Composite: You’re teaching at UNM in Albuquerque, received your MFA at Eastern Washington University, and may or may not have spent some time in Kentucky. How did you get to these places and where you are now, locationally speaking. How long did it take you to learn to spell Albuquerque without thinking about it?

Amaris Ketcham: Actually, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Kentucky. I grew up on the Bourbon Trail, and I came to New Mexico first as an undergraduate at UNM. When I was eighteen, I wanted to live in America, but in a place that was wholly different than what I thought of as “American.” I narrowed my choices down to New Mexico and Hawaii and flipped a coin. The trickiest thing about spelling Albuquerque was that so many people pronounce it “Alburquerque,” which I think is closer to the original Arabic spelling, meaning a place of apricots.

After a few years, I missed the rain and green landscapes, so I relocated to Washington, first living in Spokane and then Seattle. When I was there, I started to miss the cultural diversity that New Mexico has. Even though Washington and Kentucky are very similar, I think that I actually suffered from culture shock. When I moved back to New Mexico last summer, it was during monsoon season, so the lavender was blooming and there were double rainbows every afternoon. It was gorgeous, and I had this feeling like I was actually coming home.

C: Your practice exists quite amazingly dead center of being a designer and an author. People tend to fall to one side or the other. What gave you the gusto and made you decide to embrace both equally? How does the balance fall out for you in your practice? 

AK: I started working as a designer before I began seriously writing. Writing and designing actually share many of the same characteristics. Both are centered on communicating an idea and the most effective means to achieve relating that idea to an audience. Each uses movement and structure, whether it’s figuring out what information needs to logically come next in a narrative or where the eye lands and moves to next on the page. That attention-grabbing lead sentence might be thought of as where the eye would land first on a design, and then proximity of information creates a flow. You use repetition to keep the audience engaged while contrast surprises the audience and give depth to the work.

Both work with visual imagery, creating a tangibility of ideas, and it’s important to move away from using cliché imagery, or visual metaphors such as “love is like a red rose.” For instance, I was recently working on a project, a cover design for a set of philosophical and spiritual dialogues, where the client asked for a silhouette of a young woman holding her arms up to the sky, as if embracing wisdom from heaven. This “inspirational” image is overused in spiritual designs, so I moved away from it, and worked instead on incorporating an surgical drawing from Gray’s Anatomy, with a head sort of exploding into watercolor clouds and birds in flight. The metaphor’s impact is the same, but it implies less passivity.

So, I like to think that designing helps my writing rather than taking time away from it, because I’m still practicing the same skills. I started moving away from designing once I began teaching, which means that now I can be much more selective about the projects I pick up.

C: One of your main gigs is working as the Faculty Advisor for the University of New Mexico Honors College Literary Journal, Scribendi. Following into your own footsteps, you’re taking the year to teach students both the technical tool sides of publication, but also the editorial and content creation side of things. Pedagogically, do you think it’s important for the next generation of creatives to have the full rounded suitcase, or is your focus more on collaboration and teaching of both sides and the need for each other? 

AK: I like to think of my Scribendi course as merging an arts education with STEM education’s technological emphasis. Because the magazine staff participation is a class rather than an extracurricular activity, we can really dive into design, copyediting, literature and arts assessment, desktop publishing software, print production, and small business (small press) management. Each student acquires this diversity of skills throughout the year.

I do think that it’s important for students to work on becoming well rounded. One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is that these younger millennials are maturing in a society that values content curation. They start a Tumblr page and instead of putting up their own material (as with blogging or writing in Live Journal), they select images and blurbs from the Internet as a way to relate and display themselves to the world. In one sense, they are already understanding what effort and thought goes into assembling a cohesive work, like a magazine or exhibit, but in another sense, they aren’t creating the work themselves.

One of the things that I noticed students doing this year was communicating only animated gifs. One would make a comment and use a gif as a supporting statement, and another student would respond with an argument (“or the audience might think this:”) and find some other gif that displayed the thought. Before long, there would be nothing but this chain of moving frames representing a conversation. So the challenge becomes, okay if you’re going to communicate in this way, let’s open Photoshop and learn how to make our gifs rather than spending all of that time trying to find the right one to share our idea.

Finding this balance between creating and curating is going to be something that becomes more and more important for future generations, so it’s important that they learn the tools necessary to express themselves, and in that sense, be rounded.

