Author: Joshua Kochis

Do you like music? How ’bout small local venues that let emerging artists of all kinds show and play their work? Yes? I thought so.

This Friday, September the 19th, The Yellow Barn is hosting a show to raise money for its own upkeep and repair, and you should be present IF you like new strange powerful ear-numbing sound, black lights, body paint, dancing and singing and being generally ECSTATIC about being ALIVE! The show will feature the bands (in no particular order) Ramaganja & Mitsubisiclipse, March of the Ant (who is lucky to have my good friend and extremely talented musician and vocalist Kat Steih as a part of their crew, and whose music I can personally vouch for when I say I’ve never heard anything like it, so fresh and sharp and wonderful), The Pineapple Army, and Watabou, beginning at 7:30 PM and ending when the music stops! The Yellow Barn is located at 416 W. Huron St., Ann Arbor, and the cover (remember, for the best of causes) is $7 upon entry. This is more than worth it because the venue has been supporting local creatives since the beginning of Time, as both a rad spot to sing and dance around as well as a swell place to show visual art. Last year’s Art & Design Senior Thesis Exhibition titled “The No-Show” was held in the very same place, to great success.

So we should keep these things going, right? It’s good to have places for young excited people to show their art and play their music, rrright? RIGHT! There will be good people, good sounds, and good vibes; it will be a GOOD NIGHT!

In case you missed any of the details, consult the below poster (created by yours truly) to review them in full unadulterated color –

Hope to see you there!

 

First: Hello again to this small pocket of the ever-vasting Internet and you wonderful people who actually read these things – it’s good to be back (on campus, in classes, to not spending eight hours a day at a full-time job, etc.)! It’s been quite the summer, full of travels and eye-opening experiences that I just CAN’T WAIT to share with the World Wide Web, whether it likes them or not.

The most significant thing I did this summer was spend a month in Ireland with fourteen of my fellow art-schoolers on our questionably mandatory study abroad experience. There were many many laughs and smiles, there was much gasping at rocks (SO MANY ROCKS) and mountains and infinitely green fields, there was a whole lot of personal expression and learning and all that good stuff, some tears, new friendships, ALL THE FEELS, and most importantly (for me at least), a new way of perceiving my surroundings, a new kind of vision that has grabbed me by the eyeballs and refused to let go.

This is more pleasant than it sounds.

What I mean is that I’ve been possessed by the sense that everything I see and hear and do and feel is NEW and EXCITING, each time I see a tree or rock or a person’s face, it’s as if I’ve never seen it before. This is due to the fact that most things I saw in Ireland were actually completely foreign and unfamiliar to me – the rocks that literally explode from the ground, literally everywhere you look, were not just rocks (a cab driver once threw those words at me on the way back to Ballyvaughan from the city of Galway, and I nearly threw a punch, the only thing stopping me being that it would have been left-handed, him sitting on the right side of the car, of course) – but in my ecstasy of adventure and freedom, these rocks became a visible, physical connection to the Earth I come from, we all come from, the same Earth that we will return to in time (too morbid?). It was the most inspiring, comforting, eye-opening experience of my life, and this is one of the few things I now write that is not exaggerated. I spent a month waking up as if I’d just opened my eyes for the first time. Every solitary rock amidst miles and miles of drystone walls had been given meaning, had the traces of ancestors’ fingerprints written all over it; every leaf and twig and slug in the road became these glowing meaningful important things that I couldn’t bear to overlook, to ignore, to forget – in short, I heard the hallelujahs of Mother Nature, saw her hands working the land, in a constant state of creation and destruction, the whole process beautiful and amazing to me.

I think it’s easy to get stuck in our daily routines and comfortably familiar experiences – the faces of friends and family we know and love, the places we feel connected to, restaurants with “usuals”, streets with names we know, beds that smell like home – these are the things I definitely missed while abroad. But at the same time, if we mistake routine for knowledge and wisdom, and let comfort veil our eyes to the new and exciting things that happen to us every day, our surroundings and experiences lose the meaning that I now try to see in literally EVERY thing. This is not me saying I’ve achieved instant Buddhahood, or am now walking around more “enlightened” than you beautiful people who’ve happened to come upon this digital collection of words, hell, maybe checking this site is part of your own routine and you’re on here daily. MORE POWER TO YA! I’m not even saying that I feel the same excitement and wide-eyed amazement at everything, every moment of every day. I don’t. All I’m saying (bear with me for meta-cheesy feels here) is that if we stop every once in a while to pick up a leaf or rock off the ground and wonder how it got there, or think about how we would describe a sunset or trees waving in the wind or the infinite ripples of currents in some body of water (even the less-than-Mighty Huron River) to someone who has never seen them before, that maybe we could learn to appreciate it all a little more, and learn that our puny human problems are not so bad, that we will keep on living as we always have, us little piles of up-sitting mud who are lucky enough to get to sit up and look around for a while (thanks Vonnegut). All I’m saying is that it’s nice to get excited about things, about life, and to have that excitement come from inside; it’s nice to think of everything as new and fresh and meaningful because it IS, nothing is the same twice, I myself am now a different person than I was when I started writing this, metaphorically and physiologically, my atoms are new, they are excited to run my hand along the bark of that tree I’ve passed daily for a week and a half, knowing it too is not the same as it was the last time I saw and felt it.

