The idea of digging is making its way into my work. Digging for the meaning, digging in my heels, and digging back into history are all ways that I've recently begun an excavation of sorts. This recent video installation is about a search, but without a real feeling of completion, or knowing what it is that you are looking for while you're digging.
Dig Project Mobile Unit, 2011
This urge to dig in the sand is overwhelming to me. The sandy riverbeds from the recently receded Missouri River are miles long now, taking over paths and parks that we used to walk along, toppling trees and burying signage. This enough is an awesome sight to me, but the sheer familiarity of the fine silt in my fingers, the shells that turn up in its depth, and the dune formations from the prairie wind make me feel like I am back home on the Florida coast. This is the feeling that I cannot let go.
The video shows me setting up and demarcating an area that I have chosen to search - out of all the sand - and then setting to work. Digging methodically with a shovel at first, then furtively with my hands. There are scenes from different days, different holes. Sometimes I discover nothing, so the search continues.
The relationship between what we eat and how it makes us feel is sometimes hidden. “Gnawing” is a documentation of my attempt to eat healthier, using baby carrots as the symbol of a wholesome food. Taking small and measured bites, the video focuses on the mouth, making the action of eating seem incredibly physical and intimate. Each carrot is left with the marks of my bites, showing the intimacy of the action and the choice to eat only a little.
The viewer becomes a voyeur into the personal actions and decisions that people make every day regarding diet and food choice that is sometimes not fully weighed. While the video loops, the pile of carefully bitten and gnawed carrots becomes an object for contemplation and references my physical body, a nod to the idea that I want to effect an observable change by eating small, sensible bites of food.
Growing up in Florida, collecting shells was a pastime of mine. A marker of places visited, shells were abundant, varying, and spoke about the life forms and history of my native land. Once I moved west of the Mississippi, there were far fewer shells to find but many more rocks to discover. In both Texas and South Dakota, I have found that I pick up different interesting rocks along my travels, either to commemorate a place as a memento of a visit, to hold in my hand as a talisman, or to place on a shelf at home as an object of beauty. Rocks hold secrets much the same as shells – a creation of geologic time and compressed minerals that I can carry home in my pocket.
This particular piece (a work-in-progress) is a creation of maps within the rock forms, which serve to mimic the geographical places I have explored. As an installation, the rocks aim to relate the way we as humans collect and categorize things, including our distinct trait of recording and mapping.
I feel as though so many things capture my interest right now, that it's impossible to stay focused on one area of research. Perhaps the layering of these little thoughts or images truly is the answer to my struggles. This drawing would almost certainly be better if there was a little Eames chair tucked away in it somewhere.
Last Wednesday morning, I woke up early and couldn't go back to sleep. I decided to drive out to Spirit Mound to walk to the top again and try to make my own map of the area. As I was documenting a nice section of sage along the path, leaning in to smell its fresh scent, a moth flew out from the brush and landed right on my map.
I tried to shoo it off of my paper, but to no avail. It wandered around my drawn elevation lines of the mound, and then took a tiny crap on the section of rocks I'd previously labeled - bright orange moth poo, right on my hand-drawn map. I'd had the notion earlier to use this as a guide to recreate the map onto larger paper, but now that it had been so interestingly trail-blazed, I decided it was best to dirty it up a bit more. Aren't all good maps worn in by use?
I recently had the opportunity to take a three day trip with others from USD to learn more about the history and culture of Native Americans in South Dakota. As my work is directly affected by how we as people are influenced by the land around us and the history of that environment, I was very interested to take this tour. I wanted to know more about the Indians from this area that I am so new to, and to really see the vast changes from eastern to western South Dakota that everyone talks about.
The quick journey over into Wyoming to visit Devil's Tower, or Mato Tipila in Lakota, was also very worthwhile. The entire place is geologically interesting, as well as peaceful and beautiful. This may seem like common knowledge to a lot of folks from around these parts, but seeing this up close and hearing the legends that people (ancient and modern) have attached to this formation is all new and interesting to me. I've had no frame of reference for some of these places beyond textbooks, and the reality is hard to digest all at once. The reality of the racism, poverty, and misunderstanding of Native Americans is also hard to face.
If you would like to see all of the photos from my trip, I've made a set on my Flickr page. Please note that some of the places I visited (such as Pine Ridge and Whiteclay) or ceremonies I witnessed were not photographed. It would have been inappropriate and disrespectful in these cases. I documented my journey as I felt best.
Mom sent a package last week that contained, amongst other things, some of my school records. In October 1995, my high school administered aptitude tests to help us decide at which jobs we would be most successful. I remember little now about the actual test, but do recall that the person who explained the various bits of my "vocational profile" was a kind man with a mustache who seemed excited that I scored high on almost all areas (glaring exceptions in Engineering, Law, and Finance). He looked over the fresh dot matrix print-out and said, "Essentially, you can do whatever you want."
my interests as a 14 year old
Now, it could be that teenagers are never interested in anything, but I like to look back at the chart of "Interest Areas" because it reiterates that I've always loved science and art, despite my young passing fancies. My third grade teacher also confirms that I was gabby from early on.
Two works: (l) Nightfall Autumn Mayacamas; (r) Planetary Grouping with Yucca
This is what I'm talking about. I don't see myself necessarily drawing on globes, but I appreciate that the work recreates in some small sense the sublime and the untouched in a scale that we can try to comprehend.
From CRG Gallery:
"Direct physical engagement is at the heart of the work, with on-site field notes made in sketchbooks. Remembered experiences, along with Crotty's cognition of exploratory 19th century science, incite his peculiar taxonomies -- those of double stars, rock formations, or coastal ridgelines, for example."
closeup of Nightfall Autumn Mayacamas
During Frogman's, I was fortunate enough to enjoy two studio visits from workshop teachers Lari Gibbons and James Bailey. Both directed me to read Katharine Harmon, which was a very good start for me. Lari showed me Crotty's work in addition to asking me to think more abstractly about map making. I believe that, as is usually my problem, I hadn't really identified that maps were that crucial in my work yet -- just that I found their symbolism and charting interesting. I think I've only begun to explore why this is important to me, and thus how I can use it in a strong and viable way.
Looking for one picture that could possibly summarize Frogman's is difficult, but this one might do the trick. We spend two weeks making work, bowling, drinking, doing karaoke, having open portfolio and generally bustin' out a good time. It was great to have an intensive workshop available to devote to one class, but also emotionally stressful.
I'm starting to realize that my work is taking me somewhere. A path is emerging from the overgrown field of my thoughts and proofs.
Studies and drawings lately have all been devoted to stratification and figure, form and layers. They overlap each other on occasion, and I strive to make this marriage of ideas make sense. I cut up old, torn maps and draw from life as often as possible, looking in geology textbooks for answers to my drawing questions. Surely these two modes of thinking must have a perfect center in the Venn diagram of my artmaking.
