Whatever I Want

I'm starting to realize that my first real show is in the middle of January. I'm starting to realize that attendance might be low, which relieves some of the pressure to be a perfectionist, and opens me up to the possibility that the show could be exactly what I wanted to be without making any compromises. Instead of worrying over $700 frame jobs and making sure that I get my press release to the right critic that may or may not show up, I plan on making the entire show an installation that looks as if it were dipped in glitter glue and run through a thrift store. At least this way I can gauge whether my taste transcends my own head space. So fuck it, might as well just go all out. I don't mean to sound pessimistic about how the show is going to go over . I'm sort of proud of myself being able to just kind of let go. It helps not being in the collective environment anymore, but at the same time I don't really have a critical eye looking over me at any point. I should probably look for a balance between being 100% self indulgent and having someone reign me in a little. But in the meantime I should start shopping for tacky gold frames.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Hyde Park

Fucking Photography.

Untitled

Oh my...

Sometimes, I look at you and my breath just catches in my chest.
No piece of art has ever meant anything, because no object can suck the air out of my mouth,
can overtake me like being drenched in perfectly warm water.
Crushes me in the most delicious way.

Boys vs Girls, Lovely Skateboard Art Exibition

I was nervous going into the show last night. Just like everything lately, I had rushed my design and was not completely confident going in. Regardless, my design is the one featured on the far right, and in the end I didn't feel too terrible about the project.

Taking a Good Idea and Letting it Dissolve.

"Kickstarter allows filmmakers who otherwise would have NO access to Hollywood and NO access to serious investors to scrounge up enough money to make their movies....Recently, Kickstarter was used to fund a new VERONICA MARS movie. This is obscene to me. It’s a known television series distributed by a major studio...This is what Hollywood does...it sees an opportunity for exploitation and it takes it." Read the full Blog here.

This hits close to home for me.

When I envision people logging into Kickstarter to throw money and support to the arts, I visualize people tossing a few bucks to some struggling artists, filmmakers, product designers, or whatever. Now on the eve of our biggest struggle yet, The Roost has begun to toss around the idea of using a Kickstarter as our last ditch effort to save our space. But now I suddenly find our pet project in competition with Veronica Mars and Zack Fucking Braff, and I am disgusted. This was an idea that was meant to help people, and is now being turned around to harm the people is was designed for. These "artists" are taking money from the pockets of people who truely need it, artists like myself and my partners, artists who are trying to fund a show from their tip money, using that last little bit of their shitty ass tax refund to repaint a gallery wall, artists who are always late on the rent, who come home afraid that, any day now, they will lose everything that they have worked for.

Artists like us.

The Roost can't compete toe to toe with Zach Braff trying to make some shitty indie-comedy (that will be lost to obscurity 6 months after its release), or Veronica Mars shaking her pre-pubescent tits at fapping populations of sickly old perverts and tweens in lipliner across the globe. And The Roost shouldn't have to compete with them. But unfortunatley, all good ideas will eventually be bought from us at a cost we don't understand, and subsequently sold back to us at a price we can't afford.

In the meantime, I guess I will cash in my change at Coinstar to try and keep the lights on.

Collection.

"One need not be a vessel to be haunted."
Emily Dickenson

Someone I admire told me that they had an idea. We were talking about living in the Midwest, and how shocking it is to see miles upon miles of farmland. The strange houses in the middle of nowhere, the signs made out of white picked fence posts that read threats, "Sin is a Cancer for All People". Signs in fields, miles away from anyone, along the side of the long stretches of road on the Oklahoma highways. His idea was to find the people who made these, and photograph them. Now, I am no photographer, and in general, most of the "photographers" that I know use iPhone cameras and Instagram filters, which I am not interested in, even though I feel like it would be so easy to get away with.

