If you are looking for images of my current work, the best place to find them is by scrolling through this blog. If you want images of my older work: go to the
“Work” link at the top of the page. The Chambers show has been down for a while now and I have been down too. Today I had my first thought about making art again, that was actually coherent and continuous, and not some kind of spaced out hallucination. I am looking forward to getting back at it soon…not quite yet… but soon. Also if you want a copy the catalogue of my recent work I would be more then happy to send you one.

So most of you who read this know about my face plant by now. Oucch. But I am getting better. I even walked a few steps today! If you didn’t know, well I fell of my bike in a rather dramatic way. Dramatic enough for all the folks who saw me in the ambulance and ER to comment “someone hit you with their car?” I had to admit that no I had done it all by myself. Look for pictures soon. After my last performance, what have I got to loose right? Oh and if had promissed anyone anything. Consider all checks void. I don’t remember squat yet due to the brain stiring. ( actually I do remember some wierd shit from my child hood… like fruit slice candy. Man did I LOVE that stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a link to a catalogue about my new work, some of which is from my show at Chambers Gallery
207 SW Pine St. Wednesday Saturday 12PM - 6PM
It is running until mid-October. D.K. Row, of the Oregonian, wrote the essay.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the de-strip project. Here are some of my thought about why I was inspired to do this piece.

Our culture values youth and beauty and feminine compliance. This manifests itself in many ways, one of them in the industry of striping. Portland, Oregon, where I live, is rumored to have the highest number of strip bars per capita. It is also the place where Suicide Girls, a soft porn tattooed and pierced “pin up” girl web site, was founded. The Suicide Girls soft porn web site is just one of many exemples of the way that the sex industry has been appropriated by woman in an attempt to transform porn into an act of women’s empowerment. I am still on the fence about strip bars and porn being media for empowerment. I have visited more strip bars than most of my male friends. I do not see striping as an act of feminist empowerment that many here believe it to be. My experience with woman (and men) who have worked in the sex industry, is that it has not been the liberating experience that some claim it to be. They often talk the talk, and enjoy the cash benefits but the money is soon spent of things to numb their psyches. It is too difficult to live in a culture does not accept what you do. It is not from a place of prudishness that I say this. As long as 85% of the people in this country believe in god and in a Christian god at that, there is going to be a lot of negative reactions to people expressing their sexuality, both external negative reactions from those who view the actors and negative internal reactions. This will make it very difficult for those who do express it in these forms to feel that they fit in. I still support a woman’s (or a man’s) right to choose it as a profession.

The idea for my de-strip piece came from living in this environment. Actually I was on a bike ride and it can’t remember what exactly made me think of it. Maybe it just popped into my head when we were riding past a place that sprays paints cars and I got a good whiff of thinner. Or maybe it is because we ride by three strip clubs in the first mile of this ride.

I am 44 and looking in the mirror at a body that some days I no longer recognize. The body and face of my youth was collateral in a culture that still views a women’s beauty as one of their negotiable forms of strength. I used that tool to my advantage at times, like in getting out of driving tickets, and I had it used against me. I am at the age where men are leering less. De-striping is a formalization of this. Rather than giving me money to expose my self the participants in this piece contribute to my dressing, my de-striping:
hiding my less-pleasing to look at self. The actual dollars given, are sewn together to create the clothing that I wear. In this first performance I was able to collect enough money in 24 hours to make a dress that would have pleased June Cleaver.

Some interesting things came up while I was working. Although most of my closest friends are male, the money donated was overwhelmingly donated by women.
It seemed that they envisioned themselves in my position, and related to the idea stated in my blog that I wished to “preserve my modesty.” My male friends failing to get the concept or perhaps unable to understand the feeling of objectification that women so often experience donated very little, with the exception of one donor whose motivation was toward the cause the money was going to be given to rather towards clothing me. ( although he did provide me with a large stack of bills as well.)

