Last year took photos of my outfits almost everyday for months and months and posted them online with incomprehensible phonetic captions. Although the process of taking the photos and posting them online was always very public, looking at them retrospectively and remembering each of those days is an incredibly intimate and emotional experience for me. Last year was hard; I spent a lot of time crying and feeling really horrible about myself. I began drawing pictures of my body over and over, and recording my feelings in melodies in garageband as a new therapeutic coping mechanism. This dark and emotional personal reflection is a sharp contrast to the images I was putting in front of a growing public audience. Neither group of work is complete on its own, both are needed to form the portrait.
For a long time I felt a self-consciousness that what I was doing on my outfit blog was a waste of time, that it was too flip, that it lacked content and failed to take into account the seriousness and sadness of the world. But then I started playing my cello in a Shangri Las cover band. In the course of my totally immersing myself in the culture of the 1960s, I looked into the art of that era. What struck me first in my research is how incredibly work-intensive it was for women to do hair up in a beehive every morning. Then I began reading about Fluxus artists. I was struck by the similarities between their principles of artmaking and mine: a DIY aesthetic, off-the-cuff performance that elevates the banal and everyday, the awareness of the audience, integration of multi-media, and most of all humor. Fluxus artists didn't perform too seriously, they were social and communitarian. Art doesn't have to be alienating. It is human to be goofy.