I love the idea of this project. It would be a documentation of an experience  but I think that the real art in a project like that is not in the image, but in the experience. Like a process painting. I think that an alternative to photographing (or even in addition to) these people and their stories would be to translate them visually into small paintings, maybe to be displayed alongside photos, if with any photos at all, maybe just the notes themselves. The people that work in the restaurants that look abandoned, the maid at the side of the road motel, a hundred miles from anywhere. The farmer who gets up at 4 a.m. to read his bible to his home schooled children. The organ player in the church, and the janitor at the Creationist Museum, etc. What a brilliant idea. I want to have this for myself as a souvenir of my life in the Midwest, before I move somewhere warm and become a different person.

Books...those things your grandparents used to have.

So for my professional development class, we were required to create a physical book for portfolio submissions. But instead of physically making a book (sewing pages, crazy print techniques, etc), new fancy tech allows us to just kind of manifest books out of thin air and a basic knowledge of the interweb. So, I made this book. The cover is a map of Kansas City, it is filled with weird drawings and internal ramblings, and is availible in super swank hardcover. It will look lovely on your bookshelf, coffee table, or on your toilet tank. I don't judge. You can creep out your family and friends by putting my awful rambling and self indulgent artwork in your home.  You can buy it here.

All money goes to a terrible cause.

A Little Recognition.

Was very happy to come home from vacation to see my name on the front page of the UMKC Art & Art History website this morning, for my work in the KCAC Exhibition. You can see the little blurb here.

Americana

24 hours in a sweaty car with 4 people.

9 junk food meals....or maybe more, who can count?

4 Smart Water bottles filled with vodka

1 bag of shitty mushrooms

3 nights spent on a living room floor...

....in the company of 7 other people at close proximity for 5 days.....

a little alone time feels fantastic, even if it means sacrificing a little sleep to get it. 

One thing that the drive to Austin, Texas did was to show my how much of this country is really still just cowboy country. It's hard to imagine people stacked one on top of the other in so many places in the world when you are driving through the Flint Hills of Oklahoma (or was it Kansas?), approaching the massive sprawling oil fields of southern Oklahoma and Texas. Looking out of a gas station window, eating cold pizza from under a heat lamp, seeing nothing but oil pumps and trees with no leaves...it's kind of the most American feeling I can really imagine. Every time I see a tumbleweed, I feel like I am in a Western movie, but one that has been artificially, digitally colored, so that everything is just a little too modern to feel believable. 

I just suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to decorate everything with dusty old bones and fake flowers, giant deer skulls and bat bones on delicate string. Charcoal grey, black, eggshell white, and whatever shade is just a touch lighter than sienna. The giant collection of trinkets at my desk looks to bright and garish after so many miles of empty, southern landscapes. 

4/23

Website finished. http://stephaniebloss.com

Books ordered. Because everyone needs a coffee table book of my ridiculous bullshit.

Still broke. Still probably drink too much. Still don't sleep enough.
Still expect too much of myself. Still think too much of myself. 
Tried my hand at modeling the other day as a favor. It was terrible.

ETC. ETC. ETC.

THIS IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO MAKE YOUR CULT WORK FOR YOU.

The earliest mention of Jesus of the Christian faith is debatably around 70CE as established by a variety of documents discovered around that time.

It's also highly unlikely that Christ actually existed when the evidence is examined. What most likely happened is the following:

After the Third Mithridatic War and Rome's conquest and establishment of Judeae in 63BCE, Judea (the region in which pretty much all Christian antiquity takes place) and the surrounding regions were going through a period of pretty heavy civil chaos. The Hesmonean dynasty was besieged by civil war and the Herodian dynasty was being established by the Romans (the most earth-shaking event being Herod the Great being named "King of the Jews" by the Roman Senate in 40BCE). The Roman influence and subsequent Roman slave culture had created a new class system that the citizens of Judea found foreign to their own slave and class systems. To make matters worse for the citizens of Judea, upward social mobility was almost impossible for those in the lower classes.

It's important to understand that this Roman conquest and culture invasion was a serious blow to the cultural ego of the citizens of Judea. After all, the most prolific religion Judaism had taken the Canaanite lesser war god (Yahweh) as their lone deity in the first successful example of monotheism in the world (It was attempted by the pharaoh Akhenaten with the sun god Aten in Egypt a millennia earlier with less successful results...). So being defeated in war and being subjugated was not something sitting right with the citizens of Judea.

