The gaze is not merely an act of observation; it is a way of inhabiting the world. My personal history has been profoundly marked by a passion that predates my academic formation in psychology and my current path towards a clinical master’s degree: an uninterrupted idyll with cinema and photography. I recall with particular affection my years immersed in the industry, traversing both the technical rigour behind the camera and the purest form of expression in front of it. Those sessions, where I learned to explore and project my own sensuality, resulted in images that I hold as treasures and which today, with the perspective of time, I attempt to revisit and re-signify. I preserve the beauty of those moments, not merely as static memories, but as the evidence of a learning process that defined me.
My technical training in photography, guided by French masters, was a transformative experience that transcended the academic. That encounter with light and composition not only provided me with technical tools but also educated my eye to find beauty in nuances and in the most refined aesthetics. It was during that cultural and artistic exchange that I understood that sensuality is not something to be improvised, but a language that is cultivated with elegance and self-knowledge. Through that lens, educated over many years, I learned to capture the essence of my surroundings, moving between modelling and direction with the conviction that art is a necessary refuge.
Throughout my trajectory, I was a curious nomad, traversing fascinating places and meeting people who left an indelible mark on my sensibility. However, there comes a point in existence when the soul demands new horizons and the vocation for psychology emerges as an unwavering call towards service and human understanding. Even so, I do not rule out returning to pose before the lens; I shall do so from the maturity of one who no longer seeks validation, but expression. I firmly believe in the power of the image to tell stories that challenge prejudices.
It is precisely for this reason that this blog has a purpose that transcends the aesthetic. My commitment is to reclaim the identity of transgender women, distancing it from the vulgar or reductionist narratives that are often imposed upon us. My commitment is to good taste, to polished aesthetics, and to the normality of being simply a woman who works on her own reconstruction, in her soul and in her intellect. We do not seek exhibitionism; we seek, like any other human being, respect, recognition, and the right to be valued for our essence. Beauty, music, photography, and my clinical work are, together, the manifesto that we are complex, beautiful beings, deserving of occupying our place in the world with total dignity.
It is inevitable to note how, in digital spaces such as Tumblr, the representation of many transgender women is reduced to an exhibition that is a far cry from my vision and what this blog seeks to construct. I observe with bewilderment how some opt for an exposure that objectifies us, turning us into mere sexual elements for the consumption of others, a dynamic with which I cannot agree. Such publications, which verge on the vulgar, are not only alien to my values, but they cause me deep discomfort. I believe that by stripping us of our humanity to offer us as an object of exhibition, all efforts to be perceived as integral women—whose beauty and dignity reside in our complexity, in our history, and in the elegance with which we decide to present ourselves to the world—are undermined.
*The Lesbian Herstory Archives has intern positions available
for Archives, Library and Information Science Students for Fall/Winter 2024*
Interns will be asked to split their time on and off site, working a
minimum of 10 hours each week. Iterns will be asked to mask when working in
close proximity to others.
Project will be assigned according to intern skill sets and LHA's project
needs.
*Projects*
- *Imaging, Metadata, Rehousing, Processing*: Music (Legacy Formats),
Special Collections, Periodicals, Unpublished Papers, Video Documentation
*Requirements:*
- Completion of first semester core courses
- Interest in best practices in archival processing, metadata development,
digital libraries and access services
- Demonstrated interest in lesbian history and activism
- Comfort working with archival materials of a sexual nature.
- Ability to work remotely, independently and maintain regular
communication via gchat, email and attend weekly virtual meetings.
*Prefered Skills:*
Experience with Microsoft Office 365 , Excel, Google Suite or Zoho;
Airtable, Omeka (Training can be provided)
*Application Instructions*
Applications must be sent to* [email protected]
<[email protected]>* and must include a *Resume* and *Cover
Letter* demonstrating
your interest in lesbian studies and archival practices. *One document
combined as a PDF*. Applications that do not meet these requirements will
not be reviewed.
*About The Lesbian Herstory Archives*
All-volunteer-run since its inception in 1974, The Lesbian Herstory
Archives is home to the world's oldest and largest collection of archival,
bibliographic and multimedia materials by and about the diverse lesbian
experience. LHA is 501(c)3 , non-profit educational organization with no
paid staff and no local or federal government support.
