As I look through my blog posts, I realize that it has been more than three months since my last substantive post that was not a Daily Drawing. It is not because I do not think almost daily to sit down and write about where I am at in my studio practice, but perhaps it is because of the enormity of trying to put down where my mind is at and has been over the last three months.
There has a been a steady stream of studio administrative tasks which have occupied my time over the last several months. One of which was to consolidate my website domain www.arthurjhuang.com with my current one www.arthurjhuang.work here on Squarespace. After months and months of hemming and hawing, I finally transferred the .com domain from Yahoo (after more than 15 years) to Squarespace and it will automatically be re-directed to the current .work website. The process was made surprisingly manageable by the excellent instructions provided by Squarespace's Help Center.
With that daunting task out of the way, it is time to tackle other no less daunting administrative tasks. However, those are more about organization and preparation on my end than some still seeming unknowable black box.
Since the end of last year, I have been making a steady stream of applications for artist in residence. As with any application process, the first few submissions elicited excitement and hope, but through the first half of 2018 the letters of "not at this time" began to accumulate. The inevitable soul searching and self doubt began to take place. This is all part of the process, but somehow prior knowledge of this does not seem to dampen the intensity of the soul searching. With each "not at this time" letter, another artist in residence deadline pops up on my radar and I pick myself up again and make another application. At the moment, I have two applications out for consideration - Headlands Center for the Arts in the Bay Area and Sirius Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland. I am looking at July deadlines for Lightworks and Willapa Bay. Once those finish, the yearly cycle of artist in residence applications will repeat with Yaddo and Djerassi being on my wish list.
As I have been revising and reworking my applications, I have noticed how my application package i.e. statement and proposal have become more clear and polished which gives me some hope for future applications.
Along with artist in residence applications, I have been making applications for a number of exhibition opportunities in Japan and abroad. These efforts have met with similar results as my artist in residence applications and have perhaps amplified the depths of my soul searching.
The Daily Drawings Project has continued at a steady pace of about one drawing per day. The actual organization and analysis of the over one thousand drawing has taken a backseat. I have taken the Daily Drawings Cells from my Daily Drawings Network installation and created small cluster maps of possible origins. Beyond that, I have been spending most of my time thinking about the growing enormity of the data analysis at hand and plying artist in residence selection committees for a chance to make major headway and discover to this end.
The Memory Remnants Project which can be seen on my Instagram account started in February as an effort to utilize the many blank notebooks that I have accumulated over the years. For each day, I have been creating collages with paper that would otherwise be directly thrown away such as envelopes, expired exhibition announcements, packaging, to name just a few types. The project has gathered a life of its own over the last four months and embedded itself into my daily studio practice along with the Daily Drawings Project.
The Memory Walks Project has been on a sort of hiatus since last summer, but the data compilation continues with daily lists of my departure points which will be used for future projects that are taking shape.
Outside of these studio practice activities, I have spent the better part of my time reading and listening to a wide range of texts. Speculative fiction has been a big part of my reading list while texts about archives, forgetting, consciousness, the human species, and artificial intelligence are amongst some of the other topics of interest.
While this void is uncomfortable and uncertain, I have been able to give myself a bit more license to let my mind wander as it likes through these topics as the months have gone along.
Experience has always shown that these voids inevitably come to an end and true to form, the latter half of 2018 and start of 2019 is starting to take shape.
Small clusters of information seem to be best, so I end this post and will share what the next 12 months or so looks like in a separate post.