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The Interrogation (the dream chorus) by Andrew Bucket

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The Interrogation (the dream chorus) by Andrew Bucket

Make yourself known to me.

I take fruit on the verge
of turning, just before the bugs come to taste. I come to see
the fish tanks bubble and glow, and filter in the window,
when the streetlamp is a metallic peach.

You were sleeping. Where were you?

I stand and
the headlights get closer, but I still watch, and
always too close before I run.

You try too hard. Say again your dream.

Finally, there is no more praying for a federal black boot
to explode the doorway. The song is a breech baby.
I am drawing a taut snake across her middle cello.

So, amidst it, when did the song play?

Her arm disappeared into a closet,
it reappeared with a record, she spun the groove along her fingernail.

Say a waking thing.

Like a globetrotter. Like a skeleton piloting a plane. I heard that
once. In a lecture hall. It was a laureate speaking.

Describe the song flood.

I remember boiled throat water, a new ocean
says Nevermind.
I was the famous babe with atlantis eyes, staring out
from the album cover. She was the peach skin bottom
where all the weight goes. A black mass waits too
for every part of us to sink. It eats there, by biding
at the bottom with her.

What then when you woke?

I read about sociopaths on the wiki. I phoned a friend
who said he got stood up. I wrote a letter to someone
sarcastically signed “Antoine.”

Did then you go back to her?

I built parking around my room, I got a skylight and a spotlight.
I hit the roof, and she came.

Was there a wanting dream?

I begged her to light the fuse, and wait it out—
to watch the color die in the air. Suspended there.
It was a bomb that could not land.

Where do you go in the light?

The Meridian. The trees of axis wag their bones—
they say Not Here, You Misheard Perdition for Permission.

What is there for you?

There are empty fountain beds, frozen this month,
There is a hollowed hooker bush. I visit Dante there,
to his statue, I come

To Say?

“My dream is done, my dream endures,
the memory flames, and I am the same”

More waking.

If without the bus, without a friend,
I will always choose to walk.

What yet cannot you forget of the dark?

Spun dead wax, on and on;
No opening bands, no ‘brands of tedium,’
just my set of songs.

Why have you come to me?

For an interrogation.

Can not you ask an expert?

I can trick them. I need a detective. An agent. A lawyer.

Then what am I to you?

A memory of someone to whom I confessed. For you I will again.

Then that I will be for you.

Or else I am sick.

What will you do with her in the light?

I cannot say. “till night,
we watch the divining dance of the fuse.”

Andrew Bucket lived as a student in the Jiminez Porter Writers House at UMD, was a Lannan Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and co-founded a popular weekly reading series that you’ve never heard of. He has been published in WYWS Magazine, Mad Alley Magazine, Stylus, That Far Down, and stinted as the advice columnist: Uncle Bucket. He started a viral-celebrity-death-rumor, and is currently launching a D.C. literary journal called The Folly.

The Interrogation (the dream chorus) by Andrew Bucket (c) Copyright Andrew Bucket; printed by permission of the author.

Artwork courtesy of Haley Dolan.

Tim Tate on the Washington Glass School

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Tim Tate on the Washington Glass School

In June 2011, we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Washington Glass School, and this year we reached the milestone of 4000 students since we opened. It seems almost impossible that so much time has gone by so quickly.

When I started out in the late 1980’s, the art world presented a hugely different terrain than it does today. In those days, there was one primary path. An emerging artist would try to be noticed by a local gallery, which, if the artist were lucky, would represent him/her in that geographic region. Ideally, one would find several different galleries in different regions, striving for a New York gallery one day. If a gallery had contacts with a museum curator, perhaps it could get them to notice your work. The art world was full of gate-keepers – gallerists, curators, writers –all dominated by a small number of very knowledgeable people who had their own stable of familiar and talented artists. It was very tough to be noticed from the outside.

In the 2000’s, things began to change radically, precipitated by the rising popularity of large art fairs such as ArtBasel, SOFA Chicago, Scope, and Frieze. At the fairs, galleries pay for booths and present their best artists’ best work. The biggest collectors attend, bringing all the right players to the same place at the same time. Instead of just geographic exclusivity, now artists have to concern themselves with show exclusivity as well. (If a gallery is bringing you to Frieze, they don’t want another gallery bringing you to Frieze as well.) Throw in the internet, and the business terrain for artists is pretty complex.

