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Am working backwards this week using my images as the starting point. This was definitely a month of jolting into a rude but necessary awareness, and it has been a bumpy rough ride that at least has slowed down without quite coming to a stop. Funny that significant change and shakeup is also occurring in the outside world. Although somewhat destructive on some level, also realizing that realism may be a more constructive way of looking at my relationships going forward, but the familiar is looking a little odd these days; the same but not the same:



Although I've personalized and have taken this out of its larger feminist context, this work by Kirsten Justesen, "Sculpture II", a part of Wack! that originated at LACMA and showed at PS1 pretty much sums up how I've been feeling lately; social confusion and isolation, unwelcomed containment or restriction, an unfamiliar desire to remain hidden, being seen without really being seen; however, on second thought, this largely stems from interactions with various men in my life in reaction to their varying and usually hidden levels of traditional male thinking, whether at work or in my personal life, whether I've known them for decades or more recently:

These particularly painful and brutal images by Ryoko Suzuki "Bind," that appeared in the Brooklyn Museum, seems to speak to how women can feel tied up and bound, barely or not able to speak, much less be heard, in the face of outmoded historical chauvinistic views that are taking a long time (maybe not in the history of mankind, but in the generations of women and men since the social upheaval of the 1960s) to fundamentally change into an automatic part of modern social relationships:

Can't give the artist name or title for this image, except that it is part of the "Truthiness, Photography as Sculpture" show at the UC Riverside, California Museum of Photography:

When I saw this deaf-blind-mute-wrapped-enclosed body lost in pastel innocent colors, I thought of my optimism, and therefore reluctance, to label and categorize people, which for the most part has served me well because I remained open, and as a result, enjoy some great relationships. Sometimes, this has not worked out well for the same reason, and I feel mute, at a loss. And there's the interesting position; is she in submission, unable to stand up for herself or merely looking for something?