d. stine

I am neither a music nor literary critic, and I have seen very little of his visual output, but I have been informed by the extremely informed, that musically, Chicago composer, poet and artist d. Stine is a talent dedicated to his pursuit of the craft. Recently, he has been working within the construct of The Banana Twins on noise and ambient compositions. The works are a requirement each time I need to settle myself into the studio. Independently, a series of harmonica compositions he created for the film The Brave and the Kind evoke the same melancholy reflection I experience looking down an abandoned stretch of railroad tracks on a humid August day.

In addition, d. Stine has just published his third volume of poetry, Abacus, following previous works, Directional Forensics and Litmus. The implication of these titles is the synchronic counting, measuring, and testing apparatuses symptomatic of Post Modernism. My sense here however, is that d. Stine is a cultural skeptic cautiously dipping his toe in a broader pool of experience. It is fortifying to watch.

I am consistently surprised at what I learn about myself when meeting other artists. Part of it is learning about your own limitations. Poetry and music, necessary to my own art production, are art forms I am incapable of producing. I have tremendous respect for those who, as in this case, do it well. The other aspect is discovering hidden aspects of your own personality. I was indeed surprised by the discovery that, I do, after all, possess a maternal instinct.

in love and love

What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another. ~William Carlos Williams

This week has given me an opportunity to reflect on love and the state of being in love. Often casually referenced in the same context, they are, I believe, quite different. Being in love carries a measure of biological urgency. It is a heightened state of impracticality and idealism. Similar to a concussion, it can be accompanied by nausea and blurred vision. You don’t look, you gaze, and the object is imagined as near perfection. Those in love can rarely be apart and when together, are oblivious to the rest of the world. It is new and startling. It is electric. You are bullet proof when in love. You can be mysterious, damaged, emotional and brooding when in love. It fuels the desire of the beloved. There are aspects of the beloved that you believe you can change. You can’t, but you don’t know that yet. You merely shelve those ambitions for a rainy day. It is also extremely easy to fall out of being in love. I have done it at a moment’s notice at least 10 times. Though being in love is a conduit to love, in the end, it does not guarantee its actuality.

Love is the trenches. It is perhaps the least human characteristic humanly possible; it is a complete state of vulnerability and inflicts a loss of self. Love is sight. Sometimes it is straining to see across a vast distance (literally and figuratively.) It allows one to reveal the absolute truth about them self and still remain standing. It is forgetful, as layers of scar tissue grown around a million tiny pinpricks. It is fortification bolstered by each worldly and time-inflicted wound experienced together. It is calloused fingertips resting on your inner thigh. Its physicality is loaded with intellectual intimacy, much like an equation resulting in a single organism. As an infiltrating condition, love is far more difficult to extract oneself from. It will leave a permanent scar.

When you are in love you cannot imagine the profundity that is the mundane, day-to-day experience of sharing a life with another person. Being in love is an intense state of mind based on expectations and plans. Love carries the patina of time and experience, accomplishment and disappointment, and while you sometimes cast fleeting glances at the headiness that is being in love, you quickly recall the nausea and blurred vision. As with any long journey, you sometimes put the map in the glove box, and wait to see where life continues to take you. It has taken you amazing places already.

Maggie Meiners

Though she has an appreciation for beauty from an early age, anyone that knows Chicago photographer Maggie Meiners, suspects that what she considers to be beautiful has grown exponentially during the past several years.

Deceptively honest, Maggie’s work presupposes an informed, perceptive audience. It doesn’t proffer an opinion on what has been captured, nor does it assume circumstance. Rather, it offers generous space in which the viewer may perceive and construct their own experience of the content. This occurs, for example, in the non-narrative, non-editorial series Extractions, which is reminiscent of the mid-twentieth century work of Frederick Sommer.

Equally intriguing is her series, Childhood Contemplations. While the abstract body of work is devoid of nostalgia and sentimentality, it provides a photographic mandala or meditative gazing ball, through what one suspects is a personal conveyance of memory and color.