It is odd to using money as a material. The value of what you have made is certainly not less than the value of the things that it is made of, dollars. As an artist this is something that is often not the case. An artist can spend years and money on materials on a piece only to have the final object be worth less than its component elements. Making art out of money is one way to assure the finished objects worth in a culture that does not (as evidenced by the lack of public funding for the arts) value it.

I also realized how dirty money was. When I worked as a bartender I was aware of this fact, but touching the 259 dollar bills and quilting them together to create the outfit made me feel itchy and dirty. I could not let my mind wander to thinking about where all of this money had been. After wearing the out fit against my skin I was anxious to rush home and take a shower.

FYI I swear my ass isn’t that big… it is just the dress!

Hi There. Have you ever wondered what a naked out of shape 44 year old looks like?

Yea, well me neither. That is why I am asking you to help clothe me.
As part of Portland Art Center’s fundraising project “Bed-In” I am performing “De-strip”.
Between now and 4 o’clock pm tomorrow ( yes I said tomorrow ) I am going to be sewing together an outfit made of your donated dollars to the Portland Art Center. That is ALL I a going to be wearing while I am, “in bed”, in the window of Backspace a coffee and gaming establishment located at 5th ave in NW Portland. What I will be wearing when I show up tomorrow will depend on how much you donate between now and 2 pm Saturday the 22nd . (tomorrow!) While I am there I am going to continue to sew my outfit together. You can come by with your buckets of cash and donate in person too but I really hope you will donate ahead of time online to my pay pal account. Even 10 dollars will go a long way to cover me up. So do everyone a favor and please donate something NOW!
SCROLL DOWN TO DONATE.

Backspace has fantastic coffee too so if you want to deliver your funds directly to me “in bed” or just come by and help sew that would be great. Also I would be more than happy to discuss the “meaning” of de-strip as an art project there (think living in a city with a lot of strippers, value of youth culture, pornography, money, ageism, art funding… what have you. ) I just don’t have time to right now because I have got to get sewing!

Love Ya

Abi

I started working in the studio again. It seemed like all the voices that have been screaming in my head stopped when I walked into the room barefoot. Usually this is the time when artists get depressed… sales or no… right after their opening. I feel ok this time. hum.

My dear friend Scott came by today. I was telling him how I was getting my ass totally kicked by these paintings. They are a lot of work!

He said, “and no one is going to have any idea how much work you put into them.”

“Yea.” I replied, “People are just going to look at them and go ‘what the fuck is this? A white wall? Big deal.’ ”

I hope to hell that some of the effort that I put into these monsters is visible when you look at the work.

January of my senior year in high school I moved to Burlington Vermont to work as a photographers assistant for artist/photographer Wes Disney. Wes died a few years ago, and I don’t think I properly expressed to him the huge influence that he had on my life.

I met Wes when I was 12 years old. He held a series of photography workshops at my family’s business, what is now the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, a cross-country ski area and sculling camp, in rural Vermont. I was interested in photography and art having grown up in a creative household. My mother and sister are both artists. But at 12 my parents weren’t interested in letting me use the family Nikon. So instead I hung around and listened to the lectures and posed for photographs. The year that I was 14 I was allowed to attend the Wes’s workshop for the first time with my “new” used Pentax K1000, purchased upon Wes’s advice.

I don’t think I saw much of Wes for the next couple of years. I have no memory how or why he asked me to work for him on the Wall project, or if I asked him. (Could it possibly have been my father’s idea?) But rather than bore myself to death my senior year in high school I moved into an apartment with a graduate student and an anorexic marathon runner in Burlington and started working with Wes.

Let me digress by saying that being a 17 year old on my own in Burlington, Vermont was a bit overwhelming. Working for Wes and taking a class in religion were the only two grounding in my life at that time and these things were not particularly grounding. Just as an example of this I went to my final exam in the religion class high on mushrooms that one of the folks in Wes’s crew had sent me to sell in Burlington for him. I may have been having a personal experience with god during the religion test but that really did not seem to help with my grade in anyway.

