I remember somewhat sheepishly the day last May when I read of our contractual blogging obligation. I remember the true feelings of panic and disgust. I had been staunchly avoiding internet networking sites (I have since joined Facebook) and was actively hiding from cyberspace, and subsequently, all the people I had left behind in my life.

And yet, I could have anticipated how much I would grow to enjoy it. My very first post on this blog, while rife with anxiety, seems to give a little wink to the future me, the now-comfortable-blogging-me, the person who has shared almost every feeling of the year– gripe and triumph– with all the good citizens of the interwebs.

This is because the same thing that makes me hesitant to indulge a public forum is also what allows me to enjoy it. I am a classic over-sharer. If there is ever an opportunity to share too much of my personal self, I will do it, with anyone, for any reason.

The AIRs were talking the other night about whether or not each of us would like to keep a blog past this year. I was the only one who was seriously considering it. It’s not that they did not enjoy blogging– there were high points in the public documentation of this experience for each of them– it’s just that it seems so self-indulgent and self-involved.

This feeling was validated by an experience we had earlier that night. We had just finished checking out the website of some filmmakers who are coming to Hub-Bub in May. They have made a film about their relationship– one in which they met on the internet and preceded to communicate only through creative and digital mediums (no talking), even after they met face to face. They then made a movie about this experience, in which the plot takes you through the moment they decide to make the movie and the initial stages of the movie, so the movie becomes about making the movie. They then made podcasts about the experience of making and promoting the movie. There were several enormous projects all balled up in this tiny little corner of experience– a string of mediations of epic proportions, when really the original experience was perhaps the most valuable part of the experiment (and if it was not, then all the more reason to have left it there). The whole thing just seemed an example of how what starts as public documentation of a person’s life can become a way of disconnecting from it. We may begin by talking to an audience, but we often end up talking to ourselves, and worse– believing that the audience is there, and they are just like us. Connection becomes alienation.

Now, of course I am not arguing against mediation. It’s the reason I am not content to just live life– it is the reason I make art in the first place, because the initial experience is not enough and I crave the documentation. And yet, there is something so perverse about sharing through the blog– something about the relationship between the writer (me) and the audience (you) that is so heavily mediated in and of itself. After all, I am, right now, talking to a little text box on my computer screen. I have no evidence of having made a tangible connection with you, the outside world, but by “publishing” I am falsely assured that I have. All I have really done is climb deeper into my own head, narrow my world to myself and the computer screen, and inflate it to the utmost importance.

This is so risky. One risks becoming affected– living as if in front of an audience (when perhaps there is none), while moving farther from oneself in the process (you could argue that with the creation of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube we are all now examples of this. I have written in a previous post that we may not even be aware of the long-term affects of these circumstances). One risks becoming a static, closed system– containing the world within oneself, creating definitives of inherently amorphous experiences in order to better relate them to the aforementioned “audience” (in this post alone, I have linked to two previous posts; I linked to three in my last substantial post). One risks confusing the documentation of living art, or the documentation of actual art, with art. I have neglected my journal this year– maybe ten pages in nine months. It was replaced by a far less intimate (and arguably less valuable) document in the form of this blog.

This evening my brother sent me this:

“It’s the death of privacy,” he told me, after I had watched it. Now, of course, this video is not directly related to everything I was talking about above, but it is another “point” for turning off; over-sharing is ok if that’s who you are (and I am), but you should try to relegate it to face-to-face interaction. It can do less damage that way. Watching this pathetic woman makes me want to reclaim my privacy in a big way…and it also kind of makes me want to post it on my blog and talk about it. I just can’t decide which I want to do more in the long run.To blog or not to blog? What do you guys think?

Thanks to Mordechai for bringing this to my attention…

Thanks to Taylor and Phil for the roof over our heads this weekend. I loved Little Five Points. It was nice to find another neighborhood that I would feel comfortable living in, even if I still can’t necessarily afford it.

