-: I've always felt that there's
this very strong connection for me,
between the thread of sewing and the line of that thread
and the thread of writing.
(charcoal scraping across canvas)
(sewing machine)
I certainly grew up doing a lot of hand work, needle work,
sewing, knitting, embroidery,
all of those traditional textile arts.
I think the process is just really satisfying,
but the metaphors that cloth offer up
are really extraordinarily beautiful
because every piece of cloth that we wear
is made up of all these individual threads,
whatever their weave,
and that each one of those is still something
that you can see,
and the whole cloth needs each one of those.
And so it's a social metaphor to me.
It's actually very beautiful.
The very first piece I did when I was in graduate school,
I had taken a, just kind of generic gray man suit,
and covered it in toothpicks so that the whole skin of cloth
became like a hide. It looked like a porcupine.
(ethereal music)
-: (whispering) Find the linear broken below a human.
I know for me,
that relationship between the thread and the written line
and the drawn line,
it's about a really very fundamental act of making
(indistinct whispering)
that the relationship of the line that makes something
is related to how we make things with language.
-: (whispering) Certainty.
-: I think that I'm always trying to work
with words as materials,
the same way I work with other kinds of materials.
The project "Lineament," which is a title
that comes from a Wallace Stevens poem.
That flat two-dimensional plane of the page
is made into a three-dimensional body
because each line is lifted
out of the book as if it is a thread.
And that thread of text is run through the hands,
it's tactile, it's touched, and then it creates a ball,
which is the body of the page.
So. there are all these places I see
that there's this constant tie of thread as line
and line as line of writing.
Yeah. Now go down that way. Right.
(crinkling plastic)
I'm just gonna set up the pipes and then we'll bring the
fabric over.
Seven, eight, nine
For me, working in installation
is to work in relation to a particular place.
You're coming in and you're, in some senses,
animating the space
and you don't know what that space or situation
will do to you and vice versa,
what you will do to it. (laughs)
Like, you try to make yourself blank
so that you can just pay attention to what comes up,
what it makes you think of...
What are the things you feel?
All of those ways that your skin is a organ
and is a membrane is incredibly smart,
and immediately you walk through any threshold
and, you know, it's... you smell.
And you feel the temperature and the light
and all of those things that have an enormous influence.
(birds chirping)
-: This particular building,
it's had 1200 people working here at one time.
it's in an area that was sort of like a company town area,
and it's been forgotten.
And it just went out of business about three months ago.
-: (whispering) So, it's... I didn't ever actually visit this building
when it was in operation,
but as a textile factory and house of production,
that was now silenced.
You know, the hollowness of that,
the emptiness of that was very palpable.
I'm all thumbs today with these strings.
(indistinct) Can you grab this string?
-: I wanted to have one room be the room of the writer
and one room be the room of the reader.
And now they've become ghost-like suspensions
of silk organza that sit side by side.
So, they're identical in form.
They're about 30 foot square rooms
that are just suspended within the architecture.
(metal clanging) Yeah.
-: Hey Emmitt, can you carry this over there
with the other pipes?
Offscreen Male: Honey, he can do it. Don't, don't worry about it.
Emmitt: Yeah.
Ann: There you go. And then within each of those rooms,
there's a long 10 foot wooden table,
and upon that will be a spinning projector.
(metal clanging)
-: With what Anne's doing.
Remember, she's not a traditional artist
in the sense that it's a piece of painting
or it's a piece of sculpture.
This is something that people really have to reach for
and break out of what they expect to see.
And it's saying really to the people
that there's more here
than we even saw.
And there's someone else that's seeing that.
Here, Emmitt, you can help pull the projector. Okay?
-: So right now, this is actually the section
that's going backwards in the video.
So it's the pencils, like, eating the line.
(whooshing)
Part of making work is to allow those things,
perhaps that are always already there,
but not visible to us
and to try to make them visible
in a way that they're experience-able.
(whooshing)
(crickets)
(bells clanging)
(indistinct whispering)
(birds chirping)
This Jeffersonian neoclassical building we inherit
as a real emblem of an American democratic ideal.