C: This has really been on my mind as well, especially within a blogging context. I am of the generation I came of age actively live journaling. We wrote about our lives for anyone to read, but I feel we recognized it was generally for ourselves or for an audience of friends. Over the last 5-10 years blogging has shifted to a monetizable platform, which has in turn caused a rise in people wanting exposure for their blogging and ideas. This has given way to an idea that everyone’s opinions are valid and should be made public. Do you see that coming through with your students? Do you think it’s valid?

AK: Lately, since Google has announced that it announced that it will stop supporting Google Reader, I’ve been wondering whether this death of RSS aggregators is signaling either the death of blogging or the possibility for something new that I can’t even imagine in my technological innovation-limited existence.

However, I’ve often thought of blogging as a modern-day form of pamphleteering. They vary in size, are controlled by the author, contribute to modern characteristics of American writing, are pretty damn cheap to publish, and often have a polemic chain-reaction of responses and rebuttals. They tend to spread ideas, not necessarily great writing/literature. Here’s what George Orwell said about pamphleteering (for fun replace pamphlet with blog):

“A good writer with something he passionately wanted to say — and the essence of pamphleteering is to have something you want to say now, to as many people as possible — would hesitate to cast it in pamphlet form, because he would hardly know how to set about getting it published, and would be doubtful whether the people he wanted to reach would ever read it. Probably he would water his idea down into a newspaper article or pad it out into a book. As a result by far the greater number of pamphlets are either written by lonely lunatics who publish at their own expense, or belong to the sub-world of the crank religions, or are issued by political parties. [...] There have been a few good pamphlets in fairly recent years. D. H. Lawrence’s Pornography and Obscenity was one, Potocki de Montalk’sSnobbery with Violence was another, and some of Wyndham Lewis’s essays in The Enemy really come under this heading. [...] When one considers how flexible a form the pamphlet is, and how badly some of the events of our time need documenting, this is a thing to be desired.” –Orwell, “Pamphlet Literature“

So blogging itself, and its spread of ideas and personal opinions isn’t unique, except that that the potential audience has grown—you can reach billions of people in a relativity short period of time. As far as whether I see this coming from students, that’s harder to pinpoint.

To be honest, a majority of my students appear to either be painfully shy or still learning how to participate in large group turn-taking during class discussions. The most vocal ones either have that same vocal personality that lends to blogging or editorializing or writing Montaigne-style personal essays—either that, or they’re a little older and have the experience and maturity guiding them to participate. Some of them, though, are much more comfortable writing, and for those students, the class blogs do wonders to demonstrate their personality, voice, and insights to the rest of the class. 

What concerns me more is that this push to publish, to try to gain a wide audience almost instantaneously can lead to insincerity or superficiality of thought.

C: Even once you’ve gotten to personal creation, the impact of curating and cultural targeting is putting its hold in. Blog content is targeted at specific audiences, and handmade/craft goods are being branded as part of a specific lifestyle. Sites like Pintrest are creating a more informed and inspired (maybe?) demographic. Do you see this shift as a crutch for contemporary creatives, or is it just a rise of artists/authors who are more economically savvy? 

AK: Did you notice a couple years ago when this shift to personal branding started? It was bizarre on a lot of levels—individuals were talking like companies and companies were impersonating individuals. And that really started to rise even after Facebook stopped forcing you to talk about yourself in the third person, in that uncomfortable Bob Dole way status updates used to be. So while folk arts (crafts) are being branded as a potential lifestyle choice, that same Etsy artist is branding both his or her person and their shop. It’s business savvy to a certain extent, but going to this unprecedented personal level. 

Sites such as Pintrest have a great potential to inspire, but they also divorce the original creator from ownership, collaboration, and watching their work grow into something not conceived by the original project. For instance, last fall, I started working on this sculpture of a creature that I was calling Bunnythulhu, a minor deity with influence over bureaucracy. I worked on it and told people about it in passing, and this man decided that he would crochet a cute, stuffed animal version of it. So a deviation of the project appeared, and it was fantastic. He’d taken the starter idea and re-envisioned it, and I was rewarded by seeing the outcome. You don’t get that with Pintrest.

C: New Mexico is a magical and mysterious place, from the still very visible Native American population and culture, to the vast openness of much of the state, to the constant source of strange and unexplainable events in the state. New Mexico is home to Roswell, the Trinity Site, and America’s largest Nuclear Waste disposal facility. How has living in a place like this shaped your work?