When I first combined video and sculpture 4 years ago, it was mostly because an art critic had casually said that he believed my future would be in that direction, which actually made me focus on it. My first two very low-tech video pieces were immediately bought by museum collections (one is currently on display at the Renwick Museum here in town) and as I continued developing and re-developing the work, I was suddenly courted by galleries I’d only dreamed of. This year, I started doing collaborative work with other artists, and I have also begun to make series of works as a single piece. (Like the Seven Deadly Sins, pictured below.) Making a series as a single piece has expanded my scale, and the interest of museums. My pieces by themselves are quite small – almost too small for a large gallery space. The series are much larger, and engage viewers for a greater amount of time.

Utilizing Facebook has been a big change, and a big ally, in my work. It started, as all good Facebook stories begin, with a video of a cat playing the piano. (I posted the video to my profile – I’m not proud. I thought it was cute.) After several comments, someone popped up and said, “How cute, I should get them here at my museum.” “Museum??!!”, I said, “What museum? You should have my work there!” 24 hours later, I was in a show at the Museum Of Art and Design in NYC called “Dead or Alive” with Damien Hirst and Nick Cave. The man who commented was the Chief Curator and Director of MAD. I pitched an idea, he ran it by the curatorial staff, and I was in. The show runs till October 15th, 2010.

It was then that I fully understood the biggest difference between today’s art world and the one I entered: access to gate-keepers. Gallerists, curators, collectors, universities, all were open to me without an intermediary. I started really putting myself out there on Facebook and quickly had over 1000 friends. When I posted the image of the 7 Deadly Sins, the gallery that was taking me to SOFA/Chicago more that doubled my wall space to 50 feet, which is a huge investment in my work on their part. I have used Facebook to sell work, get west coast galleries, entice museums and get speaking engagements.

I met a man at a party who said I should apply to be a Fulbright Fellow. It seems that artists are exempt from the PhD requirement. One of my partners at the Glass School, Michael Janis, and I both applied. We just learned that we have both been granted Fellow status. Next, we find a university overseas to invite us to teach a workshop; three have already expressed interest.

A few months ago I got another surprise: I was offered my first museum solo — and it is for video alone. This year I will focus heavily on videos with no glass structure at all. I will also be working with Rob Bettmann and his new dance company in a performance called Quis Custodiet, which will use some of my video projections.

As I look back, what I am proudest of is not my individual achievement, but my work with the Washington Glass School. We are currently the second largest warm glass school in the country, and next June the Longview Gallery will host a retrospective featuring over twenty of the artists who began with us that have gone on to national and international renown. The influence of the Washington Glass School Movement has become international, as narrative sculptural glass artists around the world recognize the Washington Glass School as a major creative hub. I encourage artists in all media to come to the school and see the variety of medium we teach there. It might surprise a few to see how we can help. And if any artist reading this can think of a way we can help, give us a buzz. It would be our pleasure.

Tim Tate is co-founder of the Washington Glass School located in Mt. Ranier MD. He has shown extensively in this area and beyond since the 1990’s, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York, SOFA New York and Chicago, Art Basel, the Red Dot at Art Basel-Miami, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian, the Renwick Gallery and commercial galleries from Washington, DC to London and Berlin. His awards include “Rising Star of the 21st Century” from the Museum of American Glass, the Virginia Groot Foundation Award for Sculpture, three Artists Fellowship awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Mayor’s Art Award. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, the Mint Museum, the Katzen Art Center of American University, the University of Virginia Art Museum and Vanderbilt University. For more information, see www.washingtonglassschool.com.

Edited by Ellyn Weiss

Endurance/Suspension by Jenny Walton

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Endurance/Suspension by Jenny Walton

Recently, I have worked largely in monotypes – one-of-a-kind prints that are painterly in execution and in effect. A residency at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring gave me access to the best printmaking equipment and time to experiment. My work involves the suspension of faith in science and organized belief systems; I question commonly -held “truths” through my personal experience in the process of making art and the physical destruction and reconstruction of the body. By dealing with the beautiful, horrific, and sublime nature of the human body, I work toward an evolving sense of the spirituality and physicality of being human.