It's also important to understand that religion was much more fluid in those days. The low literacy rates in ancient Judea meant that most history was carried out by rabbinical elders and scribes and the religious and anthropologic histories were blended together and altered further by oral histories. So it was very common all across humanity, but especially in Judea, for cults and wild interpretations to pop-up. These new religious cults, some brought into Judea by the Romans and the Zoroastrians from Persia, were starting to gain popularity (such as Mithraism). The rabbinical leaders in Judea were no strangers to this practice and one of the best examples of such religious evolution can actually be seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One of the more popular aspects of Judaism was the prophecy of the coming of a Messiah. With their culture and religion under duress from the Roman occupation, this prophecy became a guiding light for many Jews who wished for the Messiah to come and deliver them from the Romans (This also factors into why the Romans are such a central player in the New Testament all the way into Revelations). The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of this playing up of the Messiah myth and one of the earliest examples of rabbinical leaders asserting that he had come. The Dead Sea Scrolls never mention the Messiah by name, which is an important fact, and many of the foundations for the Messiah myth can actually be found in those scrolls.

So, we now have rabbinical leaders claiming the Messiah has in fact already come, you have a citizenry in Judea that's disenfranchised, poor, culturally hurt, uneducated, lacking in social mobility and are hearing rumblings from more extreme rabbinical leaders that the Messiah has come. This brings us to our next important aspect of Judaic culture under the Roman empire: social mobility. In ancient Judea it was virtually impossible to move up from the lower classes unless you could become a member of the more illustrious cults or religious movements such as Mithraism under the Mithraic Mysteries. However, abandoning your one true god in favor of a cult wasn't a very attractive prospect for most Jews (especially when you consider how vindictive the Abrahamic god happens to be) so most felt there was no path for upward social mobility outside of abandoning their religion.

It was this frustration that led the myths of this new Messiah to gain traction. People began hearing about the Messiah that had come and the new religion he was preaching. This Messiah took care of the poor, healed the sick, fed the hungry and surrounded himself by those most disregarded by society. It was a narrative that should be obvious to its appeal to the Judaic citizenry. These myths began to blended with actual historical figures like Juda of Nazareth, a man who actually went into a Jewish temple, kicked over a changemaking station and challenged to the Romans to battle. He was defeated by the Romans a short while later and subsequently crucified for crimes against the Empire and I imagine this story is starting to sound familiar isn't it?

Characters like Juda that took care of the sick and challenged the Roman establishment were blended together with the popular Messiah myths and a character emerged from the smoke when it cleared: Jesus of Nazareth. That mythical man became the pillar of a new kind of religion where class didn't matter, but only belief was necessary for salvation. No needing to learn complicated rabbinical texts, no obscure Jewish rules and no matter for your lot in life. If you believed, you could be saved. That became the birth of Christianity. Around 100-120CE the newly formed Christian cults encountered a number of historians such as Pliny the Younger, Josephus (whom encountered the earliest forms of Christians and whose work suffered from alterations and interpolations by the subsequent Catholic Church), Tacitus and others.

Pliny the Younger is particularly interesting because he has the earliest recording of the Jews and Christians claiming that the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Modern historical records let us know that the Egyptians didn't actually use slaves for construction and actually paid their workers quite well, even burying many of them in quite nice graves and the most exemplary being given spaces in smaller pyramids. What most likely happened is that the Jews and Christians started working slavery into their history as the cults and religions were evolving during the period of Roman rule. They would do this because it A) Erases the shame of being defeated in war and subjugated and B) Played up to their history and culture of slavery. It's actually much more likely that the brutality they attributed to the Egyptians was actually practiced in Canaan.

This all happened between 30BCE and 10CE and from there Christianity spread at the normal rate at which cults traditionally expand until it was made the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine (an act he did for political and personal reasons, the political being to quell the problems the Christians were creating in the Empire and the personal being that his mother, Hera, had converted to the faith and he had a close relationship with her. Though there's little evidence to support Constantine actually gave a shit about Christianity, or religion in any form for that matter, as he didn't get baptized till shortly before his death.)

