February 29, 2011

I am sitting in Speeder and Earl's Coffee Shop listening to Bob Dylan's Lay Lady, Lay play on the digital radio station and it is dawning on me that I have not bought new clothes for myself in four months. You would think that my wearing the same dress every day would result in a decrease of Laundry Mountain ( oh yes, we have a mtn. not just a pile), but it seems like I have been doing the same amount since before this project kicked off. Some things don't change, I guess.

So I have to admit that I am in my exercise clothes now intending to do a little yoga in the studio later. I also have to admit to have been wearing them all morning. Yep. But I have a good reason, I have been working on cupcake all morning. I think I may have a problem... My standard for what should be accomplished every day on this dress and project may actually exceed the capacity for creation of the average, normal human being, it may even go beyond the standard over achiever. In other words I am burning myself out. I have started to notice how often my standard response of "I'm doing great" has turned into, " I'm good, but tired". Either I am getting older, or I just need to get a better nights sleep. It's hard to sleep when feeling so excited about where the night's stitching has taken me and where I would like to take it the next day. Although I love the excess of sewing, I have to admit that I am only human and that going to bed at a reasonable hour will do my soul every bit of good as staying up late sewing, it may even do me better. So I have been knocking off at 9:30 the last couple of days. And I already feel better.

I just met with a friend and he said "Wylie, even if you do one small bad-ass stitched heart or bulge or what have you and photograph it and post it, you are doing justice to your art, project and followers."

So after bringing cupcake to new extravagant heights this morning.... I am going to reflect on my friend's comment and remember that part of this project is the integration of a daily art practice into my daily life. Some times I have time for art, other times I need to make time for me.

As for more agenda discussions from last week... I will continue those but at a more leisurely pace.

The Facebook topic

I love it, it consumes me, I check it a couple of times a day....thinking about joining Twitter, but still not totally sure if this much digital exposure is a good thing, a mediocre thing or a bad thing. It is an addictive thing, maybe it's just related to FOMA- the fear of missing out? Does it have to be good or bad? Can there be a middle ground with social media networking? A little seems to go a long way....

Circus images

 

February 24, 2010

So first I have to say that although I said Wed. was going to divulge my thoughts about the Circus, I have to admit to having gone to be early.  And all is well given that I have decided to keep my thoughts about a certain artist's personal project about the Iron Curtain in my head for now as respect to both the artist and the magnitude of the project. 

 

So Circus huh... hmmm the greatest show on earth... the role of the performer as spectacle a magical metaphor of delight and defiance.  I am working on a collaboration with another artist and group of artists.  My role, what am I going to do, this thought has been circling around and around for weeks so I decided to try and get to the bottom of why the circus became so popular, what is it about something that can be so uplifting and yet so dark that draws people to it, without fail regardless of politics, economics and status?  If we are interested in creating a show that mimics the themes or aura of the carnival or circus, then we must look at the many roles that the performer played as a metaphor for the many roles of an artist.  Artist as performer.  Artist as spectacle, or even art as spectacle.  The delight in the whimsy and the addiction to the spangled grandeur and the conscious ignorance of the seedy dark underside.  What brings people back over and over again to a circus? 

 

I remember going to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus as a kid.  I remember watching the animals and trainers parade from Downtown Houston to the Sumit(now the home of the Oasis of Love Church, a huge mega evangelism church) Complex by The SouthWest Freeway (HWY 59).  It was amazing.  I remember all the rope dancers, and the tiger tamers, and the elephants and seeing the entire arena ablaze with these weird rotating tiger light flash lights.  I remember being in awe of the enormity of the whole affair.  There may have not been a Big Top but it was very impressive. 

 

And then as a University of Chicago college student I went to see Barnum's Kaleidoscape Circus under the Big Top at Soldier Field for my birthday in 2000 (image is from the outside of the tent from a web image I found ). It was the first Big Top Circus produced by Ringling Bros. since 1956 and the first one ring performance in more than a century (according to my Wikipedia findings).  It was amazing!  It was intimate, we sat right next to the ring and felt like we were taken back in time to a place where the circus truly originated  It had very few animals, but I remember the costumes were amazing and the performances were memorable.  The performers were even outside of the tent mingling with the crowd and performing all of these little vignettes before the main attraction.  I was twenty years old and I felt like such a little kid.  I found myself believing in the illusion and being taken away from the daily burden.     

