ARTSTUDI 242 Final Portfolio

Final Portfolio Nova Meurice 6 June, 2022 ARTSTUDI 241 - Daniela Rossell novameurice@gmail.com

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Table of Contents

I.

Handwriting as writing

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II.

Images that compel me to write

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III.

Blind lines using fonts

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IV.

Still lives

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V.

Burning Question

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VI.

ABCs exercise

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VII.

Elevator pitch

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VIII. Final project

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IX.

Index card self-portraits

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X.

Sketchbook highlights

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XI.

Acknowledgements

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I. Handwriting as writing

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II. Images that compel me to write

These photographs are from Alec Soth’s series Sleeping By the Mississippi. It caught my eye a while back while I was living at home in Iowa because of the way that it evokes a midwestern slow-moving melancholy.

Our river is wide and murky.

The farm runoff, all of the topsoil and pesticides feed into an opaque silky brown. It was not just us, but also our tributaries that leech like this—smaller channels bring their own trash, which eventually meanders through us en route the Mississippi itself.

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Our river moves slowly, but my mom, pointing out the tiny whirl pools on the surface, once warned me that the undercurrent will suck you under the mud if you try to swim. No one really bothered to test it anyways, not with the hydroelectric dams that ruptured the surface every few miles or

with the threat of chemical poisoning from whatever brought occasional milky foam to shore. There was one man who used to swim by the bridge near my house, but people kept calling the police, thinking that his morning swim was an attempt to take his own life. He stopped after a few weeks.

Every eight years or so the rains

do not stop and the cracked mud goes soft and the slow water rises out of its banks. One of my neighbors, an aging writer, told me when the water reached the bottom of our street that if we still had the deep-rooted prairie of the past that all of the excess would be siphoned through the roots deep into the middle of the earth, sparing our basements the 7

these two photographs I took by the Iowa River in my hometown from 2015 .

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same slow trickle. We watched a snake disappear into the rising silt tide. Another neighbor put on his waders, to avoid tetanus he told us, and followed the snake into the water.

The neighbor who used to drive me and her son to middle school claimed that she and her friends used to dive off of the low-hanging pedestrian bridge when she was in high school. On sticky summer nights, slipping first between

the metal bars, they would plunge foot first into the cool water. They were swimmers, she explained, with no fear of drowning. One night she jumped and felt something tugging at her feet from the depths, not a river monster but a metal skeleton, of a bed or an old refrigerator she wasn’t sure.

She kicked free and saw it fall back into the soft silt below her. I wouldn’t do that these days, she advised, who knows what you’d find.

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This photograph (2002) is from a falsh drive that my dad gave me with old family photos, a folder of selfies (“selfieselect”), a folder of the vacation that he took by himself (“bobovacation”) and two folders that were “left to the imagination” that he couldn’t figure out how to upload.

My older sister was born in 1990, nine years before me. I don’t remember much about the house that she sits in here—maybe I can feel the green shag carpet on the stairs or the sticky round table in the kitchen. But the blue futon still sits, more sun-faded, in the house that my parents live in now. Marielle defends our landline, whose corkscrew cord matches her lips that curl at the photographer.

My dad had just bought his first digital camera two years before. He liked to take selfies, held at arms length, and pictures of his desktop computer screen and portraits of me and my younger sister with his adult-sized glasses on our toddler-sized faces.

The slight of his hand is visible—I’m sure he liked the drama of the twin window beams that illuminate Marielle to the point of washing her out or the fact that the defensive crook of her back echoes the curve of the phone. Also, the eclipse of his head, bald and ovoid blocks the last corner of the illuminated frame. Mar notices the intrusion, of course, the unwelcome figure in her phone conversation and the imposition on her fragile independence. Maybe it will take her a few years to notice, too, the sweetness of the blocked light by her adoring photographer.

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III. Blind lines using fonts

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IV. Still lives

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V. Burning Questions

How does attention—noticing, collecting and savoring—change the passage of time?

How can you slow the passage of time without getting caught up in the fear of loss?