AK: I think that some of the magic and mystery of New Mexico comes from the intense sun, very hot summers, and consistent state of dehydration—all of which mean that during the day, when most people are the most rational, we’re operating under this kind of dream logic, seeing gods and devils on the mesa and faces in cliff sides. It’s a beautiful and unnerving landscape. New Mexico’s land is remarkably diverse—with over 4,500 species living here, it’s the fourth most diverse state in the union. There are even jaguars still eking out an endangered existence in the south. But it’s also a land that, like you mention, is set aside by the national government to be sacrificed as a violence laboratory. A testing site for atomic bombs and a disposal site for nuclear waste. For a person interested in the environment, this contrast is unique and terrifying.

I’ve been working on a collection of essays about New Mexico and an apocalyptic theme runs through them, because it’s almost impossible to avoid. For example, I was working this essay about a “chupacabra” that was found on the West Mesa, just outside of Albuquerque, and the city’s willing suspension of disbelief. We’d rather believe that a mythological creature turned up in our open space than acknowledge that the West Mesa is this frightening place where people dump carcasses.

C: You are currently working on a project involving poetry comprised of repurposed X-Files dialogue. What drew you to this and what does your process look like? What does your system of limitations look like within the project (ie, are you set to only lines Mulder and Scully say, or is every character available). The amount of source material is so expansive with 9 seasons and 2 films. How do these read topically? What’s the reading going to get out of these?

The X-Files poems are a project that challenges the line between cultural consumption and creation. Each of the poems is composed of words of dialogue spoken in X-Files episodes. Repurposing these words and rearranging them mixes found poetry with fan poetry (as opposed to fan fiction).

What I’ve been doing is taking a transcript from a particular episode and compiling a list of words that combine the language of scientific inquiry with more descriptive words. Then I work with this word set until something emerges. While each poem contains words that may reference the X-Files, they don’t rely on the TV show, individual episodes, or prior knowledge to function. In fact, approaching them with an expectation that they will reflect or recreate and episode would only hinder reading. They don’t describe what happens on the X-Files, or who the characters are, but they do contain a similar sense of mystery and inquiry, big ideas and issues, and a smattering of 1990s references

C: What are you listening to/looking at/reading right now that you are really getting lost in?

AK: Well, I’m grading final papers this week…and listening to “Loco” by Hector Lavoe on repeat.

C: On a scale of 1-10, how amazing are Hatch Chilis?

AK: This question is more political than it sounds!

I was a lecture a couple weeks ago about the potential threat of Monsanto engineering chiles. The southern, Hatch chiles are a genetically modified “Chile No. 9,” and the fear is that Monsanto will build upon that work to create a Chile No. 10, a chile that will go straight from the test tube to commercial salsas, and rob the people of their heritage food traditions in the process. In contrast, chile from Chimayo grows out of this holy dirt that heals peoples’ illnesses, which make this northern chile almost heaven-sent. 

C: As a lover of the Hatch chili, and all things green chili thanks to a 4 corners state upbringing, this breaks my heart. 

AK: I maybe misspoke. [or the interviewer completely misunderstood and got emotional] It’s my understanding that Hatch chiles are genetically modified, but these varieties come from a more field-based form of artificial selection, and bred selectively for certain traits such as high yield, resistance to droughts, and ability to withstand shipping. That would still make them genetically modified organisms, it’s a touch more traditional than the Chile No. 10 rumored to be in production by Monsanto. And they’re still local, because they aren’t yet mass-produced in China. But if you want a solid chile, a really hot, gnarly one that’s been stressed by the sun, look for something from Chimayo or one of the smaller communities.

I [Zach] have know Kevin Richards, the man behind Richards Wood Craft, for almost 15 years. We met in the awkward years of High School, spending the majority of our time falling in love with the dark room and the mysteries and magic of film. These formative years, thanks to a very influential teacher, set our creative wheels in motion. Fast forwarding to now, through a number of various pit stops and side roads, we’re both making work today, altho not in the medium we both first loved. Kevin’s wood work can be found in our latest issue No 11 The Wild.

Composite: You’ve worked within and are comfortable with a number of artistic mediums, especially photography. How did you find your way to woodworking, and what grabbed your attention about it?

Richards Wood Crafts: This thought came up a few days ago for me. I came across an old photograph I took at a concert probably in 2001 somewhere in Denver with you. The venue was dark, the lights were multicolored, and the guitarist I was photographing was moving around the stage. I remember running through the settings on my Minolta and adjusting the shutter speeds and aperture with respect to my film speed. After I developed the film and checked the proofs I wasn’t in the least bit surprised by how the surreal and color splashed guitarist turned out because I was so familiar with my camera at the time. I don’t think I was anywhere near being a great photographer, but I had developed that relationship.

