2009 was an expansive year for me… I had work featured in the finale of the major local runway fashion show this spring, styled models in my own fashion show segment (ok, only three outright, the other two were “borrowed” and I didn’t do their hair/makeup, but it was still a lot of concepting and manual labor!), founded an art collective that’s produced four events this year, celebrated 1 year of blogging on Tu Scene, was a featured interviewee in several newspaper articles, on two long-format radio interviews, one television interview and joined my first board. Whew!
Not that I felt I bit off more than I could chew though. This growth was a necessary and long-overdue character-building experience. The past couple of months though, I’ve felt borderline burned-out. Or just in need of a break that lasts longer than a three-day weekend. In need of time to relax with my family (husband and dog), with myself, work on my own artwork outside of group collaborations, re-focus on Tu Scene. The dayjob has been going in high-gear since October, and every time I’ve seen a potential break on the horizon, it eludes me with the infliction of some new task for work. It’s not that I’m not up to the challenge, but I keep finding myself double-booked, overpromising and underdelivering. And while I can take criticism of the results of my work, I hate being the flake in the inception of a project I’ve committed to. That irresponsibility, that unreliability is so not “me.”
In the vein of a break to pursue personal work, I also feel like I need time to get to know people. I’ve been blessed to work with so many talented, brilliant, kind artists on various projects who also just happen to be amazing, fascinating individuals, but feel like I haven’t been able to get to know them as friends so our relationship could continue outside of mutual goals. Part of that is my own choice. Work is a protection mechanism for me. If I keep the relationship mostly professional, I don’t risk the personal entanglements of navigating a friendship. The other part of it is that I sincerely do take a great deal of pleasure in simply realizing a dream, especially one that’s been built with others. (I also wonder, with anyone I’ve worked with, if the feeling is mutual [not reciprocated, but shared/understood]?) But it’s gotten to the point that I’ve almost forgotten how to just be with people, to spend time with them, pursing interests that don’t have to have any accomplishment on the other end, i.e. “hanging out”, “chillin’ “, whatever you want to call it. So my motto for 2010 is “less doing, more living.”
Not that I’ll stop being an overachiever, as I always have been, but realizing that I need to just back off when being tapped for a project. As an early Virgo (born August 28) leaning more towards Leo than Libra, there’s a stuck-up Leo side to my natural community-serving, genuinely concerned Virgo-ness that wants to look good and take credit for things, feeding into the negative self-critical aspects of Virgo if I pass something up. Maybe that’s why I enjoy my Libra family and friends so much, they ground me away from all of that and help find a balance. At least until the point where we start driving each other crazy, like my cousin and I. Childhood best friends all the way through much of our 20’s, born 6 weeks apart, we’d need space when she felt like I was being controlling and harsh, and I felt that she wasn’t sticking up for herself when she had every right and credit to her accomplishments as an individual to do so.
Part of this is also motivated by my husband. Ironically, he’s the one who has the knack for maintaining long-distance friendship. When I was a child, my best friend from 4th grade and I continued to write letters for four years long after I’d left the school after just one year. I always had long-term pen pals, one from Germany, one from Australia. My husband, on the other hand, moved around a lot more than I did and never kept up contact with any friends he made in school. Now, it’s the opposite! He keeps in touch while I make excuses for letting things slide. It’s not that I feel jealous of his strength, what I feel is more admiration and respect, much like the other things he’s good at that I simply could not imagine myself doing, like teaching everything from first grade to ex-con adult education. The way I witness him doing it is through correspondence, being more open about himself as a person than as a writer/artist, and through spending time with others for a movie, coffee, drinks, exercise. Things that I just said I seem to have almost lost the understanding of. (And to be really self-deprecating and completely honest, an understanding that I’m not sure I ever had. As a naturally shy person who was not taught or had the expectation of practicing basic social skills by my parents like answering the phone or shaking hands, I’ve spent my entire life since leaving home at 17, almost 18 years old, studying/analyzing for myself the basic courtesies of various social situations.) For me, it all rose to the surface when we visited Austin for four days in December, after almost a year and a half of being gone from the city we made our home for 10 years. I was genuinely happy to meet up the longtime friends I was able to, and still happy to make contact with those I didn’t get to see in person. But the experience was eerily like my sophomore year at collage: all the people I felt I knew in high school and formerly spent a good deal of time with, I realized had not actually been friends. And since there’s a chance we may be moving out of Tucson later this year, I’m determined not to let that happen again, because a piece of me will always be here that will never find a home anywhere else.