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VI. ABCs Experiment Agnès Varda, like my father, was born in a town south of Brussels. She knows how to stretch time. Her most famous film, Cléo 5 à 7 follows a pop star in the two hours, almost minute-for minute, as she waits for her biopsy results.

Varda’s films are known for an almost documentary style—the shots are long and the action muted. She likes to blur the line between the real and invented by inserting autobiography and drawing out time making you dwell on petty minutia with her.

As an older artist, she started to make documentaries about documenting. In Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, she follows gleaners in the south of France with her camera. The gleaners teach her about gathering and nourishment. As they pick their food, she starts to pick things herself— footage of her aging hands, a few gray hairs on her scalp and trucks that she has caught, with only her camera through the loop of her fingers on the highway.

Because of the bees The UC Davis school of agriculture used a camera every day over the course of three months to chart the bloom of a flower from tiny egg into full fruit. The development starts small—an ovary it is called—and its middle grows round until the petals fall. Like clockwork, the process loops each year—the budding, the swelling and the falling.

A closer look Danielle and I first met Nancy when she held a meeting for the gleaning club. Just outside our dorm,

she told us to look at the hedges.

We pushed back the leaves that we’d seen every day but never before investigated and found round fruits, almost the same shape and size as the leaves peeking from below. Danielle bit into one—the dark green skin tasted herbal and the yellow flesh underneath was like a milder pineapple or a softer, sour apple. They’re pineapple guavas, Nancy explained. Maybe we will turn them into jam so we can make the season last longer.

On day three Of new student orientation, my new friends and I heard that the university president’s house had a fig tree in the back. We snuck to the house where we thought the president lived. Through the hedges just off the street we found a full grove of fig trees. Though the fruit was still green, its insides were jammy and crunchy in a way that left seeds in between my teeth. We learned later that this house did not belong to the president. A year after that, we noticed that they had installed a tall fence.

An experience, too Nancy told me that she likes eating fruit outside because she gets to enjoy it slowly. In other contexts, it might be just food, but when she picks it and holds it to the light, it becomes an experience too.

Flatness Michele Foucault wrote that the archive preserves people through their brief contact with power like an

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herbarium. Pressed and drained of color, what was once delicate flesh lives on in only flat form for scientists to prod and catalog. Is there a way to understand fruits that allows them to keep living? That meets them in their context and does not ask more life from them than they can give?

gins, a leader of the Black Panther Party and an educator in Oakland schools. She taught children how to eat with intention, respect and curiosity. In their mouths, they let the raisin plump up before chewing. Their attention or care—or maybe their spit—filled the raisin with life.

Guidance With Nancy’s help, Danielle and I found a gleaning map on google. Each location is marked with a fruit and a season and a note ( “Plums, not great, ripe in June,” “Berries, ask before picking—community garden owners are very protective”).

Just Knowing that she can eat things, Nancy told me, has made her walks in her childhood neighborhood more exciting. Even the park near her house, one that she walked to frequently growing up, even during her COVID confinement, is teeming with new possibilities.

Gravity and Grace Simone Weil suggested that our attention was holy. “Attention, taken to its highest degree,” she wrote “is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”

Heft Nancy says that her favorite fruit is the persimmon. She watches it grow, unfettered by leaf coverage, for months hanging above her head.

In the fall, she likes to feel it plop into the picker when the stem gives way. She’ll score an X shape and peel the skin back, watching as the sun illuminates its gold threads and red flecks. The sun, she remembers, is the source of all of its sweetness.

Intention does sweeten She also told me about Ericka Hug20

From Light to Life Peach trees know innately how to maximize the amount of sun their leaves can drink by spreading out their surface area. Innately, they know how to take heat and light and turn it into life.

Made-up interventions On forums, some people suggest that you might get better colored fruit if you prune the leaves around the fruit or if you put reflective material in your mulch. Even if the color is better, though, the peaches might get smaller. They might be less protected then, and prone to the stress of heat or drought.

New trends Vrinda, another gleaner, says that campus fruits are growing more sour.

