1) I can remember always having intense feelings as a child, moods that could change dramatically from excited to melancholic to irritable depending on the music I was listening to, the room I was in, the weather outside, the people I saw, etc. From this sensitivity to change in my environment, I guess I developed different daydream "worlds." The worlds refer to specific years, feelings, dreams, or places I've mentally catalogued. They are instantly recreated when I do certain activities or experience particular environments. Now I use Pinterest to categorize these different daydream worlds to preserve them and flesh them out for art and writing projects. For example, I have a
board devoted to the feelings/images/memories I associate with the album 'In an Aeroplane Over the Sea' by indie band Neutral Milk Hotel.
2) 5 influential books/writers/thinkers:
There are many great books and writers that have influenced me, so many that I couldn't possibly name them all. Growing up, we had a huge bookcase full of children's books which my parents read to me most nights. I was always fascinated with darker stories, the ones with more mature humor and unusual illustrations. A few picture books that stand out to me are Dare Wright's
'The Lonely Doll,' 'Alice in Wonderland,'
'The Frog Prince Revisited' by John Scieszka, and Cicely Mary Barker's illustrations which were collected in
'The Complete Book of the Flower Fairies.'
When I got older, I picked up a book by David Sedaris and fell in love. Here was someone who understood my crankiness, my disillusionment with suburbia and the American Dream and let me escape into his bizarre, hilarious world. Attention to the psychology and idiosyncrasies of others, I think, has been the most influential part of Sedaris' writing for me. His perspectives were always inverted, always unapologetically skewed from the status quo. His words comforted me in some of my more awkward stages of life.
3) 5 influential musical groups/songs/poems
One of my favorite poems is
'The Pink Car' by Mark Halliday. I found it in an anthology for high schoolers called 'Poetry 180.' I knew little about poetry back then, other than the classic rhyming poems like 'The Jabberwocky,' and 'You Are Old Father William.' The poem stuck out to me because it truly felt free flowing and almost random. There's a playfulness to it that works with the rhythm of the words. I think it sends a good message- to accept who you are and to ignore the labels and attributes the world will try to assign you.
'Try to Praise the Mutilated World' by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski is another beautiful poem that I often reread. I heard it for the first time during the 9/11 service at WAC my freshmen year. The lyrical diction and the gorgeous, poignant details make for effective, accessible poetry. The poem is so sad, yet so uplifting at the same time, you can practically feel the speaker's eyes welling with tears as he repeats his mantra, as he pleads with the reader, "try to praise the mutilated world," try to find the beauty within the ugliness of human suffering.
I listen to a lot of old music, I like the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones..I love old rock n' roll. I think there's something to be said for music made before Autotune was invented and "bootylicious" became a word. (I actually can't believe I just typed that and Blogger accepted it as a real word. For shame, Blogger). I like the rawness of early rock, the purity of allowing fuzzy distortion and vocals that could express so much without worrying about always hitting the right note. Early rock, I think, got to the heart of what music is supposed to be about- expressing emotion, expressing love. Today's popular music has somehow devolved into singing mostly about material things like sex and money and power and there doesn't seem to be much room for more complex emotions.
The band the Arctic Monkeys, partly for their 70's rock sound, partly for lead singer/songwriter Alex Turner's clever lyrics. Turner wrote all of the songs for the indie movie 'Submarine' and his smart lyrics helped keep the story of two quirky kids in high school falling in love from feeling too overdone. In 'Glass in the Park' Turner sings,
Tell me how can I put you off/When you're a matter of urgency/I've got a million things that I need to do/But they're all secondary. Songwriting with too much high diction can start to sound stuffy or pretentious, but Turner gets it just right.
Finally, Paul Simon's album '
Graceland' is one of my all-time favorite albums. I I often listened to it growing up as it was my mother's special "cleaning music." After dissociating Paul Simon with vacuuming and oiling the dining room table, I actually began to enjoy the music, the narratives within Simon's lyrics and the dimension that the South African bands gave to the album.
4) I'd probably bring my guitar, lots of notebooks and writing utensils, stationary, stamps, and my camera. If I were isolated, I'd probably want to do something creative like write poetry, learn how to play guitar better, practice photography, etc. I wouldn't want to bring a computer because computers are mostly a distraction for me. I'd write to my friends and family via snail mail and send them my memory card so they could print the photos for me.
5) Issues of female sexuality, what it meant to be a woman from different times in history, what it means to be a woman now, Madonna-whore complexes, Courtney Love's concept of the "kinderwhore," these are all ideas that have interested me for a long time and they usually come up in my work, whether or not I consciously decide to use them. I'm interested in ideas of self-perception and transformation- how we often transform ourselves to try to fit our self-perception instead of transforming our self-image to reflect our true selves. Many of these concepts are woven into different fairytales which I also find interesting. I love the juxtaposition between a magical, improbable fantasy setting and dark, psychological underpinnings. To me, this only increases the strangeness two-fold. For example, I think it's the French version of Little Red Riding Hood that has Red unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly) eat her grandmother's flesh, then burn her clothes at the wolf's request and get into bed with him. As a cautionary tale, the moral is supposed to be the normal part of the story. But what is the moral? Where did Red go wrong? She did as her parents bade her, taking food to Granny's, she tried to politely evade the wolf, and somehow she was duped anyway. Then a random woodsmen comes in to save her and her grandmother, depending on which version one reads. The murkiness of the story, the flat (again, dependent on the version) character rendering, I could see myself focusing on these different components and finding my own visual solutions or inquiries to the nature of their meaning.
6) I'm fascinated with psychology, biology, art history, oneirology (the study of dreams), linguistics and literature. I think a lot of artistic inspiration can be culled from different areas of study. Conceptually, I think artists who pull knowledge from different areas as a basis for their art tend to be the most successful.
7) I've never done much with 3D installations before, so I'm excited to experiment with that, possibly doing something with dollhouses, shadowboxes, or matryoshka dolls.
8) I'm always interested in learning about current artists as well as historical artists. I experimented a bit with film during last year's Digital Imaging art course, so I'd appreciate learning more about what current art filmmakers are doing.