In 2010, I’m trying to keep those long-term life experiences in scope and in balance with continuing to build my mission as an artist through less doing, more living.
We began this project to make ourselves grow as artists, and to see and interact with what other artists are doing. 27 is more than just a picture-taking/picture-looking project.
We pick themes that are strong in their simplicity. Themes that you can shoot on a busy weekday, but that you can also put some thought into. We want to hear your thoughtful, introspective, aesthetic, and intelligent comments.
27 is how different artists approach the same theme. 27 is to be excited and inspired by photography. Come be inspired with us.
We are currently planning a traveling exhibition, which will show in Brooklyn, New York, and Tucson, Arizona.
Round 3: Friday, November 27th, 2009
This Month’s Theme: Reflections
Shoot with any lo-fi camera such as:
Disposable camera
Digital point and shoot (less than 3 Megapixels!)
Your plastic toy camera
Camera Phone
Please email maxedart@gmail.com if you have any questions, or if you would like to contribute to the traveling exhibition by hosting a show in your hometown. If you’re participating in the November shoot, let us know if you need the password for MAXED 27 Flickr account.
team 27 Rachelle, Molly, Steve
Get your 27 on at MAXEDART.com.
Staring at Screens painting #2 (original photo)
Acrylic on canvas
worked on June-November 2009
An issue of layered solids
Although I have a BA in Art with a concentration in painting, I was never taught basic techniques how to wield acrylics or oils. Yet, at as artist, I’m highly skeptical of “tips/tricks/helpful hints.” in art. I was taught Technique — Hannon excersies in the form of life drawing for three years: one in high school, two in college. That was helpful. It validated the experiments I’d done, discoveries I’d made on my own around ages 13-15: there are no lines in the world, only variations in shadow.
In 7th grade, a piano teacher showed me how to “improvise”: certain cadences and arpeggios that could create a new piece or transition an existing song in performing with an ensemble (vocalist, instrumental). It killed, to this day, the composing I’d done on my own since I was 7. I felt I learnt more from music theory, which was pure math and pure ear, dissecting intervals, the algebra of counting, without any connection, any “tips”. “Ear” was what I felt naturally. While I didn’t always get all the math equations of the annual TMTA theory tests correct (but close enough to get a 95-100% score every year for 10 years), I aced the listening part of the exam every year. It was like the final round on Wheel of Fortune where you’d get R S T L N E on the board: depending on grade level, there’d be 2-5 questions with different notes filled in. The moderator would play the whole melody and you’d have to figure out the rest; to use the Wheel of Fortune example by grade 9, you’d be lucky to get a couple of R’s and one N, I think the last one I took in 12th grade had the key signature and the first two notes out of 10 measures. It was also like “So You Want to Be A Millionaire?” in the sense that in the early years, you could ask the moderator to play over certain measures as often as you needed, by the upper levels, they could only play it through, no special requests, maybe three or four times. No colors or flashing lights, just melody, just intervals, just the distance between two things.
I also entered a new school in 7th grade, and enrolling in a new school means new competitions, chosen or not. A classmate, J., was a pianist and a good student, like myself. Yet we passively hated each other. She was a memorizer of literature, algebra, science, Chopin. I felt the knowledge I sought, and while I had an desire for it, it was a desire for utility, for creativity, not for… well, I still don’t understand people who learn based on memory to this day, over 15 years later.
What I was sold as “improvisation”, as creativity, in 7th grade connected empirical knowledge and interpreted emotion, irrevocably, instead of figuring out the connection on my own, as an artist. So, sure, I could probably take a painting class and be “taught”, but I’m so paranoid of the creativity being killed for life. Figuring out on my own how to paint layers that are also solid colors is a puzzle. With music, as with art, I have to use mathematic and scientific processes to work out and to feel, to creep my way to the solutions of the problems for myself
After reading Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers, lately I’ve been wondering about the devices of farce and hoax that visual art can use, which writing (journalism, literature) cannot. In Fakers, Mr. Maliszewski mainly cites examples of written hoaxes, primarily American since the mid-19th century. Yet he doesn’t delve very deeply into the theory as to why these writers may have created these fronts, and how the public — consumers, other media, government — reacted to the stories, how these entities were perhaps unsuspecting (or knowing of the simulation), what their response meant. While I understand there are myriad explanations behind the psychology for writing fake news passed off as fact, I can’t help but crave an explanation from his point of view as a con-artist himself. If you’re going to put this much research into a book, you’d better have something to say about the material.