 

Although it has been a long time since I have been to the circus, my interest in bedazzled performance and illusion still continues.  Not only did I become obsessed with HBO's Carnival, but I also began working for The Vermont Painted Theater Curtains Project (now known as Curtains Without Borders the image above is from Westminster Historical Society in Westminster, VT).  This became the largest on-site conservation project in New England, conserving turn of the last century painted theater back drops found in Town Halls and Grange Halls. While on this project I became quite enamored with the artistry of the itinerant artist and traveling vaudevillian. 

 

And now I am reading Water for Elephants as well as researching the history of the circus and the big top, with specific detail to the costumes.  I am interested in the Spangles or sequins and feathers, and the dichotomy of the beauty vs. the grittiness of the showman/show woman.  But what is it about the performer and their costume that so intrigues me? well... that is what is keeping me up at night.... is it the lace? the sequins? the little bit of naughtiness with the practicality of wearing it for some incredible performance feat?  There seems to be some kind of bad-assness to the whole vintage female circus performer... even her costume says I've got guts... hmmm these thoughts could just drag on... instead I will post some images to mull this idea over... clearly there is something here, I'm just not sure how to put it into words.... maybe I will just have to make it.

February 23, 2011 image

Tonight's discussion... the circus.

Self/ Fabricated Pieces

 

February 22, 2011

Agenda no. 2 continued....

So I now where was I? Oh the posting of the image of the silk jacket... Well I will post that when I also post the response piece... But this has been one of the project occupying valuable mental realestate.

So it's complicated for many reasons, both literally and metaphorically and symbolically. The piece has a lot going on in it: lace stitches, embroidery, sequins, text ( which I never use) and it is 2D. There is some appliqué using a piece of a Chinese woman's silk jacket that I bought a a marketplace in Beijing. The motif is similar to the museum selected jacket, that piece responds in a direct way to the Han Dynasty jacket, but I inverted the design because it reminded me a lot of the kinds of stitched drawings I make when I start a piece of trapunto. It has a nice shapely look... Ahem... For the sake of some of my younger readers shall I say that it looks a lot like the curve of a woman's bottom, even reveals a little more than just a bottom... this piece of fabric that i appliqued is remarkable because of the detail and suggestiveness it already possessed. So then I decided to make it literal...adding legs and a torso (think Ghada Amer, Tracy Emin, Louise Bourgeois) and started to allow each mark respond to the next. Once the female body took shape I then had a beautiful piece of a vintage embroidered pillow.... I liked the way the flower responded to the open legs. It looks like the flower was birthed by the legs... But then the lace had to be added to obscure that... Why? Well I don't want the whole birth metaphor to be so literal. Hide it with lace, add some sexiness to it, make it feel like lingerie, or costume, or just texture... And then came the sequins... Red like a little mound of red something...dripping... But incomplete.... A needle still left in place to look like more are going to be added, maybe still under construction. And then the pockets for trapunto... Which are still not finished... This will make it feel either comfy or awkward ... Trapunto makes my work feel caught on the edge of beauty and grotesque.... I love that. And then the words.... "Its Complicated" is it a cultural reference, a reference to the complication of creating this by hand stitching, a slight reference to the complications of birth, the complications of being female, complications of life or just simple frustration? Its complicated... the words are easy to say but imply something so much larger, a longer story, something that cannot be summed up in 42 characters or a status phrase, or even a blog... Deserves dissection, discussion and response... I will post the images of both pieces when I get home tonight and you can decide.

February 22, 2011

Agenda item no. 2 - A piece for the group show Self /fabricated for the Duxbury Art Complex in sept. 2012.

It's Complicated.

That's the name of the piece and it is complicated. I am making this in response to a women's silk Han Dynasty jacket that is pink with lots of embroidery that is a part of the museum's permanent collection. See the picture below and then I will continue....

February 21. 2011

Discovered the work of artist Victoria Gitman today.  She does these incredible paintings of vintage purses and drawings of vintage ladies.  I just read an article (http://danielweinberggallery.com/static/dyn-files/3/3215.pdf) about how she spends long periods of time creating these master renderings of purses that anyone else would find painstaking and meticulous.  Oh how I identify with that.  If you get a chance just read this little blurb about her.  I love the part where the variation in her daily routine exists in whether or not she takes a walk or goes for a swim in the morning or afternoon.  I feel exactly like this three to four days of the week. Sometimes there is a good monotony to being an artist, other times it can be a really intense experience to be trapped in one's head for long periods of time.  I think I have been trapped in my own head lately and now that I am again coming out of it, I can tell you all about it. 