Thank you for the comment. If I didn’t think there was some legitimacy to it, I would not be responding– this sentiment has been a fear of mine since I arrived in Spartanburg. At the time, I was unsure what to expect—I had no experience living in a smaller city, much less a Southern one, and I did not fully grasp the “community” element to the program. Throughout the year, the three other AIRS and I have discussed this issue of “community” at length. In fact, it is one of the first “arguments” I remember having as a group, early in our stay here– we wanted to get to the bottom of what it means to be an artist within a community.

This was not a simple question to answer, and there continues to be a range of opinions on what is the best way to apply our “skills” to the needs of a community. Nicholas, among us, is the first to defend the idea that an artist simply making art within a community is, by itself, enough to constitute community involvement. At first, I did not understand this point of view, but I have grown to respect it. As I learned from my little “Reasons to Live” experiment, people value art in their lives a great deal, and if there is an interested audience, the “show,” the sharing of your own art, is enough. And yet, in those arguments, I never agreed with Nicholas, but said from the beginning that an artist has a responsibility to physically insert themselves into the community. Believing that this is true is one thing, but teasing out exactly how to accomplish it while defining what it means in the process is a different task entirely, and a much more difficult one. Being an “artist” comes with no conventional career path and, being so individualized, offers few applicable models to follow. The skill sets are so vaguely definable—I find myself continually questioning just what it is that I actually have to give.

Defining the concept of “artist in community” is difficult enough on its own, in one’s comfort zone, but it becomes infinitely more difficult when you introduce the element of a foreign community. When I came down here, I had no conception of “the South.” The idea that there would be a certain level of “foreignness” had crossed my mind, but I did not give it much real thought. I had taken a road trip the summer before and had seen much of the country, and while every corner was different, it all seemed comfortable in a way that traveling in other countries had not been. We speak a common language. We watch the same things and shop at the same stores. But when I came down here, I found that the first thing that people wanted me to know was that the South is different from “the North.” They let me know this by their reactions when I told them where I had come from. They said things about “culture shock” and made audible noises that signaled some amorphous heaviness. I hadn’t known that I had come from “the North.” This was something that people here told me. And sometimes, they told me this politely, with charm, and sometimes they didn’t tell me this at all, but rather showed me through their reaction to my otherness.

The blog became an outlet for me, a way of addressing these divisions, of interpreting the things I was discovering for the first time. The tone may have sometimes been harsh, but I resolved in the beginning (and have reiterated this resolve repeatedly throughout the course of the year) that I was going to be true to my feelings, no matter how fleeting. When I was angry, or sad or confused, I expressed it. You may not have appreciated the sentiment, but I ask you to respect it. You have quite possibly grown up in the South and you doubtless have a largely accurate conception of the North (maybe through travel or popular culture). But you must understand that I had no idea what I was getting into. I am a Jewish liberal “Northerner” in the Christian conservative South. If I had nothing to say about that, about the transition from one to the other, and about being myself in the latter environment, I would likely be unworthy of the public forum I have been offered. This question of “being myself,” something I had never really had to question before, became all too real and pointed through extensive interaction with the people surrounding Hub-Bub. On the one hand, we were brought here to make art, to explore ourselves, we were given blogs to detail our experience here. On the other, by doing just that in the only way that I knew how, I seemed to be alienating people. I realize that, for better or for worse, and without value judgment, there is much value in an indirect communication style here. There is a time and a place for what I have been calling “honesty;” it is not everyone’s privilege, it should be reserved for certain people in certain situations and even then it should be dressed up, cooed at, and padded. As evidenced in the tea, the South values sweetness, even when it is false or unhealthy. This was never a quality I could purport to have per se. I take my tea straight up. There was no way around this catch-22— being in an environment with different values only strengthened my own identity, then I was put in a position to share this identity, on the blog and in person, and I could not shirk away from it, even if I thought I should.