Wes’s world was amazing to me. Entering his studio was like taking those mushrooms, but without the icky taste in your mouth. You had to climb up what seemed like an endless flight of stairs to the top of one of the old brick buildings in downtown Burlington and knock really hard so he could hear you over the sound of the Talking Heads. He was in love with them largely because of their song that goes ” I’m painting. I’m painting again.” and at that time Wes was painting. When he answered the door, there was yet another flight of stairs that led you to a room, probably 2,000 square feet. All along two walls were windows.

This was the space where Wes worked, in the back there was the darkroom, where I learned to print, a bathroom with a claw foot tub, a work area and at the far back a small kitchen living room space. It was a dream come true for me, and I mean this literally. When I was 5 my family was going to build an addition on our house. My parents asked my what kind of room did I want. Walking into Wes’s studio was like walking into to my dream environment. (Well except in my dream environment there was a big trap door in the floor that you could sweep all your junk into and a dump truck would haul it away.)
It was a big space, with big windows, a place to make things. A place dedicated to making art.

Over the years I have tried to create an environment like Wes’s. I lived in a 3,000 square foot former liquor store, and then a former meat packing plant on Main St. in Walsenburg Co. (The first place had no hot water and I used a Coleman stove to cook.) I lived in a former cheese factor in La Veta Colorado that was more like living in a subterranean torture chamber.

Today I am living in the best of all of these places. My husband and I purchased a 3,000 square foot 1946 Fire station in Portland OR. There are three 10 x 10 foot 9 pane garage doors on front and there are skylights. That is where my studio is. We have a small office, storage, and in the back a studio apartment. (I used to say an apartment about the size of a trailer but studio apartment sounds much artsier doesn’t it?)

I took me awhile to get to this point and it has been a pretty bumpy road. But through having a vision: the model that was Wes’s world, and sticking to it; tenaciously, pig headedly and at times stupidly, I am living very closely to the model that he set: living to create work, and creating work to live.

Thanks to a call from Pamela Polston from “Seven Days” an independent weekly in Burlington Vermont, I know that there is a retrospective of Wes’s work up at the Firehouse Gallery in Burlington this month and next. Here is a link to her article.

Ok see that little white line there at the end of the arrow? Well that is what happens when you use REAL Bandaids and not generic finger bandages. They burn. It hurts. Don’t try it.
If you need to use my ‘brilliant” idea to save your fingers try latex free bandy things, or gauze… the smoking chemicals did not feel good.

” The work goes on. In this photo I am super-gluing band-aids to my fingers to keep them from bleeding on the work as I sand. I know this sounds like I have gone off of the deep end into some bizarre form of self-mortification, but what the hell else should I do? I really don’t have time right now to go out and rent a floor sander, as Rob so smartly suggested, and learn how it works, or doesn’t work.

Anyway the band-aids and superglue work famously. I mean they really do. It is like having all new fingertips, with a little less feeling than they had before. And just so that you don’t think I have totally lost it, super glue was invented as a surgical aid as an alternative to stitches.

I went to the Home Despot earlier today and bought all these sanders with handles in order to save my finger but they just don’t do it. I just have to hand sand it, from 36 grit all the way up to 1500.

The process of painting all this white had an effect that I totally did not anticipate. The psychological stuff that I talked about in the earlier post is rather huge. It has been a tough year for that, but I think this is helping get through it. Either that or it is driving me totally insane. Guess I will just have to wait and see.

I have all of the paintings in the show painted now. I just have sanding to do. That is a relief, except for the fact of the bleeding fingers. Maybe I will just have to incorporate the stains in the work. UGH. That is way to menopausal for me to even think about right now.

I am finding that I paint to settle myself down if I get wound up. Spreading the white paint across the surface: it has a lovely consistency like…warm cream cheese?

I highly suggest it after a hard day of …sanding?

