Hello from bus!

The Short

Bird and I are heading into northern Utah and Wyoming. I’ve fallen in love! It’s been a long spring of healing and studio introversion. But now it’s mountain summer followed by back to back residencies at Jentel and Ucross in the fall.

New work made in April in LA!

New fieldnotes updates from recent weeks in New Mexico and the UMOCA Fieldworks: Canyonlands residency!

New print publication! Enjoy some physical mail.

The Long

Since living mostly outside and mostly on my own time, I’ve been getting a lot closer with the natural cycles around me. Two summers ago in Wyoming I cried (a lot) because the days were getting so much more noticeably shorter that far north. The longer I’m out here noticing, the more types of cycles seem to emerge nested inside one another.

Here’s a new one: I’ve spent the last two months trying to coax my menstrual cycle back into my body after two decades of birth control suppressing it. My body had a lot to say about this. There was little choice but to attend to what was rolling through me physically and emotionally, not least of which was the grief of having had to sacrifice this relationship with my own cycle to stay safe in a patriarchal system. Pretty silly to launch my big new newsletter and then disappear, but I haven’t really wanted to talk much at all.

The introversion threw me back into the privacy of my work. As I spent April in Dustin’s beautiful studio, this hormonal return-to-self called me into a felt kind of decision making in the objects: less reason, more magic/awareness. I saw Speaking in Tongues at the ICA, and it clarified something in me. Some artists reference mystical practices (the cartoonish work that “speaks about” xyz spirituality), but they are unwilling to sacrifice a certain legibility to an art audience. Other artists make me feel like, “wow, the decisions this person is making in this sculpture are driven by something VERY different than art”. They risk the mystery (see Marwa Abdul-Rahman). I returned to the studio more open to some kind of surrender to something way more at stake than Art capital A. It feels like letting the cycles around me speak, making my moves as lightly as possible.

In May, Bird and I headed to northern New Mexico, where a big part of bus was built (her cabinet doors are sticks of invasive salt cedar foraged from Ojo Creative Preserve). Another return, another cycle. I’ve joked that this spring has me revisiting earlier lives: the January residency in my hometown, Phoenix; the April reimagining of studio work in LA; and then the rugged demands of New Mexico.

I collected an inordinate amount of pine resin in preparation for making big work next studio season, but otherwise felt no desire to create. There’s a seasonality of my practice now in the bus, a trust in the cycles of production and rest.

Last weekend, I emerged from the rock and forest cocoon and went to Fieldworks: Canyonlands, a residency hosted by the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art at the Canyonlands Research Center. Artists from all over Utah and the west gathered to learn from each other and the land. I met so many interesting ranchers, writers, dancers, native community organizers, and scientists working around Bears Ears. What a gift to see this place in which I’ve spent so much time in solitude through such a variety of stewardship lenses. I have much more to say about this in a later update.

But, speaking of cycles, Fieldworks presenter Elpitha Tsoutsounaki taught us to coax color from the iron oxide in the rock. She invited us to consider the iron cycle: this essential element sloughing off the rock, shared among plant and animal bodies, absorbed back in the land and sea. Somehow, amid all of my feeling out of carbon and rock cycles in my work through charcoal, clay, wood fires, tree sap itself, I had never considered that this cycle of metal/mineral was just as present and flowing.

There I was, sitting in the dirt grinding rocks to powder, anxiously awaiting my own body’s bleeding for the previous seven weeks, hoping to somehow be reinitiated into the iron of the earth. What a gift, what a right encounter at the right time, this workshop!

Just a few days later, my own cycle finally did return to me. And I feel very ready for the new season.

Some news:

-Bird and I are heading to Ogden for a couple weeks! For love! For bus projects (Scott is going to help me engineer a pull-up bar on my roof deck)! We’ll be bouncing around northern Utah/Wyoming alllll summer. As always, reach out to come camp, Bird and bus love guests.

New publication alert!

-I printed a small “centerfold” of a selection of photos from my Self Pleasure book to exchange with the other artists at Fieldworks. I like how it turned out! I’m going to print some more, and if you send me $15 and your address, I’ll mail you one. (Venmo @christina-mesiti)

-In October I’ll be heading to a residency at Jentel, immediately followed by a residency at Ucross. Very excited for 7 weeks of consecutive studio time to make some big sculptural moves with my carbon and stone and dirt and now iron oxide materials.

-You can see some of these materials conglomerated in person in Los Angeles in A Shadow of a Daydream at Tiger Strikes Astroid LA! Curated by David Gutierrez, up through June 28th.

Love,

Christina and Bird