The only person who seemed to be able to manipulate and explain hoax, farce, faux news in the book was an artist. Why was Sandow Birk allowed, in the public/art establishment, to exhibit fake paintings, installations, and a Ken Burns-style documentary about a war that never happend without any lasting outrage? Is the falsehood, the projection more visible or clear when an artist is passing off fiction as commentary, as truth, as a joke, as opposed to a writer? Why do words have the expectation of being rooted in reality so much more than images? Why do newspapers have more “established” (traditional) credibility than art galleries? What is each really doing? Who is each really serving?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, can we process all of it? Are we really doing that? Or are words really necessary to make the point crystal clear?
I went down a 2-hour Wikipedia rabbithole this weekend, starting with this blog I recently started following on the Tucson Citizen (along with my obsession this year for all things Ghost Hunters, GHI and Paranormal State on Hulu). Let me see if I have this straight: Aleister Crowley (and about 20 related topics) > Black Mass (ugh, weird) > Goliard (/Carmina Burana, which I have fond memories of singing Carl Orff’s setting in college classical choir).
When I read about the Goliards, I couldn’t help but think of The Yes Men’s recent US Chamber of Commerce fake press-conference stunt. One one level, they were basically doing performance art and guerilla theater (as well as music and poetry) exposing the corruption in the Catholic church. The Church lacked credibility at the time (when has it not?), much like the US government over the last decade or so. The spirit of their antics was certainly not real-fake (like propping up a fake Pope, or fake miracles, and then — “The Reveal” [to cull from reality TV-speak]), and not for theoretical-artistic noogies in which no one’s reputation really gets hurt (artist or butt), but extreme late-night cable TV parody.
Let us not flatter ourselves that everything sacred in Western history has been shattered only within the last 50 years. Been there, “done” that.
A couple of weeks ago, I happily finished two new paintings within a few days. Then my time got sucked up by the excitement of major (fortunately, positive) changes at the day job and my new board position. I felt “keyed-up” and had trouble sleeping both weeks, but the point of stress was different. When I was painting, I felt it in my gut: constantly nauseous, no appetite, etc. With the job and board duties (amongst the blog, family, and everyday stuff), my head and heart/chest were constantly pounding as though I’d been running, pursued. I’m passionate about creating art and community, I just find it interesting how these different foci would produce different physical localities of stress within my body.
Here’s collaborator Bill Mackey and myself on the local news magazine Arizona Illustrated. It was my first TV appearance!
Collaborator Kimi Eisele in character as an apparatchik and Pop Up Spaces co-founder Julie Ray are in this segment featured on KOLD News 13.
Broader and artistic ideas about the plans themselves, possibilities/potential/present/past, bureaucracy, money, acts of input/processing/archiving and community identity are discussed a little more in-depth in our radio interview on Arizona Spotlight. Audio is available here.
Laura Markowitz, the journalist who produced the radio piece, will be our moderator at an Executive Summary and Artists’ Talk taking place Saturday, October 24, 7pm in the McLellan building, our exhibition site at the corner of Scott and Congress in downtown Tucson.
I just had my first ever television interview on the local PBS station’s news magazine, Arizona Illustrated. I was really nervous because although I love to talk about art, I tend to clam up when put on the spot, particularly when questioned by “authority” (art institutional types, administrators, posh curators or artists, academics, media), so I rehearsed some thoughts as I walked my dog yesterday. With exercise, the repetition of movement jogged my thought process as well. I think I finally started making some mental progress comparing/contrasting Austin and Tucson, after over a year of living here in Arizona.
When I mention I’m from Austin to people in Tucson, their eyes bug out and glisten with anticipation, as though I were some prophet who’d seen the Promised Land and returned to deliver a sacred message. THERE IS NO SACRED MESSAGE. I repeat: THERE IS NO SACRED MESSAGE.
Quoting from a particular document from the mid-90’s about a day in the life of a person living in/near downtown Tucson, as projected in 2010:
“It’s 7:00 a.m., January 12, 2010. The sun is beginning to rise overhead; and as you step outside, you feel the comfortable, cool breeze of a Tucson winter. You walk the one block from your home to catch the shuttle, which arrives just a few minutes later at the City’s intermodal transportation center, the old Amtrak Station.
