Gage Park Fun Facts :p

#1: Gage Park has a history of racism. People protested the entrance of African Americans into the neighborhood.

Poster promoting a speech by Neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

#2: During the 60's many white kids left Gage Park high school for a school year (or semester) because of integration.

#3: Gage Park was mainly settled by Roman Catholics from western Europe and many active parishes can still be found in the area.

At St. Simon the Apostle mass is still given in Slovak as well as Spanish and English.

#4:The neighborhood is predominately Hispanic.

#5 Gage Park is home to The Colony, a theater built in the 1920's.
Although no longer active as a theater The Colony is a wonderful piece of early 20th century Chicago architecture.

Theme/ideas for book, woo!

I'm not going to stick to one theme.My themes are going to be death, loss of innocence, and failure to gain an identity. I personally feel that my community and the pressures of it cause many people to loose their innocence at a very young age. This can be innocence of the mind or innocence of the body. I always feel the dense presence of death among me and others. It is exactly that...a presence. Identity is hard to find when many people get stressed into being that something that everyone else is. Sometimes people loose their innocence to those who pressure them into that identity and the identity eventually leads to death.

I've a plan for my book. My book will consist of 3 main characters. These being death, life, and innocence. Death will be represented by a girl (dressed in white or black, yet to be decided...), life will be represented by the same girl only in more lively colors, and innocence will be represented by a small red toddler car. The girl will be my sister and I have make up in mind to make her look dead. The toddler car is this little thing often left scattered about the neighborhood. My sister will be put in different situations and scenarios in which she loses her innocence and gets pressured into being someone who is everyone. In every single one of these scenarios the little red toddler car will be present...as well as her dead self. HOW? Well, in the beginning of the book she is already...dead. What killed her is still to be decided...could be a combination of things(religion, peer pressure, parental pressure, lack of motivation).I haven't decided whether to add text or not but I might make it children book style. The title I have decided on and it will be called The journey of Stiff Elaine.

When it comes to relating it to the art of others or other photography I want to do something like postcards from the past. Below is such a postcard, children smiling at what seems to be a school exhibition of a lynching. This was a postcard, it was what people sent to their friends in far away places...It was acceptable in the KKK community...It was right. In a way these kids didn't have a choice to think how they wanted to think. To their parents there was only one correct way to think, the way they did.

I would also like to play around with the out of porportion stuff like...Big shoes on little people...Huge parents and their teeny tiny children...Might help get my point across and might be fun to toy around with.

Community...Blah.

No need to ride the L down to a Borders, no sir not me. Come to think of it probably no one in my neighborhood (Gage Park) has to. The public libraries around my area sell out of print editions of wonderful classics for 10 cents in order to raise funds. Now to me these out of print copies seemed too precious to be sold at the price of a cheap lollypop, the novels weren't in bad condition but many of them were discarded...Meaning no one had bothered to check the book out in a long time...Either that or that the copy of it was too old...Why ever they were there I knew I couldn't leave poor little Capote in the box with big ol' Gore Vidal.

Walking down the streets I often overhear the different conversations people are having. These are sometimes pleasant, amusing, entertaining, emotional, igmorant, annoying, serious, priavate...Sometimes they aren't even what you'd call a conversation, they're more like examples your writing instructor might provide for proper and improper dialogue. I confess I feel guilty sometimes for overhearing certain conversations but this feeling of guilt does not last long. The conversations when cheery often have to do with people coming over for some sort of celebration, the successful delivery of a baby, the ceremony going on at church this upcoming weekend, the wedding, the cashing of a check. When not so cheery these conversations often have to do with the obligation of paying bills, the tardiness to work the other day, the displeasure of having to go to church, the pressure of school, the pressure of work, the cost of gas and food, not winning the lottery, the funeral.

Art: Sally Mann and the Romantic period

Romantic period landscapesThomas Gainsborough RA, Romantic Landscape, c. 1783. Oil on canvas

Asher B. Durand, Woodland Interior, oil on canvas, Private Collection


Sally Mann photography
Emmett and the White Boy, Sally Mann, 1990.

Untitled, Deep South collection, Sally Mann, 1998.

Untitled, Deep South collection, Sally Mann, 2001.