We rely solely upon individual donations and private foundation support. We
offer research assistance to academics, artists, filmmakers, authors,
individuals and classes. During non-pandemic times, we also provide tours,
exhibits, in-house events and a semester-long Lesbian Studies course.
We look forward to receiving your applications.
Finding the tomb of an ancient king full of golden artifacts, weapons and elaborate clothing seems like any archaeologist’s fantasy. But searching for them, Gino Caspari can tell you, is incredibly tedious.
Dr. Caspari, a research archaeologist with the Swiss National Science Foundation, studies the ancient Scythians, a nomadic culture whose horse-riding warriors terrorized the plains of Asia 3,000 years ago. The tombs of Scythian royalty contained much of the fabulous wealth they had looted from their neighbors. From the moment the bodies were interred, these tombs were popular targets for robbers; Dr. Caspari estimates that more than 90 percent of them have been destroyed.
He suspects that thousands of tombs are spread across the Eurasian steppes, which extend for millions of square miles. He had spent hours mapping burials using Google Earth images of territory in what is now Russia, Mongolia and Western China’s Xinjiang province. “It’s essentially a stupid task,” Dr. Caspari said. “And that’s not what a well-educated scholar should be doing.”
As it turned out, a neighbor of Dr. Caspari’s in the International House, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, had a solution. The neighbor, Pablo Crespo, at the time a graduate student in economics at City University of New York who was working with artificial intelligence to estimate volatility in commodity prices, told Dr. Caspari that what he needed was a convolutional neural network to search his satellite images for him. The two bonded over a shared academic philosophy, of making their work openly available for the benefit of the greater scholarly community, and a love of heavy metal music. Over beers in the International House bar, they began a collaboration that put them at the forefront of a new type of archaeological analysis.
A convolutional neural network, or C.N.N., is a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to analyze information that can be processed as a grid; it is especially well suited to analyzing photographs and other images. The network sees an image as a grid of pixels. The C.N.N. that Dr. Crespo designed starts by giving each pixel a rating based on how red it is, then another for green and for blue. After rating each pixel according to a variety of additional parameters, the network begins to analyze small groups of pixels, then successively larger ones, looking for matches or near-matches to the data it has been trained to spot.
Working in their spare time, the two researchers ran 1,212 satellite images through the network for months, asking it to look for circular stone tombs and to overlook other circular, tomblike things such as piles of construction debris and irrigation ponds.
At first they worked with images that spanned roughly 2,000 square miles. They used three-quarters of the imagery to train the network to understand what a Scythian tomb looks like, correcting the system when it missed a known tomb or highlighted a nonexistent one. They used the rest of the imagery to test the system. The network correctly identified known tombs 98 percent of the time.
Creating the network was simple, Dr. Crespo said. He wrote it in less than a month using the programming language Python and at no cost, not including the price of the beers. Dr. Caspari hopes that their creation will give archaeologists a way to find new tombs and to identify important sites so that they can be protected from looters.
Other convolutional neural networks are beginning to automate a variety of repetitive tasks that are usually foisted on to graduate students. And they are opening new windows on to the past. Some of the jobs that these networks are inheriting include classifying pottery fragments, locating shipwrecks in sonar images and finding human bones that are for sale, illegally, on the internet.
“Netflix is using this kind of technique to show you recommendations,” Dr. Crespo, now a senior data scientist for Etsy, said. “Why shouldn’t we use it for something like saving human history?”
Gabriele Gattiglia and Francesca Anichini, both archaeologists at the University of Pisa in Italy, excavate Roman Empire-era sites, which entails analyzing thousands of broken bits of pottery. In Roman culture nearly every type of container, including cooking vessels and the amphoras used for shipping goods around the Mediterranean, was made of clay, so pottery analysis is essential for understanding Roman life.
The task involves comparing pottery sherds to pictures in printed catalogs. Dr. Gattiglia and Dr. Anichini estimate that only 20 percent of their time is spent excavating sites; the rest is spent analyzing pottery, a job for which they are not paid. “We started dreaming about some magic tool to recognize pottery on an excavation,” Dr. Gattiglia said.
