Latitude, Longitude

I have been sitting in on Lee Walton’s MFA graduate seminar this semester. The academic setting is something that I find to be stimulating and engaging. I miss school.

A few weeks ago in class we exchanged gifts. The gift had to help the recipient some way in their practice as an artist. Alice, with whom I have taken a class before, drew my name. My gift was a list of eight latitude/longitude coordinates. No real instructions. Just coordinates, which have been in my mind a lot since. Alice knows I am interested in place, and works describing or seeking to understand a given space.

I have decided to make a body of work, creating visual and written investigations of each coordinate, at each coordinate. I am uncertain of how the work will be brought together; I am anticipating that the process will bring to me logical next steps.

My parameters for myself are as follow:

1. I will not make work at more than one coordinate in a single day
2. I will not return to a coordinate to remake work; at least not for this piece
3. At each site I will create a verbal 20 word description, a photogram, a pinhole, an environmental portrait, and a drawing or other single additional physical documentable response

 

john cage: some rules for students and teachers

john cage: some rules for students and teachers

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: be self-disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything – it might come in handy later.

Some distant summer.

I didn’t see the snow.

Caffeinated

Caffeine. from Lauren Ling on Vimeo.

I haven’t drank coffee in over six months. This morning, for the first time in some time, I woke up and missed it.

Coffee and I have a long history, starting back when my face became a permanent fixture on my dad’s coffee mug, decal style. Then dad decided to open a bookstore with a coffeeshop inside it. Destiny was drawing me.

When I traveled to Australia I kicked the habit. Even worked at a coffeeshop. I took up tea, and was glad I did when I made it to China. Jasmine.

Back home in North Carolina, I made up for lost time. One cup with cream and sugar became 1/2 a pot black or a 4-shot Americano. For a time I called it a quad and wore a green apron. For a time. Coffee was associated with ability to function as I slowly forgot that water wasn’t always hot and black.

In 2010 I made this video as homage to the aroma and the jitters. Now in 2012 the french press is reserved for loose leaf chai tea.

But this morning, I missed it.

cowbird

You can now find my work within the cowbird collaborative.

“Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.”

Find me here: www.cowbird.com/author/lauren-ling/

Archival

Tuesdays at Al’s on Display at Gatewood Gallery

I have been working on a long term photo project titled Tuesdays at Al’s. For the last several months I have been spending every Tuesday afternoon at a local bookshop called Glenwood Coffee & Books, owned by a man named Alan Brilliant.

The project is now in its completed form as an artist book, & is on display at the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as part of their Senior Show. The show will be up through December 23rd. The artist book is comprised of a hand-bound book of twenty three digital images from Glenwood, as well as an etching of Al, & miscellaneous digital prints, pinhole photographs, scans, & cyanotypes.

I have also put together a collection of one hundred images from the bookshop which can be viewed here as part of my portfolio.

 

In other news, I am finished with my undergraduate degree as of this coming Monday!

Loss & Groceries

I bought my most recent 1/2 gallon of soy milk before she passed. It’s still fresh, 5 days old, and I almost went to visit her today.

For 2.5 years we painted and played. Went to get her hair done. Took pictures to remember what she could not. My name. My presence. Her baby doll came everywhere.

Revisiting Ghana

It’s been eight months since I traveled to Ghana to document the building of a school in a habitat village called Kyekyewere. I struggled with the ethics of appropriating split seconds that I thought would best represent poverty, hope, and beauty to those who would see the images. Many of the adults refused to have their photographs taken at all, thrusting children in front of camera lenses, shields dodging the firing. Others demanded money or simply gestured an inapproval of sorts. I learned a lot about the implications of a photograph, third world non-profits, and myself on the trip, filling much of a sketchbook with miscellaneous thoughts and missing my husband most waking moments.

Home, I tore through the images and selected those to submit for shows and exhibitions, most of which never occurred. I selected and edited still very much submerged in the culture I had just left behind. Ghanaian culture is some strange tapestry of western celebrity, red dust, and tribal tradition. The photograph above is quite easily my favorite I took. It was in some market full of spices, fish oil in recycled water bottles, and keychains. Framed within a frame the young girl sits at bored attention. She seemed underwhelmed by the myriad of Americans suddenly at her stall; she knew we were not there for spices.

I am just now returning to my unedited photographs from Ghana. Further removed from the experience, overlooked moments take on a new significance, and I have discovered a whole new set of images.

 

 

In all my hurry, in all her beauty, I  never noticed her hesitance, her one arm still in the door.

 

In other parts of my world, one of my cyanotypes has been accepted into a student exhibition, Self Observed, being held at the North Carolina Museum of Art in conjunction with their Rembrandt in America exhibition. The exhibit runs from October 30th through January 20th.