Yes, there was clearly a dissatisfaction with elements of Spartanburg. But it pains me that you have interpreted this dissatisfaction as an “obvious distaste for the entire city and the South.” What I hope you realize is that while I have used my blog as a receptacle for this dissatisfaction, I have used my time here to improve the things I was dissatisfied with (or have at least tried to), and as such I have met and worked with dozens of like-minded Spartanburg natives to that end. My dissatisfaction with Spartanburg’s sluggish downtown turned into a five-day interactive performance in storefront windows, where we met hundreds of people who shared with us their stories and their lives. It was exhausting, but by the end I felt as though I really connected with the community, and they with us. Strangers visited us every day in droves, thanked us, gave us tokens of their appreciation and we responded in kind. Rachel and I wrote extensively on our blogs about how much we genuinely liked everyone– how close we felt to all of them. It was a surprise after all of the “difference” we were hit with when we moved here. A dissatisfaction with Spartanburg’s isolated campuses and lagging “College Town” persona prompted me to create and head a College Street Team with students from all local schools participating. Together, we are planning events, and are now publishing a monthly calendar distributed on college campuses that highlight what Spartanburg has to offer by way of the arts. These efforts have also led to me serving on the Spartanburg Creative Energy kiosk committee, and you will see the fruits of this effort by way of community boards/information kiosks in key spots in Spartanburg as early as September. I worked on this tirelessly the past couple of months, for free, alongside the growing demands for my final show. My point is not to toot my own horn here (though that is what I have been pushed to do), but rather to express that out of dissatisfaction comes progress. I lament that all you have seen is the negative end of that equation, but I have not, until now, felt the need to advertise the positive one. I recognize that these projects may not be important to you, but I assure you that they grew out of lack in Spartanburg recognized by members of the community and not imposed from without by me.

I tried to write all of this in an email to you. In fact, I spent most of my morning doing just that, with the invitation to talk to me about what you would have liked us to do differently. I have many times expressed confusion as to our role here, on the blog and in person, and have invited suggestions. In my email to you, I sent this entreaty once again. We are leaving, of course, but it would be valuable to the next group.

Moments after I pushed the Send button, I received an email back from the “mail delivery subsystem.” The email address you provided does not exist. All at once, I went from apologetic and sad to frustrated and angry. It seemed an apt metaphor for my entire existence here. The message you wrote me suggests that we have met before, that we have spoken to one another. You likely asked me what I thought of “The South,” as people here so often do, and I likely told you, quite honestly, that it has been hard living here. I do not know who you are, and so I cannot address what your real life response had been, but this most recent “exchange” is yet another example of where I tried to be direct, to start a conversation for the sake of understanding, and my efforts were misdirected in a very literal way. Whoever you are, you have met me face to face, and yet you use this anonymous venue to offer a sting with no opportunity for discussion. If I seem upset on this blog sometimes, this is a perfect example of why. You know where I live, you know how to reach me. If you don’t know that I am willing to listen then you have given me less of a chance than the one you feel I have denied you. Why have you waited this long to express discontent? When I expressed dissatisfaction to you, I was reaching out to you, I felt I was inviting you to participate in what could have been a potentially valuable dialogue. But no, let’s just giggle about “culture shock” and “The Beacon.” Everything is wonderful as long as Taco Dog makes corndogs and we all make sure not to run near Cammie Clagett Courts. Keep your disapproval inside; express it only in ways that render it meaningless, in ways that divorce it from an actual voice.

If part of our community service is to make people feel warm and fuzzy about living here than you are right, I have most likely failed. But I never thought of it that way. I reasoned that if this program were about patting Spartanburg on the back then they would’ve brought in regional artists. The only reason I can think of for inviting a diverse group of artists to come here from all over is to provide a different perspective. I am truly sorry you didn’t like that perspective, I really am. I have agonized over your comment since I received it. I wanted nothing more than to please Spartanburg, and most of all, I wanted to please the people who brought us here, if only to show my gratitude for this opportunity. By failing you I have failed them, and I feel that very profoundly. It makes me worry that the choices for the next group were made definitively based on our failures (I believe that all of them are either Southerners, or have spent significant time in the South) and that hurts me. But I hope that you can see the ways that I have invested myself in Spartanburg through specific projects; if so, you might find that my voice becomes so scathing because of the ways I often see necessary progress thwarted. If I hadn’t cared, the tone would have been milder.

Similarly, if it was part of our community service to spend a great deal of time interacting socially with the community, I also likely failed. But, I was surrounded from the get go with three people that I felt comfortable with, and I also began a romantic relationship the summer we arrived. I had four full-time friends pretty instantly, and they were always readily accessible. Add to this a jam-packed event schedule outlined for us by Hub-Bub, and add all that to the fact that we were trying to make art. I spent most evenings, seven days a week, hunched over my studio table.