With woodworking right now I barely have a hint of that understanding. When I cut into or join together different woods I’m most always surprised with the results. That’s what has really pulled me into this medium so strongly. The outcomes have been exciting.

 C: Your admittedly new to the wood working world.  What sort of investment did it require to get started? 

 RWC: Since beginning this experiment, I’ve acquired a nice collection of power tools. Originally, I wanted to teach myself how to carve a small spoon. After a few failed attempted I realized I didn’t have a natural talent for that. My former boss, who I look up to as a very capable person who can make or fix about anything would give me advice. I’d come to him with a problem of shaping wood for a projects and his response would usually be something like, “Well, you know what you need don’t ya? You ought to get yourself a miter saw” or planer, or miter saw, or dremel tool, etc. And so I did. Each new tool opened up a few more options to what I could make and how I could make it.

 C: The bulk of composite’s contributors (and probably readers) work within a fine arts studio context; paint on canvas, dark rooms and laptops, the occasional power tool or table saw. What’s your work style like? What’s a day in your studio?

RWC: When I moved to Salt Lake a few months ago I turned half the space of my landlord’s tool shed into my workshop. It’s incredibly unimpressive, but I sort of love my little space.

My whole M.O. revolves around the desire to make something personal with my hands that people would want for themselves or as a really neat gift. So after I load up my iPod with a few hours worth of podcasts and music, I work on the idea for that week of what people might appreciate. I get on different kicks for a while with projects. My girlfriend stole my pencil to put up her hair a few weeks ago on a drive so I made figured wooden hair sticks from exotic hardwoods for a few days. A few people bought them. I waited too long in a restaurant lobby to be seated, so the next week I made wooden spinning tops so that I could have something in my pocket to occupy my boredom in those scenarios.  I’ve spent weeks making individually designed wooden goblets for a wedding, and bowls and spoons always pique my interest to try new things. I might have answered your question somewhere in there.

C: You’ve spent your life living in the West; Colorado, Idaho, Utah, etc. What impact has this had on your identity, especially as a creative?

RWC: I guess I have spent the past few years bouncing around the West. Whenever my father is asked what I’m doing with my life he often answers. “Oh, Kevin? He’s out finding himself somewhere I think” with a smirk. He’s exactly right. I’ll be 30 in a few months and I’m terrified of going to location 40 hours a week where creativity isn’t a factor. I’ve found a lot of support to pursue lofty goals in making a career in woodworking from artists in the West. I think this part of the country just has a very strong can-do attitude from able people who just live that lifestyle. I recently wrapped up a short apprenticeship with an incredible hardwood furniture craftsman in Salt Lake at Ivory Bill Furniture. It really opened my eyes to what great talent comes out of hard work, attention to detail and a love of wood.

C: Word on the streets is you make a killer eggplant Parmesan. Any interest in leaking the recipe?

RWC: If any of the readers pass through the Salt Lake area, I’d love to show you how to turn a block of wood into a bowl and discuss art over my secret eggplant parm recipe.

photo by Sam Bortnick Photography

Being married to a Texan, I (Zach) have spent more of the last 5 years in Dallas than I had ever expected to. There are opinions and stereotypes that float around about Texas, least of these within the community Composite is a part of, is that of Texas being the next artistic hotbed. However, what a lot of us aren’t talking about or aware of, is that (besides Austin of course) cities like Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston are massive metropolitan areas with resources (and money) and creative communities coming out of the woodwork. This has only become more evident to us by the amount of submissions and proposals that have begun to roll in from across the Lone Star State.

With Issue No. 11, The Wild, we rolled out our Artist Proposal calls. For the first two years of Composite, we, the editors, has been inviting and selecting Visual Art contributors based on personal relationships and work we had seen ourselves. We have been accepting literary work via blind submissions for awhile, but moving forward we knew we needed to open the conversation up to creatives we weren’t running into ourselves. We wanted to open our circle up as big as we coud. Patricia Rodriguez is the first visual artist to be included in Composite through our open calls. Based out of Dallas, I specifically was excited to work with a member of a community happening right under the nose of my extended family, in neighborhoods I barely know but am growing to love.

Recently, Patricia took time out of her super busy schedule to talk with us about her art, her health, and whats going on in South Dallas.

Composite: You might not know this, but you were the first artist we accepted through our new proposal submission calls. How did you find out about composite? How often are you submitting your work for new things? How much of your work time is spent on getting your work out there vs making your work? 