Select pieces from Childhood Contemplations are included in the exhibition Meditative Surfaces along with work by Charles Gniech and Deanna Krueger at Schoenherr Art Gallery in Naperville, Illinois. The exhibition opens this week on July 21 will run through August 21.

Diz

One week from today, the elder of my two beautiful goddaughters, Elizabeth, is getting married to a lovely young man named Tony. The first time I was introduced to Tony was at Liz’s college graduation party. Liz kept nudging me and asking, “Aunt Sioban, isn’t he cute”? I suspected his bachelor days were numbered.

In her published journal, Daybook[1], sculptor Anne Truitt wrote,

“The first feelings of marriage are so heavenly. I remember I used to wake up on purpose just to feel how happy I was. The heady potpourri of marriage delighted me: the lavish closeness, the just balance between delight and responsibility, household decisions, the openendedness (the whole rest of our lives!), and the incredible beauty of being allowed to love someone as much as I wanted to”.

It is my experience that these feelings can continue throughout a marriage. I wish this for Liz and Tony.

What is it with we Nora’s and our Italians? Denise, Susan, Mat? I suspect that Liz’s Great Grandfather would secretly be very proud. After all, an early U.S. Census recording from Northern Michigan lists his given name as Domemico.

Pass the Fettuccini, please.

---

[1] Truitt, Anne, Daybook, The Journal of an Artist, New York, NY. Penguin Books, 1982.

i ♥ damien hirst

Among so many reasons are:

Because he’s naughty.

Because of the Butterfly Paintings.

Because, at his invitation, dozens of artists donated work to Bono’s RED Auction to benefit IV/AIDS relief programs in Africa conducted by UN The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The Auction raised $42 million for the cause.

Because he may be a drunk, and I love drunks.

Because he understands our demand for spectacle, our idolatry and our insatiable appetite; creates the ultimate object to lampoon this (For the Love of God), and it still gets published on the cover of art forum.

Because he held his own Auction.

Because the Art World wants to hate him, but it needs him.

Because he said, “I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So far I've found there aren't any. I just wanted to be stopped, and no one will stop me”.

I don’t love Jeff Koons.

likes and dislikes 7.11

The studios are very quiet right now, summer is here and schedules far more relaxed and non-specific. Summer is good.

Listening to:

general shuffle of my iPod

Build, Build

Four Concepts, Banana Twins

All titles, Mat Lombardi

4 harmonica pieces, d. stine

Reading:

I and Thou, Martin Buber

Collected Poetry, W.H. Auden

Likes

Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils

that men in Brooklyn still wear seersucker suits in the summer

blue 9 burger

fancy ladies & gentlemen at Lincoln center

gingham

Iconoclasts

bunnies

old Catholic hymns

the human face

Dislikes

the smell of the subway in summer

the flu in summer

non-specific, tentative edges

when people talk around each other

mumbling

linda logan

Linda Logan is a Chicago-area artist who works in a variety of mediums. With a PhD in Geography, her work is often concerned with vestiges, or what remains from a speculative past that endures today. What do these vestiges mean?

I first became familiar with Linda’s work through her cave painting series. Though certainly informed by those found at Lascaux, these works are concerned with language and symbol, prehistoric and contemporary. The intuitive gestures of the paintings communicate deeper, more profound notions than the surface concerns of present-day society. One might think that her work will also endure for 40,000 years.

Recently, Linda has been working with digital photography. What is interesting and unusual is that she manipulates her photo before taking the picture, not in post. In essence, she is a sort of pre-deconstructionist – or perhaps a pre-constructionist. This technique was utilized in her gridded portrait of Mat illustrated above.

She is currently working on "Pentimento," a series of semi-abstract photographs where images from opposite sides of magazines or newspapers are photographed simultaneously by shooting the pictures through a very bright light. The melding of the images asks questions about the entire act of perceiving a photograph, or if indeed these even are photographs.

Linda is a member of Margin Art Gallery, a not for profit collective art gallery dedicated to nurturing artistic expression. Works from “Pentimento” were exhibited at Margin’s spring 2009 show.