November 2023 - Studio Reflection

Starting the slow descent into winter.

November somehow feels like it was both 10 seconds, and several months long. I’ve felt off-center all month, struggling to connect to my art practice, feeling like my writing is coming from a place that isn’t inauthentic, but not what I want to be writing about. A lot of this month has been spent on job-seeking, a pursuit that often feels defeating, like a pit into which my time and energy gets sucked into with no return. Trying to find something that both fits my skill set and my health needs is challenging-getting an email back to say that the application has been received is even harder. So, wish me luck!

Even with this airy, unrooted energy that has been in my life, I’ve been embracing play into my practice and really enjoying pushing things in my studio. I’ve been thinking about all of the things around art-making that I do-the Spotify playlists that I find such a pleasure in curating to have on while writing or making, the sources of inspiration that I’ve been finding myself tapping into (like watching Let’s Plays of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding again), and I find myself so excited by the infinite ways that art can manifest. 

For most of my life, I’ve seen my broad interest in all media types as a flaw. I have an eclectic set of skills and interests. I feel like I am only now beginning to find a groove into which my portfolio fits, however I also forget sometimes that I have such broad interests. I think it is definitely an easier time to find paid work in the current economic and cultural system we have where branding is king if you have a niche. When I was at college, the second half of my education was attempting to develop that niche. If there is one thing I struggle with in life it is self-definition.

Let me be a nebulous slime-mold! As I am writing this, I am realizing more and more that a lot of my own discomfort this month, life stresses and world-scale grief besides, has been this self-editing that often crops up in my work. I have a mean perfectionist streak, though it rarely actually manifests in perfection because of how twisted up I will get about a thing. While sometimes I embrace the playful parts of me that ask “but what if you fed your brain mri to an AI to make a 3d render,” there are equal, if not more times where I find a voice in my head telling me I shouldn’t explore something because it isn’t marketable, isn’t “worth” my time.

But we as artists need that playtime, that freedom to experiment. Granted, I notice that my mind often likes to wander into tangents to avoid more urgent work (I am wrapping up one book project and meandering around another book project), but maybe that’s just part of the process.

In winter I always find myself a little darker, drawn more to heavy music and black ink drawings, exploring the shadow-y parts of self and excavating a bit deeper. My work this month has been reflective of that. I loaded a recent brain MRI into After Effects to play around with it. I made a reel on Instagram pairing the animation with Trentemøller’s song “Sinus” and really appreciated the way that the dark drone and pulsing beat of the song paired with the MRI images. When I’m in MRIs I often close my eyes and imagine myself at some experimental noise show.