2 for 5                                                                                                                                               

they’re going fast                                                                                                                                   

the future’s bargain                                                                                                                       

that’s strange, i heard my name

the rivers parting – hurry up

things blurry up

 

6,000 feet above sea level

3300 bodies disassembled

the head bones connected to the cockpit

knee jerk ass backwards

We are always outnumbered but we were never out militiad.

There's no dignity for criminals, no ministry for the wicked.

In this town if you make a sound you're the leper with the most fingers.

The League of Extraordinary Nobodies, the other teams bringing in ringers.

No faith in the majority, no hope for the little ones.

Sally pulled a pistol out; Billy got a blunderbuss.

So what the fuck we feeling that make this struggle so wondrous?

Is it enough to arrogantly pull what's left of the rug out from under us?

We in the same barrel; all us crabs are caught.

I need you to pray for me and
I need you to care for me and
I need you to want me to win
I need to know where I'm heading,'cause I know where I've been
Flows, bones, crushing it's nothing
I come up with something
Come through your strip, fronting, stunting
It's something you want, 745 chrome spinning

the world is shrinking and i am able to make connections outside of my subculture.

from now on cities will be built on one side of the street

so that soothsayers will have wilderness to wander

and lovers space enough to contemplate a kiss.

 

This is a revisionist’s draft of history.  This is a state of mind that refutes all states but its own.

 

your sidewalks scuff your wingtips

your angels fly through barrels…monkeys laugh at them

i had begun to believe my blackened toenails

 

were on path to decay,

 

when, in truth, they had begun the gradual process of crystallization 

 

hand you my nuts as i walk through customs 

i am to be reassembled after the final checkpoint

I’ve found the library where all the dreams deferred were stored

Catalogues of cultures indexed by communal disappearance

I cannot make your past disappear

Only rabbits, only rabbits

Ignore the blood on my laces

Pools of blood are recreational

I don’t speak a lick of that that language and I got a slippery memory

 

Let me get uh…ink poisoning…

European tailspin scrawlin’ messages on my pail skin in hopes that they get mailed in.

 

This is my box

These are my walls

This is when time stops

 

You’re coming with our family recipes and us.

 

Let me get uh fire…  I’m at the fire…  where are you?

 

I’m at the fire…where the hell are you?  I’m blacked out

Don’t get cooked by the pilot light, I can smell metal in the air tonight.

RECONCILIATION

A REVISIONIST’S DRAFT

Craft Alliance Grand Center June 2009

I have found that I am not solely a studio artist.  I know how to work in a studio and I’ve got lots of conventional studio skills but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out.  I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.

I am a resident of Hyde Park, a North St. Louis neighborhood.  I’m not an outsider or an insider and I still have the great privilege to talk.  What I am seeing in my neighborhood is evidence of a collapsed system. My research is about working with entropy – taking apart a system and working toward disorder.  The sites in which I choose to work present a sore spot.  They are physical proof of the destructive powers of the world, and serve as a concrete example of the wider context of social failure.

My work has become a dialectic that fuses architecture and site, living experience, and the making of jewelry objects as artifacts of an experience. This has been achieved by treating material on multiple layers of scale and behavior, altering the integrity of built structures as a way to compromise and transform. 

I employ photography as an intervention on my chosen sites, and use building material in a way that disengages it from its original structure and system. There is a revealing nature in their revision. I am releasing associations about sites I deal with.  You can only see these things once I have taken them apart, ennobled them, and resurrected them.  There is an awareness that I am trying to bring about.  By bringing pieces of the system and reassembling them, I demonstrate that as the system breaks down, it reveals much about its impossibility.  My experiences have been open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable.

There is an urgency, surgical skill, and neutrality to the small works I create.  The true message in my work is in the craft and what I can do with metals and material on a small scale.  Yet, at this point I could not make objects without participating in these other defining activities.  In a sense, I am ending with my beginning, and am beginning to talk about how these small objects have given voice to a wider practice.  The work I present here is an attempt to reconcile the evolving concentric circles of the tourism that I employ along the way of working to reveal an object.

 

Now follow suit

The lights are out

Phones are dead

And I’m the only thing that’s running in this city

Except for the clouds and man they’re coming down

If I knew my way around I wouldn’t feel so dizzy

blunted

The murder weapon was a bicycle

Standard issue fence post…twenty-sum stuffed animals…remember me

And let me get one of those cigarettes… and thirty cents

Here’s fifty…you bark a lot through my window

 

And can I uh…  no let me get uh…

 

Let me get     let me get    let me get…   some skin pigmentation

I combusted in written pictures and that’s why I ain’t considered a saint

Well guess what….  I ain’t

 

Blew my credit on some decongestant

Free vaccinations at the clinic

I’m infected with a curious nature

Let me get uh…

Let me get uh…an answer…

 

the answer comes in the form of a handwritten letter

 

It says this is brutally… beautifully – beautifully absence in my briefcase

Hole in front of the shovel

Shovel in front of the brawn

Bump in the night

I’m funny w/ the catch and release

 

Can uh… can I get uh…

Can I get a brick…

Can I get uh…

Can I get some mortar

 

I got to put myself back together

 

And uh… can I get uh…  let me get a ladder for my feet to follow

And can I get uh some of them mamba

And uh, my bad can I get two…

we don’t like it when the city lights start fading when the city lights fading then we can’t get down.  ok.

we don’t like it when the city people act crooked when the city people crooked then we can’t get down.  ok.

we don’t like it when the city pigeons break wings when the pigeons break wings then we cant get down.  ok.

we don’t like it when the city fire starts spreading when the fire starts spreading then we can’t get down.  ok.

