes, even as an adult

Her questions are very like the questions I ask students - what does your demon look like, feel like, smell like, can you describe its texture, the sounds it makes

It allows a kind of gently active reflection about the things holding us back

a way to look without having to stare it down or defend yourself

To admit, acknowledge its existence

I know this demon isn't mine, I explain to her

It is a family demon, passed down through the women but manifests as choosing

violent, abusive, addicted men to be with us

My mother carries it inside of her, and to protect myself I had to reject the vessel 

because she cannot distinguish between herself and this destructive other

I always thought we carried a kind of fucked up female energy, damaged or inverted 

but as we talk I start to understand this entity as masculine

desperately hungry for the feminine

What does it look like? she asks in her accented voice

a dainty silver chain with Hebrew letters slips out of her ceremonial costume

A human shaped void - just empty blackness with two moist human eyes 

and a scary mouth with long, sharp teeth

What does it sound like? she asks

It has no voice - it just makes sounds when it eats, saliva and teeth sounds 

he is so hungry. I guess its a He, I laugh

So it manifests through gender? she clarifies

It is time to invite it into my little bowl

this is the first time I have addressed it directly

rather then through the vessel of family members

I can feel its confusion - curious about being engaged with

about being invited somewhere, anywhere at all - 

but also a fear of doing someone else's bidding

of being tricked by the desire to engage and not being able 

to protect himself if the dynamic shifted

There is a community of other demons waiting for him, 

I find they sort themselves out, she says

I feel him decide to put a foot in, and together we count to three and flip.

Come back for the ceremony, tell me how you feel after, she says.

Her ritual is clear and simple

We all gather together, collect our demons for releasing, make a circle

As she talks about them, she mentions that a few ghosts also showed up 

sliding her eyes in my direction for a second

We breathe together, adults and children, holding our little cups, then we dump them out

and shake them out of our bodies, we hum, then we scream 

when the crown of matches is lit and then dunked in a bucket of water

And I see how Joy is the antidote, the shield, the thing that frees us 

from demons of shame and anxiety, of sleeping to avoid reality and workaholic dervishes 

how greeting these demons like loving friends and inviting them to have a seat at the table 

is what allows them to live their own lives, not at our expense

But what I have is a ghost

Like patterns in sand that tell us of the presence of wind

I have born witness to this wounded being's impacts through time

surfacing again and again 

an inheritance as real as a house but impossible to get rid of

The entire ceremony I could feel him clinging to my body

keeping me from unfurling with the abandon of everyone else in the group

I think of the person my mother didn't get to be 

when this ghost wore the face of her father, irreperable damage

for years, a decade I have described her like a Zombie, 

shaped like the woman who birthed me but vacant inside 

her child self buried too deep to be found in this lifetime

My anger and grief and shame at her inability to be whole or present 

became too much

Now that I have located this ghost, I understand what the task is ahead of me

I have to invite it to speak, and I have to listen

listen until it runs out of breath

Practical Magic

I discovered the other day that chocolate bunnies made for Easter baskets are hollow to represent the empty tomb of Jesus.

While discussing this holiday with my local barista, I ended up mentioning the psychic church I went to growing up - and she was surprised because she associated Christianity (distinct from Catholicism) with being very anti magical things. A close friend disclosed recently that she has deeply Christian relatives that are part of a sect that does snake-handling, not getting bitten or surviving the poison were signs that your relationship with God was good. My research on it suggests this is a very specific manifestation of Christianity mostly amongst Appalachian communities - also the birthplace of a very distinct quality of country music. She grew up in the mountains in Chattanooga Tennessee, so maybe it is less surprising then how deeply Christian parts of Florida are - I often have to remind people that the northern half of Florida is included in the Bible Belt, in my home town there was a church at almost every street corner. Similarly, my grandmother on my father's side studied at a Virginia Beach institution created by Edgar Cayce - one of America's most famous clairvoyants during the 20's and 30's, when mediumship was trending all over the western world. Edgar Cayce was deeply religious, and his new age teachings are deeply founded in spiritual practices involving the bible and even Jesus like powers of healing. It is bizarre to notice language I use in my day to day life be used on wikipedia pages to describe the doctrine of this person. She died a few weeks before I was born - apparently she was an extremely studied astrologer and I grew up with a small library full of books that include notes in her lilting, spidery handwriting.

