Last Week of January in Austin:

Just a quick post to let you know what is happening in Austin in the last week of January.

Tonight the Creative Research Lab has the opening reception for their first exhibition in 2010. Ideas of Mountains is a group exhibition with concentration on large scale installations. The exhibition will be on view until February 6th. Ideas of Mountains features 11 pieces by artists affiliated with Austin and/or the Department of Art and Art History at UT. I am exited to see the installations by Mark Aguhar, Andrew Long and Kendra Kinsey. For more info check the Creative Research Lab website, which, to be honest, is not so user friendly. Come and enjoy the the first night of this exhibition!

Ideas of Mountains
January 23 - February 6, 2010
Opening Reception: January 23, 6:00-9:00 PM
Artists Talk: January 28, 6:30-8:00 PM
Creative Research Lab: 2832 East Martin Luther King, Jr. Austin

Convulsive!

The spring semester will start tomorrow at UT. I hope for a very green semester; Green with all of its metaphors!

I have two classes and an advance reading tutorial course with my advisor. My January so far was challenging and experimental. I was part of a compact course offered by Anhoek School; Accidental Pornographies - the Visual Effects of the American Women's Health Movement Since 1970. The class discussions made the challenge worthwhile. Besides my accidental course, I prepared, wrote and rewrote the labels for my coming exhibition. I will write about that in detail in another post.

I will end this post with a couple of lines from André Breton’s autobiographical novel, Nadja:

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does. Which has all the importance I do not want to arrogate to myself. In every domain the mind appropriates certain rights, which it does not possess. Beauty, neither static nor dynamic. The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph. Royalty of silence. […] Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”*

Nadja Cover

* Breton, Nadja 1928, trans. R.Howard, Grove Press New York (1960), pp. 159-160.
** Please note that the italic words, capital letters and different fonts in Breton's writings are important. I have not changed them.

My Letters to Rilke – Number 4

Dear R,

Your fig tree,
The one that meant a lot to you,
What happened to it,
What came of the hero?

My fig tree,
The one I grew up with,
The one that hid the boy next door among its wide leaves,
The one that I marked my little brother’s height on,
The fig tree that was so real then, is now only a dream!

No blossoms,
No hero,
Just a dream,
A dream that I cannot even share with a child I will never have!

Fig Tree, Paul Klee

*Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegie (the sixth elegy) part of the Letters to Rilke, my sequence in process.

Sneak a Peek

Petrified, Photo by Roja Najafi
Hearst Castle, CA, October 2007

Liberty in Tears, Photo by Roja Najafi
NY, May 2008

Is No Right, Photo by Roja Najafi
Graffiti on Lord & Taylor Billboard,
NJ Transit Train Station, Princeton , April 2008

* Three photographs from Fragmented Close-up, a 17-piece photography collection; Anyone interested in exhibiting these babies?

PS. Fragmented Close-up was my two-year photography project (2007-2009) which was completed on December 2009. I thought it was clear that I am the photographer. Just to prevent the confusion I wrote the complete title with the photographer's name.