 

who are the consumers.

what are you consuming.

why are you not filtering the poison they are spooning.

where you gonna be when the murder rate starts ballooning.

coming to your senses on some who the fuck made you king.

trade up at the factory outlet; machines hit the floors

 

could it possibly just maybe be his lessons can’t be summed up in a linear set of pop culture references

 

inoperable and late frame rates

i got all my money on the one with lung cramps

there’s a new style born of spare parts

an extracted product of streetwise ingenuity

this ain’t a grieving face here

just look at that building woven together from opposable thumbs 

in a world of once upon a times

where babies are born into numerical order

there are things like hip-hop and dead people

we just need to talk for two minutes

Office

 

 

When the order finally organized the storming of the gate

 

The justice had been redefined for every whore and saint

 

The able bodied soldiers put their quarters up to play

 

How much more can the coroner’s office take

 

When the ordinary people leave their corner stores and cribs

 

The citizens of earth will put their quarters up to kiss

 

How much more can the coroner’s office give

Yo, you got newport

 

 

What’s this mean?

 

What’s stuck on you here.

 

Ur car kinda dirty.

 

Can I wash it?

 

            Naw kid it’s a trainwreck; hopeless.

 

I’ll do it right.

 

            Let it be.

 

So um, you an artist right?

 

So, you like draw with a vision?

 

Or is it like you just start something and see what happens?

 

Or is it both?

 

I just ask cause I’m trying to draw a parallel.

 

I don’t just ask anyone for something.

 

That was why I asked to wash the outside of your car.

 

I’ll make it look good.

All I really want is a sandwich.

 

I used to do all sort of heavy jobs.

 

Like lifting things and moving them.

 

My arms all messed up now.

 

            That looks rough.  You damaged.

 

I got shot, my bone is shattered and I got pins and metal in it.

 

It has been four years.

 

 

You got a loosie?

 

            Where the burglars slept.

 

            Same place the angels wept.

 

Yo you got Newport!

 

            Here take two.

 

Really man I’m just trying to get a sandwich or a bus ticket.

 

            Naw.

 

Just a solid?

 

            Two times two is four, and all it for my four year old.

But I’m just tryin to reincarnate myself into someone who matters.

 

            Maybe she’s you.

 

            Just a dollar for a moving target.

 

            Not because it’s fly, but because I can identify.

GENERALIZATIONS

I can be beguiled and repelled simultaneously by the character of my environment. There is magnetism to the visual cacophony of my city, rife with an extravagance of historic material culture.  This excess of stuff confronts me, almost relentlessly. While I surely absorb the stimulation unconsciously, I also save fragments of the most personally compelling detritus for its experiential mnemonics and tactile enticement.

 

Perhaps we are all accumulators at heart.

 

The selected evidence of age, decay, residue, and profuse quantities of discards seem to echo the energy and stimulation, the problems and issues, the dynamics of my neighborhood.

 

This is the palette with which I corroborate the meaning and content of my work.

 

They may also imply larger problems­ – those which all humans share.  We all seek safety, well-being, sustenance, and peace. My artwork is a formulated method of acknowledging the discomforting personal and societal stories of our time – ethnicity, intolerance, impersonality, social ills, and blight.

 

My research is deeply engaged in the investigation of the particular places that I encounter in my daily life.  I decode places in order to in-code an experience.  This often involves the commingling of devastating realism with a buoyant spirit of hope.  My works are about the landscape of renovation and repair, and of making spaces accessible.

 

I take material and engage it in a way that makes the work rough, but managed, manipulated, made. I take the dynamic, the idea, the visceral quality of the environment and have used it as a formulated method in my work.

 

Borrowed, but managed, engaged.  It’s high end.  It’s formulated to be thought about.  It’s formulated to have a message.  

 

There is a question, a challenge and a resolution that draws forward, in a small way, a facsimile of the landscape of the made, but makes it manageable, comprehensible, and small so that you feel the sense of individual maker, manipulator, a personality out in the world, transforming it.

 

Ya’ll need to get up – y’all need to get up – give the scooters back to the youngins.

 

What’s up kid  - dap dap dap

 

Who you?

 

                        T.O. - let me get those glasses (fronts flash)

 

They prescription an do you no good

 

                        Your eyes blue – that’s tight

 

            Aw shit son – that is tight

 

                                    Look at hers – she your daughter?

 

Yup – tru - I ain’t ever seen you round here

 

                                    Three streets up pass the park

 

Look monkey (postures fade) – aw sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it – but he ain’t really taking that man to jail (just a trick as if a district 5 rider with a mope is gonna drive past no matter what).

 

Heaven – heaven – turn that around and don’t go past the hydrant again

 

I know, they’ve been all over today – you seen all the cars right?  Beige coupe, red Taurus, y’all smarter than that.

 

What about you little man?

 

            He say he in eighth grade.

 

Really (he lean back on the vacant) you built small, seem to carry big though. Eighth grade really?

 

                                                Yeah

 

Tell me something smart then.

 

Elijah, get out of the street.

 

Run it smart.  What?

 

Ok, um – I know that if you lift weights a lot and get strong your dick shrink.  You only have so much skin and if you get strong that extra skin has to come from somewhere.

 

Bump bump bump bump

 

Look it’s that Lexus again (profile low, grill gold plate, all leaned back) stuntin.

 

                                                                                    Daddy, red light green light again.

 

Green light go…

 

Red light stop…

 

Green light…

 

Red light…

 

Green light…

 

DASIA WINS!!!

the illustrators of bare walls projected their dreams beyond their fears.

 

theirs were the walls of pyramids.  mine are the walls of crumbled towers.

 

 est.  05.26.09