Finally figured out how to post from my instagram!

The world realized too late what we had done.  Even though we saw the inevitability of the something that was coming. We thought it would be a nuclear holocaust, or perhaps an astrological one.  We thought maybe pollution would do us in, or overpopulation; but no, it was the grass.  Species that we introduced where they didn't belong, slowly crept up, took over, suffocated everything other green thing within their reach, and then slowly began to die themselves.  Like with so many things, we didn't realize until it was too late, there was nothing we could do, nothing to be done.  The animals continued to breath for a while, but then it got harder.  Eventually, we all choked on our own ambition.  I'm sorry.

“We all like to hope that times have changed and the war of the sexes is less like a war and more like a sophisticated dialogue. And yet, when you consider that only 5% of all the artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection in 1989 were women, while the Louvre today still has no female artists in their collection of over 35,000 artworks, it’s a pretty shocking state of affairs. The facts suggest that the war still needs to happen.

At the Museum of Modern Art, only 8% of the work exhibited are created by women. The Tate’s female holdings? A whopping 15%. Meanwhile it’s just as bleak in commercial galleries. In 2010, an average of 23% of gallery shows in NY and London featured female artists. What’s more, is that this imbalance doesn’t only exist in fine art. It’s in Fashion, with the leading fashion photographers creating the leading fashion campaigns mostly being men. And it’s in Film, where women hold only 33% of all speaking roles and 7% of all Directors in Hollywood are women. And, the real kicker? There are still ONLY three industries in which women earn more money than men - Pornography, Prostitution and Modelling. What does that tell us?

Well, for one, the statistics don’t lie. We live in a world where man’s version of the world is more prevalent than woman’s which in turn means that the majority of images we see of women are created by men.So, for this exhibition at SHOWstudio Shop we decided to take a look exclusively at what a woman’s version of a woman looks like. Is it different? Is it the same as a man’s? Is an image of a nude woman somehow empowered in the hand’s of a female artist? Does it resist all those traditionally constructed gender roles? Does it mock an unavoidably voyeuristic male gaze? Do the women confront? Or, do we see yet more examples of the female constantly diverting her own eye, facilitating her status as the object to be looked at verses ever being the subject doing the looking, as Laura Mulvey writes in her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema?” And is John Berger still right? Though also some 20 years old, in his often-referenced “Ways of Seeing” he contends that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Does all this still hold true? And if a woman creates an image of a woman, is the male perspective so engrained that she still creates a to-be-looked-at female?

We are aware of the potential short fallings of such a exhibition.We know we’re tipping the imbalance right back the other way. We know we are ghettoizing work by women in their own unique female grotto. And we know we’re not launching the major survey show that this should be in our Mayfair gallery. But, we feel, it’s a start. It’s a conversation. And one that we hope helps us all emerge just a little more aware of just how male gendered our visual culture really is and a little less willing to put up with it. “

- Nick Knight (Selling Sex - an exhibition at SHOWStudio from March 11th to June 1st)

(Image credit: Arm Bends (2011) by Cortney Andrews)

Vhils - Deconstruction from Arrested Motion on Vimeo.

"Stage 4"

you taught me things

like how to walk, how to run

you taught me words

like "please" and "thank you" and "love"

you taught me games

basketball, monopoly, blackjack

you taught me how to drive a car

reverse, shift, clutch

you taught me how to feel safe

you taught me lessons

like learning from your mistakes

you taught me about loving someone

and all of their imperfections

you taught me how to be loved

you taught me to brush my teeth and feed myself

you taught me how to ride a bike

you taught me about God

and how to count to ten in Cherokee

you taught me how to live

And now,

you'll teach me how to lose.

There is a peace within my soul

that even in times of great sadness,

anchors me to the joy of knowing you.

The strength given through you

overwhelms all my weakness

so that i see the light of even the darkest of paths,

as you shepherd me through the dark night.

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been—and may someday be again—a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/02/rick-santorum-meet-hamza-kashgari.html#ixzz1oVTevmp9

MAKEKONYFAMOUS

The Six types of Love

Eros

a passionate physical and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love

Ludus
a love that is played as a game or sport; conquest; may have multiple partners at once

Storge
an affectionate love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity

Pragma
love that is driven by the head, not the heart

Mania
obsessive love; experience great emotional highs and lows; very possessive and often jealous lovers

Agape
selfless altruistic love; spiritual

"There is no manlier sport in the world than mountaineering. It is true that all the sports Englishmen take part in are manly, but mountaineering is different from others, because it is sport purely for the sake of sport. There is no question of beating anyone else, as in a race or a game, or of killing an animal or a bird as in hunting or shooting. A mountaineer sets his skill and his strength against the difficulty of getting to the top of a steep peak. Either he conquers the mountain, or it conquers him. If he fails, he keeps on trying until he succeeds. This teaches him perseverance, and proves to him that anything is possible if he is determined to do it." —Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed (a.k.a. Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond) from the preface of her book True Tales of Mountain Adventure for Non-climbers Young and Old, 1903.

A Time for Everything

¹ There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

¹⁵ Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.^[b]

¹⁶ And I saw something else under the sun:

In the place of judgment—wickedness was there,
in the place of justice—wickedness was there.

¹⁷ I said to myself,

“God will bring into judgment
both the righteous and the wicked,
for there will be a time for every activity,
a time to judge every deed.”

¹⁸ I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. ¹⁹ Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath^[c]; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. ²⁰ All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. ²¹ Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

²² So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?

Metamorphosis and Theoretical Physics, or the M theory

When i think about you,

i think about you in the fifth dimension.

In the fifth dimension, our time line is but one branch of the tree,

where every decision creates the possibility

for infinitely many different branches

and thus infinitely many other timelines.

I like to think of myself as a caterpillar,

tracing my way back down this branch

to the branch where things were different,

where i made better decisions,

and somehow, things worked out.

Knowing that that time line exists somewhere in the fifth dimension makes me smile.

i think that would be a good place to build a cocoon.

My friend and I exploring and goofing around on roosevelt island, new york