The Beginning
This project is situated in the psychology of habits that exists on two levels: instinct and subconscious. However, these habits are not ones purposefully formed for art making, but rather deeply engrained tendencies that inform the work. It is a causal relationship that began much earlier than the conscious iterations performed for this thesis project.
When I was a kid, my parents would return home from Costco with empty cardboard boxes. With these materials, packing tape, and adult-sized scissors, I would sit on the floor of our arts and crafts room and create. For hours I would allow the forms and surfaces in front of me to dictate a final product, if there even was to be one. It was play and it was art, but it was also the start of an individual procedure to be integrated into future artwork.
Similarly, I performed an outdoor version of this habitual process which had an emphasis on the temporary more than the indoor cardboard manipulations could embrace. Unless I brought inside the pinecones, sticks, leaves, rocks, weeds, and so forth, time and weather would dictate the course of my work. It was not until I moved houses in 2008 that I begin an expansion of the outdoor habit and dwindling of the indoor habit; a new labor of material gathering. I began building stick huts.
One of the first days of the stick hut, featuring Sheba. Progression #1
Progression #2
Progression #3
Progression #4
The Stick Hut
An estimated 12ft in diameter and 10ft in height, the stick form in these next images served as the catalyst for Semblance. A dead tree in the front yard left a withered and dried mark of earth on our property.
One day, I went outside, picked up a few small limbs, and shoved them in the place where the trunk diverged into two. Over time, I collected limbs heavier than I could reasonably manage and an abundance of smaller pieces all at once, from both my property and the neighboring residences. (I like to think my neighbors appreciated my one-woman tree limb-removal lawn service.) After 4 years, the structure reached a point where I could toss a pile of twigs at it and they would secure themselves as they fell. However, that does not mean I always left each piece as I initially placed them; often aesthetic adjustments were made.
(Stick Hut Update, 2019)
When I moved in Spring 2019, I unfortunately did not have the ability to transport my stick hut in its entirety to my new residence as I would have liked. However, I have immense gratitude for what that stick hut had given me and meant to me over the course of the years that I had worked on it. It felt only right that I should take it down by hand myself.
Inevitable demise.
Subconscious Elements
The subconscious elements of this habit, unlike the instinctual, are rooted in neurotic behaviors. Semblance is not a commentary on a diagnosed condition, but to ignore the related qualities would demean the habit’s performative significance. Among the cardboard series and stick series, there has always been an air of perfectionism and focus on detailed control. The cardboard creations would take hours to complete and I would not put them down until they were at a point of completion I felt comfortable with. I had adjusted cumbersome and oddly shaped limbs multiple times, changing positions, carefully weaving them into and out of the structure until I found their proper spot. A absolute need for a proper completion of each work and the obsessiveness of reaching that point repeat each time a new work begins.
In addition, over a decade of private art lessons each Saturday morning from the age of four-and-a-half to fifteen channelled this innate behavior and repetitive process, forming another layer of routine. I always say I was taught to break the rules before I truly understood them. An unspoken encouragement towards manipulating the formal art movements and techniques I learned about became an inlet of creativity in expression and a freedom to explore materials. Unique project prompts intertwined with more traditional, technical lessons and histories allowed for an appreciation for materiality and a contentment with following my own, artistic inclinations despite any purported norm.
Together, a foundation in art and a predetermined habit laid the groundwork for Semblance. This is not another iteration of the process I have described above – one that comes upon naturally and that I proceed with freely – but a reiteration. Having an awareness of the lead up to the work and being able to reflect on that provided an opportunity to immerse myself into a narrative pre-written into my genetic behavior that I mark-up over time.
Storm King Art Center, NY. Off the beaten path and down a very steep hill not too far from Andy Goldsworthy’s piece, Storm King Wall.
Earthworks
Placing Semblance into context means recognizing its place in an already established art movement, known as Earthworks, which put simply, is the “movement that uses natural landscape to create site-specific structures, art forms, and sculptures” (“Earth Art Movement, Artists and Major Works.” Edited by The Art Story Contributors). The bulk of my initial research investigated the work of a few Earthworks artists in particular, including Richard Long, Robert Simthson, and most of all, Andy Goldsworthy. I had to understand that Earthworks was an already established art movement I had been performing without a clear awareness of such, and throughout the examination of notable Earthwork artists came to understand the value of my work, exceeding a mere activity to fill time and alleviate boredom.