The jury is still out as to whether it was a mistake not to invest more in Spartanburg in a social sense. It goes back to the question of what the artist’s responsibilities to the community are, and this question is further complicated when paired with a community’s individual priorities. Unfortunately, it does seem we would have looked more invested in “community” if we had wanted to get a beer at the Nu-Way more often, if we wanted to “hang out.” Admittedly, I did not participate in this for the aforementioned reasons. Rather, I threw myself into my work. The work I have produced this year is all about Spartanburg, and more specifically, the process of finding beauty in Spartanburg’s urban landscapes. It was about a very tangible relationship with the environment, and about presenting that relationship to the community so they might see the place they live in a different way. I mistakenly believed that this was the pinnacle of my contribution to this program, but as I said, this feeling loses its punch in relation to the individual priorities of the community. Regardless of the quality of the programming, Hub-Bub often has trouble creating steady interest and demand for what it supplies—it is why some of the best shows this year have had smaller attendance. In many ways, it seems the function of Hub-Bub is to encourage growth in Spartanburg, but also to anticipate the growing demand for cultural stimulus once that growth occurs, and in that respect, sometimes it feels like Hub-Bub is a necessary, but largely premature venture. I’m talking generally here, but it seems that Spartanburg as a whole has only a marginal interest in art, which is what I thought I was brought here to do. It is no wonder then that there is a miscommunication in terms of “connection with the community.” And along these lines, maybe I should have gone to the Nu-Way, maybe it would have made my “connection to the community” more visible, maybe it would have responded to the individual values and priorities of this community, which have a lot to do with general agreeableness. But I still maintain that it was an unreasonable request—mistake or no, social interaction was never our obligation nor our responsibility, as much as some would have us believe that it is so.

I have written too much for too long, as is my wont, and it was probably a silly thing to do. As Nicholas pointed out to me, you obviously weren’t trying to start a discussion with me—you just wanted to tell me you didn’t like me. But I had to respond, if only for myself. I don’t mind speaking for all of us when I say that we have done our best. I am so grateful for this experience—it has made me a fuller person and a more focused artist. I wanted to share that gratitude and the fruits of that discovery process with the community in the form of our exit show. You ask me what I expected. I expected the poets from the anthology that Rachel edited, meeting often with them for coffee and interviews. I expected people who came to some of Derya’s potlucks, or some of Nicholas’s figure drawing sessions. (It should be noted that members of Derya’s knitting group showed up!) I expected people we met in the box, or people that served with me on Wofford’s Women’s Month panel. I expected people from my college town group, or people from the Spartanburg Creative Energy committee. I expected people from SDS, where we hung a show, spoke to classrooms, and helped paint griffins. I expected people from all of the elementary, middle, high and college-level schools that we visited, judging contests and speaking with students. I expected the people we gave our time and efforts to. But I find now in your comment that perhaps they didn’t show up because we are “Northerners” or, more accurately, because we embodied some expression of this difference. I write this letter to ask you to share responsibility with me in a missed connection; it is a two-way street and I did what I thought was appropriate and good. I tried to answer the question I put forth in the beginning of this letter through my actions here. I still invite you to disagree with the way I have done it, but next time, leave your name.

Sincerely,
Arielle Angel

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and if I were not going to Atlanta in an hour, I would be focusing all of my energy on responding, which I will doubtless do at length in the next post.

For now, please accept this short response:

Touché. I tried my best. Please understand that it has been hard.

the Greeks were outside doing this:

…many of them literally weeping about their role in the death of Christ.

The next year, I made the seder in New York, on the floor of my tiny living room with my closest college friends. It looked like this:

Both seders were different and wonderful experiences. Because the seder is made up of so many different parts, there are so many customs that come from all over the world. Jews from different backgrounds have different takes on the traditional foods. There are so many interpretations of the best way to relate the story of Exodus, and on Passover, every household around the world is presenting the story through their tiny little lens– reflecting their own values in the retelling, and projecting them on our ancestors. Because of this, there are many, many different versions of the Haggadah, the book that is used to officiate the seder.