Patricia Rodriguez: I found out about Composite through this site called Art Hash  they regularly post open calls, opportunities and the like for artists. I had no idea I was the first artist accepted but I was super excited to be! I try to be proactive as possible in submitting for new things but of late I’ve been getting ready for some art shows and have slacked off a bit. I do try to catch the major things, like Texas Biennial, even though I’m busy. But usually I try to start my week by finding a few new places to submit, you have to have your fishing lines in the water so hope for new opportunities stay alive.

C: For our most recent issue, the wild, your work involved heavily around birds and bugs and where they call home. An evosystem all their own, what is the catalyst for the use of this kind of imagery in your work?

PR: I wanted to utilize creatures that were right outside your doorstep most likely, our little suburban neighbors. A lot of my work deals with bringing attention to the natural world that is around us here and now- not in some wilderness or exotic place. I feel everyone is always plugged in to technology and the busyness of modern life and should “log in” to Nature a little more. I think there is an upset in the balance of what is natural if you don’t recognize the natural world you live in and realie that everything we have is derived from the Earth. I give humanlike virtues to the creatures in my paintings- doing things that we do….work, survive, push through trials, form societies and families, seek the fruits in life…in hopes of drawing the viewer in and feeling a kinship with the creatures instead of a revulsion like “Ew! A bug!”

C: You call Dallas Texas home. Obviously Dallas, and Texas as whole, have a reputation in regards to culture, accurate or not. What is it actually like living and making work in Dallas? 

PR: Well honestly it is very hard in this town in some regards. Dallas in general is built on restaurants, entertainment and business and it is just now starting to understand that the Arts have been neglected and more of a focus is being turned toward it. There is a cry for “how do we get young artists to come live in our city and help the arts flourish?” by the clueless city planners –with no regard to the fact that the artists ARE HERE they just need opportunities to thrive. That being said the arts community is amazing and helpful and always providing opportunities to each other in various ways so it has it’s pluses living here in Dallas but trying to survive as a full time artist here- extremely hard.

C: There seems to be a real Renaissance going on in neighborhoods like oak cliff, with the Bishop Arts District and the explosion of great new restaurants and breweries popping up all the time. (This interviewer is sad 4 months still about how quickly I drank up the Oak Cliff Roasters Christmas blend) When did all of this start in motion. What are Some of your favorite spots?

PR: I’m a little biased on this question because I grew up in Oak Cliff and have resided here for 36 years so while I appreciate that there’s a plethora of places to grab a cup of coffee and dinner now I also see the bad effects of gentrification going on and familiar spots being torn down, neighbors being kicked out. But that being said I do have a couple of spots to give the thumbs up to, {neighborhood} in the Bishop Arts District actually has….ART! They do a great job of showcasing local artists in their interior design shop, more places should do that. From the Ends of the Earth does the same as well as focusing on recycled, upcycled and Earth friendly art and goods.

C: You have a process somewhat untraditional to the archetypical painter, combining acrylic and krylon (spray paint). What does this process look like in practice? Spray paint/tagging/murals are all common place with in the rising world of street art. Does this growing movement have much context in your work?

PR: I actually love graffiti so much it was the subject of my final term paper in Art History class, that being said I can’t tag if my life depended on it. So I found a way to incorporate the spray paint into my work giving it a different context on canvas. When I did the first painting this way it started with a spray background that reminded me of an ugly tie dye shirt. I hated it. I painted on it and hated it. For the first five hours of painting I hated it until I started to see what was happening- it started to have this really amazing 3D effect, soft and diffused in the background, sharp and graphic in the foreground. It’s something I’m still exploring but from that first sprayed piece I knew I had finally found what I was looking for, my signature style. Now each painting starts that way and for the first five hours it is hated and ugly. It’s like my Nature graffiti, maybe I can put it on a big wall mural style some day.

C: You’ve recently been hit with a few health struggles. What all is going on, and how can people help out? 

PR: Yeah, I’ve had chronic pain for years and it has slowly just gotten worse so much so that the past two months have seen me in the ER more times than I’d ever care to be. After many tests and misdiagnosis the doctors finally see cysts on both ovaries and since it’s been an ongoing source of extreme pain, nausea and vomiting I’m fairly certain a surgery is going to be needed. I’m uninsured and a struggling freelance artist so this comes as a huge blow to me. Having to miss a week of work because I have to go to the ER every month is just not an option and I won’t even mention the outrageous medical bills ($830 for a 3 minute ambulance ride!) So if anyone would like to help out I started a GoFundMe page for donations, you can find it here http://www.gofundme.com/2im5r0

The outpouring of help has been amazing and gives me hope that I can face this ailment and get through it, I have an army of awesome souls behind me!

