To be honest, I am a person who is weary.  For all sorts of reasons.

            I am tired, (exhausted really) of this continual effort of living, of hoping someone will say “I love you,” or “Hey – you are beautiful!” or simply “Hello: you matter.”

            What are we?  We pretend and pretend and pretend.  We shapeshift personalities and beings as often as we eat or sleep, listen to music or breathe.

            We’re amazing and psychotic (clinically speaking).

            And we’ll use everything, anything, quite basely, to simply shout “I am!”

            And we use “Art.”

            We use “selves.”  We use “others.”  We use objects and actions and language.

            To say:  I AM.

            We use our bodies, our children, talents, wood, paint, plastic, light and luggage,

Furniture, robots, clothes, paper, jewelry, yards and homes to tell you:

SEE ME?  I. AM. HERE.

            What strikes me as particularly valuable and rich about this RCB show is that it is filled with complex and versatile, committed and exceptional artists who deconstruct and rebuild, inquire and assess, soar out and burrow in, to this essential conundrum of being.

            From the landscapes we’re imbedded in that form/inform us (Kristen, Larry, Lisa, Monika) to the trappings, objects and habits that accompany us (Marc, Sarah, Derrick, Joey).  The persons that surround and source, violate and encourage us (Sarah, Monika) the apparatus and technologies of ourselves and our world that we invent and that still fabricate us (Lisa, Joey, Derrick, Marc).  Our own bodies and minds (all) the society and culture we swim in (all).

(I’m listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” by Thom Yorke & company – any and all versions)

            So you happen to come and look.  Some of you will participate, listen, touch, act, feel.  Some of you will feel.  Some of you will stop.  (If only for a moment).

            What is grand about this community of artists is that they utilize home, people (persons), objects, landscapes, technologies, matter and body and mind, emotion, dream and thought not simply to express “Here I Am.”

                                                                        But “Here We Are.”

                                                …and not as an answer,

                                                                                      but as a question…



Nathan Filbert 04/29/10

• on the convenience and frustration of objects –
• on the nostalgia and wonder of objects –
• on the history and dual nature of objects –

Homo Faber. The making being. Who constructs, creates, assembles, installs, operates, utilizes, labors.

Homo Ludens. The playing being. Who delights, tinkers, discovers, uncovers, imagines, enjoys.

Homo Sapien. The knowing being. Who is wise, who thinks, comprehends, investigates, questions, determines.

Does it save time? Does it make the task simpler? What is required to operate it? What function does it serve? How much space does it require? Is it appealing to the eye? How well does it marry function and form? Are we “better off” possessing it? Is it a trash product or a fixable one? What is the level of craft in commercially produced objects?

Humans make objects. By the uncountable bazillions.

Marc is fascinated and alarmed by them. Particularly “found objects,” objects that have acquired a history. What rooms has this vacuum vacuum’d? Whose hands have changed the bag? Gripped the handle? Attached the hose? What items and toys have disappeared into it?

A radio. Whose heart has it soothed? What news has passed through its wires? Whose love has it increased, expressed, or ruined? What grief has it accentuated or comforted? What would have transpired otherwise…without it?

Is it beautiful? This pipe. The building it has conveyed essential water to and from? The people depending on it. The assemblers wage…

The human mind is capable of complexity, imagination and understanding. What dialogues do these apparently disparate objects hold? Where do they bond? How? Why have we made them? What do they carry of us? What do we retain of them? A photograph, kitchen appliance, toy, tool…objects associated with relationships, achievements, loss… What is an object outside of its designed use, or combined with another object, or with a handle on it?

When does an object become over-convenient…frustrating? When do we begin to serve or obey the objects we have made (or the national or corporate entity producing, programming, promoting and providing said object)? Useful objects require participation, accessibility, action/interaction. The things we carry. Our “luggage,” our views of ourselves, what we think we need.

Humans make. Humans explore and combine. Humans (can) think. What do you make, create? What do you use or obey? What do you think of that?

Objects as mirrors. Objects explored. Objects enjoyed. Objects utilized.

Make. Use. Play. Question. Discern.

Interact.

Nathan Filbert 04/24/10

DERRICK STANLEY – ROBOT MIND

The tension between form and content is an old one. The parameters of finitude have tormented creative humans since the inception of making and being. Whether the tool is one’s hands, one’s thoughts, one’s language, one’s knowledge, bodied motion or breath; and the technic a brush, a concept or theory, a word or sentence, an explanation or hypothesis, a stage or an instrument; whether the medium be paint, clay or plastic; science, mathematics or philosophy; poetry or prose; conjecture or research; dance, rhythm or music, the wrestling goes on…inspiration, idea and experiment – struggling through the body, through the tools, through the mediums toward – beauty? form? balance? energy, power? expression? communication?

Art lives from constraints, and dies from freedom.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

“Mechanisms” he calls them. “Everything is new and in progress…” he says.
The wildness and weirdness of creative processes.
What might a “mechanism” of creative process be?
What if you had a robot in your head, constantly whirring and clicking and moving about, marking and tracing and tracking your thoughts? Possibilities? How busy would it be?

