May 10, 2008 Salon Sit Down Discussion

This being our first meeting after the winter hiatus, we met at the Carver Museum on the perfect 100 degree day. Next door was the Saturday afternoon drumming classes (the rooms are soundproof), and through the glass panel we saw the generations streaming by on their way into the drumming circle.

Nelly expressed her wish to be in the space as a collaborative artist, and perhaps, to lead a small writing workshop. We settled in and Nelly began by introducing us to her creative process and the theoretical underpinnings to her approach.

She then continued her presentation with a discussion on the importance of artistic discourse and attention to craft as fundamental elements of her practice. She asked us to consider the question of text as object ("Why do we think text cannot move?"). Much like perusing art objects in a gallery or museum space creates an individual experience of time and space, language on the page can also function to mirror this trajectory. She described her work as "holographic" - in which the text is not only a reproduction of itself, but moves and acts as if the characters and their landscapes are present before us - the novel as crystal.

In her debut novel, Song of the Water Saints, Nelly Rosario succeeded in bridging stories between land and sea. In her forthcoming work, of which she read an excerpt previously published in Callaloo under the title "Airman Basic Training", her characters are embodying each other; they are literally exchanging their eyes. When asked to describe the composition of this new work, Nelly delves into her fascination with Gaudi - Barcelona's fanatical architect who is famous for La Sagrada Familia - and his obsession with details, with perfection and with seemingly oppositional elements. Her character, an airman, is compulsively focused on power, but is conflicted by the reality of constantly changing authorities. The author asks her character: At what point does he own himself? She asks us, as readers, to consider questions of value and worth, motivation and multiple perspectives. What would compel someone to trade eyes? How do you determine the value of your eyes in exchange with someone else’s? This is not only a theoretical contemplation, but a negotiation embodied by her characters.

When asked about other influences on her current work, Nelly spoke of “Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K LeGuin, of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino (especially “Invisible Cities”, for its structure), and Toni Morrison (specifically, the language of “Palace of Dreams”). She also spoke of her own philosophical inquiries: “Imagine looking down at the stars.”

“How can my readers exchange eyes with my characters?”

“What occupies the space between our eyes and a camera’s eyes?”

and finally, “How do we exist within infinite processes?”

I might describe Nelly’s aesthetic as the clouds left behind by comets: concurrently gracile with language and dense in conceptual and historical undertones. She herself spoke of the first time she understood beauty: living on the third floor of a building in New York City, staring at the mosaics on the floor. She was fascinated by the way the light passed through the bubble glass and danced across the hexagonal patterns of tile. Similar to what we see against our eyelids when we tightly shut them. Fractals. Things that are simultaneously broken and unified at the same time.

We talked about the concepts that Nelly had presented to us: the concepts of value and planes of sight, of language and perspective. And then, we finished by giving each other creative tasks. I agreed to share these here on the blog page for others who might want to try them.

1) Envision your work in a museum of choice – any museum – and create the piece to show there.

2) Write a dialogue between your 12 year old self and your 80 year old self – using diaries or other source materials to inform your writing.

3) Draw SWARM theory.

4) Write an application form for a completely free person. What does her day look like? What does she dream? Where does she live? What kinds of questions would she ask of the world?

5) Create collages for a week in place of writing.

Summer Line Up

The Austin Salon was on hiatus for the winter (hibernation), and has resumed with an extraordinary line-up for the summer and early fall:

May 10th, 2-4pm

Carver Museum

Austin, TX

Featured Artist: Nelly Rosario

Nelly Rosario was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA in engineering from MIT and an MFA from Columbia University. She has received numerous awards, including a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, The Bronx Writers' Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship for 1999-2000, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, the 1997 Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction, and the 1988 National Teachers in English Writing Award. She was named "Writer on the Verge" by the Village Voice Literary Supplement in 2001. Her debut novel Song of the Water Saints, which traces the lives of three generations of Dominican women, won a PEN Open Book Award in 2002. Currently she teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.

June 14th, 2-4pm

Carver Museum

Austin, TX

Featured Artist: Amanda Johnston

Cave Canem Fellow and Affrilachian Poet, Amanda Johnston has performed across the country for various causes and events. Honors include a 2003 and 2004 Artists Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the 2005 Austin International Poetry Festival's Christina Sergeyevna Award. Currently, Johnston serves on the board of directors for the National Women's Alliance, is an ensemble member of The Austin Project Performance Company (TAPPCo) and is the founding editor of Torch: poetry, prose, and short stories by African American Women. www.torchpoetry.org

July 5th, 2-4pm

Carver Museum

Austin, TX

Featured Artist: A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise and MACNOLIA. Among other awards, Jordan has received the Whiting Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Jordan teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and serves on the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Austin, Texas.