C: What is up next for you? 

PR: I’m in the middle of getting work ready for my first solo show at Baylor Health Science Library at the end of May and preparing for a big joint show at WAAS Gallery with Neil Matthiessen in July. These require a lot of new paintings so I’m hustling to make it happen. I will need at least over 25 new works and time is ticking! It’s a lot of stress but it’s also a lot of fun, I’m doing what I love to do- painting! I usually have about 3 good weeks in the month before I start getting ill,  so I try to paint as much as humanly possible in a day, it’s amazing therapy. Every day painting is a great day.

The weirdest, strangest, and most violent interaction, in my opinion, is the interaction between two people in love. This is well supported by any art house or foreign film where either one or both (or three, or four, or six, if the subject matter is polyamorous, a staple of foreign cinema, no?) exhibit traits not too uncommon to serial killers. The result is an inverse of the romantic comedy. Rather than leaving one feeling warm and fuzzy, one leaves devoid a soul.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (“Lovers On A Bridge”)(1991) is an exercise of that violent interaction. Center to the story is Michele and Alex. Michele, a recent vagabond, wanders Paris sketching people and objects as her vision slowly deteriorates. Alex is a vagrant dependent on downers to help him sleep through the night on Pont-Neuf, a bridge in Paris that is going through reconstruction. They meet one night as Alex returns to the bridge to discover Michele in his sleeping spot. He is immediately enamored, and thus begins a relationship of codependency: Alex assists Michele walking through the streets of Paris and Michele assists Alex by providing companionship through the night. During the film, baggage is revealed that neither is aware of: Alex confronts a Cellist, who spurned Michele as a lover in the past, and threatens him to leave the station before Michele finds the Cellist (who Alex thinks Michele is still in love with), only for Michele to find the Cellist and kill him at his residence.

The relationship operates in the same condition as the bridge, strained, decayed, and held together by its own collapsing structure. So too, these damaged human beings collapse on each other, supporting their ruinous lives, but only barely. Between slow moving scenes of deep elation for each other (drunkenly dancing on Pont-Neuf as fireworks exploded in the background in celebration of the French Centennial, running naked, silhouetted, through a beach as Michele grabs Alex’s erection and runs) are moments of physical violence towards others and at each other.

A grueling display of pleasure and pain, Les Amants works slowly from one extreme of love to the other and back again.

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (“Lovers On A Bridge”)(1991) is available through Netflix.

]]> http://compositearts.com/blog/review-les-amants-du-pont-neuf-1991/feed/ 0 http://compositearts.com/blog/zachs-top-albums-of-2012/ http://compositearts.com/blog/zachs-top-albums-of-2012/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2013 20:57:30 +0000 zachclark http://compositearts.com/?p=1117

2. Sea Wolf -  Old World Romance

3. Field Report -  Field Report

4. Happy Particles -  Under Sleeping Waves

5. Lord Huron -  Lonesome Dreams

6. Beach House -  Bloom

7. A Boy and His Kite -  A Boy and His Kite

8. Carly Rae Jepsen -  Kiss (Deluxe)

9. Such Gold -  Misadventures

10. John K. Samson -  Provincial

11. Now, Now -  Threads

12. The Hives -  Lex Hives

13. Jens Lekman -  I Know What Love Isn’t

14. Further Seems Forever -  Penny Black

15. Murder By Death -  Bitter Drink, Bitter Moon

16. Freelance Whales -  Diluvia

17. Japandroids -  Celebration Rock

18. Converge -  All We Love We Leave Behind [Deluxe Edition]

19. Good Old War -  Come Back As Rain

20. mewithoutYou -  Ten Stories

21. Stars -  The North

22. FIDLAR -  Don’t Try – EP

23. Delta Spirit -  Delta Spirit

24. The Lumineers -  The Lumineers

25. Milo Greene -  Milo Greene

26. Eight And A Half -  Eight and a Half

27. Oddisee -  People Hear What They See

28. The Soft Pack -  Strapped

29. TALLHART -  Bloodlines

30. Punch Brothers -  Who’s Feeling Young Now?

31. Hey Rosetta! -  A Cup of Kindness Yet

So… in honor of that:

http://bomomo.com/

Go interact!