This has been a rant. Long story short: I had fun in Ireland. I’ll probably be posting about it for a while. Hope you don’t mind.

🙂

This weekend was a big deal for all of the seniors in the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design, marking the sporadic openings of a citywide exhibition titled Launch, which showcases the thesis work they’ve been creating all year. Displayed in a variety of locations (the galleries of A&D aka 2000 Bonisteel Blvd., Work Gallery on State St., 325 Braun Ct. between Out Bar and The Bar, and The Yellow Barn/416 W. Huron), the results were across the board: there are eight-foot prints of caves hung from the ceiling, plants potted in concrete geometry, books bound like the Kells, books describing how to teach kids business through screen printing, books with illustrations drawn by hand, life size figure sketches that may as well be sculptures, chairs that change the way you sit, woodcut body contours, prints of fish guts, Minecrafted paintings, paintings of revolutionary leaders, shapes in a sand box, performance, poetry, installation – the variation was nothing short of overwhelming, in the best way. There’s enough to spend days simply looking, touching, listening, smelling, thinking; the most impressive part is that it was all made by students. Sometimes confused, stressed, and scared students, but dedicated students, talented students. Students I should be graduating with.

I switched into A&D from LSA after my freshman year; putting me behind in studio credits and flushing any hopes I had of a four-year undergraduate degree down the drain. Still, I’m friends with large amount of the class of 2014, and consider myself more closely related to them in the art school family tree than the ‘15ers. I was asked a hundred times about my “missing” work that didn’t exist yet. It was strange having spent all year listening to them talk about their ideas, materials, processes, ups and downs, heroic failures and happy accidents, to see it all come together in real concrete space. No more words, hand gestures, quick sketches – real stuff, each project a mirror image of its creator in some way, pieces of my friends hanging on walls or mounted to board, splashed on canvas, lying on the floor – proof of how seriously each artist took their work, a measure of their individual obsessions, priorities, an estimation of how much sleep they’d given up over the past few months. At first, it was really tough to separate the work from the person who made it. I realized this is how I’ll remember, or forget, every one of them. All of the memories, little strings tying together the people I’ve spent the past three years with, now anchored to these objects, images, gestures, staked down to the lattices of my mind.

Does this take away from any aspect of the exhibition? Of course not. The work stands on its own, and is simply augmented by the experiences and memories that have shaped my perception of each individual artist. I was lucky enough to witness the challenges, setbacks, inspirations, epiphanies, and everything in between, from a perspective that is simultaneously personal and detached. I feel as though I’ve taken a free prep course that’s allowed me to make an informed approach to my own project in the fall. I learned what’s possible to make in a year, what falls flat, how viewer interaction is the key to a visible response, how bigger is not always better (but most of the time it is), how to stick to my guns, how to stick it out. It felt strange to tell my peers I was proud of them, like my approval somehow validates their work, but I couldn’t help it. It felt awkward to thank them for making something they would have made anyway, but it had to be said. I’m proud and grateful to have made stuff beside these folks, to have known them and seen them grow into the artists and designers they are today. The majority of them don’t know where they’ll be in a few months, let alone a year from now, but I’m not worried. Each one has ventured into themselves and come out the other side unscathed; what better preparation for real life is there? One thing is for certain: they will be missed.

I had this dream the other night which began with me talking to James Elkins, an art historian kind of guy with frameless glasses and big interested eyes that are very aware of themselves, and in fact he writes books on how to use them and see everything all at once but this time in particular we were discussing The Object Stares Back.