That dream became the ArchAIDE project, a digital tool that will allow archaeologists to photograph a piece of pottery in the field and have it identified by convolutional neural networks. The project, which received financing from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, now involves researchers from across Europe, as well as a team of computer scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel who designed the C.N.N.s.
The project involved digitizing many of the paper catalogs and using them to train a neural network to recognize different types of pottery vessels. A second network was trained to recognize the profiles of pottery sherds. So far, ArchAIDE can identify only a few specific pottery types, but as more researchers add their collections to the database the number of types is expected to grow.
“I dream of a catalog of all types of ceramics,” Dr. Anichini said. “I don’t know if it is possible to complete in this lifetime.”
Saving time is one of the biggest advantages of using convolutional neural networks. In marine archaeology, ship time is expensive, and divers cannot spend too much time underwater without risking serious pressure-related injuries. Chris Clark, an engineer at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., is addressing both problems by using an underwater robot to make sonar scans of the seafloor, then using a convolutional neural network to search the images for shipwrecks and other sites. In recent years he has been working with Timmy Gambin, an archaeologist at the University of Malta, to search the floor of the Mediterranean Sea around the island of Malta.
Their system got off to a rough start: On one of its first voyages, they ran their robot into a shipwreck and had to send a diver down to retrieve it. Things improved from there. In 2017, the network identified what turned out to be the wreck of a World War II-era dive bomber off the coast of Malta. Dr. Clark and Dr. Gambin are now working on another site that was identified by the network, but did not want to discuss the details until the research has gone through peer-review.
Shawn Graham, a professor of digital humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, uses a convolutional neural network called Inception 3.0, designed by Google, to search the internet for images related to the buying and selling of human bones. The United States and many other countries have laws requiring that human bones held in museum collections be returned to their descendants. But there are also bones being held by people who have skirted these laws. Dr. Graham said he had even seen online videos of people digging up graves to feed this market.
“These folks who are being bought and sold never consented to this,” Dr. Graham said. “This does continued violence to the communities from which these ancestors have been removed. As archaeologists, we should be trying to stop this.”
He made some alterations to Inception 3.0 so that it could recognize photographs of human bones. The system had already been trained to recognize objects in millions of photographs, but none of those objects were bones; he has since trained his version on more than 80,000 images of human bones. He is now working with a group called Countering Crime Online, which is using neural networks to track down images related to the illegal ivory trade and sex trafficking.
Dr. Crespo and Dr. Caspari said that the social sciences and humanities could benefit by incorporating the tools of information technology into their work. Their convolutional neural network was easy to use and freely available for anyone to modify to suit their own research needs. In the end, they said, scientific advances come down to two things.
“Innovation really happens at the intersections of established fields,” Dr. Caspari said. Dr. Crespo added: “Have a beer with your neighbor every once in a while.”
Exploding Fashion unpacks the role of innovative pattern-cutting in key examples of 20th-century design. This book 'explodes' key dress designs by five game-changing fashion designers held in the world's leading dress collections, and reverse-engineers them to understand how they were made and once moved on the body. It brings traditional ways of making into dialogue with new ways of visualising, illuminating haute couture and prêt-a-porter methods for a visually-driven, digital age.
The project ‘explodes’ the mystique of the fashion design process in two ways. Firstly, it deconstructs the myth of the designer as sole creative genius by uncovering the intriguing role of the pattern cutter. Secondly, it reverse-engineers five historical designs by game-changing designers who were also innovative pattern cutters, digitally reanimating museum objects as moving images which visually narrate how these things were once made, and how they moved on the body. The designers are Madeleine Vionnet (1912-1939), Charles James (1928-1978), Cristóbal Balenciaga (1936-1968), Halston (1957-1983) and Comme des Garçons (1973-ongoing)
The research team consists of professional pattern cutters, historians, curators, and digital visualisers. Situated at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, the project bridges fashion design practice and academic history and theory, and draws on its expertise in both areas to produce innovative fashion thinking that is unique to London’s status as a fashion capital that excels in design, education and curation.
