Just some short updates, details to come.

I have been in Baltimore for 2 whole years! The experience has not been without trials and errors, some very very good times and some not-very-good-at-all times, but I’m feelin pretty great about where I am professionally, creatively, socially, and geographically. Job is active and feeling dynamic these days; figuring out my studio practice and making lots of work; have made a bunch of new and wonderful friends; have nurtured old friendships with people I’ve known for years and years and years; feel quite settled in my neighborhood, too.

Next week, you can catch me in Philly at SGC where I’ll be making some gallery rounds with my old MFA pals. Really looking forward to some spring time celebrating with them. What I love most about this little cohort of ours is that the 8 of us are still quite close, regardless of distance, and that we continue to support each other and share ideas and complain and whine and understand. Even three years out (I seriously cannot believe we left MFA world nearly 3 years ago!!!) I love seeing what everyone is working on, that we still sustain our studio practice, that we are still in touch. Many hearts to y’all. See you very soon!

Last night, I was reflecting on the last 2 years with my good pal Andrew. He’s become one of my closest pals since I’ve moved here, primarily because we met under the same circumstances (new to a city, wanting to meet other creative people and find colleagues, not interested in sitting around being bored/restless) and probably because we have some similar neuroses fine qualities. I remember when I first moved here that my motto was “Do things that scare you.” I think I did a lot of scary things, such that they have really shaped my current professional and creative life. In considering some drawings recently, I was wondering if I’ve lost sight of that, if I’ve gotten comfortable and haven’t done scary things lately. Creativity always involves risk; we don’t make things because it’s easy.

Anyway, I’m spending the next few months stepping outside of my creative comfort zone as much as possible. It is easy for me to embrace a routine and I need to mix things up while I also try to reconcile a balance between work, commuting 45 miles each way, fitting in yoga 3-5 times a week, making art, managing the gallery, spending time with my family, and oh yeah, being social. Life is full.

My first “scary” upcoming tasks are performance and public art. I tend to work very intimately and subtly and I need to push beyond that to see what else I can make. So, I’ve got a roaming performance piece in the works for the middle of April, hopefully, and some sketches in order for a collaborative site-specific installation in early May. Also doing another site-specific piece in early June.

If you’re in Baltimore on Tuesday the 23rd, I’ll be doing a short talk at UMBC about my creative career/professional development. I still need to put together some slides, but it should be interesting to see where the last 5 years have taken me, visually.

That’s all! Happy Spring! Don’t forget to enter the Giveaway!

xo

Applications are open for Charm City Craft Mafia’s Pile of Craft 2010!!!

Pile Of Craft is our annual juried Spring craft fair, featuring handmade and original items from 40+ talented artists from all over the country. Apparel, ceramics, handbags, jewelry, fine art, scuplture, homegoods and more – made by hand, sold by the artists themselves!
Want to be a vendor? You can APPLY HERE. Applications to Pile Of Craft 2010 are open until April 2 at midnight, and we will be announcing the accepted vendors by April 9th.

Good luck!!

Let’s do this again–hooray for free stuff! This giveaway consists of a charm necklace with a feather cameo-type pendant and a pair of earrings from the Little Pancakes shop. (will put up some photos this week when it’s not so gray outside) I’ll even throw in a couple Phampersand Press goodies.

How to win? In impatient anticipation for consecutive sunny days, I want to hear all about the things you’re excited to do and see once Spring is here! I am seriously getting so antsy for the shift; here’s what I’m looking forward to:
-I just moved (hence the lack of posts lately) and am participating in this year’s Apartment Therapy Cure. I’ve been a fan of the blog for years and years, and now I think I’m finally in a place where I can try their 8 week home regimen
-outdoor concerts
-sangria and margaritas
-wearing shoes without socks
-working on my fire escape garden
-climbing on to the roof with good friends and good beers
-lots and lots more drawings as I get my studio set up and can work at my desk with the windows open
-FARMERS MARKET
-participating in a CSA share this year
-skirts and dresses with flip flops or slip-ons, rather than tights and boots

oh man, can’t wait for all of this stuff.

so leave a comment with your Spring goodies, and one person will be picked at random to receive some fun sunny crafts from Little Pancakes and Phampersand Press. Last day to enter is March 31st.

someday I will stop substituting coffee for sleep.