Of course, for my seder, I wanted a Haggadah that reflected what this holiday means to me. I am not particularly interested in god as much as I am in people and in histories. I wanted a Haggadah that was inclusive as opposed to exclusive, especially as most of the people at my seders tend to be non-Jews. I wanted to take the story of tolerance and freedom and relate it to our world, to use the seder to begin a conversation about how we can counter the oppression we see all around us. And therefore, both years, I created my own Haggadah, drawing from a multitude of different sources, including the traditional, the secular/humanist, the scientific, and even Wikipedia. It looks as you would imagine, like a literal cut-and-paste job photocopied together. This text has grown from the first year to the next, to further reflect the development of my thinking about this holiday.

And so it is no surprise, then, that the South should be an influence on this year’s seder. I began by wanting to reflect the Southern-Jewish tradition in the menu, alongside my more traditional Mediterranean one. There is a history of Jews in the South, though small, and they have continued to find their own ways of assimilating to life in the Bible Belt. Some byproducts of this are Matzah-Ball Gumbo and Passover fried green tomatoes with matzah meal.

It occurred to me that if there were Jews in the South during African slavery, and there were, then it was possible that their histories collided in some way. I decided to do more research. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for– I know now that I was looking for some peace of mind, something that might tell me that Jews did not fully participate in African slavery. How could they? They sat around the seder table every year and celebrated freedom, they ate things that made their throats burn and their eyes water to remind them of the bitterness of slavery.

What I found was unnerving. There were very few Jewish families in the South, but comparatively, Jewish families were much more likely to own slaves than the general white population. What’s more, there were at least a half dozen Jewish families who were influential in the slave trade in the New World– many of the ships who brought the slaves from Africa were Jewish-owned and were run by Jewish crews. This was not a New World phenomenon, either. Jews were the principal slave traders in Suriname and Brazil.

The more I read, the worse it got. I found pieces of sermons from rabbis in the Confederacy around the time of the Civil War speaking passionately about the Bible’s defense of slavery. (I suddenly remember parts of things I “studied” in Hebrew school, ancient laws from the Talmud regarding how you should value the worth of your slave, and what you should do if your slave runs away.) I found evidence of Jews trafficking human chattel all over ancient history, sometimes even introducing the practice to their non-Jewish neighbors.

(It was a rough experience in and of itself to even look for this information, as most of what I found fell into one of two territories: anti-Semitism or overly-defensive Jewish people accusing everyone of anti-Semitism, which seems to pretty accurately summarize the cloud over honest Jewish discourse today. This turned out to be one of the best sources I found, even though it was pretty harsh and obviously had an agenda.)

I was deflated and embarrassed. My Haggadahs have always contained an appropriated passage about the bond that Jews and Blacks share over slavery. It asks the people at the seder to join in singing, “Let My People Go,” an African slave tune inspired by the Exodus and often recycled back into American seders, thereby highlighting the connection and showing solidarity with all others who are or have been slaves throughout history. How naive I had been!

I was horrified to think of this tune wafting through the open windows of Southern-Jewish households on particularly hot days. A still more horrifying reality– that throughout history, in different parts of the world, Jewish seders must have been attended to by slaves– that while we rejoiced over the story of our redemption, a slave cleared the table of our celebratory meal. It is almost too unbearable to think about.

It is not that I ever held Jewish people to a higher moral standard than others– people are people, and they are all essentially rotten*. It just seems that a Jew’s charge down through the ages is to remember his history, no matter how hard he tries to forget. It seems impossible that while remembering– each year, remembering– and reminding our children, we were turning our backs on it all the same.

The children are a particularly disturbing element to this equation, because while the adults could likely “rationalize” away the difference between the Jewish slaves of Egypt and the modern, darker-skinned slaves in their kitchens, the children, most likely, were confused. On Passover, a time when the children are invited to ask questions of their parents, it is sickening to imagine what they must have answered to explain away the inconvenient similarities. It reminds me of the sentiment I so often hear in connection with the Holocaust, the disbelief expressed when people see pictures of SS officers with their families, right outside the camps. How could they do this to other families, to other children, people ask, and then go home to their own? The answer, of course, is that you can only do it when you cease to see humanity in a certain kind of person.