I was having a nice evening, November 29th 2007, at 7pm, really. My friends Barbara, Martha and I had gone out for a good meal after looking at some great intricate artwork at a nice gallery. After Barbara and I said goodbye to Martha as she headed off to choir practice we headed down Broadway. At around Couch I think, although I wasn’t looking at street signs, we were first on scene at an accident involving a bicycle and an auto. Barbara suggested I do something knowing that I had been an EMT in the past. I made a quick look in my right hand mirror and pulled my car up onto the sidewalk so I could try to help this woman. The guy who hit her was there. After I asked some basic questions, I had him isolate her head while I looked to see if she was bleeding out any place. She seemed fairly good condition and did not express that she was in much pain. We just held her until the ambulance came. As I was getting up to leave she asked me to check on her bicycle and to bring it too her. I located her bike from one of the bystanders, and headed toward her with it. I realized that there was no way to communicate with her at this point in time, since there were now a lot of medics working on her. As I was milling about trying to figure out what to do with her bike, standing well out side the area where the medics were active, a police officer came and stood right in front of me and said
“Get back on the Curb.” I said to him “That woman wanted me to bring her bike to her. What should I do with it? Do you have a system for dealing with a bike after and accident? Do you want me to put it in my car or something for safe keeping?
He said “ No, Get back on the curb” and bumped me with his chest. I said “oh fuck you, your not an EMT , what are you doing that is so important that you can’t answer my questions?” I then turned to go back to the curb with the bike. I decided that I had done what I could for the woman and that I wasn’t going to get any answers from the police man, so I should leave at that point. I asked some by standers what they thought that we should do with the bike and a nice guy from the Sushi Restaurant said that he would take it inside. So, I handed the bike to him. I then turned to leave. At which point police officer Mike Close started yelling “stop.” At first I looked around and was thinking, Who is he talking to? What the heck it that guy talking about?” I continued to try to leave but found myself being herded towards a police car by Officer Close. He put out his arms in what I interpreted as a violent gesture towards me. Sort of like he was trying to grab me. Since there was no reason for him to grab me, since I did not have the bicycle nor was I doing anything illegal, I turned away from him to get around him. He was frighteningly out of control. My fright/flight response kicked in when I was confronted with his inappropriate yelling, and I continued to try to move away from what I saw as a threat to my safety and well being. He grabbed me by the right arm, to which I said, “what the fuck are you doing? I am not doing anything. ” At that point he forced me onto the back of his police car, cuffed my hands taking a little extra time to make sure that they were on extra painfully tight, and threw me in the back of his cruiser. I told him he was out of his mind. And I stand by that comment. I have bruises and cuts from his treatment.
I was very upset and frightened in the back of the police car. I tried to call the police to help me using my cell phone. This officer seemed crazy and frightening to me. As I sat in the car and during the “arrest” when I was cuffed, I was comforted by the fact that people had yelled police brutality when the officer cuffed me and one of the people who said it had the courage to stay for the entire time I was in the patrol car and to call the police to complain and to stay until I was let out of the car.

If being assaulted by a police officer for no reason wasn’t frightening and bizarre enough what happened afterwards was truly disturbing.

After sitting in the car for awhile and then being moved to another police officer’s car,
The sergeant who had been called to the seen, to investigate the police brutality came a read me my Miranda rights. He told me the version of the story that they had some how spun. I wondered if we were talking about the same incident. I am a great believer in everyone having their own truth and objective truth is almost impossible to find, however, the stories I heard from the officers were so far from what had happened, I found myself laughing at one point, even though I was still facing jail time. The “Back to the Curb” officer said that the first thing that I had said to him was “FUCK YOU” twice. I said it once, yes but not until I had asked him what he was going to do to secure the woman’s bicycle. It was not the first thing I said to him. Granted spending as much time alone as I do, I say it more than is polite, but I don’t think saying it is a crime. Yes if that was all I had said to him and I had said it twice, then he would have had a good reason to think I was crazy. But even then cuffs and cruiser? But I wanted to know what to do with the woman’s bicycle, and I asked him, when he wouldn’t tell me, I returned to the curb as requested. No one told me what to do with the bicycle. They also told me I was accused of tampering with evidence. Fine. Tell me to put the bike down. More than happy to. Just like I went back to the curb when he told me to the second time after I realized officer “back to the curb” wasn’t going to answer my questions. He said I needed to listen to police officers. He said that the Medics had repeatedly asked me to step aside. As soon as the first two got there, I stepped aside, went to the bike and did not get with in 15 feet of the woman again. Not one of the EMTS spoke to me at all, not even to ask me any questions. They certainly did not ask me to leave several times because I wasn’t anywhere near the woman once they were there.

