Sourcing Inspiration

Are you more likely to be inspired by:

The presence or absence of contentment?
Personal situations or social conditions?
Interactions with humans or non-humans?
Rest or fatigue?
Relaxation or pressure?
Sobriety or being high?
Joy or sorrow?
Culture or nature?
Familiarity or mystery?
Production or consumption?
The past or the present?
Facts or feelings?
Anger or pity?
Yourself or others?

A couple of these were difficult for me to answer. On the other hand, some of them I found to be very easy to answer. So first I will start with those.

Culture or nature?

Culture is what absolutely inspires me. Whether it be for the positive or the negative, the society we live in and the "culture" that is embedded in that society is integral to my work and my life. My own culture is also very inspirational to me. Growing up white and Roman Catholic in the suburbs of Detroit is something that has been definitive in my upbringing. It is part of who I am and the way I think is a result of that circumstance. As much as I like to pretend I am something else, it is what it is.

Familiarity or mystery?

Familiarity is something that I understand. Mystery is scary. While I like a healthy dose of mystery, I find that I work well when I am working with topics that I know well from a personal experience or viewpoint. I believe strongly in research, but unless I am personally invested in the subject matter, I find myself getting lost.

Facts or feelings?

Facts are important. I definitely believe in knowing and understanding facts. But I also am a strong feeler. I believed for a short period of time this summer that I was crazy. My sister told me, "You're not crazy, Jenna. You just feel things stronger than other people." I know, so deep you could drown. But seriously, I am very emotional and that is an important element in how I work and understand my work.


Now a couple that were difficult for me to answer:

Personal situations or social conditions?

Social conditions are extremely, extremely important to me and I find inspiration in that. However, I can only truly speak from my own personal experiences. I work best when I am able to relate my personal situations to social conditions.

Yourself or others?

This is similar to the last question. I am inspired by other people always. I am not the type of person who could lock herself in a studio for weeks and just come out with a ton of brilliant work that would change the world. I am a part of my community. I need to be talking and responding to other people. I get lost in my own head a lot, but I need to be grounded by those around me to stay sane.

Thank you, Linda Weintraub for that exercise.

narrativeeevs

I find something really fantastic in the narrative; I love something that tells a story. Work that speaks not only to a situation but to the people involved and their story are all things that are important to me. I think this began when I was younger and I was obsessed with this book about Egyptians that my mom gave me. I liked to make up stories about the people and how they would interact.


I love the way that Kara Walker creates these epic stories using silhouettes. The scale and the figures speak about slave revolt and rebellion. Yet they retain some sort of whimsy in the exaggeration of certain body parts and features.


Bec Young, who was my supervisor this summer (and my life mentor), is part of this print collaborative called JustSeeds. Her work is really fantastic. I have had the opportunity to see many of the other printmakers' works in real life as well at a show this summer. I absolutely loved the work by Meredith Stern. Her creatures have something sort of dark and mysterious about them; something sort of weird. (This image is not the colors of the print I saw- the one I saw was blues and browns and no reds) Her work is very stylistic and also has a nice mix of whimsy, darkness, and narration.

I want to find a way to incorporate this narrative style and memory into my work.

What've you been doin' in therrr?

So you may be wondering..... Jenna, you have a lovely studio space. But what do ya actually DO in there? Well.... mostly, I think. I think.... and I think. I have been researching a lot. Specifically, I have been reading about postwar Detroit. Right now, I am reading a book entitled Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. It's by Thomas Sugrue and while it's not exactly a page turner, it clearly outlines how the situation in Detroit has deteriorated to the state it's in now. Sugrue writes about the origins of racism and how tenuous race relations have contributed to inequality in housing and employment. I think that reading this kind of stuff is really helpful to me because it helps me to see that Detroiters didn't just wake up one morning and find that their city had been abandoned. It was a gradual process that was inclusive of various factors including housing, industrialization, racism, classism, and more. Detroit is coming more and more into clear focus as an important part of the work I will be doing this year.

Furthermore, my mother sent me a box in the mail of family photos. I have been going through them, trying to decode the gibberish writing on many of them, and finally, scanning them into digital files because soon, they need to be sent home to my mother. (She doesn't trust me with them for too long.) There are some really incredible photographs that I find to be full of inspiration. I guess I am most interested in the fact that these lives are a strange part of my own and yet they exist only as frozen moments from the past.

Along those lines.... I have been thinking a lot about traditional photo development techniques. This all started when I went to a cyanotype workshop at the DIA and I hope it takes off from there.....

Well, if I sneeze onto the keyboard one more time, I think it's going to develop its own swine flu.

Oy vey.

-jlu