August 9th, 2-4pm

Location TBA

Austin, TX

Featured Artist: Samiya Bashir

Samiya Bashir is the author of Where the Apple Falls: poems, editor of Best Black Women's Erotica 2 and co-editor, with Tony Medina and Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social & Political Black Literature & Art. She has also published two chapbook poetry collections: Wearing Shorts on the First Day of Spring & American Visa. Her poetry, stories, articles, essays and editorial work have been featured in numerous publications including: Callaloo, Essence, Contemporary American Women Poets, among many others. Bashir is a fellow with Cave Canem and a founding organizer of Fire & Ink, a writer's festival for LGBT writers of African descent. She's currently wrasslin' poetry, paint, stuffed bunnies and sunshine in Austin, Tejas. website: samiyabashir.com

October Featured Artist - Senalka McDonald

Artist's Statement:

Being a young, black, Latina in America, I have always known what it is like to be unlike my American peers. This caused me to question many human actions and analyze them entirely. I feel that human emotions and relationships fuel our past and serve to shape our futures. Having grown up always questioning the dealings of humans, they are what I choose to focus my artwork on. My paintings have been about child molestation, focusing on a specific moment that changes a child's life forever. Because I am currently working though moving on to a new stage of my life, so are the children in my newer pieces. They are beginning their adolescent years; discovering social capacities, burgeoning sexuality and hidden longings. My photos and videos are of a completely different nature. I choose to focus on the grandeur of human memory. My attempt is to create a feeling of importance and beauty using a simple image, causing the viewer to relate what is being seen to his or her own memories. Serigraphy is a new obsession of mine. In this media, I ask the viewer "Who is an American?" I think about who has value within the United States and how much power the racial hierarchy has over the public. I plan this to be an ongoing project, using many different images to create a body of work that causes the viewer to question their notion of who an American truly is.

Currently, I am a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cultural Geography.

Artist's Work:





To learn more about the artist and her work, visit her website: www.senalka.com

October Featured Artist - Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano

Artist's Bio:
Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano is a Queer Xicano poet, dreamer and activist. Born in San José, California, he was raised in Estación Adela, Chihuahua and now lives in Austin, Texas. Lorenzo’s work has been called “uncompromising and hopeful, cínico y cariñoso,” “inspiring… provocative,” and “landing so deep / you bleed without feeling the cut.” He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-Nominated Santo de la Pata Alzada: Poems from the Queer/Xicano/Positive Pen. He is in the final stages of publishing his second book, Promesas y Amenazas, an all-Spanish collection of poetry inspired by the Bolero aesthetic and is finalizing his third collection, God Don’t Live Here Anymore, scheduled for release in 2008. Lorenzo is the Director of Arts & Community Building for allgo: a Statewide Queer People of Color Organization in Texas; is a founding member and Board member of Unid@s, the National Latina/o Human Rights Organization; served on the Steering Committee of the recently consolidated National Latino Coalition for Justice; and, is the Cisgender Male CoChair of Out Youth, a community based queer youth organization in Austin. For more on Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, including random ramblings and embarrassing moments, visit: www.jotopower.com; godisbrown.blogspot.com; myspace.com/jotopower.

An excerpt of Lorenzo's Work:
Coming Soon!!

October 13, 2007 - Salon Sit Down Discussion

The afternoon began with some new faces, Miles Davis and light snacks over at the DiverseArts Little Gallery. Black and white photos from the gallery’s recent show, Tuskeegee Airmen, were on the walls. The day’s Featured Artists: Senalka McDonald and Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano. I brought these two artists together because, with limited familiarity of their work, I was intuitively convinced that there is a dialogue between their aesthetics and processes.

Senalka’s artistic process is an unconscious, discomforting act that uses the information so readily available in the media to transform two-dimensional spaces into active inquiries of collective memory, bodies and power/powerlessness. She said, upon being asked the question, “where is your body in relation to the work?” that when she works, “It’s like I’m swimming through murkiness, asking questions [with the material and subject] until I get clear, and then once I’m there, I dive back into the murkiness again”.

