Untouchable Cake

Yesterday I spent most of my day at work eating a Seahawks-themed birthday cake that was leftover from a three-year-old's birthday party and reminiscing about hot bathroom stall sex. A questionable combination, but enjoyable nonetheless: Cookie-Monster blue and Indoor-Soccer-Field green frosting; a tile floor with a peach hue from the surprisingly soft lighting of a bathroom, and the disregard for what might be viewable through that vertical-space-peep-show that all bathroom stalls seem to don above and below their locks. 
 
(pause)

I've been thinking about, considering, and investigating art, again.  Any time I feel strange or uncertain, it is what I turn to in order to inform my own art, life, and mind.  

Two days ago, I read about Jacinda Russell, an artist who, having reached a year of let downs in her own artistic ventures, created a project involving creating fake cakes and photo documenting them in bodies of water (real/man made) that she viewed as 'pristine'. She said that cake seemed to make everyone happy and that she wanted to investigate, simply, if cake would make her happy as well. (Nine Fake Cakes Nine Bodies of Water ).

On a note of Art-I-Would-Like-to-Live-Inside-of, I want to share Mariele Neudecker's piece, Stolen Sunsets (1996). Take a minute to imagine living inside of one of those cubes.  Specifically, the one on the far right/forefront.

A summary from Sculpture Today: Mariele Neudecker makes elegantly crafted three-dimensional models based on German Romantic paintings, such as those of Caspar David Friedrich, which she sets on plinths and encloses in glass tanks filled with liquid so that she can simulate atmospheric weather conditions. Her mountains and fir trees are made from fiberglass and resin and are airbrushed with acrylic paint. She hopes to evoke the concept of the sublime impresses by the Romantic paintings, even though the sublime impresses by virtue of its overwhelming size and scale.

(pause)


Overall, things have been good. 

Incredible, really.  

I'm on the cusp of a creative/internal spurt which has less to do with how many people I'm around, and more to do with how I am around them.   


Be well; be loved.  

Create. Connect.

Always.


-k.




(top photo: Untitled by Leahmiriamon on Flickr via Dystopier tumblr)

(Thanks for Dystopier tumblr and Something Between Want and Desire blog for helping me discover the Neudecker piece)

The Grey-Green of Abandoned Ships

 

I did not grow up with the sea.  It is something I am drawn to. Bodies of water in general, perhaps, but there is something specific about the depth and vastness of the ocean. I do not claim to understand it- even in its basics. But the way I am drawn to it- an apparition pulled by a dull golden thread towards it's foamy crashing- is unmistakeable, unexplained, and haunting.

The first time I became aware of it's pull was during cancer.  

It was almost always at night. Unable to sleep, I would walk up and down the streets of my neighborhood. I recall always feeling like I should be wearing some kind of flowing, scary-as-shit nightgown roaming the pavement at such ungodly hours. But I never did, and the streets and the images of waves in my head were never enough.  I would, almost always, climb into my truck and drive down to the ocean stand-in of a nearby lake. Craving salt upon my skin but settling for a puddle underneath the massive arch of a black skeleton bridge, I would sit on a rotting and damp log and stare out and into the water. 

The waves. The moon's lightening bolt reflection upon it's surface. I would think about the vague pieces of information I could recall about the moon and the waves and our bodies and the strange, glimmering fishing line that connects the three. 

In the rocking of the waves, something calmed.  In the soaked and entire cold, something numb began to feel.  Watching waves curl and turn and push and disappear, two questions emerged each time I was in the presence of water. 

Salted. Unsalted.  

Among currents and undertows, swellings and dissipations, the same two questions would spill then recede from the horizon to the dark wet rocks under my feet, and back again. 

What is it that makes us loveable? 

What is it that makes us survive?

(photo credit: englishteacups tumblr)