Several issues come to mind here

*Why can’t I stop referring to the slave-owners of yesteryear as “we” and “us?” I have no Southern-Jewish ancestry, half of my family did not even arrive until after WWII, the other half only a few decades before, and yet I feel the burden as if it had been my own parents. The answer to this one is simple– it is embedded in the Passover ritual. We are required to say that “we” were taken out of Egypt, not “they,” when referring to our ancestors. It is a way of feeling connected to our history and to our people, but now it also seems a way of taking responsibility. It a valuable lesson: “we” are all responsible when oppression occurs.

*A particularly sinister thought continues to assert itself, challenging everything I have ever thought about the beauty of Passover and I can’t seem to shake it. I have never thought about Judaism as a religion as much as a culture. This is what allows me to hide god under the table at my seders, while instead creating a love-fest of touchy-feely liberal ideals. I enjoy this method– it makes me feel more Jewish while simultaneously connecting me to all of humanity. But what if I’ve got it all wrong? When I think now about the Biblical references to sanctioned slavery of others, I must face the fact that maybe the story of Exodus really is about god, and as such, maybe it is about god’s salvation of us, in particular, at the expense of everyone else. Maybe in order to participate in Passover, we must actually believe that we are chosen, for we were freed even though slavery was still a-ok. I can’t believe that and I won’t, but then how do I celebrate the holiday in good-conscience? I have sent my rabbi in Miami this question, along with the task of reconciling the biblical view of slavery with Passover and I am awaiting his reply.

*The worst thought of all is sparked by the coincidence of my beginning this journey into Jewish slave owning history on the same day that the Israeli government has announced expansion plans for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I strongly support Israel and have always believed firmly in our right to exist and make our homeland there, but I have never supported the settlements. It always felt to me like running over to your neighbors yard, pulling down your pants and yelling “na-na-na-boo-boo” while you mooned them, and then staying in that position FOR-EVER. It’s extreme, it’s provocative and it shows no good faith in the peace process. The settlers, mostly fundamentalist Jews, feel as far away from me and my life as the fundamentalist Christians in this country, or the fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East, and yet, in some ways, I am being forced to take responsibility for them. This recent development in Israel along with my Passover crisis frightens me; it makes me feel that, like the child-victim of an abusive father who will grow up to beat his own family, perhaps all we have gotten from our history of oppression is a subconscious desire to oppress others.

That this new information will work its way into this year’s seder is clear. The question that remains now is how? I have sent it out to a few people, including my old rabbi, and I am awaiting responses while I ponder the question myself.

I am sad about this finding, about how horrible human nature is and how this conundrum born of Passover (and the many Passover meals likely served by slaves) becomes an example of just how hard all of us will have to work for freedom, whether it be mental or physical, whether it be for ourselves or for others. And yet, this is also an exciting opportunity. As I wrote to my rabbi, “Passovers of years past now feel superficial to me; there is suddenly opportunity for real and more satisfying discourse, real exploration and inquisitiveness, as opposed to a rhetoric of the example of moral superiority.”

*please see the comments after this post for a more accurate articulation of what I meant by the assertion that “people are essentially rotten.”

The show was on Tuesday night and I have taken a few days to relax. It is a strange feeling to be through with it all– I wake up in the morning in a panic, What is it that I should be doing? What have I left unfinished? But, somewhat miraculously, and somewhat depressingly, there is nothing left to do. My studio is empty. All of my hard work is gathered in a cleaner, more organized space downstairs. I have not yet thrown out the newsprint on which I stored my glass paintings for months as they were being painted. The outlines of where they laid all those months, the spaces around them darkened by long days of sun through large windows, reminds me that it is all over. I must admit, it feels a little bit empty.