Senalka began by showing us her earlier photographs of “wet women” – portraits of young women meant to capture their perceptions of themselves. From there, Senalka led us into the series of photographs where she as the artist is making inquiries into her relationship with her father, as well as a study of who her father is – as a man, a black man, a black Panamanian man. These served as primary material for a larger body of work encompassing images of black men, in and of themselves, but also as “every day people” – fathers, workers, and friends. She cites her motivation for these photographs as 1) a desire to understand her father more deeply but also 2) as a conscious attempt to create work that would put black faces on the walls of galleries. This motivation is highly resonant with her photographs of women – and serves as an exploration of the idea of self-perception. It also begs the question of how and where the artist’s own body occupies space in relationship to her subject/object. Where does the subjectivity lie? What’s so moving about her photographs is that they achieve a relative subjectivity. The young women and black men in the photographs speak their own truths, the photographer acting as a mere reflection. This kind of eye is rare and places us – the viewers - in an unspoken, simultaneous conversation with all the bodies in the room.

In a similar fashion, Senalka’s drawings (what she terms as drawings on child molestation) pulled us into a conversation with our own individual experiences, society and collective memory. Drawn from eerie, skewed angles, with slightly or wholly disfigured bodies placed in juxtaposition to each other, these pieces were, for the artist, a deep interrogation into her own sense of powerlessness. Their shapes, she states, are resonant of the works of Egon Schiel and Henry Darger. The pieces arose out of her experience of the media – watching Oprah, watching the news – where stories of child molestation appeared en masse. In this way, her work can be seen as a conversation with collective (pop) culture, and as a universe that runs parallel to the social history created by the media. These pieces are also a dialogue between the idea of innocence and the careful balance between that state and the desecration that seems all too common in post-colonial bodies. Senalka states: “I want people to be confronted with what I’m doing and to have a dialogue about it.”


Lorenzo’s work, which primarily takes the form of writing and more specifically poetry, is also a plunging into currents of media and collective memory. Lorenzo described his own work as being influenced by three major sources: religion, pop culture, and his experience as a bi-national Chicano raised in both the U.S. and Mexico. He states, “My work is really about honoring that which is considered dishonorable.” He read us numerous pieces, among them “San Lorenzo Ramera” (the first poem he wrote in English), “Psalm 69”, “Hairspray and Fideos”, “Deseo Detestado” - a piece from his new collection of bolero inspired poems Promesas y Amenazas.

What’s clear in all of his work is that the body is the primary landscape for enacting desire, and that desire is filtered through the language of religion and political astuteness. He places the queer Chicano body at the center of our landscape, unapologetically, and pushes us to consider our own relationships to desire, shame, guilt, and liberation. Taking inspiration from living artists, as well as artists whose work has outlived them, Lorenzo pieces together a narrative that transcends state and national borders and embeds the Chicano queer, male/female bodies as integral to our collective memory. He is influenced by Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Apolinaria Lorenzana, Marvin K White, Sharon Bridgforth, Sandra Cisneros, David Alfaro Siquieros, Chelo Silva, Frida Kahlo (he says, not for what she is glorified now, but for her fierceness in living in the grotesque), Maria Felix, Agustin Lara, Luis Dimitri (Lorenzo states, “He wrote stuff for women to sing, and all addressed to other men. That’s what I’m interested in.”) among others.

In speaking about one of his earliest influences – a porn found in his Baptist parents’ closet featuring Ron Jerry – Lorenzo made it clear to us that what he found so fascinating about Ron Jerry was not his physical appearance, but rather his audacity in being an ugly man who elicited confidence and who was made into a phenomenon because of his audience. This example serves as an example of the honoring of the dishonorable that Lorenzo aims to embody in his work. How is it that the grotesque occupies our imagination, and becomes a central marker of history and culture?

Lorenzo went on to describe his artistic process as “an unhealthy one” – a process which requires his own confrontation with depression, chaos and the night. He states, “As a scribe, how do I process, interpret all of what I’ve been fed about history, religion, and pop culture. [I believe my work lies] at the intersections between the different kinds of information.”

Similarly, Senalka speaks of her work as a diary – an attempt to capture with images what she cannot say with words. Her visual work is a conversation with others, as well as an inquiry into her own emotional state.

Both of these artists reside in the gaps between cultures, societies and nation-states. They both use the information in those gaps to create landscapes of inquiry and self-reflection. The media becomes a primary material for crafting innovative intersectional art that asks us to be subjects in a larger conversation around our own complicity in shifting the way the world works.

August Featured Artist - Annette Lawrence

Artist's Bio:
Annette has been living and working in Texas since 1990. She works in both two and three-dimensional media. Her work is generally related to text and information, and physical space and time, embedded with autobiography. Recent exhibits include Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art from 1970 to the present at The Contemporary Arts Museum inHouston, TX, The Collection in Context at the Studio Museum in Harlem, andNew, Now, Next at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin TX. Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, and Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York represent Annette’s work.