Native American Series- Archives Student Perspective
By Dani Fulwiler (she/her/hers)
As an undergraduate, I decided that one of my majors (along with history and humanities) would be in First Nation Studies. It is through my work that I did and the mentors I gained from that program that I ended up at UW-Madison’s iSchool. My mentor who is alumni from UW-Madison himself told me about the TLAM (Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums) class and the student organization that the iSchool offered. He highly recommended that I apply to iSchool so I could continue the work I had started during my undergrad. So essentially one of the biggest reasons I ended up at UW-Madison’s iSchool is because of TLAM.
Image: Dani with Kristen Whiston, George Greendeer, and Josie Lee after participating in the Innovation in Cultural Preservation Partnerships panel
The TLAM class is offered every spring and focuses on service learning projects throughout the entire semester. Students are taught about Indigenous people, knowledge, and worldviews and how all of that works within libraries, archives, and museums. The project I worked on was with the Hoocąk Waaziija Haci Language Division to process their various forms of language materials and work with Ho-Chunk Elders to transcribe materials. The TLAM student org, which I became an officer of my second year, focused on maintaining the relationships built from the TLAM class service learning projects. Students would volunteer time to continue the work started. The org would also host events such as touring the mounds of Madison or attending lecture series by Indigneous speakers.
During my time at the iSchool I have been given various opportunities to continue the work I was doing during my undergrad. I took the TLAM class and was a part of the Hoocąk Waaziija Haci Language Division service learning project. My practicum through Curating Community Digital Collections was with the College of Menominee Nation S. Verna Fowler Academic Library where I wrote digital preservation policies and worked on metadata for various collections. From my time at Hoocąk Waaziija Haci Language Division I was asked to be a part of the Innovation in Cultural Preservation panel as part of the Our Shared Future initiative at UW-Madison. Lastly, I was fully funded to attend the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) conference in Temecula, California.
Image: Sign for the library at College of Menominee Nation main campus
The panel that I was in was a part of a series that the University offered in conjunction with putting up the “Our Shared Future” plaque and displaying it throughout campus to acknowledge the atrocities the University has committed against Ho-Chunk Nation. You can find more information about it here.
Image: Our Shared Future plaque on display at UW-Madison’s College Library
ATALM was the most amazing experience. At this conference, I was able to meet various professionals in the field, listen and learn from Indigenous speakers, and given current and real-life experiences and issues in the information field. By attending ATALM, I received training on Mukurtu by its creator. Mukurtu is a free online and open-source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage. It was so awesome to learn from all these amazing people.
Image: Dani at the ATALM conference receiving training on Mukurtu from the creator
My time at the University Archives as a processing assistant focused on Non-Native materials until the pandemic happened. While I worked from home I was given the Native American series project to work on. I got to explore all our collections to see what the Archives has and bring it to light. While I’m not ending my time at the University Archives the way I planned, I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to finish out working on something I’m passionate about. To say I’ll miss the archives is an understatement.
This is the final post in the continuing series where we explored the archive’s collection on Native Americans and considered how we, as an archive, can do better in preserving this history.
Photo Restoration Live Streams: A Pedagogical Practice
In celebration of World Digital Preservation Day 2020 on November 5, we’re sharing a series of posts by University of Pittsburgh Library System librarians and archivists that highlight their expertise and work to preserve the digital!
This post was written by Dan Kaple, Digital Creation Specialist for the University of Pittsburgh Library System
As a unit within Digital Scholarship Services, The Digital Stewardship Lab has a tradition of providing hands-on access to digitization tools for members of the University of Pittsburgh community. We provide patrons the necessary training and access to both 2D and 3D digitization tools as well as one-on-one project consultation. One of the more common projects we have assisted with is personal archiving. Patrons have used the Stewardship Lab to scan materials from their own personal family histories with the purpose of preserving these for future generations.
With the onset of COVID-19, the Stewardship Lab had to suspend its hands-on services and, as a result, find new ways of supporting and providing instruction for digital creation and digital preservation. One way we have done this is to produce a series of live stream events. These live streams present a project-oriented workspace with the intention of demystifying the digital creation tools and exposing users to the workflow and problem-solving processes.
