Currently reading:
Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture by Patricia A. Turner
On Photography by Susan Sontag
The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy
Sound Design and Science Fiction by William Whittington

Beyond my own continuous curiosity, looking for those bits of writing which
might be appropriate to foundation-level readers, containing abstraction while rooted in the particular. Writing which considers the way objects and images operate, asking important questions about the authority of the voice, the use of media in the production of ideology, the responsibility of the image-maker, the impact of reproduction... unpacking, through a multitude of specific examples. That's the goal for the next semester - an omnivorous interest in cultural artifacts of any variety, whether it's a blockbuster movie, an abstract painting, a glossy advertisement, a documentary photograph, a racist ceramic cookie jar, a font, a newscast, a building, a public park. Not to equalize these "objects" but to observe them in all their specificity. I want to move away from art-world specific considerations and to view any object as potentially fascinating, any object as a carrier of layered meanings.
Any suggestions?

New earth pigments have expanded a range of colors.

Shelves are constructed and need to be sanded and painted. Drawings on paper are nearing completion. Arrangements are being experimented. Summer brings open days and the possibility of long studio hours. Maybe a box of saltines and a jar of peanut butter... It's the perfect season to be in the studio - not yet blazing hot when that late afternoon sun comes directly through the windows.

Performance questions

I’m interested in the yell - the shock as a moment of compression and expansion, a release of energy. I’m interested in making bold, clear forms, in reacting against timidity. The yell/shout/exclamation is suggestive of animal characteristics - the oddity and violence of a frog inflating its air sac and the release of that air in a compressed burst which charges the space between. The power of waiting, a group which is poised in the edge of breaking a silence... each performer can be the one to disrupt the structure, balancing on the edge of a catastrophy. The yell as rawness, untrained vocalization. Anyone could make the sound without special knowledge or practice. The yell as a basic, unformed element of music which punctures. By altering factors slightly (extension, tonality) the yell can become pitched - it exists between noise and note. I’m interested in the balance between talking, exclaiming and singing. Crossing between the communicative and the aesthetic. Finding a base physicality which joins the act and the sound.

I’m interested in boldness, clarity, force, perceptual derangement, intentionality, spatial dispersion, emergent form, shifts, demanding durations, engagement, physicality, patterns, darkness, repetition, off-balance structures, tension, care, precision and wildness.