I am back-up. If something goes wrong, I can step in. I can drive, I can call the medic. I can listen, I can cajole, I can alert.
I cannot advise on chess. I do not enjoy playing. I know where all the pieces go but I am not engaged. However, I care for you. I know you want to do well at this game so I will do what I can to help. I can be quiet. Do any of those things contribute?
I observe. Tens of hundreds of players, mostly boys, some girls and others are here to play. It is a cerebral game. This is not a sport you dress up for. Our players look fine. Matching sweatshirts, most in whatever.
Downstairs, separate from this but in the same facility, a cheer, dance competition. Mostly girls, dressed in satin and shiny fabrics. I only see them from the outside window. There is practice, bits of preparatory performance. Dazzling.
A few chess members break out in spontaneous dance. Check this dazzle.
Mural made from sequins decorates the underpass where 2 homeless people sleep. I can’t stop thinking about these connections.
Dzuricsko has several recurring themes. These themes support various stories both remembered and invented. Some repeated images: rabbits, dinosaurs, furniture, and lab coats. Rabbits recall former students and friends. Dinosaurs remind the artist that she has been on earth for some time. Furniture evokes scenes and environments. What happens when the living room is imagined differently? Is there a place of importance? The work with lab coats derives not just from the daily quandary of what to wear, but the uniform of experimentation.
The security envelopes have been a current obsession. Materials have their own weight. Dzuricsko has collected envelopes from the finance office as well as her own mailings. Initially it was the variety of patterns that attracted. The pattern both hides and dresses up the inside personal information. It is a mode of protection. With each envelope acquired from Marmion, the artist considers the parents and guardians making this sacrifice with love and care to send their students here. The addresses are not included in the piece, (except for the art supply store invoice envelopes.)
The 2020 apron piece has crayon rubbings from linoleum plates Art Explorations was working on in class. Their images included food design which paired well with the old-fashioned apron motif.
This year some students have again collaborated with Dzuricsko, adding their own drawings to the envelopes. She is still considering how to tie these ideas together.
Drawing, printmaking, collage, ceramics, installations, photoshop, performance and even some video, have found their ways into Dzuricsko’s practice. The focus is frequently the medium addressed in Marmion classes. As a teacher at Marmion for over 20 years she is consistently inspired by her students.
Art history influences: Alice Neal (unflinching portraits), Joseph Beuys (the “everyone is an artist” conceptual artist.)
Other Influences: School of the Art Institute, my artists groups, colleagues, students, friends, and family.
Mom killed herself on Mother’s Day when I was 15. I attribute it to the lack of Mother’s Day acknowledgement from my siblings and I. Feeling that she didn’t mean anything, she exited.
We both felt abandonment. I am over this. I think.
II.
Other people’s memories.
The school has well over 350 different Nativity scenes donated from a monk’s brother and sister-in-law. The collection began with a gift to a loved teacher and then snowballed. The collection is not overly valuable. Mostly kitschy. And then there are the problematic pieces. The Native American set made in China speaking in cliches. And there are others.
No slights intended. These are family stories. I can almost see the child picking up the pieces and moving them around. Grouping the camels. Putting everyone in the house. Hiding the broken figures. Adding the star wars figures to the procession.
All tell the same story. Family love story.
My heart softens as I arrange the display.
III.
Tess remembers the prayer.
My friend of forty years in the hospital with brain tumors. Some weird aphasia that still allows her to speak coherently but breaks connections. Growing up Catholic, somehow she tries to bring forth the Mary prayer. The Mary prayer Dennis! He doesn’t know. I can help. A vision of mother of solace.
To the plant I bought at Home Depot. I am sorry. I know you needed more attention. Thank you for hanging in there.
To the geraniums, yes, I could water you more. Thank you for the color. And the fragrance. Fresh. But when I snap off those used flowers stalks, well, it seems painful. I am sorry if I hurt you.
To the Aldi salad mixes, I sometimes let you go to waste. I am embarrassed.