One of our most popular segment topics is photo restoration. Given our instructional focus, we view photo restoration as a pedagogical activity and have found that it presents us with several opportunities. Working on photo restoration projects is a good way to show digital creation tools at work; to explore the thought process that goes into making specific problem-solving solutions, and from a digital preservation perspective, it provides an opportunity to explore photo restoration best practices. During live streams we discuss how to work non-destructively on our photographs in Photoshop. We demonstrate tips and tricks for fixing particularly difficult cases of image damage or staining. We also discuss more conceptual issues such as the ethical line between photo restoration and photo enhancement or manipulation.
Our goal is to get attendees excited and interested in restoration, leading to broader conversations about digital creation and digital preservation and how both are essential for academic research as well as historic and cultural conservation. We want attendees to consider how that photograph of Great Grandma can tell us a lot about broader issues concerning society, culture, and class during her lifetime; to recontextualize these family relics and imbue them with greater value. We want them to think about how digital preservation is relevant in their own lives. To start thinking about the long-term care of modern, born-digital materials, our social media feeds, and online repositories, so we can reevaluate them as the cultural relics of the future.
For all your writing projects set in the 19th century or inspired by it, to add detail and accuracy to your setting: my ever-expanding list of research. Keep in mind that not everything that’s on the internet is accurate, there are different opinions throughout the world of historical academics and the best research still is and always will be to go through the sources, but that’s hard, difficult and not everyone is a history student with access to archives and a massive library. So, here we go.
FASHION HISTORY
The Ultimate Fashion History Show by US-american Professor Amanda Halley, teaches culture, history and fashion. General recommendtion, she’s got the terms and background history to it all wonderfully explained, plus Make-Up and popular hairdos.
UFH 1830s-1860s
UFH 1870s-1890s
UFH Oscar Wilde and the Victorian dress reform
Karolina Żebrowska is a Polish fashion history YouTuber who sews her own dresses and really knows her fashion history.
19th century women’s silhouettes
A Regency ballroom outfit
Victorian Fashion is not what you think it is
Victorian photo editing for tinier waists in photography
Disgusting and creepy Victorian Fashion trends
Karolina’s corset collection
1851 women’s pants: Bloomer pants
This History-of-fashion tumblr blog as a ton of images from the Victoria-and-Albert museum in London and other sources for fashion history. If you need inspiration for clothes of various periods, here you go.
SOCIETY
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ courtcases from a court in London 1674-1913. This is basically just sources with additional articles to explain London culture through the centuries, including minorities. The article on homosexuality in the 18th and 19th century especially is spot-on.
https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ old maps from around the world! This enables you to put them on top of Google Maps to see how the area changed and fits into modern day urban and rural landscapes.
Townsends is a massive treasure chest of (mostly north-american) 18th entury lifestyle and cookery. They do have a load of 19th century receipes too, so go search for “19th century” on their channel and enjoy getting progressively hungrier while watching.
https://www.loc.gov/ is a site for American and British newspapers over the centuries digitalized. Don’t get me started on how important digitalization is for modern day historical academics, people.
Ballet:
the Royal Opera House on YouTube:
Ballet evolved, lots of 19th century ballet in this playlist. Also, this channel is a rabbit hole of beauty and grace.
Theater: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being earnest, played by the Vaudeville theatre in London. I cried tears of laughter through this, it’s absolute perfection, spot-on and so gaycoded (”Bunburying” = “burying the bun” = euphemism for anal sex in late Victorian London), it’s actually amazing.
Act I, Act II, Act III.
