things I would have said in my artist talk
if I had known that I knew them
Really though, even if I had known that I knew them, I probably still wouldn’t said them in my artist talk, because it feels like a vulnerable thing to say what the work is really about, and there were strangers at my artist talk. I don’t like having to say very personal things about my work. This is an issue I ran into a lot in grad school. My professors always wanted me to be more vulnerable. I re-read my dissertation recently (it is less good than I remember it being), and my response to the demand for more vulnerability was addressed as follows: “My trauma is my own; I do not intend to dissect it and lay it before my audience”. This is, I think, the best and most true-to-me sentence of my entire dissertation.
However, it feels fine to say this to all of you, my close personal friends, and also the psychologists specializing in clinical narcissism who I assume subscribe to this because they think it is a newsletter about clinical narcissism written by a clinical narcissist who will follow them back in order to get help with their clinical narcissism (this is not a newsletter about clinical narcissism, guys. I’ve had that in the description of this newsletter for ages. you can unsubscribe now).
In the talk (which you can actually watch here if you’d like to hear the whole spiel), I said the thing about the Museum of Time that made such an impact on me was the visceral response I had to seeing time physically layered in that manner (hundreds of clocks, all set to different times and going off at hours that didn’t match up), because it felt like a physical, exterior representation of the way time had always felt inside my body. In my body, time has always felt like everything - past, present, future - happening all at once.
This is an idea I’ve spent a lot of time with since I first visited the museum in 2021, but when I sat with it after finally saying it out loud, it felt incomplete - especially after also discussing how community and collaboration are at the root of my practice in the same talk.
At the root of everything I do is a desire for connection.
(isn’t that at the root of everything we all do?)
And I think at the root of all of my work with time is a mourning for the absence of that connection - at the root of my work with time is all of the people I have lost in some way, to death or to distance, and the longing left behind.
A room full of clocks is a physical layering of time, and that’s what I tried to echo with the work in this show. In the abstract, it’s a layering of memory, of stories. In my body, it’s a layering of everyone I love and have loved.
Art is magic - and, as previously mentioned, all magic is made of love.
An overall review of the experience:
After all my months (and months and months and months) of agonizing, my show went off without a hitch (well, one slight hitch. we ripped my big centerpiece $300 print on the way out the door on day one of install and I had to perform emergency surgery with none of the correct equipment in order to remove an inch strip across the top of the piece, but aside from that, not a hitch).
The install went smoothly, and I had a great time hanging out with the director of the space. Everything went up exactly how I had envisioned it. The director curated an Enya-themed playlist for the gallery to play when they weren’t playing my insane clock chaos sound piece. Working with her over the last year has made me feel like my work had a real champion - she has been completely supportive of and SO enthusiastic about whatever vision I expressed through this whole process. She made me feel how I hope artists feel when they work with me as a curator. The reason that I work the way that I do in artist-run spaces and as a curator is because I want to offer that level of support to other artists, so it felt really special to receive the same upon my re-entry into the more formal art world with my own work.
I was kind of shocked by how well attended the opening was - since the show was so near my hometown and where I went to college, lots of family and friends and old teachers that I’d invited were able to come, but there were so many people I didn’t know! And everyone engaged so sincerely with the response wall, where I asked visitors to write a haiku about time, draw a clock, or answer what they thought time was in exchange for a tiny photographic print.
In the end, after swearing up and down that I’d never do another solo show after this…I think I would do another solo show. Probably not for ages, though - this body of work was in development for four years. I’m very slow, and I like it that way.
bits and bobs
A couple days ago, Zola showed me a NOVEL that I texted her in 2018 about a BIG BRAND NEW LIFE REVELATION that I was going through for the first time, which is funny and proves that I have never actually learned anything in my life, because I just went through the same exact BIG BRAND NEW LIFE REVELATION for the first time a couple months ago.
Yesterday, I found a picture I’d taken of a journal entry my therapist had me write in 2020 to identify harmful narratives I have about myself in regards to love and YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE IT but I wrote a journal entry identifying every single one of those same narratives about a month ago, thinking I was doing this work for the first time. I have never actually learned anything in my life.
I told Zola about this and she reminded me that healing is not linear. Rude.
xoxo,
the mindful narcissist
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