Hello from Texas! An invitation to help me think...

Hi friends,

A. Thing 1: performance projects forthcoming.

It's been a while since i've posted/made - it's taken me a few months to adjust to the fast pace of a new job in the seriously interesting and corrupt world of Texas state politics. Its contradictions, flexibilities where they shouldn't be, rigitidities and formalities that are centuries old, are bringing me back to a fascination with ettiquette, rules, and law. For example: I was just at a hearing where Texas dept. that oversees all types of insurance moved for the FIRST TIME to do something about health insurers (we have the highest rate of uninsured people of any state, and one of the most profitable insurance industries). How does Texas start to regulate insurance industry abuse? They ask the insurance industry - the state department literally gets all the insurance industry heads in one place, tells them they're very confused by this new task, and asks them how they would like to be supervised. I watched it, it was weird.

So what is corruption? Corruption is solid food. Fluids flow freely in capitol offices - you can't walk into one without getting the standards mini-water bottle (state contract- all offices have the same horde of miniwater). But solid food - feeding a representative - is illegal for us lobbyists; if we could only get a sandwhich to Senator Cornyn, maybe he would vote for heath care reform. Manners are obsessive, lint is prohibitted, handshakes are firm and their are no real political tools to make the rougue Texas Dept. of Transportation explain its $1billion dollar accounting error for Fiscal Year 2009. And then the media, oh god, the media. How do you tell yourself something until it's true? A lot like the poison ivy rash i've got right now - take a spot, start scratching, scratch all over until you make so many spots that what was once a small problem is a bloated, itchy mess all over the House floor.

Some first frustrations/ideas, and an invitation to please help me think about the tools we use to rope ourselves in & hold ourselves together: barriers and how to talk across them, walls with perforations (physical, digital, personal); the mystery and power of what isn't there, what isn't written, what's suggested, what can be suggested from nothing; how to walk in circles; jurries, or how to hold people together and keep them there until they agree; how things line up when you throw 100 magnets in a bucket; how to get to the same spot you're in from where you are now.

B. Place - where are you, where am i, where can we be together?

I've been thinking a lot about place, city, community, and the kinds of idea-seeds that JoshP is so good at sowing in his friends. I want to write more about this later. But the bottom line:

I miss you. I'm stuck, you're what's missing, I need pieces of you all to finish what I'm making. Will you collaborate with me?

To explain - the way i've been making my drawings for the last year is to go through a space and to try to see the landscape as its layered over by the energies around it, my own and others, to let the broodings be part of the environment, to draw to the feeling of the place, and invite in the energies around me and in my memory. People get emedded, a few ghosts have been embedded, the voices of plants I didnt know would show up decide to turn out. The way of getting energy into the drawings has been to use dramatic material interventions when I start controlling the environment too much, to let chance happen and then carve out again the image underneath.

Lately, I haven't been able to feel these kinds of energies. I've just been seeing landscapes, i've been losing focus easily, and material interventions start to feel formulaic. I think the reason for this is because the human noise I'm hearing everyday my job is so much louder and more urgent than the landscape right now. That means to find focus, or to find meaningful intervention, I need some positive human noise. Intervention is a way of inviting in energy that I can't produce on my own.

I've started a series of animations of drawings, moving through paths of pattern. I'm thinking of these as the first layer. If you're interested, I want to give you the first layer, or collaborate. From you, I'm looking for music, sounds, layers of animation, images to work with, editing, altering, whatever. The core idea is to take a first step and invite you to be the intervention. here's a sample of the animation (just starting, will be smoother w. more frames)



I know Josh & Claire are doing something like this now, along with other Portland artists, in a place-specific way. This is a cool idea, and I think there are ways of adapting this for placelessness, place of memory, etc.

If you want to make an animation with me, I want to make an animation with you.

love, Elizabeth