Quick update! More great art from Erik Peterson (No. 4 Doppelganger) with Happy Collaborationists! Square Dance, a choreographed dance between two forklifts, was at Daley Plaza last Friday.

Video Here, shot by us:

Square Dance by Erik Peterson

This is a part of the larger series of works under the title Industry of the Ordinary. Their next performance is next Friday, November 9 at 5:30pm at the Chicago Cultural Center, in the Claudia Cassidy Theater. There will be a screening of Pete & Dyl: The Documentary, by Composite artist Peter Frederiksen (No. 2 The Gaze) as part of Pete and Dyl, with Dylan Jones and James Kozar. Please go check it out!

Images from Square Dance:

A couple weeks ago, I ventured down to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA) to watch a screening of On Our Way to Tomorrow and conversation with one of our artists, Kirsten Leenaars (No. 3 Kith and Kin). Her video series is a thirteen episode fictional narrative focusing on the ‘real life drama’ of an art museum, presented as a soap opera. As part of the MCA exhibition Without You I am Nothing—which ran in 2010-2011, and where the works of art are meant to be interacted with—the creative process of Kirsten’s filming became entwined with the staff and visitors of the museum.

The main characters are the staff of the museum, each filling their actual role, but put on a persona and ambitions that (may or may not) be true to their personality. But like any good soap opera, there also is some extra spice, such as the manipulative ghost of the museum, a bathroom janitor/fortune teller, murder, and unexpected twists and romances. Yet this all takes place inside of a museum exhibit, so all ambitions and arguments are placed in that context. For example, two curators argue between themselves as one person’s exhibit got loud with applause after a performance, interrupting a gallery talk that the other curator had been giving. They then get into an argument about what kind of art and art viewing is better, performative and interactive, or quiet and introspective.

Overall the series is very tongue in cheek, poking fun at (and at the same time showing admiration for) both the genre of the soap opera and the museum as an institution. The soap opera was never scripted beyond a general guideline of what the conversation should be about, leaving the participants, both staff and museum goers, to shape the outcome of the work itself. When Kirsten was asked if the process of making the film or the final product was her main goal of the work, she replied that the end film was always her goal, and the interactive form of the filming was new to her, but she plans to continue making work in a similar vein.

I am glad to share this work with you, Composite readers, as we gear up for our winter issue, Interact. How would you define interactive artwork? Is it merely an object you can touch or walk upon, or a work that you directly influence the end result of?

Kirsten’s website: http://kirstenleenaars.wordpress.com/

On Our Way to Tomorrow, Episode 1 (the whole series can be gotten to through here): http://vimeo.com/23788475

Kirsten’s work in Kith and Kin: http://compositearts.com/kith-kin/

Family Swim, attempts to synchronize, the actual video for what is talked about in Kith and Kin: http://vimeo.com/48275035

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

-Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak (27 January 1904)

Reading a Junot Diaz book, you need to set aside some time. This isn’t something to take lightly, this is a commitment. Put down the book from time to time, take a deep breath, walk around to ground yourself. This is only going to get heavier. Lumps will form in your throat, a panic attack or two might arise, but in the end, however, it is incredibly worth it.

This Is How You Lose Her is Junot Diaz’s newest work that is filled with his familiar underpinnings of Dominican identity, masculinity, fatherlessness, and a tang of bittersweetness. Lose Her follows Yunior from impoverished childhood through adulthood as he moves from comic books to juggling women which leads to the loss of someone incredibly special that leaves him clawing at her ephemeral image through other women. In between, vignettes of Dominican life in America illustrates racism, desperation, isolation, and longing for something meaningful, highlighting Yunior’s internal as well as external battle.

Yunior is an incredibly flawed, but redeemable, man. There is an earnest need for a connection with someone that when it is within arms reach, like clockwork, he stumbles upon himself only to repeat the devastating ritual again. And again. And again. A cheater’s heart looking for love. While one is tempted to judge, empathy trumps finger wagging and one cannot help but feel for Yunior as he struggles to unbury himself from the graves he has dug himself in.

Diaz is no amateur to building damn good characters or stories. Diaz’s previous endeavor The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and in 2012 he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”

This Is How You Lose Her is available in print and Kindle editions through Amazon.com.

Zach talked to Brandon Proff (No 9. Function) about his work, beer, and Denver.  Here’s what he had to say.

