Oh No! My child vomited on my brand new laminator. What cleaning supplies should I use and what punishment is best for the child? Spanking?

(-Final Entry-) This, as you may have guessed from the parenthesized title, is my last entry for Siena. In which, not only will I be summarizing all of my feeling towards Italy and this program in which I am currently enrolled, but also one artist of my choosing. Exciting.

Ghada Amer is ridiculous. Full on unbelievable. There’s a reason I have seen her work three times in the last month an a half. Once in Seattle. Once at the Bienalle. And one final time at the MACRO gallery in Rome. Their was a lot of it in Rome. A whole floor of the place. Four rooms. More work than I could shake a fist at. Not that I would want to.

The initial draw comes from her recognition of canvas as a fabric. Her lines are stitched not painted (excepting of course those lines that are painted). Repetitious, patterned, images turn the canvas into an embroidered blanket that reads like a painting. The excess of thread ends hanging from the paintings make sure you know what you’re looking at. There’s no attempt to make the thread look like brushwork. Because, well, it’s thread. Why should it look like anything else? The sexual imagery of the works is contrary to the method of their production. We are forced to reconcile the imagery with the very apparent means. Despite all of these things, her work is so good that I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what it is that makes me like it so much... and not just because of the security guard eyeballing me the whole time.

I have a hard time saying her work is anything but good. It is solid, put together, thought out, ridiculous. Good. Undeniably some of the best work I have seen in the last... ever.

On the whole the last month has gone fairly smoothly. Collaborating with 16 other people was a little work. The first half of the trip established a nice base for the group to work from. For the group as a whole to experience so much contemporary work at the Bienalle was helpful in giving everyone a similar background. As with my other collaborative experience of this size it opens up possibilities that would not be executable individually. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the work comes together back in Eugene. I got to make the poster for the gallery show. I was excited. Very excited. I think the text still needs some tweaking, but this is where it’s at right now.