Exoskeleton

Today I drove to Manhattan to deliver two pieces that will be exhibited with the Hullaballoo Collective (follow link to see my two works), at the Fountain Art Fair, located in the historical Armory on Lexington Avenue . We are excited that it is the 100th anniversary of the first Armory Fair! After long years of feeling isolated in my work, and having mostly an audience that exists only behind a computer screen, I am frankly thrilled to think that living breathing human beings will be respiring and perspiring in the same space that my collage and painting will occupy. People will be overstimulated and fatigued, but I look forward to seeing how my work holds up in that crush. I am very grateful to the Hullaballoo Collective for including my work and for all the work that various members have taken on to make it possible.

The lighting was fixed on the part of the wall where my two pieces are hanging, (above the chair in this shot), and before the show actually opened to the public. Thank you, Hullaballoos and Fountain.

 While awaiting the drop-off hour, I went to the Whitney to see the Jay de Feo survey. It was very moving to me in a number of ways. There are her ambitious oil paintings, but also many more personal and private works: drawings in mixed media, photos and photocollages, photograms, and objects. Here is a photo of a piece that was labeled "gelatin silver chemgram."

It touched me to learn that Jay de Feo had stopped painting for 4 years after disruptions in her personal life and her health, and then had returned to the Bay Area to teach; in a new and more secure phase of her life, she resumed her work, paintings informed by all the pursuits she had kept up in the intervening years, although she never did anything again as ambitious and strange as her "Rose."

After dropping off my work at the Armory, (near-missing a parking ticket), I went to Chelsea and managed to hear a good part of a panel about the work on exhibit at Cheim & Read currently, the "Alphabet Paintings" of Al Held. The paintings are monumental, stunningly so; but in their touch, they have a human trace. They are magnificent.

My online exhibition is underway, where I have twelve works on display now, with Galerie Cerulean at AbArtOnline. I can't help reflecting upon all that has unfolded in my life in the years that the exhibition covers, from 1999 to the present. Tonight, to have been among works, and also among artists, who tower over me, in a week that is a beehive of activity for the artworld, taking place in NY -- I moved to put myself in this proximity, and find myself feeling, sometimes, almost further away than when I lived in San Francisco.

For many months now - maybe nearing a year - I have been feeling a little like Rip Van Winkle, waking to find myself in a world different from what I knew when I went under the spell. But it's not just the surrounding world that feels changed; my inner world too, and the "container" through which I experience it, so that no aspect of life is untouched, and where I thought my feet were falling, suddenly the ground is different in quality, and the imprint of my presence too.

I have things on my mind I don't know how to say tonight. Maybe what I'm feeling is Spring, the lengthening days; or maybe it's the return of my embodiment. One feels a bit as in a dream sometimes, walking in the world insufficiently clothed. Just maybe what I'm feeling is an artistic breakthrough chipping at my fragile shell.