I drive around Spartanburg these days, more often now that I have time to wander, and I lament over the snapshots that I missed, that there was not time to paint. One scene in particular, an old mom and pop Mexican restaurant, in the shadow of a giant truck and a broken marquee (on New Cut Road in Una, for you Spartanburgers) was recently bulldozed. I have meant to photograph it for months now– I have seriously considered painting it even after the series went up– but now that it is gone, I feel the finality of this series, and with it, my experience in Spartanburg. In some ways, it makes me feel as though my exploration of the post-industrial South is not over, I still feel the tugging to document when I pass these sorts of places. But with or without this tugging, my time is up– life pushes me forward.

Without further ado, here is the work that I have been making this year. Stephen was kind enough to take these pictures during and the day after the show. The glass paintings are extremely hard to document without better equipment, so forgive the glare of other lights and the reflection of the camera. I am tempted to wait until I have them professionally photographed, but I am excited to give you out-of-towners a chance to see them. Hope you enjoy…

Here are the Apocalyptic Anagrams, which you may remember from the blog. Of course, the 28 pages that were reproduced by color photocopy and hung in a grid do not include some of the racier rearrangements of letters, but they are also available in the backlog of this blog.

This series is of four marquees around Spartanburg. (Please see my artist statement, in a previous post, for further information). The paintings are reverse glass paintings done on the front glass of shadow boxes, with the more translucent areas achieved by mixing medium in with the colored acrylic. There are lights installed inside the shadow boxes so that the marquees glow in their night scenes. (Cliff thinks I should point out that the messages on the marquees are my own and not found.)

“(I’d Like to Say) Yes.”

“Why Aren’t You Afraid?”

“Because You Don’t Love Me.” (plus detail)

“Here. This Is For You.”

The medium of these organs are sculpey, marker, acrylic paint, glass vial, vellum scroll and ribbon. This display was developed just for the Spartanburg showing, as these pieces will eventually be installed in New York, in the places they represent (again, see artist statement). For this show, I situated the organs on New York subway maps (thanks Charles!), above the area they refer to, along with an excerpt from each scroll.

From left: my liver, heart, pancreas, stomach, uterus, intestines, and lungs.

These are the 51 small reverse glass paintings that I have been referring to on this blog for quite awhile. Thankfully, the flaws that I had been agonizing over did not show up prominently (Brian went into each one individually and tried to fix them). The red dots indicate that they are sold! And they seem to just keep going, so thank you Spartanburg for your support! I hope to get some more detail shots when they are documented one by one– obviously not all of the 51 are viewable in detail here.

I had a slideshow playing in the tiny room off The Showroom for one night only. Due to my own stupidity (and several glasses of wine), I forgot to photograph it. The idea (refer to artist statement) is that I projected a series of 39 photographs into the small, open mouth of a beautiful, old hard-shelled suitcase, in an otherwise very dark room. All the photographs were taken on the way back from the Charlotte airport. You may remember some of the pictures that didn’t make the cut in an older post titled “The Losers” from quite a while ago. It will be hard to recreate the effect of seeing it in the dark, in the suitcase, but here are about a third of the pictures projected:

Thank you to everyone at the Bub who was responsible for this show going up, and for our presence here in the first place (you know who you are). And thanks to MY ENTIRE IMMEDIATE FAMILY for flying and driving in from Miami and Boston. I can’t remember the last time we were all together like that (it might have been my high-school graduation lunch, and what preceded that was both sides threatening that they were not going to come, so it was nice to have everyone together this time without the drama). Thank you to Howie, Cliff and Elinor for the well-wishes and thank you SOOOO MUCH to Alice who overnighted me homemade white chocolate macadamia nut cookies (my favorite) to congratulate me. Thank you most of all to Brian who, quite literally, had a hand in every single piece of anything I accomplished this year. Thank you to everyone who came out to the show, for real. There were much fewer people there than at our opening show, which was a little saddening for us to consider– that people were more interested in us then than they are after a year of our visibility in the community. I have resolved to blame Spartanburg for this, and the general tendency towards indifference to new and challenging arts, rather than take responsibility for it myself. It’s easier that way; it hurts less. And besides, the people who really mattered showed up (again, you know who you are).

I would have loved to take you through the whole show, virtually, through everyone’s work, because it was all impressive, but this blog post is too long as it is. Check out the Hub-Bub Flickr for more all-inclusive pictures from the show. As of now, pages 1-8 on the front page showcase our work.