• cleaned the heck out of the whole place, including the main room, bathrooms, bar, gallery, storage room, and basement
• took a major truck haul to the dump
• primed and repainted the ENTIRE gallery and front desk (the paint we had been using was cheapish and gray and kind of ugly). this took sooooo long.
• patched up a big hunk of broken drywall
• etched, degreased, and repaired the gallery’s concrete floor (final coating today! it’s looking sooooooo good so far!)
• took a couple breaks for karaoke and junk food
• repainted the whole back hallway

so much so much so much! my body is KILLIN me. I’m sure we are all very exhausted and this Monday has been uniquely painful already. but the space is looking wonderful and we are all really excited. I have pretty much booked the space (and soon to be auxiliary project space) until October and I’m looking forward to all of the shows. WOO TEAMWORK!

IT’S A TSHIRT WITH APPLIQUED CAT HEADS, HOW CAN I NOT LOVE THAT

One evening during Snowmageddon II, T and I found ourselves curled up with hot toddies and Kurosawa. The first Samurai finally commits to the cause when he realizes that the villagers have been feeding him fine rice while they have been eating millet. I mostly considered this a part of the Asian Folklore we all know.

This past weekend, I went home to celebrate Tet, or Lunar New Year, with my family. Musky incense and jasmine rice had already done their work and I could smell home just walking to the door. On the morning of Tet, my mom and I wound summer rolls, crushed peanuts, and soaked fresh flat rice noodles while my dad poked at a shoddy steamer on the stove cooking big hunks of yucca root. I always noticed that he enjoyed this really simple food, sometimes giving it a dip in a mixture of salt, sugar, and chili. When it was done cooking, we leaned against the kitchen island together and peeled away the rough fuzzy bark to get to the steaming, slightly sweet, starchy insides. And in his usual way, he dropped a few sentences that maybe to him were a simple footnote of a part of his life, but tell so much more. I went back to chopping peanuts and he was picking at another hunk of root, now savoring it. He half grinned across the kitchen and said, “In 1976, after the we lost the war and the Communists take over, they took every, everything from us, from all the families. we were so poor and we couldn’t pay for the rice. So my mom, she grew this and we ate this root. It is cheap and easy to grow and you can make a lot of it. And when I eat this, I think of that time.”

Ever since I began visiting home instead of living at home (wow, really? 10 years?) my mom would thrust any and all food items in my arms before I could leave. Now that I’m older she gives me fewer packs of fruit snacks and bottles of water but always knows that I want rice. I still don’t even know why I don’t just buy the entire 20 or 50 lb bag myself, because I know I would eat it all. I guess it’s just something about opening the closet door in their kitchen and dragging the bright green 5 gallon bucket that my parents have had for years and years and years and sticking my hand, Amelie style, into that little bumpy white sea. It’s that gesture that I love, the thing that reminds me of her care for me, that allows me a second to stop being so stubborn and to ask her for something.

I lived in Bangkok for a brief time in 2003 and my uncle on my father’s side came to visit for a couple weeks. We met up in Vietnam, actually, to see some more family, and while feeling homesick, it was nice to have something like a littler version of my dad showing me memories of his country.

We feasted on lots of favorites I already recognized, tried some new things, but my greatest pleasures while living in that part of the world was the fruit. Just, wow. Fresh pineapple plucked from a tree and chopped right in front of you? 10 cents. Diced guava? No problem. My uncle’s favorite fruit to eat while we traveled together was the Rose Apple, or as he called it “Flip Flop.” They can be red or green, are sort of pear shaped but smaller, very watery when you bite into them like the texture of biting into a bell pepper, and taste slightly less sweet and slightly more floral than a Japanese pear. Something like that. These were so named the Flip Flop because when my uncle was a boy, he would chuck one of his flip flops into the tree to knock them down. “I lost so many shoes that way, my mom was furious.”

