Homesick

Carrie Schneider
Fallen Women (From Here) / c-print / 58 x 87 inches

Today I spent a short time staring into the sky thinking about the ocean...I thought of how nice it would be to sit at the shore and smell the salty air as it filled my lungs. Feeling the sand squish between my toes...and diving into the water letting it surround my body as I'm submerged...the sound of the world becomes muffled, distant, still. I miss being able to walk to the shore line and being enveloped by the sea...today I felt a kind of homesickness.


I don't know what that means anymore...to be homesick, because to be sick for a home you have to have one first. I miss places I've lived and the people located at those places...but I think more of home as the people not the place. A place can have sentimental aspect and give nostalgic stimulus to memories...but its not the place that remembers... its us. Or does it? Can not a place bare scares of its past, like the bulbous cancer like forms on a tree that grow over places it has been cut...a kind of remembering of its pains but growing past them.
For a while now I have been plagued with the question...what is home? The more I think about it I realize that part of my answer is in what it is not. Home for me is not in a place or in a building. Although a house is a beautiful structure that contains history and memory of those whom have dwell within its walls...it can also be a confining structure with limitations. Is home with those we love? Sometimes I feel like this is true...that with family and loved ones this is where I feel most at home...but this lacks also.
I have to backtrack to the statement of place...there is something about place. There are places I've been at for years...leave and return and I feel only the distance...but there are places I have never been and I feel a sense of "home."
I think there is something in these "sense of home" that makes me want to understand what is this "sensing?" Usually when I am outside and still, quiet, listening, and looking I can feel it...like coding in a system.



derelict |ˈderəˌlikt|
adjective
in a very poor condition as a result of disuse and neglect : the cities were derelict and dying.
• (of a person) shamefully negligent in not having done what one should have done : he was derelict in his duty to his country.
noun
a person without a home, job, or property : derelicts who could fit all their possessions in a paper bag.
• a piece of property, esp. a ship, abandoned by the owner and in poor condition.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin derelictus ‘abandoned,’ past participle of derelinquere, from de- ‘completely’ + relinquere ‘forsake.’

No Guts No Golry

Artist from VOLTA 2010: NY Art Fair

VALERIE BLASS

LUIS GONZALEZ PALMA

His work titles were very beautiful:

"The Light of The Mind" -a chair that diminishes frame to frame

"His (Her, Your) Hand Hesitates" - photos of chairs

"So Not To Talk About Her" - photo of chair with thorns

NOBUAKI, ONISHI

All his works were made of glass...mimicking common banal objects like light bulbs, bones, ladders, nails, and branches

CARRIE SCHNEIDER

still form the video "Slow Dance" 2009

The Amory Show 2010

This was my first year attending The Amory Show in NYC...it was an overload of sense giving access to art from all around the world. Even without attending just knowing about the even is overwhelming...actually being there is utterly exhausting.

A couple of artist really stood out to me:
Berlin based artist Susanne M. Winterling had a video at the booth of Daniel Reich Gallery. I almost walked passed because the screen was placed so low to the ground...but I noticed the slow stepping rhythm of three girls, each with one hand upon the others shoulder...stepping to the beat of a nestalgic song. They were dressed in Native American garb...they transitioned into moment into a green grassy field, a hawk in on one of the girls shoulders now...I am captivated. The way Winterling uses sound and rhythm reminds me of something I used to know, bringing reference to 1920-50's film and her use of symbols are direct and but quiet.

The following clip is from her show at Daniel Reich Gallery back in 2008 titled: All Tomorrow's Parties: Stage


Installation view of “Untitled (Play Winterling)”
video
7m:00s
2007

Another artist I took time to view again was Ori Gersht an Israeli artist who works in photography and film. I had seen his work a couple weeks before...but to watch the film Envaders (2009) again this time was even more breath taking. The dialogue in the film states that the man you see slumped over the bed...walking down a windy pathway all day and night is a lost angle...wondering...forever fighting the elements and time.

here is one of his videos...but it is very much contrasted from the one I just described.




One more artist that I found interesting was Eve Sussman "A Parliament of Rooks" of which two screen scanned slowly across a field of crows



Helena Almeida




Shaun Gladwell

Proxemics

"Like gravity, the influence of two bodies on each other is inversely proportional not only to the square of their distance but possibly even the cube of the distance between them." - E. T. Hall (1966)

The space surrounding us is continually a part of ones perception of themselves and the things around them. Whether one is conscious of this or not...proxemics is a part of everyday life.

I've been trying to figure out what is the most pressing thing in my life...and my conclusion is distance, the distance between me and others. There are all kinds of distance: physical, mental (communication), spiritual beyond that we can clearly perceive or see. These are the types of space I consider all the time just did not realize it before. Within these types of space I am interested in the distance between them. The distance between two people or a group...what is transferred or transmitted and how? Between our body and our mind...the distance between a though and a action.

Social Distance:
Intimate: 6-18"
Personal: 1.5-2.5"
Social (acquaintances): 4-7 ft.
Public: 12-25 ft.

I then began to think of how to transfer the idea of distance into form. How does one transfer the distance of 1,015 mi./ 5,359,200 ft. (CT to TN) or 5,761 mi./30,418,080 ft. (CT to HI) into some kind of material or form. When I thought about it I became overwhelmed to actually think about the "distance." To display or address such distance it has to be represented in an ephemeral or documentation form (photography/video). There are many ways to address distance and the possibilities are infinite, but I want to address it in a manner that is true to the immensity of the length of distance.

This lead me to think of the idea of forms that fit into this mass of length...and I thought of buildings/skyscrapers. I find the idea of buildings being the same distance as masses of land interesting, and how one can travel up one of these buildings in minutes what would take many many hours to travel the same distance on land.
I would like to do a project with people I know that live near these very tall buildings but what that project is I do not know yet. It would be interesting to document or address the vastness of these heights and their relation to the ground and space.