An Inquiry of Place
I couldn’t tell you why it caught my eye or what drew me to it, but somehow, I knew that this one portrait was something I should claim. Like the one puppy you lock eyes with, cementing the desire to be together, the shape and the colors of the picture resonated within me.
“Have you heard back from the artist on this one yet?”
My voice was pitched to sound detached, but I knew I couldn’t entirely hide the hope for a negative answer.
I have a few guilty pleasures. I’m a woman who loves her ice cream, french fries, and soap operas. For a long time, I watched four. This meant four and a half hours of television shows to catch up on after school a day. Nowadays, the demand for soaps have changed and my four dwindled down to one.
I truly believe it is an art form that is dying for the wrong reasons.
The rally call went up in the first months of 2016.
Writers of all ranks came together and decided that they must work harder than ever to ridicule, satirize and attack the new political world. They had not voted for things like Brexit and Trump, and these ideas were not only the annoying chirps of uninformed, they were the enemy of liberal, innovative art.
On any given day, I prefer being out of doors. I’m a hiker, a gardener, a beach bum, a wanderer. Being inside is difficult. For me, Seasonal Affective Disorder manifests itself as claustrophobia.
Unfortunately, I live in a part of the world that gets a very real winter. Short days, snow, clouds covering the sun. Chafed ankles from snow boots. Chilled red ears from a biting wind.
This is the time of year when we make resolutions to do better, be better. I’m going to try to think better. I will try to enjoy being indoors more, and take more opportunities to create. Sitting at a table. Knitting by a fire.
From time to time, as artists and in our various other roles, we’ve all felt as though we are suffocating: Under the weight of a deadline. Under a pile of rejection letters. Under your peers’ seemingly-impossible successes. Or simply beneath the weight of a bad day.
Kuma Kitsune is a mixed-media artist and photographer living in Portland, OR. Her work incorporates a diversity of materials, such as fabric, projection film, tiny shreds of paper — and, in her most recent installment, other people’s poetry. More of her work can be seen here.
E. D. Watson: Your current work, A Walk Through the Looking Glass, is an assemblage of twenty-four individual pieces, titled with fragments of poetry produced by Hafiz, Ray Bradbury, Mary Oliver, Rimbaud and Lewis Carroll, which form a corresponding poem. Viewers are then invited to re-position the works and create their own poem from the new arrangement of the titles. Can you talk a little bit about how literature influences your work, and how you came to select these particular, seemingly disparate, writers?
Kuma Kitsune: I think what most influences my work is the Surrealistic concept of unleashing the unconscious.
I like watching true-life whodunnits. I’m particularly fond of NBC’s Dateline. It’s my secret lowbrow television pleasure (along with Say Yes to the Dress, but that’s for another post). In general I like hearing other people’s stories. But with true-life crime you spend an hour learning about a bizarre, hideous murder of an often unusually endearing person in some part of the country very far from where you live. I guess the secret dirty pleasure part comes in because watching true-life murder mysteries are a sort of cathartic experience: my life isn’t as bad as that person’s. At least someone didn’t kill me. Nor have I been accused of murder.
The part of the show that most piques my interest happens when police investigators haul the suspect into the interrogation room. The scenes are high anxiety as investigators try to buddy up with the suspect and get definitive proof while the suspect tries to evade the truth and not give herself away. Secret camera video footage often captures a person out-of-sorts, divided between herself and what she’s done. I can relate.
Last summer, my family and I went on a road trip which included a stop at Cadillac Ranch. For those who are unfamiliar with it, this enormous installation is composed of old Cadillacs planted end-up in an empty field. The history of the work has to do with the evolution of the cars’ tail fins. For a car guy, this is interesting enough. Yet, even if you aren’t aware of — or don’t care about — tail fin evolution, you can enjoy interacting with the work by spray-painting the cars. In fact, this is sort of the point. You don’t even have to bring your own paint. Partially-used cans are scattered all around. In our case, another family offered us their cans when they decided to leave.