Another Deep South piece, I couldn't find the title.Piece from Motherland, couldn't find title.

Community in the art of Sally Mann

Most of Sally Mann's photographs are landscapes of Virginia , Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Her photography often reflects the historical past of the south and also a hint of romanticism.The environment she uses as her setting is what connects her art to a community: the southern community. The nature shots are the ones that reflect romanticism because many of her shots show similarity to landscape paintings of the romantic period. Romantic artists where highly interested in nature and stressed the expressions of emotions and imagination. Since the setting is mostly southern country side we can assume the subjects share knowledge of the unattractive historical background of the south. The little romantic touch also allows us to assume that her subjects all hold interest in nature and self expression. The sharing of the environment, past, and beliefs wraps her characters into a community since they have all three of these in common. All members of the same society in the same environment.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/mann/index.html

*Civil War locations, family farm/home

*Broken/damaged lenses

Explination on Untitled piece #1

My piece is based on a short story of mine that came out with the most morbid of tones. It talked about a man who found no joy in life whatsoever. All starting with his father's death and his mother's apathy towards his being and his future. He develops a rather destructive and lonesome lifestyle. It continued until he failed to find joy in anything. This story circled my head because some of this character's thoughts are similar to mine. So the 'point' was the acceptance of one's mortality but also how to deal with it. Not just rolling over in one's bed and falling into one's coffin but living life while we have it.



My poem is in the form of 'lines' running down my cheek. There are two reasons for this. One, I couldn't get my face to look right (:p) and two most people cry because of death, either because they're frightened of it or because it came to someone they held dear.

Poem:
If I bothered showing you the rotten side of the fruit
you wouldn't bite it.
If you told me she was a good catch at least for the night
I wouldn't hear you.
If she pulled the curtains to cover the splotch on the wall
you wouldn't see it.
If he held his heart and confessed sincere feelings
you wouldn't care.
If I pulled my hair back to show you my face
you wouldn't see it.

Next to the poem was the one of my favorite quotes from Capote:

"Life is like a moderately good play with a badly written third act"

This quote served as inspiration for the short story this piece is based on.

My eyes/hair/shirt are made up of the words "he" "puzzle" "skin" "box"
because those words spell out the main idea of the story. The background is all one paragraph from the story.

Paragraph:

His skin would open up like a puzzle box and give way to dead nerve bundles,and then the gleaming finality of the skull. It wasn’t the concept of that sightless dark that troubled him so, nor that of being buried and degrading along with the days, but rather the notion of substance without sensation. The thought of death moved him very little, except for this one fact, and yet it was as silent an idea to him as the consistency of cracked concrete.

The character in this chosen scene is making love to one of his many lovers and in the middle of orgasm the thought of death comes to him and he tries to imagine what it would be like not to feel. To be numb. To be dead. People tend to avoid unpleasant things/situations. The way my character avoided such situations was by making love to sometimes complete strangers but always the thought of death came to him and he always ended up trying to imagine what it would be like. The poem describes people avoiding "unpleasant" things whether a dirty spot, undesired love, rotting life, jealousy, or a crying face.

My purpose as an Artist

I have no set purpose. Moments of inspiration are short when they come but they are also sweet. I'm not sure what 'message' I want to scream out to humanity.

I am not yet sure, I am in the stage where I don't know what the purpose of my words is- the stage is the one when the words arrive without a meaning. They are said yet not understood by even the person who says them.

I suppose I'd like to help people understand themselves. People watch t.v. programs or read books and articles and listen to songs about criminals or crimes or anti-morality and they automatically say "Well that person is insane...I would never do that...There is no valid reason for what he/she did except insanity!" I'd like to help them understand the reason for the person's doing by helping them go into the minds of others. Help them feel compassion and hatred all the same. Accomplish what others have before me but in my own style.

The art of others usually serves as inspiration to me. I am a writer- it's my type of art but when I look at a painting, installation, sculpture, whatever it might be my mind tries to figure the mind of the other artist and if I know he/she's history I try to place myself in their shows and figure out the reason the idea for their piece triggered in their head. Often these my mind-wanderings result in plot ideas or verses based on observation- the observation of the mind of another.