In much of the work, I envisioned the rib cage as a structural and metaphorical stabilizer within each composition. It offers protection, structure, and containment, much like organized religion. The often abstracted and wildly expressive landscapes outside of the ribcage allude to a constantly changing realm of scientific discovery that challenges established belief systems. These monotypes were created by painting and drawing into ink on YUPO polypropylene sheeting the size of the full press bed. Using this material as the printing matrix emphasizes fluidity and spontaneity.

I worked in suites of prints, building upon or destroying parts of the previous composition to further ideas and elements in the next. At the beginning of each suite, I would utilize imagery from anatomy books, x-rays of my own body, and photography to create the initial composition. As I worked further into the suite, those representational images would either be obliterated or emphasized, depending on the response to my physical awareness of previous injuries to my body. As my own physical stamina decreased in the course of long printing sessions, so too did the representation of human anatomy in the work.

Physical endurance during my artistic practice has become a key factor in my work. As I reached for larger ranges of motion and pushed the limits of my physical ability and mark-making, the pieces reflect my response to thoughts of spirituality, mortality, and the metaphors of human life and its evolving relationships to the world.

Recently my work has taken some new directions that are also inspired by the limitations of the physical body. Shortly after my residency, I had a serious fall that required a long healing process on multiple limbs. My studio practice has suffered significantly. It felt like being on a speeding freight train, then coming to a sudden halt without notice. It hasn’t been easy to work in the last year; it feels stilted, rusty, and painful. But the key is, I continue to try. The physicality of the work that I was enjoying in the residency, using my whole body to work on increasingly larger images, is no longer accessible. I had to try to figure out how to translate the marks, ideas, and methods that I discovered at Pyramid Atlantic into something more manageable from the sitting or reclining positions that I can maintain.

My best friend, who understands my frustrations, dared me to try working with my left hand while the right arm heals, and I took the dare. Training my left hand to respond to my brain’s directions takes great concentration. It requires doing the opposite of what comes naturally.

Using my left hand, I have been working very small. It’s strange to me how a 5” x 7” piece of watercolor paper can become intimidating, when just last year, 60” x 30” inches seemed too small. With each piece, both my body and ability gets better. While at this moment I’m concentrating more on regaining my skills, I can’t keep the content from emerging. The small intimate pieces have become meditations on healing. While my work in the last several years has addressed the healing process, it has never been quite so important that the work also BE the healing process.

Jenny Walton was born in Spokane, Washington. She received her MFA from American University, which included a year in Italy. Walton has received the Joanne Crisp Ellert Award of Excellence and two Mellon Research Grants. She has shown work at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York, Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Pyramid Studio in Rome, and is included in the American University Watkins Collection and the District of Columbia Art Bank. Residencies include the Chautauqua School of Art and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. She currently lives and works in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

Edited by Ellyn Weiss

In My Father’s Image by Camille Mosley-Pasley

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In My Father’s Image by Camille Mosley-Pasley

My father was a phenomenal photographer. He took his camera everywhere and documented the ordinary. He took photos of relatives, neighbors, door-to-door salesmen and anyone else that crossed his path or entered our home. He had a way of drawing people out and making photographs that revealed their personality, quirks and all. I used to look at his photos in magazines and newspapers and his boxes and albums of photos over and over, the way a child does with a favorite storybook. Everyone that came to our home did the same thing. They would pick up an album and reminisce about the people and places they knew and ask for the story behind those they didn’t know.

When I was 14, I asked to use my father’s camera so I could make my own photo albums full of the people, places and stories that meant something to me. He wasn’t partial to me handling his equipment, so he bought a camera for me and taught me how to expose, compose, develop film and print. I’ve been documenting the ordinary ever since.

I’m drawn to the sights, ideas and experiences that most people readily dismiss as insignificant. Things that are so common or second nature that they are not noticed. In my mind, these are the things that define a person, place and time and tell a story. These are the nuances of life that fade and disappear with the passing of time. These are the things I want to remember with photographs.