Annette Lawrence is an Associate Professor of Art in the College of Visual Art and Design at
The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.

www.annettelawrence.net

Work Samples:

Double Edge

Crossed Edges

August 11, 2007 Salon Sit Down Discussion

Annette Lawrence brought slides of her work from the past 20 years, as well as digital photos of her recent trip to Scotland. Carl Phillips, in a talk he gave in June, talked about the need to understand and measure an artist's work not by the individual elements themselves, but by the scope and range of their work over a period of time. This could not be a more apt statement. Annette's work ranges from the minute to the grandiose, encompassing circles made out of carefully written dates from her menstrual cycle over a period of nine years as well as large string installations covering an entire 39 x 24 foot space in between floors at the Glassell School (Houston, TX).

What remains constant in her work is an inquiry into language and time, and sometimes an inquiry into time as language. What is also constant is a fascination not with the object, but with the experience of creation itself - a desire to capture in physical form the ever shifting present.

Annette's earlier work actually used letters as a way to visually evoke sound. In particular, her pieces, such as "They Must Dont Know Who We Are" leads us to question our relationship to space, language in space and memory. This piece was done in response to the Rodney King verdict and the artist used lava and limestone rocks to form the sculpture and the words within the sculpture. Another piece, "John 3:16", in which Annette drew out the verse from John 3:16 in alphabets other than the Latin Alphabet, asks us to consider our relationship to language - and its underlying symbolism. One of the participants asked what audiences' reactions have been to "John 3:16" and Annette specifically noted that fear - and/or a sense of complicity - have been common reactions, depending on the religious and political orientation of the viewer.

"Drawing Blood" in which she created circles by writing the dates from her menstrual cycle, generate a spiral effect present in both our lived experiences and in our physical world. It is with these pieces that language begins to take on the form of numbers, which she then explored in drawings themselves as well as in sculptural installations. And following this exploration, Annette began the series "Ellipses", which took music written and studied during her childhood, and transformed the notes into abstract language on the page that is simultaneously representative and sculptural.

At this juncture, Annette then began to look at sound itself, and out of this came the diptych inspired by John Coltrane's "Alabama", in which she used sound waves to create patterns on the page. And it is at this moment that there seems to be a split in how the artist approaches both her work and space. From text representing sound to text related to sound to sound as text itself.

Through all of this, Annette has been installing string sculptures in spaces as a way to explore our relationships to space, mathematical concepts and our very own humanity. Pieces such as "Theory" - an inquiry into time and material suspended in space, in which perspective impacts our understanding of truth. And an installation from the African American Museum in Dallas, in which the artist reflects on our relationship to the 20th century (the pieces on the wall were made in South Africa in patterns of nineteen using brown, black and white colors).

What I found most fascinating about Annette's work is the alchemical element underlying her use of numbers, patterns, and incredibly simple materials. Her use of repetition generates a space in which the now is suspended, even as she makes her own artistic inquiries into that very concept. We enter work that is incredibly specific because of its materials and references (for example, the dates in her "Drawing Blood" pieces), but that expands beyond the specific into a universal pulse measured primarily through our non-verbal responses to the images and installations themselves.

Currently Annette is working on pieces where she creates "Edges" out of piles of junkmail collected from November 2005 - November 2006. She is again interrogating time, but through the creation of objects that become fixed in space that are themselves a representation of time. It is almost as if she is entering her artistic cycle again, but with a shift in her inquiry - it is no longer about the text itself, but about time as text - time as a marker of her moments of "now".

The discussion that followed Annette's presentation was rich and spanned a wide range of questions, including questions about her materials, use of colors, her relationship to the number nine (9), her artistic ancestors, her artistic process, her choice of languages (she stated that right now, she's figuring out what language she is working in, but that she's working with objects again for the first time in almost 20 years), her choice of iconography and her thoughts on aging as an artist. We discussed her use of lists, not just as her nature, but as material for her work, where the lists function as "a journal" of her life, and a mirror of her artistic process, and her interrogation of different forms of time ("generational time" and "cyclical time" to name a couple of examples).

Annette listed her influences from a wide range of artistic genres, including writers Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis; musicians Cassandra Wilson, Sarah Vaughn, Diane Reeves, Betty Carter ("all female [jazz] vocalists, really"), John Coltrane as well as other great jazz musicians; visual artists Constantin Brancusi, Mark Rothko, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, Janine Antoni, Agnes Martin; to all manner of films ("I'm a film buff." she said).

I'm sure that today she's influences at least all of the people who were in that room.