MEDICINE
Health and hygiene in the 19th century from the British Library
article by the BBC on germ theory
YouTube documentary channel Absolute History
three videos on deadly aspects of Victorian life:
Cleanliness
Food processing
Hidden killers in the victorian home
POLITICS, WAR, PEACE: EVENT HISTORY
YouTube Channel CrashCourse is generally one of the most extensive sources of education on the internet, they’ve got John and Hank Green, yes, THE John Green, and he’s teaching History and Literature while his brother does Biology and Chemistry. To link every possible aspect of the 19th century they’ve ever done would be way too much, so just click through their playlists, especially World History one and two, US History, European History and Literature to get started. There’s more on Chemistry, Theater, Movies, Sociology; you name it, they probably have it.
https://www.britishbattles.com/ has every goddamn British battle since the bloody Roman times up until Wolrd War 1. Yup. Including weaponry, armory and uniforms of every war party involved, so there’s fashion history here too, plus strategy maps of the individuals battles, context, battle descriptions, famous monarchs amd military men involved...
I could go on and on and on even without digging into Jstor.org and academia.edu, which are academic paper publication sites recognized by my university at least, so if any of y’all has as much energy and time as me to spend on historical research, these are really good points to start on any topic.
19th century politics had loads to do with rising nationalism and the begin of the idea of a national identity, for Germany especially; the industrialization brought communism and liberalism on the way, the Regency period (which I don’t have nearly as many research sources on as the Victorian period, which I’m aware of and working on), was dominated by the Napoleonic wars and thus Europe once again being re-organised. India was the far-away exotic pet-project of the British Empire, which is a whole nother history to dive into, tied to colonial history and imperialism. The list is endless, and I encourage you wholeheartedly to do your own individual research for whatever needs you have, or just the fun of it. Happy learning to you all while digging through the past!
From vibrant rainbows to familiar yet alien landscapes occupied by strange beings, LA based artist Rob Sato’s works are filled with creative energy in a loose minimalistic style. From watercolor, digital medium to acrylics and oil, Rob’s artworks and illustrations have been shown in various galleries from Giant Robot 2 to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, where recently his original paintings for a comic called 442 were exhibited. We’re excited to chat with Rob about his work, his various collaborations and what he’s got coming up for the rest of the year. Take the Leap!
Photographs courtesy of the artist.
Introduce yourself
Hello, my name is Rob Sato. I’m an artist, illustrator, and writer. Something people might not know about me is that I was a kid I was so fanatical about the Oakland A’s that when they lost in the World Series I threw a tantrum so big that I destroyed my bedroom and after that I felt so stupid I quit following baseball. Also, I’m told I have maybe one of the great poop stories of the world. It can only be related in person, so ask me about it sometime if we ever meet.
How would you describe your work and style?
Eclectic? Kaleidoscopic? I’ve never had a concise answer to this question. I tend not to pin myself down because I think if I did, I’d stop making things.
Art is my outlet for the cryptic and obscure as well as the gushing spillover of foolish idealism and wild fantasy. It’s the only place I’ve ever found where you can healthily play with unhealthy thoughts, where you can explore undefined emotions, things that lurk out in the corners of consciousness that may be embarrassing or uncontrollable.
I love to make entertainment and decorative work, things that tend to be obvious, that communicate very clearly and reveal all their cards, but I also love to make work that hides things, that actively resists easy understanding or recognition and risks being super personal or unrelatable and strange. This can make things difficult, especially in the ongoing deterioration of attention spans, but I can’t help but pursue things outside of a pop sensibility and logical thought. I have to be, much of the time, in mental wildernesses. It’s hard to get there, hard to be there, and hard to come back, but it keeps me going.
Tell us about how you really started getting into art, and how that turned into what you do now? Was it something you always intended to pursue?
I’ve drawn every single day for as long as I can remember. I never really thought about it. It just seems to be what I do. It’s how I have fun, how I solve problems, how I think. I’ve wanted to pursue other things like make movies or write books, but I always find myself drawing. Before I know it, it’s time for bed again.
When you are working on a new piece or upcoming exhibition or show? What’s your process like? What themes do you find yourself taking on?
I explode. I used to plan things in a very directed way, but lately I’ve just let my brains spill out everywhere. I make a ton of drawings and paintings, and try my best to be fearless and open. Most of it produces failure after failure, but it shows me what might be worth building on, plus many exciting surprises reveal themselves in the process. As a show nears I start seeing what things fit together, what needs to be edited out, and how it all might form a cohesive exhibition. Sometimes the subject matter is the glue that makes everything stick, other times it’s the aesthetics. Alongside the explosion I usually have 2 or 3 pieces going at any given time that I’ve had long term plans for. These pieces can take take months or even years.
