steshathinksart

[steshathinksart]

[steshathinksart]

You are allowed to jump around.

You are allowed to have varied interests .

You are allowed to change your mind about how you want to spend your time.

You don't have to justify your existence to anyone.

All you really have to do is not be an asshole and the rest is golden.

[steshathinksart]

I worked through a lot of stuff by working on my Hauntology miniature build. I no longer feel the same kind of anxiety I felt at the start of the semester. I've embraced anger instead and I think that's much healthier. It's fueling my work in an impact full way.

I am grateful.

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Be impressed please and thank you

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I was supposed to write something about thinking thoughts, but I've decided on no thinking for at least 72 hours. Sorry Neil.

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The end is very much NOT in sight.

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Epiphany

A few times this semester someone or another has said they feel like they are waiting for that "ah ha" moment where they finally begin to understand why they are doing what they do, where they realize what it is they are after.

I was glad to get away from the university setting and out into the sparseness of Wyoming last week because it reset my being. Less than a day after my return the "ah ha moment" struck. I realized that what I care about right now is unconcealing the way in which marginalized people are forced to contort their bodies and slice of pieces of themselves in sacrifice to access even the smallest piece of the process of coming to knowin the academy. While in any other body they would be handed in full without hesitation.

I have hated the academy because it functions as a constant reminder of my earlier traumas, where I felt I had to give over my femme nature in order to be able to reach after desire. I am disgusted with the system that slaps back my hand unless I offer it over for absolute consumption. For a decade I worked on the outskirts to avoide the triggers. This year I jumped back in and have been working for the last 4 months to reaim these weapons back at the system that made them. I have found the first steps in restructuring our valued epistemologies and ontologies, and it turns out it is very, very pink.

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I might be spreading myself a little too thin

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I am watching Lego Masters for the first time and it's making me think about how I really believe we all just want time to get beyond obsessive about an absolutely mundane thing. Capitalism destroys are curiosity and dedication. Let's get rid of it huh?

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I'm still working on my miniature, though only on the motivating ideas because transporting a miniature room to Wyoming ain't happening. But I can take yarn and I can also find more. I have the first batch of my materials for my work concerning Bimbology ready to go!

A part of this work involves a sort of surprise, so I don't want to spoil anything by saying too much. I'm just really getting into embracing revolutionary epistemologies and ontologies. After reading about and talking over Jette Out the Window and learning about F. Herko, I'm liking the idea of making my art as sort of renegade resumes.

It's also a fun experiement to push myself with this color palette. It's got me on that gender deliberation train again.

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Doors and tiles getting done!

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This week is going to haunt me for awhile. I presented my work which commented on the overwhelming misogynistic history of rationality overall, but more specifically in the academy. This piece took me more than 4 months to make and while the femmes in the audience offered constructive and positive feedback, most of the cis males in the critique dedicated their time to doubling down on this by challenging the relevance of my concept -ummmm excuse me but I've been working in the professional philosophical world for a decade before entering this program and I have PLENTY of evidence to justify that white cis voices are dominate and unavoidable in the culture to harmful results - and then another nit picked my grammar choices - which HA the degree of 1. Pointlessness of that and 2. The enormously classist, racist, and sexist oppression of strict grammar insistence could not provide a better example of the kind of problematic foundations of the academy that I am specifically attempting to point out.

Then, when I finally started to recover from my anger ...wait no... rage, my sweet beautiful baby boy kitty succumbed to illness he'd been bravely facing for months. My partner and I had to say goodbye to him Thursday afternoon and I'm absolutely devastated.

Those of you who encounter my AFK on Monday should know I am nothing more than a grieving mother right now. I doubt I'll talk at all. I used enough of my voice in the last 7 days to justify a break. I'm ready to fly out west to my ranch and away from this week of absolutely crushing experiences.

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Bimbology was never more necessary

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"IMAGINE A WORLD WITH BARBIE AS AN ARTIST! SO CRAZY!" - a white guy who clearly has zero understanding that Barbie is an artist in 3 different instantiations. Anyway, read this cause Barbie be making the point like a badass bimbo boss

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Bimbology

My first reflection focused on how I was haunted by philosophical thought and how all I want sometimes is to just turn that voice off for even a second.

Enter Bimbology.

This movement embraces being purposely empty-headed, even stupid. It could be seen as anti-feminist, if it weren't so fucking empowering. It is a direct challenge to the dominate mysoginistic concept of "rationality", which is a concept that was made by white hetero men for white hetero men. Bimbology is about validating different ideas of intelligence. It's a giant fuck you to Descartes and Kant and Hegel and the whole list of privileged people who have discounted the experiences and ideas of people not like them. And because I hate those guys, I'm down to jump into the deep (shallow) end of the Bimblology pool.

My first artistic foray into this area of existence is my knitted tapestry - Ummmm...(I don't get it). See my previous post for how it looks. As far as the meaning behind the image, I've taken the rallying cry of cis male rationality "Cogito ergo sum", smashed it down and broken it apart. There is no thinking and there is no "I am" anymore. There's just a amorphous, illegible person walking into a historically established space and destroying it by not understanding it. It's kind of like the subversive way of undermining racist and sexist jokes. You say "I don't get it" so much that you force the speaker to explain to the point that all of the bullshit behind what they've said falls apart.

I'm pretty happy with it. So much so that I'm actually considering doing more of this giant, time consuming knitted tapestry stuff in *gasp* PINK *gasp*.

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Ummmmm(I don't get it)

Stesha VanWye 2022