The return of beloved friends, enemies and professors slurps the sauce from me daily. As the leaves begin to fall, the prattling and prying–the sipping of the summer sauce, happens in every hidden corridor. We catch up. After slathering on that sauce pretty thick–explaining my summer jay oh bee plus the rest of my life (the gooey, gloppy, fingerlickin details I omit here), I remain emulsified–the questions below still coil around me. The collective slurping has not caused me to empty. In this analogy, my Mellon research is the proverbial slushie of eternal renewal. The more slurping from me, the more concentrated my ideas are becoming… or at least, the better I am at articulating them clearly and concisely without feeling frazzled.
Mercy, its time for a new paragraph. I don’t know what the hell is going on up there about high sugar, high color, low nutrient beverages and condiments. All I know is that it needs to stop, now, right now. Poison aftertaste still in my mouth. New paragraph again.
I am about to delve into ideas about how religious and political structures can influence visual culture. I will continue dealing with questions of gender–but I also have the opportunity to pursue studies in Islamic ceramics as well as world ceramics and gender, so I will be following this path along side my previous paths.
I look forward to asking questions about spaces and their uses: to understand how a home, for example, creates and organizes power or to understand the ways spaces are shared and negotiated by different groups of people. I want to know more about space making as performance of the self.
I am still unable to cease inquiry on the topic of portraiture and self portraiture–what does it mean to make a copy–a replica–a replacement–a memorial? How do portraits contrast the self? Can I truly see my face, being that my eyes are eternally confined to my eye sockets–what do mirrors/photographs/casts do for me/to me? Why make self-portraits? How does image interact with identity? How do I want to be seen/to see myself?–Or rather, how does a maker of portraiture solve the riddles of representation? (Riddles including styles, form, color, composition and a limited space/time for the portrait object/event) How are self portraits consumed? How is portraiture consumed more generally?
Golly, questions about the consumption of visual culture alone could be my life’s work.
Today, I am thirsty for more.