I spotted this off of Pine Street across from the Food Lion (even Publix was closed today). The message: “The key to Heaven hangs from a nail in the cross. He has risen and I’m forgiven! Heaven’s gates are open wide!” I saw this and was so shocked I had to take a video on my cell phone.

I feel that anything I have to say about this is both predictable and redundant: blah, blah, otherness, blah, blah, the south. But damn…McDonalds is on board now too? I was almost positive I would be seeing them in hell.

And of course, as I admitted in the last post, silence has never really been a part of my nature, so I think I’ll get back to it.

Either way, I’m going to have to hold off of posts of actual substance until after next Tuesday, after the final show is over. Things have been crazy over here– even Derya is staying up til 4 am! Nicholas sometimes doesn’t go to sleep until 4 pm the next afternoon, and I suppose I am somewhere in the middle. I am still not sure I am going to get it all done.

For now, I thought I’d share with you my unabridged artist statement (I will have to shorten it considerably for the show). Enjoy this uninterrupted block of text, because although that has been my jam lately, after Tuesday I will post the pictures of my work that I have been witholding this entire time.

Artist Statement

My most recent work explores the concept of place, and the abstract and sometimes contradictory ways that a place succeeds or does not succeed in constituting a home.

My recent and temporary relocation from New York City to Spartanburg, coupled with the fact that I may not return there has led me to question the definition of home in fundamental ways and has contributed to an overwhelming feeling of homelessness and displacement. Each project I have embarked on this year has been influenced by these feelings; each attempts to assess and define the qualities of home.

The series of 51 small reverse glass paintings “I’m Not Here,” began with the simple desire to become better acquainted with Spartanburg. Coming from New York, I had a strong sense that one should get to know a place by foot. I began a series of undirected, unplanned walks around the area. I called the walks dérives, based on the theories of the Situationist artist, Guy Debord, about how we should approach the cities in which we live. Many times, I did not bring a camera, but rather used my camera-phone if I was surprised by something worth photographing. It was on these dérives that I began to identify and photograph the small beauties of Spartanburg— abandoned industrial and commercial structures, old cemeteries, and brilliant sunsets. This process affirmed a sense of home and place in the form of my developing Spartanburg aesthetic, in the choices that I made for which images begged inclusion in the painting series. The result, somewhat unintentionally, is a series that highlights not only my enjoyment of a new and different landscape, but also the anxiety and alienation that these solitary and depressed landscapes reflected in me.

Marquees also became a part of this Spartanburg aesthetic and I became interested in the ways that they are used, especially by the faith community, as a legitimate means of communication. It has become clear to me that there are regional differences in communication style and I have often been frustrated by an inability to effectively communicate with the Spartanburg community in a meaningful way. This series combines my delight in Spartanburg’s marquee landscapes, the underlying feelings of anxiety and melancholy that accompany my search for home, and the need to relate these feelings using a local communication tool.

While focusing on my new home in Spartanburg, I could not help but incessantly invoke my old home, New York, with a great sadness and nostalgia. I have been plagued by the feeling that I have left some of the most vital parts of myself in New York. I chose seven places in the city that held the most meaning for me and then wrote letters to each of those places, discussing their role in my life in New York as well as my decision to bring that particular life to an end. These letters were handwritten onto scrolls and inserted into glass vials, which in turn, are each held in one of my vital internal organs. These organs will be installed clandestinely in the places that the scrolls correspond to, in hopes that they might be found and read by current residents. It is a very literal way of leaving a piece of myself in my old home and, at the same time, making sure that I can never really leave, and that I will always retain a presence there.

The projected slideshow, “On The Way from Nowhere, Elsewhere” is comprised of pictures taken on the highway on the way back from the Charlotte airport. These drives, whether I am leaving Spartanburg to go to one of my former homes or returning from those visits, are always mired in a certain amount of emotional baggage, marked by a hazy sense of uncertainty and expectation. I intend for the images taken en route to induce a similar form of emotive contemplation, as well as a fuzzy sense of wonder.

Through these projects, I aim to create a conceptual home in many diverse places simultaneously.