On the morning before I left home again this week, I found my mom carving away Pomelos (like a grapefruit, but green and bigger, with a really thick rind) in the kitchen. They had come off the altar for New Year’s blessings and were ready for consumption. In a few hours, she would undergo minor surgery to her right hand. It was the day after we celebrated the new year, the day when your actions aren’t quite as ominous but you should still be wary.

I remember driving my mom to the hospital through a 4 AM blizzard on Tet last January, for her first of 3 surgeries in 6 months. I remember her wondering if getting major uteran surgery was a bad omen for the coming lunar year (we say that you shouldn’t sweep on the first day of Tet, lest you spend the rest of the calendar cleaning up after yourself). I remember my knees shaking for about 12 hours as I alternated doses of caffeine and over-analyzed anxiety. I remember trying to knit. I remember not finding anything worth reading, not even the stupid horse magazines. I remember pinging texts back and forth to friends as if they were trying as desperately as I was to find stillness. Most of all I remember telling myself that I had to be the strong one, on this one day for her, after all of the many many many many years she had been strong for all of us.

So this year, I came downstairs to spend time with her before she left for another surgery. Very minor, in and out in just a couple hours, just around the corner from the house. Out of Dr.’s orders (and also out of nerves, I assume) she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in a while, but she was still at the sink, peeling stringy pith away from the meats. She offered me some, but I don’t like sweets, not even fruit, so early in the morning. Because the rind is so thick, pomelos are impossible to peel without a knife. She has a way that she likes to do it–make a cut in the middle, traveling around the whole circumference, then do the perpendicular spoke cuts down the length, like panels on a beach ball. now you have, more or less, pomelo half-spheres from which the fruit and pith can slowly pull away.

Like my dad the day before, she smiled out of focus across the sink and remembered her own gestures of peeling pomelos as a kid. after all that work, you could split the half spheres along the spokes and squash it down to look like a giant flower. or a hat. we joked about saving the funny pomelo hats for my little nieces, twin girls 4 and a half years old, Scarlett and Samantha, they would have just been tickled with their new citrus helmets.

Mom’s surgery was fine, I talked to her a couple nights ago right after she came home. Although it was minor, I still can’t help feeling that clench in my gut when she says she’s got another appointment to check out something or other. I hope that this time around isn’t yet another omen for this coming year.

I feel positive though. Celebrating the passing of time is as arbitrary as any other day, but I do believe that for those who mark it, they ought to spend it how they hope to see moons pass before the next celebration. I brought in the year of the Tiger eating foods I love with people I truly love. I’ve been packing pomelo wedges to work this week and gradually making a dent in some hearty Vietnamese beef stew and jasmine rice.

took up cross-stitch during the blizzards

lots of yoga

another print show in March

small print exchange in April

installation early summer-ish

cabin weekend equipped with magical karaoke

been feeling really Frenchy and twee and whimsical and not ashamed about any of it, probably because I’m excited to move and have been cruising the vintagey design blogs

so speaking of which, reading The Mandarins, want to go to there, want to drink some of that

food awakenings

more more more more more

end of my block… it pretty much still looks the same today

I LOOOOVE my neighborhood, especially in the winter, so pretty

There were city people going around in hummers

this is the center of my neighborhood. had a snowball fight and loooong night of bar crawling with my buddies

snow my god

wtf this is someone’s car… but all of our cars look like this right now

hey look, here is a list of all the yummy things I have made or am making in the near future, with many thanks to the awesomeness of H-Mart (recipes don’t exist in my life but I’ll try to wing something written for anyone interested):
-hearty beef & veggie stew (with homemade stock that I had in the freezer!! mmm)
-empanadas
-braised short ribs with ginger glaze, steamed carrots, kale, and jasmine rice
-roasted chicken (this is my usual, as snowmageddon descends)
-from that chicken, fresh-made stock
-with that stock, pea risotto
-roasted brussel sprouts (another specialty, I like to think)
annndddddd
I am super excited to experiment with these thai eggplants I just got. they are usually pretty hard to find or are only in season for really short time, so I jumped on them as soon as I saw them. I also got some of the flavor notes to play around with something curry-ish–lemongrass, tamarind, fish sauce, coconut milk, and the spices I always have around–we’ll see how it goes!