Some weird synchronicities are happening in La Grande, Oregon.
As I sit down, looking out my west facing windows, I'm listening to Laura Gibson's new album, La Grande, which one can listen to on NPR. Her cool, whispering words are rocking me into sublime silence, while I watch the snow fall outside my window. I occupy a nearly empty room, a room of my own, and I am looking into the week ahead of me, lingering on the edge of my consciousness.
Around me are boxes filled with projects and paper and paints and external hard drives that I have brought with me. They all represent loose commitments I've made to myself in the last weeks and months and years around making and yearning and wanting, but have somehow remanded as floating wisps lacking action, just desires in my head, and items on to-do lists.
This post is a chance for me to delineate my goals and intentions for the next week. Partially my desire to share it with you all, my faithful readers, and partially to vocalize what I want to do so that I actually do these things this next week. Some of my goals are very art-making orientated, and some are very personal me oriented
My goals
- build myself an artist website using dreamhost.com and wordpress
- plan out MIMESIS: FANTASY AND FRIENDS, a project for which I got RACC funding
- put all of my old Feyonce videos up on Vimeo and youtube
- clean up my desktop and photo archive
- hand make some books using monastery binding
- drive to an unknown place and photograph myself in the landscape in costume
- send art to people via snail mail
- make a painting
- go on a walk everyday
- mediate and do yoga everyday
- take a nap when my body feels tired
- get a good amount of normal, healthy sleep
- destroy my old laptop
In typical Wayne fashion, this all feels like a lot and is probably more than I can get done in a week.
I've gotten a lot of weird responses from friend when I have told them I was heading to La Grande for a residency: Why there? What's in La Grande? Why would you want to spend a week there?
If anything, this residency is a reset button.
What I love most about residencies like this (having gotten to spend two weeks at Caldera in October 2009), and very unlike vacations, is that I get to leave all of the confines of my usual daily living. No work (well, I have to do a little, cause I didn't get it all done before I left), no daily commute, no chores around the house, no friends' shows to go see, no performances to make., no boys to date. Just me, in a new and different place.
And me, alone, in a studio, which scares the hell out of me.
I am not always the best on being studious in the studio. As a photographer, the world is my studio. I edit my photos at my desk and then print them out at PNCA. As a performance artist, I use my living room as a rehearsal space, and my bedroom to choreograph. In my numerous years of art practice, I have never needed a dedicated studio space that is my own. And when I have sat in such place, I feel the onslaught of boredom starting inch its way into my life and I get restless and turn to other things. And thus this list of goals which I have laid out to the world, and everyone reading this missive.
I would not be here without the generosity of Signal Fire and their Winter Wren residency. Many thanks goes out to Ryan Pierce, Amy Harwood, and Daniela Molnar whose work has made Signal Fire a viable resource for artists. Thanks to Ryan for turning the upstairs of the house he's renting out and allowing it to be a residency space for artists. Also, some big thanks go out to numerous people who have directly supported me on the trip out here. Thanks to John Brennen for allowing me to use his car, enabling me to be my usual hoarder/pack rat self, and to Mikey Sexton for letting me borrow his Canon EOS 20mm f/2.8 lens, which captures landscape so well. Also, due is given to Regional Arts and Culture council, for funding my project MIMESIS: FANTASY AND FRIENDS.
And now onto to unpacking and getting things done.
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