In my late teens and early twenties, I thought I needed to document exotic places and exciting events. The resulting photographs rarely interested me unless people were in them doing something very ordinary. The scenic postcard type of photo does not resonate with me. I need human or animal interaction to hold my interest. I need to tell a story.

The best way for me to tell a story is in a series. I usually work on two or three concurrently, with one on the front burner and the others simmering in back. Elements from one series segue into the next. The “Mama Love” series is currently on the front burner. It’s an offshoot of a pregnancy series that began several years ago. As a thank you gift, I invited the women to return to my studio for portraits after they had their babies. During the photo sessions, the new mothers expressed amazement at the magnitude of the feelings they experienced after giving birth. I felt that their casual, seemingly insignificant expressions and the resulting images were far more moving and powerful than the series of pregnancy photographs I was working on, so I switched gears and began inviting women to the studio to be photographed with their infants and to comment on their feelings about motherhood. This series aspires to give the viewer a glimpse into the special bond between mothers and their children. The women are not portrayed as madonnas or mother goddesses to be idolized. They are fully human, expressing the complexities of parenthood.

While photographing women for “Mama Love” the related series “Nurture” emerged. Many crying babies were bottle and breastfed during the photo sessions. This was a great relief to me since a happy baby resulted. Most of the breastfeeding moms gave permission to continue photographing while they fed. The images reveal an even deeper connection between mother and child. The calm contentment of both mother and child is heartwarming and powerful. Several of the breastfeeding images have been used by national and international health organizations to raise awareness of the health, psychological and financial benefits of breastfeeding. As health care becomes less available and affordable, breastfeeding is one way to give a child a healthy advantage. “Nurture” will be used to advocate breastfeeding, particularly in low-income communities with high rates of formula fed babies.

Further development and promotion of the “Nurture” series is on the back burner for now along with the pregnancy series. “Mama Love” will be self published in book form in the near future. What pleases me most is that the book has the same effect effect on me as my father’s photo albums. I look at the images over and over, remembering the ordinary stories and conversations with extraordinary people.

Camille Mosley-Pasley studied Commercial Photography at Penn Career Center, a vocational high school in Washington, DC and earned a BFA in Fine Art from the Corcoran College of Art & Design with an emphasis on sculpture and photography. For many years she served as director for two DC area galleries. Currently, she owns and operates a photography studio, serves as chair of Market 5 Gallery, a non-profit alternative arts organization, is an art consultant and independent curator. Through her ongoing documentary series Transcendence and Mama Love, she preserves the small, often ignored details of daily life that define her culture.

Edited by Ellyn Weiss

Tricycle Trip in the Mesilla Valley by John Russell Monagle

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Tricycle Trip in the Mesilla Valley by John Russell Monagle

When mother went to sleep
in the afternoon I pedaled
my tricycle by yards and houses
behind chain linked fences,
along paths beside dry ditches,
through a vacant lot,
across the sidewalk
before tracking on solid
yellow lines parting asphalt streets.

I pedaled toward the mesa,
cars rushed from ahead and behind.
Unconcerned about my danger,
I rode through the slow hours
before a mother left her son in the yard
and ran to stop my tricycle
on the yellow lines, straddling
her legs on the big wheel.
She carried me into her house
and fed me ice cream before calling
the police who arrived a short time after
and took me home in their cruiser.

Through the back window,
I tracked the sun’s descent
through the final hours
to its splashdown. It sank
too quickly for me to join
others who went every day
to the evening party where
mothers put the sun to its sleep
while twilight children danced
on the tightrope of the horizon.

John Monagle was born in Claymont, Delaware and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico. A graduate of New Mexico State University, he is a resident of Rockville, Maryland and works at the Library of Congress. He has been twice selected as a Jenny McKean Moore fellow at The George Washington University and has been previously published in Minimus and Wordwrights poetry journals.

Tricycle Trip in the Mesilla Valley by John Russell Monagle (c) Copyright John Russell Monagle; printed by permission of the author.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (Thegreenj)

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