(women speaking in phonetic code)
And so, I wanted to engage that in the building.
How do we deal with the stains of our own history?
How do we take those aspects of our social history,
slavery being the largest one.
That we have a democratic country that was founded
and based in slavery, and how do you talk about that?
I felt like the only way to do it, perhaps,
was very abstractly.
This stream of intensely chromed fusca powder
sifted down the walls.
And it would catch on raise plaster dots
that were fixed to the wall, spelling out a text in braille.
And that text was edited from the poems
by Charles Resnikoff.
From the corner of each of the four rooms,
there was a soundtrack
of Lincoln's second inaugural address,
which was really one of healing.
It was translated letter by letter
into the phonetic alphabet.
(Women whispering phonetic code)
(birds chirping)
(door opening) (door closing)
Come on, Timmy. Let's go.
(dog leash clanking)
-: I live in Ohio and I moved back after teaching
for about seven years in Santa Barbara.
It is a very conscious decision to wanna move
and be closer to my family who live here.
This is where I grew up.
(geese calling)
it's a, kind of, a real comfort to come home
and to work out of that place.
And for a long time, my parents also really helped
with a lot of my work.
You know, my mother would sometimes fly out
to work on a big project
and my dad has helped on projects.
And now increasingly they're...
They provide me with that kind of backup
that actually allows me
to do the kind of traveling that my work has needed.
I think that would be much harder for me
if I didn't have all that.
Do you wanna help change the film?
-: You can't be a mom and have a child in kindergarten,
and not have some other help.
Hey Emmitt, do you wanna come see your picture?
(mouse clicking)
There's an aspect of my work,
which is wanting to give voice,
but my voice is not necessarily the voice that's here.
I feel like my voice is maybe here and here.
And so, how do I literally make the place where song also,
as well as all other words, exits the body
actually become my eye.
I devised a way of making pinhole cameras.
I put the camera in my mouth and then I unblock the aperture
so that when I reopen my lips,
I'm actually exposing the film.
(footsteps)
You know,
you're never supposed to have your mouth open in public.
This is like, you don't see people standing, you know,
(laughs) It's a vulnerable position.
It's a place where you've relaxed
and you've let yourself be open and vulnerable.
(laughs) Sorry.
You ready?
-: Um-hm.
-: Um.
-: It became very interesting
to register this time of standing quite still,
face to face with another person,
like soul to soul,
and revealing something that's not, you know,
the surface stuff that we usually allow out to the world.
The shape of the mouth is very much
the same shape as the eye.
And the image becomes almost like the pupil.
(bell ringing) (dog barking)
Good.
So to...and sometimes invert the location
of one sense to another part of the body.
Those kind of dislocations or slippages is one way
that we come to see something differently.
(motor running)
Female Voice: Looks like there's fire coming
off of your hand.
Ann: Wow, look it.
Look, oh, totally magic.
Maarten: It's a flat sheet of water
with soap on either side.
And it's about a 50th of the thickness of a human hair.
And when things get that thin, like oil slicks on water,
they tend to reflect certain colors of light depending on
their thickness.
I just thought it would be interesting
to try to see if Ann would be able to incorporate this
in any of her work.
...Which is part of the problem.
-: You know, Martin sort of said, "I'm doing this thing,"
and I...and then he demonstrated it.
It's like, I, I don't know necessarily how or when,
or what I would use this,
but it's becoming increasingly clear to me
that it's related to everything I've ever done.
You know, it's the fluidity of the cloth.
It's the way that you can take your hands
and you can go through the membrane of it.
Oh, I love this bubble coming out like this
and the breath being made palpably, visually present.
It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
-: And I know when I'm making work that I have to...
Like, there's a point where I can't see it.
I can't see it in my head. And then, you know,
there's that moment where you can see it
and you think it might be beautiful.
It's like it bites you, you know,
and then you will go to all ends sometimes to try to see it
(laughs) in fact.
And of course it's always different or something else but...
(ethereal music)