RAIR GOMI

Reflections upon my first weekend at the Recycled Artist in Residency program

I was moved to buy expensive rainbow carrots from the co-op near my house, on Sunday afternoon after a full two days of residency at RAIR, with which I made a large carrot salad and several vegan stir fries though I am not vegan. My body was craving something in the combination of easy-to-find vegetables in unfamiliar tones and promises we make with diets made for the future. Despite the intended logic of listening to my body and thinking environmentally, I made a beeline to the coffee shop by my office this morning to get the biggest iced espresso I could stomach. The barista congratulated me on my residency, which she called RAWR and we chuckled. I was honestly so flattered she knew.

Last night after Day 3 on site, I was overwhelmed with the full circumference of art as a thought pattern. The explosion of ideas followed by a head first approach to the materials and finally, a short-lived but vivid feeling of dejection and despondence: there was no way I could execute any of this to the high level of my desire. The irony of culminating my “art practice” with depression is not lost from me. Aside from “morose artist” being so common a trope as to be an annoying cliche, the fact is that the Idea-Outcome discrepancy probably bothers artists mostly because we’ve been trained to believe we are “ahead of our time.” I for one am someone who rose and grew in this world with precocity at every juncture of existence. 

Everything I have done in my life has predated the moment it was supposed to have happened. Creating things that do not meet their full potential, seems endemic to the sublime of time. The fact that I feel my body screaming for specific kinds of food means I may finally have gained enough experience in the showing up early scheme, to finally (finally!) show up on time. The work is all happening at exactly the time it needs to.

I keep thinking of the words I’m trying to use to explain the virtues of trash. The words we use are contingent on an understanding of linear ordinal time. Post-consumer, Upcycled, Recycled, Re-purposed. My favorite phrase so far, though, is “circular economy.”

I think about how I am positioned in this moment in time to complete a thought meant just for this time and space. Did you know that the etymological origin of the word for trash in Japanese (gomi), is “tree leaves”? Once fallen, it becomes “trash.” The word refers to the form of the object and not its position on the continuum of intent. 

It is clearer to me that this is what is meant by relentlessness, which serves as the theme of my project at RAIR. I have talked, well…relentlessly about relentlessness here on my blog. It serves, in one sense, as an eradication of the nature of linear time. There will always be time. There will always be a time.

gomi