When she first arrived, it had rained enough to fill the lake bed for a few months. Then, year after year, winters grew shorter and rains became sparse. Feijoas were fewer, orang-

es were thicker skinned and more acidic. Interrupted and thirsty at their early developmental stages, the harsher weather prevented them from growing more. Some scientists say that we won’t be able to see the change for another 40 years, others say that a discerning palette will not lie.

On the spot In the late fall, after everything else had ripened and dropped or been eaten, Danielle and I went out to eat strawberry fruits (Arbutus Unedo). They’re not actually related to strawberries, it turns out, but their bumpy red skin looks similar to their ground-dwelling friends.

Their soft flesh is orange, though, and doesn’t taste like much beyond the sweet. Although they’re drought, shade, and frost tolerant, they are still too delicate to preserve.

Their soft skin will get squashed if you collect them one atop the other, and their jams will turn brown—it’s best to eat them immediately.

Picked young, then eaten Nancy knows now that she can eat the feijoa flowers too in the springtime.

Before, she might have felt bad. Now knowing that several consecutive days of 90 degree heat in the summer, a state growing more and more common, has meant that the bushes produce little fruit, she doesn’t mind chewing on the succulent purple petals.

Questions, still It might also just be that the bushes are older, another professor suggested, and not exclusively the effects of drought and heat.

Rot We didn’t have a picking tool, so when we finally located the public fig trees, Danielle and I had to stack on each other’s shoulders to reach the fruit. I had only had a fig once in Iowa, but I didn’t realize that their leaves smelled like maple syrup in October or that they bled white sap when you twisted them from their stem. Much of the fruit, before we even arrived, split open and fell away from the husk of the top of its skin, leaving the flesh and seeds in a bloody pile on the ground.

Separation Dan and I are from Iowa where most of the world’s corn is grown. Because of the way that the global capitalist economy works, big farms conglomerated small farms and started growing single crops. Because of this, we didn’t grow up with much fauna variety, beyond the stray apple tree, in our neighborhoods.

Trash One man collected not food but garbage for his art. Other people’s waste, he told Varda, represented a cluster of possibilities.

Unnecessary Maybe there is something to the idea of taking for necessity. Varda was most excited about what it meant to take the unwanted, though. To take what you need and leave the chaff in the ground so it might go on living just like her. I am so lucky to revel in excess here.

Use of Devotion?

One time, Danielle and I couldn’t sleep, so we spent the small hours 21

of the morning going to all of the fruit trees on campus. We put our hands on their trunks and told them that we didn’t want anything, that we just wanted to ask how they were doing. We wished we could give the trees rain—there had been so little that year. All that reached the bark was the heat from our palms and a few words lost to the night wind. We wondered if they could hear us.

Vow What I seek is transformation. Only transcendence can stop time. I will attend to what I see before it is gone.

When?

At the end of the film, after she has collected many heart-shaped potatoes Varda places a silent, broken clock that she has found on her mantle. In their own way, both objects mark the dull thuds of time.

X marks the spot When they drove me to the airport for a funeral, Miley sent me a photo of the plum pit that I left in their passenger seat. Forgot something? They asked. Sometimes I wonder if I lose as much as I collect.

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VII. Elevator Pitch

My project is about gathering, attending to and savoring plants as a way to understand the passage of time.

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VIII. Final Project

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IV. Still lives

IX. Self-portraiture

5/10/2022 5/12/2022

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5/17/2022 5/19/2022

5/26/2022 40

5/24/2022

6/1/2022

X. Sketchbook highlights

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ink and plum jam from the breakfast table 5/20/2022

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ink and plum jam from the breakfast table 4/28/2022

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ink and plum jam from the breakfast table 4/25/2022

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XI. Acknowledgements

Thank you to the class for your engagement and feedback and for showing me all of the exciting directions you’ve taken your projects in. It has been inspiring to see people’s work grow on the wall for the past several week, and it’s been a pleasure to get to learn and try new things in this space alongside you. Thank you to Daniela for all of the wonderful exciting art recommendations and for pushing me in unexpected directions. I’m looking forward to bringing this spirit of experimentation into my writing and visual arts practice going forward.

Thanks to all for the grace and flexibility in this difficult quarter. I’m wishing everyone sunnier days ahead.