Strolling across the plaza, you glance at the kiosk and see that there’s a new show opening at the Temple of Music and Art. You’ve already made plans for dinner at Cafe Magritte, if it’s not too busy, and then you are going to catch a live jazz show down the street. Maybe Tuesday you’ll see the new show at the Temple.
As you weave your way through the outdoor dining area at Hotel Congress, you step up to the take-out window and wonder if you’ll get everything done today. Another busy Saturday. Normally, you’d sit outside at a table for breakfast, but today you grab coffee and a muffin to go, and begin your walk down Congress, past dozens of stores teeming with local and regional goods. A new gallery catches your eye and then the bookstore next door which has recently doubled its size. Didn’t it just open a year ago?
You walk past the main library, stopping to grab two loaves of French bread from a cart vendor. They have bread at the Farmer’s Market, too, but you’re not sure you’ll have time to get there today. As you walk under what used to be the old Pima County Courthouse and is now part of the Museum of Art…”
“It’s 7:00 a.m., January 12, 2010. The sun is beginning to rise overhead; and as you step outside, you feel the comfortable, cool breeze of a Tucson winter. You walk the one block from your home to catch the shuttle, which arrives just a few minutes later at the City’s intermodal transportation center, the old Amtrak Station. Strolling across the plaza, you glance at the kiosk and see that there’s a new show opening at the Temple of Music and Art. You’ve already made plans for dinner at Cafe Magritte, if it’s not too busy, and then you are going to catch a live jazz show down the street. Maybe Tuesday you’ll see the new show at the Temple. As you weave your way through the outdoor dining area at Hotel Congress, you step up to the take-out window and wonder if you’ll get everything done today. Another busy Saturday. Normally, you’d sit outside at a table for breakfast, but today you grab coffee and a muffin to go, and begin your walk down Congress, past dozens of stores teeming with local and regional goods. A new gallery catches your eye and then the bookstore next door which has recently doubled its size. Didn’t it just open a year ago? You walk past the main library, stopping to grab two loaves of French bread from a cart vendor. They have bread at the Farmer’s Market, too, but you’re not sure you’ll have time to get there today. As you walk under what used to be the old Pima County Courthouse and is now part of the Museum of Art…”
I came across this text as I was researching raw material the Field Guide to Downtown Tucson Master Plans booklet and Pop Up Spaces’ ±92 exhibition. In my experience with gentrification in Austin (Tucson is sooo not even close to using “gentrification” as a bummer-buzzword in polite conversation), what struck me was how much this lifestyle was crammed down the throat. But it’s not for everyone. It’s not inclusive. Yet people see this ideal as the big success story of Austin as a 21st-century national cultural center. What outsiders don’t realize and what many Austinties take for granted is that Austin was a segregated city for generations. African-Americans and Mexican-Americans resided and maintained business communities within separate pieces/peaces of the city (East Austin, Clarksville, South First/Cumberland a.k.a. at Casa Diaz as Cumbialand, et. al.), in some areas for over 100 years. What people think of as “downtown” Austin (not central Austin at large) has been/is largely influenced architecturally, spatially, culturally by Anglos. It is homogenous. Tearing away all the highbrow festoons, it’s still leisure centered around the gut and the eye. What is this person doing? Consuming.
What I have learned as a part of coordinating ±92 is that downtown = history = identity.
Tucson’s identity, history, and landscape is much different than Austin’s: Mexicans, Native Americans, and Anglos. The desert and mountain landscape is an identity, an entity, in itself. It’s all in yo’ face. And yet it’s not (just drive to South Tucson and you’ll see chain-linked fenced, concrete lion-adorned barrios similar to my in-laws’ y tios’ y tias’ neighborhood just off the farthest reaches of Southmost Blvd. in Brownsville, TX, el Rio and that abominable wall less than a mile away [slicing through orange groves and reedy marshes buzzing with grasshopers, locusts, crickets {you cannot cut Twilight}], then traveling a few miles Highway 77, up to north Brownsville, up to the primos’ y primas’ garage-enclosed suburbs, it’s all the same here, as if you mixed the Valley and San Anto, minus the Gulf-breeze green).