Composite Arts: Graphic design is such a loose term these days. In it’s most academic terms, it’s visual communication, but in practical terms it’s grid design, it’s type layout for printed informational sources, it’s navigation mapping and coding for interactive mediums. Your most recent collection of your work, featured in Composite No 9 Function, didn’t contain any information in language form to communicate relying more on digital photo minipulation. As a designer of album packaging, apparel, and even a day job in front end web interface design, you appreciate the difficulty of wearing multiple hats accuratly. Where do you see your place in Graphic Design and where do you see it going forward? Is one general approach and classification a viable option?

Brandon Proff: I think that it all depends what’s in the cards person to person. Experience leads me to believe that being viable requires being able to evolve. I have always been more of a kind-of-good-at-a-bunch-of-things than a really-good-at-one-thing-kind-of-guy. As the years have gone by I maybe regret not focusing more on a specific medium or technique, but I am happy with all the work I have put in at this point. We are our harshest critics after all.

One unforeseen result of my schizophrenic portfolio is that I think if I want to take my career in another more specific direction that I have many good starting points. Overall though, I would like to wind back on the volume of work I do and only take on projects I am really excited and inspired by. It’s happening more and more.

CO: Due to your past career paths, much of your design portfolio is dedicated to designing for the music industry via apparel and packaging. Obviously this type of work is artistic and has aesthetic merit, but often there is a goal to set a mood, almost creating a brand. How do you approach the task of creating a product counter part to an existing creative endeavor? Once completed, how do you think this work should be approached in relation to traditional art vernacular

BP: Most of the work I’ve done album wise, the band or artist was interested in doing something completely different, so I more or less had a blank canvas to work with. The nice thing about the music/art paradigm is that if you are the next artist in line to get to work with a band, you don’t really need to reference the previous artist’s work to make your own. In instances where you are continuing the relationship with the band on a new project, your mark on their brand is already there so you can work with that style or familiarity as much as you’d like and that incorporation can really help the cohesiveness of it all.

I tend to not really discuss graphic design in music with traditional art vernacular. Part of that might be out of not having very high regard for most art and design in music, but also that it serves a different purpose. Of course an album cover or a movie poster can be discussed in artistic terms because whoever made them was hoping to elicit an emotional response, and that is what most art hopes to accomplish. Everything in its place.

CO: Aside from your design work, you have your hand in  other pots, including a quite large kettle; what is Our Mutual Friend?

BP: Our Mutual Friend is a little brewery that some friends and I started in Denver. Most breweries order their ingredients (malted grain, hops, yeast) from a distributor and call it good. It’s pretty much the only way breweries do things because of the volumes they need and most of them make incredible beers with it so I have no complaints. Our goal is to try and get as many of the processes between the plants in the fields and the beer in your glass happening in house. We buy raw grain and hope to eventually be malting it all on site. We are currently roasting all the grain in our beers and have seven proprietary malted barley and wheat roasts we do ourselves.

Eventually down the road we would love to have a farm in Colorado that is growing the grain and hops we use. A guy can dream! For now we would like to accomplish sourcing all our ingredients in Colorado to keep our footprint as small as possible.

CO: Denver is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. It has been a beer Mecca for decades, and it is now starting to turn heads within its culinary scene.  There constantly seems to be another hit band coming out of the Mile High City. What’s it like to be beginning a new endeavor like Our Mutual Friend now in a place like Denver?

BP: It keeps us on our toes for sure. Part of this big boom in breweries in Denver (22 at last count) is that there are a lot of amazing people making great beer everywhere you turn. I think that there is still market share for little guys like us, but you have to be sure your product is perfect so that people WANT to support you. It’s easy to be mediocre in a small town where you’re the only one offering a product or service. Denver requires you to prove yourself and I love that challenge. Having fun, building a community, being relevant are all things we strive to do.

CO: With the boom Denver is experiencing, it can become overwhelming. If a Composite reader was to plan a long weekend in Denver, what must they do and see?

BP: The Clyfford Still Museum is a new personal favorite. I also recommend the 2up for some awesome 80′s arcade game action. As far as food goes, we have a Momofuku inspired restaurant called Uncle that is really great and Euclid Hall has my favorite menu item in town (the Bone Marrow). I definitely recommend Our Mutual Friend for beer but also check out TRVE brewing, River North brewing, and HogsHead brewing for many different styles of fantastic beer. Denver is a very walkable city but we also have rental bikes all over town if that’s your thing.

CO: Any other things you want to mention?

BP: Thanks for having me on here! If anyone has any more questions for me, I can be emailed at brandon@omfmb.com