Another creepy part of this experience was that they were telling me “what happened” as if I hadn’t been there, and as if telling me their way of “how it happened” would either scare me into changing my story the “We have evidence against you” tactic, or would make me believe that I had actually done what they were saying I had. Ah Hello, I was there too remember? I am not a crazy person. I do not walk up to police officers and just yell FUCK YOU FUCK YOU, not even if I have PMS… and I didn’t. They also told me the my friend had said I had said that. She was sitting in the car across the street and didn’t hear anything (You can call her and ask her.)

Having worked as am EMT, domestic violence prevention advocate, and having become a paralegal, I know enough about the law to know that police don’t necessarily know it.
For example an officer came over to a friends house the other night and told her that even though she had been sexual assaulted, there had been no crime since there was no penetration. I guess that means that any one can grab someone else’s ass any time they like, no?

When it was officer Close’s chance to give me a lecture he told me that because the woman had been yelling “police brutality” I was guilty of disorderly conduct. Say what?
I suppose they could have arrested me for inciting a riot too because I was mad enough to think about. They all had lots of things that I was being charged with. I think that abusing an officer was one of them too. Supposedly as I turned around with the bike I hit Officer Close in the leg. I didn’t feel it. But what if I had? I was trying to get out of the way and it should have been obvious that since I couldn’t see the officer that I was not doing it on purpose. Lets see, oh… and I think they had avoiding arrest in there to… hard to know if you are avoiding arrest if you haven’t done anything that should get you arrested.

After they lectured me, they let me go. No one had asked my name, no one had asked me what I saw. The driver who hit the woman, drove off, and I got to spend a better part of the evening in a police car, because the officers were rude, and couldn’t handle it when I was rude back.
After I was released Officer Close came and got my name from me as I sat on a park bench, almost as an after thought. It felt like he was stalking me, driving around the block and coming back to ask a few more questions, while I sat there trying to get my shit together enough to drive home.
In the course of our conversation, Officer Close also told me that he thinks police and the military need to get more respect. I agree, but I believe that this respect should be achieved through good deeds and not through intimidation. He also told me that he had been in three tours of duty in Iraq. I feel for Officer Close, trauma makes you edgy, but I am also concerned that the Citizens of Portland are not safe with an officer with his hair trigger working on the streets.
Who is more likely to over react…I was going to say in a stressful situation, but to be honest, it really wasn’t that stressful until the police got involved,… someone back from a war or someone back from dinner with friends?

But the scariest part of all this, is that the other officers were in collusion.

Uggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh.

I was gonna write but man am I tired and filthy.

A

Taking the Pee out of painting.
and now I am ain’ting.

I had some thoughts about a possible psychological interpretation of my work.
I generally hate work that is overtly psychological and avoid it in my work at any cost but
I was thinking, as I was painting the other day and was rather miffed at someone, that what I do is painting over that anger. I am not angry that often, rarely in fact, but in a way the process is very much like the process of meditation someone taught me when I was about 12. In that process you imagine that the thoughts you have while sitting are bubbles floating up in front of you, you recognize them, and then you let them go.

In my work I am painting over nothing, and grinding all the paint off again and maybe letting go of the things in my head in the process?

I don’t know if I am painting over anything but I truly find the process of putting the paint on to be soothing. Can the end product be the record of this process?

Too many questions.

phewph