And he’s going on about how seeing is being seen, how everything we look at looks back, and the world is so full of seeing staring things that we can’t comprehend most of them, our minds can’t keep up and it becomes overwhelming very quickly. Soon enough we’re talking about images and how they like to provoke this “stifled dialogue” (his words) where there’s always this possibility of “disinterested seeing” while simultaneously offering the eyes so much, so that the image always sets us up for disappointment because it isn’t real – it’s just an illusion sitting on the wall in frames (like parentheses that keep the world’s words flowing around them as they sit untouched), little fences keeping the picture and the things inside it from escaping out into reality.

And I’m right there with him even when he goes on saying “furthermore, images are corrosive and have the power to melt parts of what we are and re-form them into new shapes” and I’m really digging this guy now and nodding my head and saying things like “yes!” and “damn!” and I realize we’re walking in a seemingly endless hall of luminescent blue-grey stucco and the shiniest hardwood floor I’ve ever seen, so glassy that I notice the reflections of all these paintings before the actual paintings themselves and there’s no ceiling so where’s all this light coming from? I look around in a state of bewilderment at how it’s not pitch black in here and I go to ask old Jim what he thinks and he’s gone. I’m alone in this strange mad corridor full of whispers and my footsteps sound obtrusive and echo all over so I stop walking and turn to hear with eyes what all this quiet ruckus is about.

Hanging there are five gigantic landscapes in gilded frames at least six inches thick, if they were parentheses they’d be in 98-point font and bold faced, and inside these massive golden fences are classical American painter Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series. Each landscape is a snapshot of the same river valley at five points in an unnamed Greek-looking society’s evolution, depicting the Savage State, Pastoral State, Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and finally Desolation in that order, constructing a narrative that spans hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. Naturally I begin with the first painting on the far left-hand side and I get so close to the surface I can smell the old musty oil paint and just when I think I hear it the surface begins to ripple and shimmer mysteriously. What else is there to do but poke and the second my finger tip makes contact there is a flash of light even brighter than the hall and the hall is gone and so am I.

 

What is light – is color, weight – is thought – is fire licking a dry log – is bug crawling up stalk – is hexagon in bee hives – is replication – geometry – smell of bacon, lingers all day – is the best kind – soul food – mind food – is my seventh cervical vertebrae – out of line – joints and bones and fibers – is jungle bird freakin’ out – wild flashing colors – is a dance – finding mates – in the air – in the clouds – in the grass – underground – full and empty, all around – right on time – in your face – art is truth – is a lie – is the money – just like time – art is time – in the books – is a habit – in the sun – flicking corner smile – is addicting, is a drug – is repulsive – art’s a bitch – pain in ass – is a good book – On The Road – a good night’s sleep – a balled-up wad – the tip of a cigarette – eyelash stuck on finger – stray hair – nervous tick – what comes out when no one’s there – art’s for dinner – is what’s up – holds us all together – holds me together – is the strongest glue – breaks apart – art decay, death by art – is motion – gesture – stride – is a firm hand shake – is a stubbed toe on sidewalk edge – is a root – knot in rope – in your hair – Charlie horse – art’s what’s there – what is not – art evolves – is a game – life or death – heat – sweat – lack of sleep – is a Coney dog, side of hash – hung over – rip in pants – in the crotch – under sheets – art is tension – fear – a joke, a gag – a good piece of gum – last forever – is time again – is life – in the air – is a challenge – isn’t fair  – is tree leaning over sidewalk – steamrolled flag relief, waved around – is a shout – art is bark with so much to say, with an H carved in the side – palace pillars hugged by half nudes at the top – broken glass on ledges – is the pigeon who likes Poptarts – deer eating out of hands – wooden sculpted man, lifting other up – art is mirror puddle at base of trunk downtown – is beat book store, holes in ceiling – empty bathroom shelves – metallic ink that plays the drums on turn tables – rocks with small white shells all over – is the First Baptist Church in neon lights – is a beautiful curse – what’s an Art?

 

They made a mountain

out of dirt,

crumble slopes

to flat plateau

with tread prints

all around

but no machines

in sight –

and there it sat,

fenced in

setting, hard

from all the chills

and locked up

so that nobody

could conquer it.

After all, who

would want to jump

that fence, rip

their pants,

bear crawl up

sending avalanche of dirt

and dust rocks

down the side?

The base spreads

towards the fence –

a dance, up on top

took place:

boot/sneaker

prints erasing tire tracks

of bull dozers, now

they lead back

over cold iron fence (as

tarp shivers in wind)

and take

the mountain away

bit by bit

inside their shoes;

bandits

of the Earth,

spreading dirt

like it was love.