February.28.2008. • 12:30 PM 2
It’s a good thing that our new pup took to the snow because we’ve gotten a ton of it this winter. Here’s a pic of her prancing in the snow— I was hoping to get a shot of her running through the yard with her nose plowing piles of snow to eat, but she is just too damned fast— so this will have to do.
Filed under: family, life, maine, personal., pics, portland. , dog, pics, puppy
February.27.2008. • 5:40 PM 0
Despite the rough beginning to our week, when we woke to a house with no heat as a result of our aging boiler igniter and motor,progress on the house is marching on and its beginning to look like a whole new house. The siding on the front of our house is done, replacement windows are in and despite the 4” of new snow last night and the on and off snow/rain all day I came home this afternoon and was greeted with a view of our new metal roof on the addition (2nd pic).Now work is beginning on the inside— tomorrow the studio gets a skylight and the lower roof gets finished. We have just about a month and a half before its all done and I can’t wait!
Filed under: family, kevin + karen townsend, life, maine, personal., pics, portland., thoughts , home, home improvement, life, personal.
February.19.2008. • 11:03 PM 0
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., life, youtube , art, creativity, education, life
February.16.2008. • 1:08 PM 0
Here is what I’ve been up lately——well, at least what I’ve been up to in the studio. I am in the process of applying to MFA programs and have been developing a new series of works, completing applications and writing program proposals and artist statements.
a bit about this new work (and what I propose to do in an MFA program)
I have these memories, horrible memories from my past— I’m huddled in a phone booth with my biological father, a hard cold receiver pressed against one ear, the scruff of his face grating against my cheek and his hot whisper in my other ear. His words described the atrocities he would commit if my mother wouldn’t come back to him. He wanted to hear his words come out of my mouth; he needed my mother to hear these horrible things in the small, trembling voice of a four-year-old boy. Even now as I type these words, my hands shake. I have relived, this memory and others like it in sweat-soaked slumber for most of my life.Each of these memories represents a separate existence, a self-portrait, encapsulating my thoughts, sensations and emotions from a moment in my life. They are the architecture of my identity. If time can be understood as the space that our consciousness travels along then these memories also occupy a specific location in space-time. And while our experience of times passage may be universal our perceptions of those moments are highly personal.As we move through our lives the external world provides each of us with an incessant stream of stimulus and sensations that are processed by our minds and encoded as memories. These processes of memory formation, their subsequent degradation over time and the impact of memory on ones perception of self, fuel my current work. Informed by Hume’s Bundle Theory of Identity and Kant’s concept of Transcendental Idealism, my work seeks to give form to the substances of memory and their corresponding internal locus, representing memory as a substance that occupies a space in time, encapsulating the sensations and cognitions of a moment and forming our self-concept.Through my work I explore metaphors for the internal sites of memory capture, containment and collection from my personal history as a means of connecting with the universal experience of memory formation. The act of drawing is at the center of my process and is a way for me to examine, understand and articulate the vessels that hold the substance of these recollections and access their content. In the drawings, text and image often work together as a means of depicting the markings in ones mind from the processes of cognition. Hand-written text functions as a representation of speech itself, a kind of narrative simultaneously documenting the past and attempting to record perceptions as they happen in the present. In this way the drawings themselves become vessels—filled with idea and image and encapsulating the moments spent embedding them on their surfaces.The vessel as locus for memory imparts associations with containment, circulation, distribution, and transportation on the work and offers an opportunity to play with binary oppositions. Concepts of strength and fragility, fullness and emptiness or presence and absence, create hierarchies in our minds implying that the second term is inferior, almost parasitic, to the first, and are employed in my work as a means of giving voice to the impact of time on anamnesis and the duplicitous nature of memory.Presently, I find myself in new territory, delving deeper into this vein of content, influenced by artists like Wolfgang Laib, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Louise Bourgeois, Nedko Solakov, Doris Salcedo, Ernesto Neto, Anselm Kiefer and Marina Abramovic, I see my role as an artist shifting from the making of images to the fabrication of experience. In my most recent works I have begun to utilize the drawings as plans for the construction of 3-dimensional objects and small installations. If accepted as a participant in an MFA program, it is from this point that I propose to move forward and further pursue the exploration of installation-based work as a means of giving form to my content.Hume describes man as a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and that are in perpetual flux and movement. In our current culture many of these perceptions happen in front the flat screens of televisions, cell phones or computers, where our personal sense of perspective is lost, where we communicate through the push of cold buttons and where we publish our most intimate moments for public consumption and commercial gain. It is for these reasons that I seek a more intimate means of engaging the viewer and propose to produce works that allow the viewer to physically move through a space and encounter objects, in much the same way that our consciousness travels through time. By engaging them in an experience that is simultaneously physical and temporal, communal and individual, it is my aim to cause the formation of a new memory within them.
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., kevin townsend, life, personal., pics , art, drawings, images, new work
November.4.2007. • 3:49 PM 0
I love the idea that graffiti artists are thinking greener and as a result raising new questions about the line between vandalism and artistic expression. By using a glorified version of the “wash me” graffiti usually found on the back of dirt and dust covered 18 wheelers, artists like Alexandre Orion (see a video of him in action here) or Moose, of Symbollix, make their art by cleaning surfaces covered in dirt, dust, grime and soot or power-washing dirty side walks. This kind of graffiti raises questions in the minds of the anti-graffiti activists. Questions like: Is the selective cleaning of a dirty surface vandalism? or Is it possible to fine or otherwise penalize someone who has done no damage to public property?