Further, while I do not plan or map out each piece I build but rather allow the growth of work to parallel its creation (much like Goldsworthy), I am not in search of a deeper comprehension of my environment. Going out into nature to accumulate materials is a convenience of space, substance, and opportunity among which to allow my habits to proceed organically. My more recent stick structures look very much like proper Earthworks, but they are more so byproducts of neurotic behavior. While Goldsworthy may go out into nature to better understand his relationship to it, I go out into nature to better understand my relationship with my own behavior; Semblance is a reflective process on the internalized.
My mom out in the distance, early on Day 1.
Working with Stephanie, end of Day 1.
Always on camera, mid day on Day 2.
Documentation
The making of the work itself with an awareness of surveillance and documentation forced me to constantly consider the decisions I made: which stick or limb worked for that moment in time, how I placed and weaved each piece, and when I felt the need for alterations. I had at least one camera focused on me at a time and carried on my person a recorder with a lavaliere microphone attached to my North Face jacket. (I never used that audio recording but I felt it important to capture for my own records nonetheless.) Some moments I had a keen and almost distracting awareness of this new type of eye fixated on my movement, but overtime I grew used to it and fell into a pattern of work, only sometimes being drawn out of such a familiar state. However, that was the purpose of this build: to consciously reiterate.
On the first day at Shark River Park, NJ, a close family friend, Stephanie Neuhaus, shadowed my progression with a steady-cam as I collected, added, adjusted, added, and collected again. Stephanie had been my art teacher who had given me those private art lessons every Saturday morning for over a decade starting from the age of four-and-a-half. Having her there felt full-circle. The second day only my mother was present, sitting in a lawn chair off in the distance, outside the frame of the camera. As the person who knows this artistic and neurotic behavior better than anyone else, she observed without judgement. The presence of both Stephanie and my mother was meaningful to me personally, but did not affect the outcome of Semblance’s process. This was a performative work, but not a performance piece.
Editing With Meaning
I had to capture footage and edit the final video piece without a loss of meaning. There were significant moments not necessarily caught on camera whose implications and residual impacts informed how those two days progressed. The most significant emotional matter came with the change overnight after my work on the first day. I went home that evening and sat with the work I thought I had completed, but I did not experience the satisfaction I had anticipated. Instead, a buzzing anxiety surfaced. I despised part of the structure I had built. I had to go back and change it – not for the sake of additional work, but to quell the discomfort of leaving the work as it was, even if no one else were ever to pass through that part of the park and see it again.
Residual anxiety & frustration caught on camera, Day 2.
Presentation
The video alone was not the final presented form of Semblance. This was not a video project. The gallery space at Field Colony in Hoboken (where our Visual Arts & Technology Class of 2018 thesis exhibition took place) had a small, 100sq ft room in the rear of the building in which I showcased Semblance.
The ten minute film played on a loop on a large monitor mounted on the wall, facing the small doorway. A couch and small coffee table sat across from the television. On the wall to the left of the television hung four chronological images of the stick hut from my former home. Against the wall to the right of the television, I built a miniature stick structure no taller than 3ft. Outside the doorway hung a single printed image of the finished structure featured in the video. I wanted the room to feel familiar, home-like. It was small, most of the walls were painted black, and only two lightbulbs lit the space, all providing a comfortable but ethereal quality.
The purpose of these additional elements was to further express the significance of reiteration in context. The still images of the stick huts presented side-by-side identified a past and continuing iteration of the process; the looped video presented the documented conscious reiteration; and the miniature stick structure provided a tangible and accessible iteration for the duration of the show; semblance in still imagery, semblance on film, semblance in presence.
There is more to the work than simply the physicality or the footage or the images alone. However, the purported search for understanding of nature, environment, balance, risk, patience, texture, or life must be removed from the scope of this piece. Semblance materializes the internalized, extending a dialogue of temporality.
Final Thoughts
The entirety of Semblance can be unpacked across of set of timelines. The structure within the video is finite, built within two days, it will eventually erode to nothing. Those arrangements of sticks had a beginning and end during their construction, and will one day have an absolute end. Likewise, the gallery presentation and miniature stick structure had a set beginning and end, an abridged lifespan from load in to load out. The video has a start and end, but will last due to its archival quality. The habit, though, is infinite and eternal. It is a psychological pattern that has and will always persist. There is no manner in which to trace its beginning or end outside of the fact that it is bound by lifespan only. As the stick huts I’ve built at home and in the park, the video, gallery exhibition, and all related elements exist among the habit, this art process of mine, as a whole, is cyclical. It had no start. It has no end.
Somewhere off the trail at Shark River Park, NJ. (3-18-18) | Current condition: unknown.
“Semblance: The outward appearance or apparent form of something, especially when the reality is different.”