Like my swollen figs...

...a marker of the inevitable end of summer...

Thought for the day

These days I often describe myself as crazy. It's so much easier for people to accept "crazy" rather than "different", different tastes, different desires, different views, different opinions.  People accept crazy but they like to argue with different.  When one wants to be left alone, crazy is a hell of a lot easier...

The Evolution of a Joke

photo by Carlyn Tucker
stand by John Foster

I started this piece in response to an irritant and as a tongue in cheek game to dispel personal demons, not as art.  I did a quick and dirty Google search on how to make voodoo dolls, made one, and started impaling her with pins in an orderly fashion. 

I have always loved Lucas Samaras’ work, especially all those pieces in which he obsessively covered and transformed objects of personal significance with pins. The act of repetitively and consciously skewering and transmuting my own object with pins quickly became reflective, and I acquired a haptic sense of appreciation for what Samaras had done so long ago.  Still fun to make, the doll was no longer just a joke.  Altered physically by acquiring heft and an outer shell, it became a fetish embodying characteristics that also had to do with art.

Lucas Samaras

From the beginning, as part of the joke, it was my intention to photograph the doll after each “pinning session” and to download the pictures to a blog I created for that purpose at  http://voodart.blogspot.com/.  In all but the last couple of entries in which the doll’s face is covered and defined by real multicolored pins, I had fun using Photoshop to virtually cover her face with John Baldessari-like face-obliterating shapes.   And as I played with these during the object’s physical transformation from doll to pin cushion, I forgot Baldessari’s and started creating masks of my own. 

John Baldessari

At some point during the process of photographing and blogging, I also decided to compose one picture using the blog entries in order to have it printed on paper, thus effecting one more transubstantiation from virtual into real space as I had done with the use of colored pins on the doll’s face.  What started as a joke acquired a transformative magic all its own; and when Flemming called telling me she had run across my blog and wanted to show the doll and its evolution at Riverworks, the metamorphosis was complete.   

                                                   

The Evolution of a Joke comment

since it is impossible to edit these things without affecting format spacing, I leave Allison's trace of being here while cutting and pasting on entry above--- blogspot is amazing but has its effing problems...