To the decorative grass. It was a bad idea. Sorry
To the plant not well painted. I am sorry. I may try again later. I will make sure I throw this one painting out.
Standard
Notes on mom painting
It was good to take oil paints out again. It is a luxury to paint.
It is also a pleasure to paint figures. Oh I will return to the bunnies, but I like this challenge.
The painting has an unfinished quality, but I believe it is done. It is from a photo from my baby book.
How did she find time to put that together? All five of us are wearing dresses she made with swiss dotted fabric, each in a different color. I could not possibly remember this, could I?
I suggested mother portraits to the MotherArt Revisited group. http://motherartrevisited.com/ I believe we will post them sometime soon. But this will probably be my contribution. So many of my art seems to be a Mom portrait. I found a single earring of hers and encased it in resin behind the Lost in Space TV box I painted. That worked too.
Acknowledge the difficulty for artists who are mothers to do it all, heck, acknowledge the many challenges for all of us. https://www.ebdzart.org/
Small private school. Girls in plaid skirts, boys in ties. 1970’s.
A teacher who I did not think was important was the most formative.
Mrs. Hull was really old. I mean like maybe 60’s or 70’s. She stood under 5 feet tall even with the platform shoes she wore. Her clothes included groovy pant suits and paisley bright patterns. She complemented outfits with oversize jewelry. Pouffy white hair. Oversized teeth. Big thick glasses with styling frames. She taught Music Appreciation.
We all knew she had a son who performed with Up with People. Up With People, matching outfits with Brady Bunch choreography. Am I remembering this wrong? I think they played for an early Superbowl. They may have even performed in our gym.
Was Music class a semester? Two days a week? Like I teach Art Appreciation now?
She ran the class from a well used notebook and a phonograph player, the kind that comes in a suit case.
She began all her classes the same way. “Music is magic for everyone.”
We wrote these notes down. There would be tests. Mrs. Hull would walk in and out through the rows, not really policing the class but giving hints to anyone who could not come up with the answers. Oh, it was probably more than hints.
There was classical music as well as the current stuff. We listened to Jesus Christ Superstar. “Tension and Release’ said Mrs. Hull. We listened to Jethro Tull. Aqualung.
We were in invited to bring in our favorite albums. It was painful to listen as Mrs Hull place the needle.
But you got cool cred if the music was appreciated.
Stop
Imaginary David Bowie: You’re writing this now because?
Me: I doubt everything, but maybe I share some of that joy too.
In my work email, notes on faith take up a lot of real estate.
Mostly I give them a cursory view.
It is often a window as to have the sender is doing. I can see who is having a rough day and maybe send a note back.
If it is from someone higher up in work, it takes a more didactic color.
The images and fonts of these messages get to me. One image has accompanied daily Lenten messages. It is austere, verticals and horizontals, black and white. An older figure is present with the rounded shoulders of age. No comfort here. Each time I open my mail I feel a chill looking at this picture. It is not that sometimes the words aren’t reassuring (sometimes they are) but seeing the image changes meaning.
Other emails encouraging faith are prayers featuring bright colors, cursive fonts, fast images from the top of a google search. Accessible they are. Dismiss-able mostly.
My apron images are on my desktop.
The apron is a garment of service.
The plate of cookies food prepared for you.
Apron prints, crayon rubbings on used security envelopes
F I V E is a critique group formed from the Lowres MFA 2018 class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Tyler Kirkholm, Jessica Mueller, Kris Shaedig, Laura Drey, and myself.
Kirkholm
The first piece you might notice as you come into the gallery looks like a rock. And it’s a rock on a single grid. The piece is hung so that it’s eye level. Well, it’s eye level for me not necessarily so for my taller students. It looks like pink granite, but surprise! This is made out of clay. If you look in the back, you’ll see that it is hollow.
The way it is displayed references traditional trompe l’oeil paintings. It fools you into thinking it is something it is not. If it were placed on the ground, you might pass by and consider it a misplaced piece of landscaping. But in hanging it in this vertical manner gives it a different life. Is it a lie or an homage?