My mother chose to get baptized (she was raised Baptist) when she was 16, and was compelled to marry my father whom she was living with while attending community college - because her father considered it sinful, in 1983 (and also to get away from him and that property in Labelle Fl with no running water). She was not in love with my father - but wanted an education, and wished her high school boyfriend would come interrupt the ceremony and take her away on his motorcycle. Years later, in the church we regularly attended after my stepfather was incarcerated the last time during my childhood (The Seraphim Center) my mother would be ordained a minister and briefly held an office in the space for mediation/reiki/tarot reading/feng shui. The psychics I have encountered always spoke from a place of angelic connection, their tone was as pastel colored in my mind as any other kind of Christian ceremony I've ever witnessed. My grandmother dresses mostly in white, owns a white Cadillac and has a house filled with kewpie dolls and angel figurines that I'm glad I won't have to deal with, and I just read an article in the Economist about Evangelical Christianity sweeping South America - especially in places like Guatemala, where my uber Christian cousin goes on mission trips every year.

While in my kitchen awhile back, my roommate's new boyfriend cornered me to talk about Chaos magic (something he's into, while also being a physicist) and I was kind of gently horrified - it makes me think of kids in silly costumes larping in a park - but I realized a core difference in my experience of astrology/tarot etc were not things I chose, were not symbols of a witchy personality and a middle finger to modern religious practices, was not something I came to as a fully formed adult, but embedded in my experience of the world and my sense of connection with the divine that still mirrors what I understand most Christians experience of worship to be - kind of like a child trying to read a book about quantum physics.

I remember celebrating Easter pretty hardcore growing up, when I was younger we did egg hunts at the non-denominational church, the Easter baskets waiting for us when we woke up, the pastel colors and perfect sunshiney day it always seemed to be, where it was still cool in the shade but just getting really hot standing in full sun. A day of artificial tasting candy and plastic grass in fake wicker baskets. The kind of day I went on Garage Sales with my grandmother and poured through other people's stuff looking for flashes of selfness to leap out at me - a kind of rebirth I suppose. But maybe there are clues in that ritual with my grandmother - was it a practice born from growing up during war time, of rationed fabric like the box of scraps we got from my great grandmother since she made all of her and her children's clothing back then? Or is it evidence of a deeper practice of sharing, stemming all the way from pioneer communites who bartered with neighbors and reused everything they had collectively? Is my tendency to save every scrap of food, even the bones to become stock - part of a cultural behavior that began long before the great depression?

My great grandfather on my grandmother's side, Reddick Bowman Rives (everyone called him R.B. I think, he died when i was in high school) seems to have inherited those family names from the pioneers who left north Carolina to settle what eventually became Gainesville, the town I grew up in. From the bizarre family history my dead beat father hoisted on me after college (and my own research based on his writing) shows that I am also linked to North Carolina folk on his side - and he repeatedly referred to my mother's family as a bunch of 'hillbillies' - the same name given to Appalachian music - 'hillbilly music' before it was absorbed into the Country genre. I am descended from true Florida crackers - cattlepokes, cowboys that settled the backwater (referring to the swamplands) it was before becoming a popular vacation destination during WW1, when Europe tours were not possible for the upper classes. My grandfather (a monster we haven't talked to in decades) owns a cattle ranch today, worked by my cowboy hat wearing redneck Uncle Ben. 

I've written a lot about the kind of backwoods family I'm carrying the baggage of, but I think I was missing a fuller view of the lens until I took a deeper look at the religious aspect of my upbringing, a clear thread back through time that reveals the places and ways of being that imbue everything I do, that makes available to me the choice making of my family members that felt so disconnected from the people I grew up around in a university town full of academics and people from all over the country. I also am starting to understand the people I have found I almost magically seem to resonate with in this big city - people with roots along the Appalachian trail as well.

My grandfather (and ancestry.com) says we are related to Davey Crockett (not Daniel Boone), even offered to present me with a written family history - while ignoring the black ancestor clearly delineated in his 23+Me genetic break down that I asked him about. According to the site, this ancestor entered the family bloodline in the late 1700/early 1800s. I also have cousins with native American ancestry - they are the only dark eyed family members. While my genetic break down is heavily British/Irish, there is a touch of German and Scandinavian - which tracks with the communites that populated the Appalachian mountains. It also makes sense that my grandfather seems to over identify with this particular rugged, self sufficient personality type - but I do wonder if that purple sliver on his chart is a clue about his sadistic treatment of his children, and a history of hating/punishing your own, being passed down through our family.

Character Design @Chelsea CTE Week 9: Recap of the Program so far

Week 1: Thinking While Drawing 

Week 2: Shape Language + Line of Action

Week 3 + 4: Anatomy and Facial Expressions + Iterative Drawing

 Week 5 and 6: Storyboards and Story Development

Week 7 + 8: Character Development and Color Scripts