Thematically I’m all over the place. War and peace, realism and surrealism, grim realities and escapism, sober observations and dumb jokes.
What are some of your go-to art making materials? Are there mediums you want to explore that you’ve yet to get your hands on?
I feel pretty comfortable with anything you can use to make a mark on a piece of paper. I’ve mainly used watercolor and various drawing tools for the past several years. I’m been having fun with acrylics and oils again, and I’ve started to play around with photography a little. I’ve had ideas for sculpture and film for years that I’d really like to finally get to. What I really want to get my hands on is more time.
Where do you find inspiration? What kind of things or people inspire what you make?
Watching someone pick their nose listening to headphones and singing softly to themselves in line at the grocery store. Just watching my cat live her weird life. Even though the final artwork may not really show it, these places are usually where my ideas originate. Art has also been a place where I can put memories that have some abstract need to be recorded.
I made this series of drawings called “Bad Hands”, which started out with me laughing at these dumb hands I was drawing with academically incorrect anatomy. Abandoning correctness felt so good. In the process it triggered a memory from High School. I had been forbidden from drawing in one of my classes, so I was contorting my hands into different shapes at my desk to amuse myself. There was a hysteria over gang activity in the school at the time and the teacher freaked out thinking I was throwing gang signs and I ended up getting sent to detention.
At detention I was talking with a friend and made fun of the teacher for her mistake. A kid who was in a gang overheard and then HE misunderstood and thought I was making fun of gangs or something. On my way home from school he and a couple dudes punched and kicked me for a bit while I tried and failed to explain. I think it’s funny.
So embedded in that piece is this tumbling series of misunderstandings, these multiple layers of hands being perceived as bad, speaking in an absurd language that communicates different things to different people. I know people aren’t going to see all those layers in the final piece, but that’s where it comes from and I hope it at least sparks some thoughts about talking with our hands, and where else can you follow this kind of train of thought except in art?
I get inspired by artists who seem to approach art as an intuitive discovery process rather than a pursuit of mastery, that play is one of the more important aspects of making things. My wife, Ako, has been a huge influence on me in this respect. She’s continuously playing with various materials around her at any given time and finding out what she can do with them. Everywhere she goes she abandons a nest made of fresh creations she’s manifested out of mud, string, packaging, plants, uneaten rice, her used drinking straw, lint and whatever else was within her reach
You’ve done a lot of collaborations with companies, museums and art galleries. Do you have a favorite collaboration, and what about the collaboration do you enjoy the most?
I’ve recently been collaborating with Tiny Splendor, an indie publisher and printer who have studios in LA and Oakland. It’s been really great working with them, Cynthia Navarro in LA on risographs, and with Max Stadnik, who runs the print shop in Oakland.
Max has been returning to lithography, my favorite traditional printing medium, and he printed a piece of mine inspired by mushrooms called “Growerings". It’s a full 5 color print, which means it took five separate plates and each print had to go through the press 5 times. It turned out more beautifully than I could have hoped for. Litho is a super difficult but also very fun process and the results are so rich.
I think I particularly love this collaboration because the image fits the medium so well, and the combination of the two elevates the final piece of work, When it works, the artwork and the print become more than just an image on a piece of paper. It’s more alive in some undefinable way.
Since we’re called Art School, we always ask the artists to give us their favorite art tip?
Never force the thing you think you want, you’ll probably miss out on the really interesting thing that’s happening. Also, don’t drink too much coffee. I have trouble taking both of these pieces of my own advice every day.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making stuff? How do you chill out?
I read and run. I love coffee and I love gossip and talking nonsense with friends. Also, I cannot stop watching Terrace House.
What is the last art show that you went to? What artists should folks keep an eye out for?
I recently went to the Velveteria in LA’s Chinatown, which is one man’s collection of paintings on velvet. A very entertaining and very fucked up experience. I went to a life drawing session at Subliminal Projects and got to draw surrounded by Chad Kouri’s fun abstracts. I’m actually typing this interview inside an art show right now.