Derrick’s head might be a robot set in motion.
Might be unstoppable action.
Might be new and in progress NOW.

If Derrick’s head spawned.
If Derrick’s head spawned, it would give rise to a robot, busily buzzing around sheets of paper, sketching, drawing, marking with ink pen.
Working, working, creating…
A maker’s mind.

So here is Derrick’s mind as a robot, astir with actionable influence.

Robot busies itself with sheets of paper for hours and hours while Derrick’s mind moves on. Into hand and charcoal. Into motion and composition. Into conception and experiment. Into art.
One day (each day) Derrick Stanley had (has) an idea. One day Derrick Stanley made a robot to “try it out,” which became “trying it out” which became “trying it out.” So we are interested in what Derrick’s robots are doing…and the mind minding the robots. A “godlike” creational brain, constructing a mechanism both free and constrained, given to programming and chance, working alongside.

So here is Derrick Stanley’s mind.
Here is Derrick Stanley’s mind in robot-form.
Here is Derrick Stanley’s mind observing its robot-form / action.
Derrick Stanley’s robot-mind.

For more information about the artist, please go to derrickstanley.com.

Nathan Filbert – March 19, 2010

“Painting as Relief”            

You put the album “Memoryhouse” or “Songs from Before” by Max Richter on your stereo.  Lie back in your favorite armchair like a bed.  Perhaps it is night, quiet, perhaps there is rain.  Close your eyes.

Suddenly you are seven, nine, or twelve years old again.  Headphones strung from your yellow water-resistant Walkman to the sides of your head.  You’re in the rear of the car, perhaps even facing the sky from a bucket seat in the tail of a giant station wagon, an LTD.  There are stars.  Duffel bags, hard suitcases, fishing rods and shoes surround you.  Maybe you remembered a pillow.

The vehicle also carries others, persons who will come to mean nearly everything for who you become.  Who will wound and anger you, who may save you from disaster a time or two and cause some as well.  Who may come to define you through misunderstandings, perhaps through love.

The hum and shimmy of the car on asphalt vibrates you toward a state not unlike Zen meditation, not unlike daydreaming.  From the corners of your eyes telephone poles, brush grass, rock cutaways, buildings, cows, other cars and their lights, an occasional tree, perhaps a horse become indistinguishable strokes of a hazy bluish gray’d light, darkness, running shadow.  It’s stop motion.  Primordial moving pictures.  The open language of Kansas like a canvas.

An oil derrick, rocking up and down, becomes a still life in the landscape rushing past.  An owl overhead, a fencepost after fencepost after fencepost.  Sometimes you cry in drowsy silence, an elsewhere-longing.  Your head lolls to the side in ways that allow saliva eventually, in slumbers, to dribble its way from your mouth, and your neck to wake in a sort of locked anguish.

There are loopholes, risks, and freedoms in traveling an open landscape.  You inhabit a barn you see, hardly protected during a bloody difficult war, huddled in piles of hay.  You take flight off of a flint hill cliff, circle slowly over this rambling car filled by a sister or brother, perhaps a mother, a father.

You begin to be the people that live out there – isolate across the expanse, a Christmas light nestled among a farmstead of trees, far out in the vast prairie.  The horse under you almost leaves the ground as you, breathless, flee the attacking tribe amongst whoops and shrieks.

Rolling, tumbling, for hours, miles.

What is painting but relief?  Structure and shadow, color and shape, layers and accumulation.  Blends of striations of strokes traveling at 75 mph.  The moon somewhere, poles hidden under sunset and nightfall.  Every memory, every dream, every love and inquiry and thought…turned inside out, upside down, over and over…

The world working its way through the world inside of you and back out again…

Magic…surprise…

For a preview of one of the artist’s biennale pieces, please see  http://kristinbeal.com/id9.html.

For more information about the artist, please see her websites, at www.kristinbeal.com and www.hackartlab.org.

Nathan Filbert  3.31.2010

“Growth Systems”

Imagine a wash made from masonite.

Diamonds shattered into glitter.

The petals of flowers melted down as glue, as brightness, as window.

Imagine the system of the world as plastic tubing

            lit by our tears and our dreams

If you could be an organism.

This is our “collective actuality”:  temporal, ephemeral, vision.

The world is scattered all about us, within us, around us…

Our mind a melting-pot and invention.

If we absorbed it (all) twisted, bent, collaged it

If we were to soak it (all) up…grab whatever came to hand or eye

If we put colored water in a plastocene bag and it was the ocean

Of our heart.  Of our capacity to smell.

Imagine straws as trees, now a forest

We were given scraps and shards…we made mountains

We gathered shit and detritus…we made jewels

What compacts in us

What infuses

What is loved.  Hated.  Feared or forgotten.

Our children as tinsel of joy

Our romance as a cloudy mylar

Our thinking as plastic leaves

We assemble.  We play.  We grieve.  We transform.

Organic.

What do you make of that?

Complex growth system.  Metaphor.  Reality.  It’s all in your head.

Veined in your limbs.  Ocular.  Liminal.  Kinetic.  Ever-growing.

NOW.

To find out more about the artist, please go to her website, at  http://lisarundstrom.com/.

Nathan Filbert  3.31.2010