The practice of reverse graffiti is not new, just think of all of the times you drew on a dust covered surface with your finger. But these guys are stepping the concept up a bit and using it to produce work that is evocative on both the aesthetic and social level.
Then there is Edina Tokodi, who I learned about on Inhabitiat and whose work is pictured above. Edina employs a different method of green graffiti that is literally green in both form and content. Her method seems less like graffiti and more like site specific installation art that relies on the contrast between her medium, her imagery and the setting in which they are displayed to draw attention to the insufficient relationship between its city dwelling audience and nature.
This is the kind of thing I used to love to talk to my Humanities classes about when asking them: What is the role of the artist in contemporary society?
Filed under: art+photography, artsy., pics, random, thoughts , art, graffiti, green
October.5.2007. • 10:41 AM 0
Last night I had an anxiety dream, this is the second one I’ve had in the last 2 weeks and before these it had been years since I had one last. Both of these dreams involve losing a tooth. I know that this is one of the archetypal dreams that Freud talks about, meaning that it is a fairly common dream occurrence. I have read and heard all kinds of interpretations of this kind of dream ranging from being concerned with appearance, potency or finances— but none of these make sense with my dream.
In my dream I am in my studio, frantically working. A large digital clock with glowing red numbers ticking backwards towards zero is hung on the wall. I specifically remember the time remaining as being 90 minutes and forty three seconds (90:43). Although I am alone I am aware that I only have this amount of time to finish the work for a critique— apparently I am in grad school in this dream. I look around my studio and there is nothing that resembles finished work, only sketches and ideas on paper litter the tables. I remember feeling nauseous and anxious with my heart thrumming wildly in my chest. I hear a knock on the door and standing there are my wife and daughter. My feelings of anxiety are replaced by a feeling of guilt, they are coming to get me… I am supposed to be done and ready to go do something with them.
The dream jumps at this point and I am walking Karen and Teagan to the car, Karen is reassuring me, telling me to take my time and not to worry. As they get in the car I feel a pain in my right top molar and realize I am clenching my teeth (both in the dream and in my sleep). When I realize I am clenching my teeth in the dream I stop, feeling my tooth loosen from my gums as I release the tension of my jaw muscles. The tooth falls slightly in my mouth and clicks as it touches the corresponding tooth under it, still clinging slightly to the upper gum. A feeling of panic returns as I reach in my mouth to pull out the tooth. In order to extricate it I must almost tear it out, the action is accompanied by a brief searing pain. Once out, I stare at the tooth and notice a fragment of red gum tissue adhering to one side of the tooth. I immediately feel flush, and can feel blood in my mouth. As I walk alone back towards my studio I stop every few feet to spit out the blood and gently probe the void in my mouth with the tip of my tongue. After the third or 4th stop I feel something sharp in the void, causing me to examine the tooth again. This time when I look at it I notice that it is missing the roots. Instead of being a whole tooth it is just the cap of a tooth, hollow inside with almost architectural supports that are distinctly untooth-like. As I keep looking closer I feel a jolt of current running through my body. I am looking at the tooth that has come from my mouth and I am seeing the shapes and structures that I am currently using in my work (outside of the dream)
Again the dream cuts and I am back in my studio the clock now reads 60:13 and is still counting backwards. The panic is back and I feel like I am sweating. I actually feel like I am on the verge of tears feeling in adequate as a father and as an artist and it is at this point that I wake up, soaked with sweat, heart throbbing and feeling as if I am on the verge of gushing tears.
One of the things I learned in the dreaming class I took in college is that the way you feel in the dream is often more important than what is actually happening. In this case: anxiety, fear and profound lack of confidence and competence both as a father and as an artist pretty much sum it up. The definition of the word ‘tooth’ combined with my feelings and the scenario in the dream make me feel like this dream is mirroring a situation in my waking life. The loss of tooth would leave me at a disadvantaged to process food and get what I need to sustain myself. If the metaphor extends outside the dream maybe my fear is literally that of not being able to do something that I feel is necessary to me. In my class I also learned that teeth dreams are often about transitions, as we lose our teeth as part of our transition to adolescence and ultimately adulthood . I think this is ultimately all about my decision to pursue a grad degree beginning in the summer. I guess somewhere inside me I am afraid of failing, afraid that I may not have what it takes to do what I need to do. It seems that I am concerned about having time, confidence and resolve to be able to be the father I need to be and the artist I want to be simultaneously. I noticed that I also used the word ‘guilt’ to describe my feelings at one point in the dream, and I do feel a bit of guilt/selfishness when I think about grad school— especially from a financial stand point. For me this dream is reassurance in an odd way. If this situation has made its way to my dreams in such a strong way it makes me more sure that it is something I must do, and these fears and anxieties are important things to not only acknowledge but also to address as I move closer to making the dream of grad school a reality.
Filed under: artsy., family, life, personal., random, thoughts , anxiety, art, control, dreams, fear, grad school, interpretation, teeth
September.12.2007. • 3:18 PM 0
Filed under: 2007, kevin townsend, works on paper
• 2:54 PM 0
Filed under: 2007, kevin townsend, works on paper