 

First I have to lay out the internal agenda.   1.  Cupcake  2.  A piece for a group show for Self Fabricated  3. A Group Show called Circus  4.  A friend's project about the Iron Curtain  5.  Facebook  6.  The Vermont/Texas Conundrum. 

 

So let's start with Cupcake.  She is a great dress, but slow moving. I have a bag full of lace ready to fluff up her body, but I have been over thinking her.  She is kind of a free spirit, I am kind of not in that mode right now, we are having our conversations and she is making me want to be really flowy, spacey, loosey-goosey, She is losing a sense of formality, she wants things to just be placed, stitches, continued and yet here I am resisting; but odd things are happening while wearing her.  I want to loaf around, I want to day dream, I want to space out, I want to feel carefree... I feel myself fighting this, wanting more structure, wanting to be pushed to a more formalized place and yet Cupcake is on her own adventure.  At times I still feel like Wyile just wearing a weird dress, other times I feel like Cupcake just wanting to go on a road trip willing to go wherever the road leads.  Maybe she wants to be a lady of leisure?  

 

Tough cookies, Cupcake, Wylie has no time for that right now.   It is February Break and I am teaching this awesome group of kids a week of Art Extravaganza Camp. And Yes, I am wearing Cupcake and she is at the whim of little painty hands and endless disaster possibilities, but I feel that all of these possibilities are happy possibilities and will act as little reminders to my daily doings.  

 

So here she is, Cupcake right next to me on the couch waiting to be worked on and it is 8:30 at night and I am tired after a long day of work and a long walk at Shelburne Farms in the super un-human cold weather.  I am playing the parts of  part blogger, part artist, part mother ( my two year old son doesn't want to go to bed right now).  I have laid out an agenda above and yet I feel that the moment, each time it gets interrupted either by a restless child or my own restlessness to want to get to work on Cupcake, is getting further from the heart of the discussion.  Perhaps I can address each issue each night of this week?  There are still night time hours to work before bed time so maybe I will just end with this last anecdote about Cupcake and then leave the next item on the agenda for tomorrow. 

 

People want to touch Cupcake.  They want to feel her, to squish her, to pop her.  The identity between Wylie and Cupcake are beginning to blur out on the outside, on the veneer of the persona.  Wylie is beginning to take the sidelines, although uncomfortable with where she is at, Cupcake is pulling people in to her confectioned sweetness but also seeming almost too good to be true.  A story from a woman I just met made this all the more clear.  She and I had been scheduled to meet to talk about art related things and she had recently checked out my blog  and my website and thought this project was neat, and we had spoken on the phone but never met.  Then she saw me in the grocery store.  I was wearing cupcake and she was in awe.  A friend of hers urged her to introduce herself to me, but she said she was just stunned.  She said they followed me around the store for a little bit (me totally unaware, to my dismay) and couldn't believe that there I was in real life in the dress.  

 

Yep, it's true.  I wear the dress, even when shopping for milk at 9 pm at night.  I even wear it when I clean out the litter box for the cat.  I even wear it when it is colder than CUSS out there.  I wear it cooking, I wear it trudging through the snow to feed my cardinals outside.  I will be wearing it to teach 16 kids how to make abstract sculptures tomorrow.  Yes, folks step right up and see the woman who wears the same dress day in and day out, what a spectacle to behold!  (now we are encroaching on agenda number 3, you'll just have to wait til Wed. night to read about that one).

 

February 18, 2011

My camera doesn't take as great of a picture as my husband's.... but I had the time alone today so I just had to make the image... It's nice how soft it turned out, but still a little grainy.

Studio Randoms

I have to give props here to artist Kelli-Scott Kelly.  Her new work on antique linens and handkerchiefs have fueled my return to working with them as a base medium.  I am trying treat them with a little gloss gel medium and water to help stiffen their surface to make a more rigid surface to draw upon.  Here's one of them drying next to the radio.  And of course my weird Bric-a-brac collection in the windowsill. 

February 17, 2011

Getting larger now.  I started some ink and graphite drawings of hair on a larger piece of vintage linen.  The other piece next to it is what I am working on for the Duxbury Art Complex show called Self/Fabricated in September 2012. 

February 17, 2011

These images are of my new obsession... Hair... I have been doing alot of hair drawings as well as little mock stitched falls.  A fall is a hair extenstion.

I like the alternative of the drawing to the stitching but both seem to be too interesting to ignore one for the other.

