the beach at Arbroath, Scotland

12 January 2004
all the things i said

i got my slides back from my senior show on Friday. i have mixed emotions about them, mostly because (to my eye) they're far too light. but i do tend to favor darker photos, and besides, my entire show was white, for goodness' sake. i don't know exactly what i was expecting.

i'm also a bit freaked out beacuse now i owe this photographer a big box of money, money that i don't really have and won't for at least a couple weeks. but then, he took nearly a month to get my slides to me (after he said less than a week and then promptly took off to London for christmas and new year's without even telling me), so should i feel bad that i'm not paying him right away? probably not. maybe i'm on vacation, too. in fucking Rome.

my senior show was the main reason this site was so abandoned for many months. it was incredibly stressful to put up. very installation intensive (remind me to NEVER hang 300+ tiny pieces on a wall with 700+ tiny t-pins) i had a nervous breakdown the night before it was all supposed to be done, and that was with my parents and friends around me, helping. it did get finished a day late, but it hardly matters now.

and then people ask, so how does it feel? and i feel as though i'm supposed to have a tidy, glib but very profound answer at the ready. i didn't know how it felt then, and i really don't know how i feel now.

during the time the show was up (a mere 5 days, that's all they allow for BFA shows), i kept dreaming i was sleeping in the gallery. nearly every night, i would half wake up, lying in my bed, and sure that i was in the gallery, sleeping with all these white shapes around me. i felt like all the pieces i made were all these wounded, hurting girls who had somehow managed to get past their pain and hubris and become something really beautiful and triumphant. i thought i was feeling their pain, but really, it was just my pain, leaking through my work. they say that every writer's first novel is autobiographical. maybe that goes for artists, too.

did i mention i cried? i cried during the installation, i cried while it was in the gallery, i cried during the reception, and i cried the next evening when i took it all down and packed it in boxes. i was probably crying because of what it had opened up in me. very overwhelming. i was a complete basketcase, even after it was all finished.

so now, all i have left of this deluge of emotion is this little page of slides. it's a little weird. i know i'll never be able to fully communicate to someone looking at the slides what this show meant to me. i don't even know if i should. maybe that's just for me to keep to myself. once everything is up and people are allowed to look at it, it becomes less your own. everyone takes a little piece with themselves. maybe that's what art is about. i really don't know.

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