Mueller
Continuing to the left is a case with three small ceramics and six drawings. Three terra cotta pieces are each about the size of an orange. They reside in a glass case. The one on the top shelf has roots. It resembles a sea creature out of its environment. I am reminded of the squid at the Smithsonian. Just beneath the shelf are two more pieces, one is a ceramic cup or a cap. Is this a cap for a tooth that has been enlarged for demonstration purposes?
The most terrifying piece is a screw type instrument. Looks like dental torture but the displayed documents tell us that this is a “second chance.” A second chance for a tooth or what?
The display looks like a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities.[1]
Schaedig
On the next grid are two fabric pieces. They are suspended on twigs. There is stitching and different fabrics one on top of the other. These fabric pieces are a natural extension of her painterly practice. Here she paints with materials that have lived a previous life. You can identify pieces of bed linens, aprons, and kitchen cloths. These are remnants of the fabrics the family has been using for years.
These hangings are compilations of white-on-white fabric with these little bits of color. She operates the same way an abstract painter does, playing tone on tone. And then on top of these fields of different color she draws with zigzaggy lines that crossed these fields of a fabric.
In this space one may contemplate the composition while considering the past life of the materials. Bits and pieces of family memories are presented for appreciation for composition as well as content.
Drey
Drey: “I use farming packaging materials to investigate the layered identity of my American experiences and my Mexican heritage. I juxtapose traditional techniques with contemporary technology to create assemblages where weaving and storytelling come together as a hybrid of symbolic and literal objects. I incorporate hand-weaving and sewing as small ways to pay tribute to those who came before me and worked with the material under very different circumstances.”[2] Drey’s piece here is a weaving comprised of red twist ties. Like Schaedig’s fabric hangings, meaning and material merge in an aesthetically striking experience.
Dzuricsko
Security Wear Panels. Four panels of paper works are up next. Completed during a Marmion printmaking session, students and teacher alike considered the Benedictine value of hospitality through imagery. I chose used security envelopes as a meaningful substrate. These were used envelopes, some from the school finance office, some from bills at home are in the mix. Some may have been used for tuition payments (names have been removed) some may have contained art supply invoices. Most were printed the image of an old-fashioned apron with hands offering a plate of cookies. The backs of some of the prints, feature crayon rubbings of student linoleum plates from February and March of last year (before Marmion went remote due to the pandemic.) They are tied together like a quilt with yellow ribbon.
Work done in art class is affected by the artists in the class through conversations and physical art pieces. My work has been improved by the interactions with my critique. In the same way my work and my students work inform and support each other.
The classroom interactions have changed due to the pandemic, but it is my hope to foster more collaborations and interactions with my socially distant students. Theater is also operating in a differently this year. Performers in the recent school radio play exaggerated inflections for delivery of content. The dialogue required effort. Likewise, this communication used to advance art and thought requires effort. The results are worth it.
January 6 was a long day. Hard to break from the news. Mother Art Revisited On Tyranny project was helpful in parsing out the current condition of American democracy.
I had written 2 letters to Vice President Pence. I thought perhaps his need to appear moral might be the angle I could work with. Pence could ask Trump to step down. Trump could frame this departure in any number of ways. Maybe he could retire to become a golf pro. He could have a good time manipulating his scores and handicap – right? He could rig the golf courses.
So much grief over the losses Covid has afflicted. More grief in the wounds our democracy has suffered.
Fever dream: herd of mini therapy horses in their little converse tennies march down Pennsylvania Ave towards the protestors. Long flowy manes, little snortie sounds.
In the face of such majesty and impossibility, all turn and marvel at the sight. Everyone turns and trots home.
Except the Senate and the House who respect the public’s wishes and declare Biden president elect.
Imaginary David Bowie: well….this is a different space
E: I know. This I question do I even show this to anyone?
IDB: You just did. Make the thing that you want to make. In a conversation with J Jenkins he said the same thing. He makes the things that interest him.
E: It really doesn’t have to matter to anyone else.
ebdzart 