Sweater again

I added another sweater, still too cold to go sleeveless.  I managed to hoist up the bust and give the trunk of the dress some support when I added the sweater.  The seam line connecting the dress to the sweater has been tripple reinforced and somehow has managed to redistribute the weight to around the middle and not the shoulders or chest area. 

Cupcake on the Valentines day chopping block

Yes, I am working in my favorite pink wig... sometimes you just go with it.

February 16,2011

I promise to post new photos tomorrow...it has been a busy and exciting week, lots of alterations and lots of great comments from folks. Thanks to the reader's comments on this blog, I was able to brainstorm about some possibilities with changing Cupcake for the better.

This dress is going in the washer tomorrow too, I think she needs to be cleaned better than just being washed by hand.... This makes me a little nervous because I think I may be sending her to ultimate doom, but on the other hand what ever gets destroyed can always be rebuilt... Or it may give me a reason to practice my new mantra...There is a solution to every problem... I think.

Wylie Sofia Garcia
www.wyliegarcia.com
dressthatmakesthewoman.blogspot.com

At war with Cupcake

So I honestly tried to wear Cupcake today, but something odd happened.  I put the dress on, and I turned into grumpy Wylie.  I took the dress off and felt like calm, peaceful, happy Wylie.  Dress on, grumpy, anxious and totally claustrophobic.  After much examination and discussion, (even my husband mentioned how crabby I was instantly being) this dress is an all out failure in terms of wear ability.  So today I feel like saying F**K this!.  I wore my PJ's all day and contemplated what could possibly be the problem with Cupcake?!  So here is my list of what I think could be wrong and why compromising for one's art is sometimes total B.S.  

 

1.  She is heavy-  all the trapunto and stuffing has given a huge amount of weight to the bottom of the dress.  This pulls down on my shoulders and back and I have been wondering why my left shoulder feels like there is a knot the size of a small boulder under my shoulder blade.  

 

2.  She is too tight-  I started this dress off using my own body but then transferred her to the dress form never thinking that I was going to wear it for a month!  But here I am, wearing it and it is very constraining.  I don't even think I can truly take a deep breath while wearing it- oxygen = happy.  The tightness is also making me aware of how my body is not a fan of being snugged in by anything.

 

3.  The top of the dress, the straps and the arm things are all wrong.  The construction of this dress is ridiculous! Who would possibly wear a dress with these silly shoulder things? They have to go.  The neckline has to get tucked up a little higher and the shoulder straps have to be chopped, I am thinking about maybe turning it into a halter or tie back....

 

4. The back of the dress is very full, this makes it hard to sit down and even walk without feeling encumbered.  HOW THE HELL DID WOMEN DO HOOP SKIRTS?!  They must have been crazy!  I feel like I have a constant satellite on my behind, not too fun.

 

5.  Although the bottom half of the dress is nice and warm because of the trapunto and layers, the top is so cold.  I have a little shrug that I am going to start to incorporate with this dress, but I am also thinking about adding some 3/4 length sleeves.  It is still way to cold here to even contemplate going without something over my shoulders and arms. 

 

6.  I need something in the middle to help hoist up the bust of this dress, to help carry part of her weight, she is very robust you know and only getting more so with the lace that is soon to be added.  I am thinking a bodice of some sort, but then that leads to problems of my body feeling too tied into the garment. 

 

 

 

On one hand I am so happy that this dress is looking beautiful, but on the other hand I am asking for what price is beauty worth the sacrifice?  I could go even farther and say at what price is art making worth the sacrifice.  Cupcake is making me doubt weather or not I can wear a garment like this for a month?  I also want to maintain some integrity to the way she started off, with all the work that has already gone into creating her, but I am beginning to wonder if this dress is going to be an example of a drastic reduction?

 

 

February 13, 2011

I shortened the back piece so that it no longer drags like a tail.  It is folded underneath to still maintain some shape and robustness.  Because the back is so puffy, it is hard to get in and out of my car.  It is hard to sit on chairs.  It is making me feel a little claustrophobic.  I am still in denial that I have chosen this dress for this month, but I am starting to reconcile it by sewing almost exclusively with my absolutely favorite material: Lace. 

February 13, 2011

Glorious winter morning light....

February 12, 2011, image

Oops, here's the picture... oh yes, Cupcake... because all she needs is a whole lotta icing...

--

Wylie Sofia Garcia

www.wyliegarcia.com

www.dressthatmakesthewoman.blogspot.com