The master planning exhibition I helped facilitate is not about how sad it was that buildings and roads were not built, because identity is at the heart of it all. People constantly argue over what downtown Tucson should and should not represent. The truth is, there is something there for everyone. There are services for the people that need them: homeless, Veterans, Native Americans (Indian Affairs), Mexican Nationals (Mexican Consulate). There is fine dining. There are bars for bros, bars for hos and bars for hipsters. There are coffeeshops and casual dining and sushi and sandwiches and Sonoran hot dog stands. There are theatre, film, art, music shows. There are places for children and families. There are places that celebrate the outdoors. There are houses of religion, there are suppliers for the spiritual, pagans, wiccans, curanderos. There are spots for people who drive; there are lanes for people who cycle. People can work in banks, government administration, convenience stores, food service, clothing boutiques, schools, upholstery shops, arts, social services, car repair, real estate, bicycle sales, furniture and appliance stores. There are fancy-schmansy condos, there are single-family homes, there are residences affordable for students and artists, there are barrios, there are alleys.
This day-in-the-life-of story took up 3 single-spaced pages. It reflects the identity of a 60-year-old retired U of A professor. It reflects the identity of one demographic. And really, a lot of positivity is crammed down the throat in the name of cultural understanding, political correctness, mental safety. That’s not fair either. But it seems that people don’t like about downtown Tucson is not about the space, it is about the people using it. If you have a gripe with the cultural/business/service/food offerings and architecture downtown, you might need to dig deeper into your prejudices about history, skin color, family, age and financial status.
There is something for everyone in downtown Tucson. And it is beautiful.
Pop Up Spaces‘ newest project, ±92, is a hybrid of art show, history lesson, architectural exhibit, planning study, performance and interactive experience. It will be unlike anything you or I have ever seen.
±92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009
Soft Opening: Friday, October 2, 4-7pm
Grand Opening: Saturday, October 3, 6-10pm
Exhibit Hours: October 10, 17 and 24, 6-10pm
McLellan Building, 63 E. Congress (NW corner of Scott Ave. and Congress)
Tucson artists Bill Mackey, Julie Ray, Rachelle Díaz and Kimi Eisele, representing several collectives and entities including Worker, Inc., Pop-Up Spaces and Design Co*op, present ±92: Downtown Master Plans, 1932-2009, a compilation of over 100 Downtown Tucson master plans, comprehensive plans, studies and projects. The exhibition will include realized and unrealized plans authored from the early 20th century to 2009. An interactive timeline will help viewers track world events, economic and social trends, and Tucson’s history in relationship to the plans’ origins, realization, or death. This is a rare opportunity to see ALL of the planning for downtown Tucson in one space at one time.
Also included in the exhibition will be 92 images (by photographers including Josh Schachter) of spaces and places that make our downtown unique—some of these are a direct result of planning, some of which are not. A crew of official performing “apparatchiks” (i.e. officials in a large organization, usually a political one), will be on site to collect public input for current and future downtown master planning, for which there are no funds, of course. A small booklet entitled “A Guide to the Master Plans of Downtown Tucson” will be available for purchase.
Worker, Inc., Pop-Up Spaces and Design Co*op received pertinent plans, information, space, and materials for this exhibit from Pima County Planning Department Archives, City of Tucson Department of Transportation, Tucson Pima Arts Council, Poster Frost Architects, BWS Architects, Rob Paulus Architects, Wheat Scharf Landscape Architects, PARKWISE, Earl Wettstein, Alex Kimmelman, Donovan Durband, Sy Schorr, J.T. Fey, John Wesley Miller Companies, MOCA Tucson, Wilko, and others.
Created in 1995, Worker Inc. is a company that specializes in promoting change in the built environment. In 2007, Worker Inc. saw the need for science based research of the more mundane processes of popular culture and formed the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit.
POP UP SPACES seeks to produce temporary, interactive, site-specific installations in empty spaces in which the visitors are not just expected to be passive viewers, but asked to be active participants. The goal of these art-based experiences is to enhance economic vitality and public engagement in downtown Tucson through promotion of the area’s culture, history, architecture and business community.
Design Co*op is a collective of Tucson-based architects, designers, and artists working across disciplines to raise public awareness of the value of affordable and appropriate urban design.
For more information, contact Bill Mackey, workerarchitect@yahoo.com; Julie Ray, juliegraphics@gmail.com; Rachelle Díaz, info@popupspaces.org; Kimi Eisele, kimi@kimieisele.com. Visit popupspaces.org to view past projects.
art diva studios is the home of art, design and commentary by Rachelle Díaz, whose un-pidgeonhole-able aesthetic and amorphous disposition is often mistaken for something else. Instead of dividing her online presence into "art," "design," and "commentary", she classified all three forms into the Common Threads below. For more about her affiliations in Tucson, Arizona and Austin, Texas, visit the Cred page. This website is best viewed in Firefox.
