All Nighter

Once again it took an all nighter for me to finally get the job done. Thanks to Chris Purdie for the great idea on how to keep the wires from getting tangled. Now all 3 robots are fully operational! I can finally sleep easy.

I'm never going to do this again...

Am I the only one who tells myself I'm never going to do this again whenever I have an art show? The stress is just to much sometimes. I have had several mini breakdowns over the past couple of weeks. I keep thinking to myself, God I just want to get a nice simple 9-5 job that I can actually go home from. How nice it would be to be able to leave my work at the office.

Someone told me once that every successful artist they knew was the type of person who would be successful no matter what they did. So I was thinking, does the converse also hold true? Is every unsuccessful artist the type of person who would be unsuccessful no matter what they do? Then I thought, well fuck it! If I'm going to be unsuccessful at whatever I do, I might as well be unsuccessful doing something I love, being an artist. Embrace it! Celebrate it! Make a show out of my failures!

But on the other hand I might as well just be unsuccessful at a job that pays well, or at least pays the bills.

Or maybe I just need to revisit my definition of success.

Crash

Boy it has been a tumultuous past couple of weeks. Last week I collaborated with Ian Ruffino to turn the shredded paper that I had gathered into new clean sheets of paper. That took place on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then on Thursday a gave a presentation to the glass club about this project and two past projects leading up to this project. And after the presentation they blew some glass vessels for me. They look really cool, like bacterial cells growing together.

After it was all over I felt exhausted. I felt like I was going to collapse. I could have easily fallen asleep right there in the studio, but I somehow made it home, on my bike no less. And then it hit me. That emptiness that you feel after exerting yourself so completely that you have absolutely nothing left in you, and then it is all over and everyone goes home and your like, what? that's it? It is like when I worked really hard in college and pulled an all nighter to write a paper and you hand it in just in the nick of time and class just goes on like normal. Nobody even knows how hard you worked. I felt like I needed some celebration or acknowledgement or something.

But I guess that is what the opening reception is for. May 9, 2011, 5-7pm at Hopkins Hall Gallery. Hope to see lots of people there.

The Last Potluck

Tonight was the fifth and final potluck in my Sauerkraut Dinner Party series. In the end it was great, but I was a bit nervous at the beginning because a lot of people were late. We ended up with about 10 people again, which has pretty consistently been the number of guests. It is a good number of people that I feel I can manage.

There were a lot of people who didn't know each other at the dinner, so things started out a little slow and quiet, but by the time we got to the sauerkraut making people loosened up and there was a lot of playful banter. We had a lot of fun making sauerkraut. We even finished around 8:30, exactly when I had said we would in the invitation.

Then everybody left and I was alone in my apartment. This feeling of sadness washed over me as I realized I am creating this great community around me, but at the end of the day I don't have anyone to share it with. I don't have a partner. I was feeling pretty lonely.

Luckily a friend called who is in a similar situation as me and we talked for a bit. He knew exactly what I was feeling with out me even explaining. It made me feel better to know that I'm not the only one who notices that we join these groups and create these communities around us, but somehow in the end we are still separated on a fundamental level. I mean, what I am doing is not really that radical. It is pretty tame in fact.

I don't want to invalidate or belittle what I am doing, but it really doesn't get at the underlying issues of alienation and isolation. We are divided. We are separate. We are suffering. But we go on, we make progress.

I read once that when faced with a problem or difficulty, all we need to be happy is a sense of progress, we don't actually need to solve the problem to be happy. This project may not be the most radical action, but it is a step in the right direction. It is progress. I am happy with it.

And I am making progress too. I called a couple more friends and told them about the party. I do have people to share it with after all.

Glass really is awesome

Sunday night the gaffers, Linda and Molly, made these wonderful custom glass vessels for my sauerkraut. They are all organic looking. They are going to be great!

Thanks Mom

My mom came over yesterday before the party and helped me get things ready. It was really nice, and a big change from how I had been operating. Until yesterday I had prepared for the parties alone in isolation, which was a miserable thing because I would sit there and worry that nobody was going to show up. But with somebody already there, well, somebody was already there.

Last night at the Sauerkraut party the thing I decided to let go of was isolation.

Then on the ride to the meadry to go dancing after the party, I was talking to Aimee and asked her if she would help me with doing some press work for this project in exchange for me doing some web work for her. It looks like letting go is happening.

Life is good

The Sauerkraut party Saturday night was awesome. Just the right number of people. Not to many to make it stressful, and not to few to make it awkward. Delicious food. Although it seemed like everyone brought potato dishes, which I think happened the last time too. I'll have to start asking people to bring other things.

Then afterwards we went dancing. Life is good.

Glass rocks

The glass folks are awesome. I want to the glass club on Thursday night and it was so much fun. There was this great sense of community. And they were so willing to help me out with making some custom glass vessels for my sauerkraut. I'm pretty excited. After the custom ceramic crocks not working out, it renewed my spirits :)