A hundred years later the Roman Church was founded and from there Catholicism was born under the Roman Empire which then spread out at a meteoric rate due to the Colonial Imperialism the Roman Empire was so skilled at. From there you had the establishment of the modern Catholic Church, the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the rise of Protestantism and finally the worldwide spread of Christianity through the various European Empire's colonialism (the British, Dutch, Spanish and French being the largest of the serial offenders.)

For pretty much the last 1500 years, the study of history, particularly history in the Middle East and specifically historical Judea, was done by either members of the Catholic Church (as they generally were one of the few organizations that had the money and the most to gain from such historical study) or Christians/Abrahamic faiths (it's not hard to imagine that the vast majority of historians studying the subject even today are themselves Christian).

So there's obviously a pretty glaring conflict of interest, even more so when you consider the fact that historical study is itself incredibly subjective since so much of ancient history was left to be recorded by a small group of literate individuals usually in positions of political and/or clerical power across multiple Abrahamic faiths. So yeah, that's a short history of Christianity and where it came from.

4/17/2013

Today on talk radio, a politician from the city where the bombs went off told the story of a woman who had her legs nearly torn off by shrapnel. After she had been rushed to an emergency station, she was comforted by a twenty-something, a war veteran, most likely one who had come home to an angry country after fighting what he once told himself was "the good fight". He was able to finally comfort this hysterical, panicking woman by showing her the shrapnel wounds on his own mangled legs.
Just two people who will never fully recover.
I wonder when I will get used to the growing pains and small tragedies that occur while our history writes itself.

SKETCHBOOK THEMES VOL. 4

THE INEVITABLE DISAPPOINTMENT OF EVER THINKING I COULD BE A REAL THING  //  THE INSURMOUNTABLE, UNFORGIVABLE HE  //  A MASSIVE DEFLECTION //  PRESSING DISEASE INTO SOFT DISEASE  //  A POTENTIAL TO TAKE AND L EAVE   N  O  T   H  I  N  G    //  I WILL BLOW IT ALL AWAY //  MORE COMFORTABLE THAN IT SHOULD BE  //  BAD PRAYERS OR WISHES MADE AGAINST YOU //  B L O W F L I E S  //  VERTEBRAE BEING SEWN APART SMELLS LIKE THIS  //  THE    U B I Q U I T Y    AND      H U M A N I T Y    OF THE   I N H U M A N

I AM BUILDING AN ATOMIC BOMB FOR A CULTURE I CAN NOT ESCAPE FROM.

update: creating content the hard way..

while I am sure that it would be infinitely more simple to only worry about the execution of this series, the problem that has become most overwhelming is the changing dynamic of my mental state and how it lends itself in so specific a way to the project.

while I view this series as an study in empathy, the tumultuous nature of my current situation is overwhelming, to say the least. from a first person perspective, I am able to actually feel the knots in my stomach and to visualize their tangles, creating limitless possibilities for new work, new colors, new shapes. however, from a third person perspective, the project has crept uncomfortably close to home. while I creep closer to my understanding of certain individuals, others pull away from me, sinking deeper into their self indulgant ways. visually, I translate this into the shape of stones, reflecting the colors around them but revealing no content, unaffected by their environment, unmoved. physically I am brought closer to the growing mass of anxiety inside of myself.

it is all so uncomfortable.

Legend.

• I feel anxious when I consider insignificance. 
• Breathing never helps.
• Recycled trauma has pooled into the vacant spaces.
• Old paranoia resurfaces every time my cell phone rings or a car lingers too long.
• I feel momentarily disconnected during moments of boredom.
• I am inclined to feel warmly to you. Simultaneously I am superficially attached to the traits you allow me to see.
• I don't know what the fuck you mean.
• Social and Intellectual Inertia is Celebrated Here.
• Every scenic vista is a reminder of evangelical masses in the foothills.
• I feel threatened at every truck stop.
• I am made uncomfortable by my geographic location.