I’m here at my wife, Ako Castuera’s, show “Soil” at the Weingart Gallery at Occidental College. We’re here feeding worms. She sculpted this beautiful ceramic vermiculture composter for the show. It’s a grand temple for worms. The show is an act of gratitude for the exchange we have with the soil which provides the clay for ceramics, and for the worms who turn decay into healthy earth to grow new life in.
She sculpted a menagerie of creatures out of the worm poop that also populate the show. Super fun. Speaking of Ako and Subliminal, her show there with Hellen Jo and Kris Chau this past December was one of those once-in-a-lifetime powerhouse gathering of forces. That may have been the best show I’ve ever seen.
What advice would you give someone thinking about following in your footsteps? What’s something you learned that you want to pass along to art making newbies.
Don’t listen to advice if it is extremely quotable. Pay no attention to it especially if it accompanies a photo of a famous artist and fits perfectly into an instagram post. If it’s easy to remember then it’s probably empty, crap inspiration. Those things are entertainments and not words to live by.
If you’re interested in making art you’ll keep making it. It takes day in, day out patience and exploration and mutation to discover how you really work, not some idea of how an artist works.
Sometimes it will be very hard, sometimes it will be so breathtakingly easy you think that your problems have been solved forever. Neither situation ever lasts, but cultivate and nurture your curiosity and what you love, and you’ll find ways to make it through the rough times and keep on making things one way or another.
Who are some of your favorite artists to follow and/or see in a show?
Lately I’ve been really enjoying the work of Nathaniel Russell whose work makes this great space where funny, grounded matter-of-factness and sweet nothingness sit comfortably together. His drawing also reminds me of Ben Shahn, my all-time favorite drawer.
I really like Amy Bennet’s oils, these intimate studies of isolation in suburbia where mundanity overlaps with quiet drama and melancholy. Her work obliquely reminds me of Edwin Ushiro’s work, though his stuff is the opposite of melancholic. He captures almost incidental but haunted moments from growing up in Hawaii and infuses them with warmth, and it’s in a style influenced in a super personal way by animation. It reminds me of Satoshi Kon’s movies in its well observed, slice-of-life elements. Edwin’s sketchbooks are a treasure too.
Esther Pearl Watson’s recent autobiographical paintings, Hellen Jo’s latest badass watercolors, Amber Wellman’s funny, playful oil paintings, and Matthew Palladino’s watercolors are also favorites.
Megan Whitmarsh’s work is some of my favorite to see in person. Her installation with Jade Gordon at the Hammer’s “Made In LA “ show was maybe the funnest work I’ve ever seen and interacted with. I went to see the Ai Wei Wei show at the Marciano Foundation, which I thought was impressive in scale and execution but still somehow lame, but I stumbled on a Mike Kelley installation/ video piece I’d never seen before in the upstairs collection and loved it so much, but I can’t remember the name of it at the moment.
It’s 2 videos shown side by side of the same guy wearing a cape singing almost the same song simultaneously, but each version has different words at different points. It’s a love song but one version is more bitter and mean and one is sickly sweet. Anyway, highly recommended!
What do you have coming up the rest of the year that you can share with us?
For just a few more days there’s a show up at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a bunch of my original paintings for a comic I illustrated about the 442, the Japanese American Army unit of World War II. Plus it has some personal work about Japanese American Incarceration and images from my family’s experience in the concentration camps. My grandfather was incarcerated in the Arkansas camps, and he was a soldier in the 442.
Next up, I’m in a slew of group shows all happening within a few weeks of each other this month. Poor scheduling on my part as usual, but it’s nice to be invited to so many. I just sent off my piece to the “Seeing Red” show curated by Jeff Hamada of the BOOOOOOOM art and culture blog. That show will be at Thinkspace in LA. Giant Robot has been kind enough to host another solo show for me in September.
I’ve been busy experimenting with some more 3d stuff that pushes the more narrative side of my work which I hope to show there. We’ll see how the experiments turn out. I’ve also been working on a ton of prints and ideas for books. This year I want to focus on working in print, making zines and comics, and writing a lot more.
