No pictures, it’s too embarrassing / sensitive. Now I’m wrapped up in cleanup / hopeful paradigm shift for my workspace. And things unrelated to work are going great! Even this cleanup hopefully signals/echoes the start of some new times & a different relationship to the physical scenario around me… will check in in a day or two with cleanup update… if I don’t get buried under piles… !

It features some of my (and possibly your) favorite buildings in Providence being re-inhabited by a terrifying-yet-friendly giant yellow squash plant. No full shots yet, you’ll have to catch a glimpse of one around town, but don’t steal them down till after the event on May 19th & 20th!

These posters keep getting sexier & sexier, says “one who knows“…

Here’s a moment in the process from about a week ago, when I was drawing the final ‘key’ layer with ink onto wet media mylar (plastic which is treated to hold the ink & not let it run). I mostly used a nib pen, but a couple of Rapidograph pens (passed down from my Grandpa, #1 & #00) are crucial tools for the tiny details. Then to correct blobs & mistakes, clean up lines, and also to create light in the dark areas, I scratch the dried ink away with the back of the blade of my trusty lil’ Olfa knife… Here you can see the pencil drawing underneath, layered with a sheet of tracing paper where I was working out the balance & rhythm of the large color shapes (of yellow squashes & green leaves) across the paper:

Also, each of the three layers in the print was a rainbow roll, which I’ve discussed in the past, but this is this new style where I do one transparent rainbow roll layer over a solid rainbow roll layer… and then a rainbow roll key outline layer. (As seen in this print from a year ago…) Something about the subtlety / complexity of those shifting layers overlapping each other turns out kind of incomprehensible & thus, it seems, pretty amazing.

Ink ready (those are three colors of transparent ink in the foreground, then a jar with water in it for washing off mixing spoons behind them):

On the screen, blending the colors together:

Then printed over the blue layer:

Here’s a tiny detail when ink on the final layer was still wet, and the early morning sunlight was coming in the studio window, showing how the ink sits bumpily on the paper (click for larger, it’s worth it!):

And, speaking of process, here’s what my past few weeks have been like:

To all my friends, including new/future friends as well as old friends, I’m really sorry for dropping off the face of the planet into this total screenprint work zone, please excuse my neglect of you / our friendship & know that I am eating mint-chocolate-chip ice cream in the middle of the night while I draw at a desk in a messy room, and thinking of you.

<3 ian

I was also excited to write about problems with capitalism for a story about “how industrial cities like Providence are drawing new residents” — which I assume takes as a baseline that development & capitalist progress are good things. (That might be a mistaken assumption — we’ll see when the piece comes out — but I know my work has been used to justify capitalist development projects in the past…)

The questions were about what drew me to Providence, and about my & other artists’ finding artistic inspiration in old industrial sites.

My answers were, again, not perfect, but turned out interesting enough to post here. (At the bottom are some links to mind-blowing interviews I’ve been listening to recently, super necessary, don’t miss them!)

I came to Providence in 1999 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, after three years in Chicago attending & dropping out of the University of Chicago, waiting tables, & doing theater tech. Re-applying to art schools, my other option was in Manhattan, and I chose Providence after a conversation with an older artist about how not being in a big city gives you time & space to focus & figure out who you are & what kind of work you want to make. Ultimately this was a good instinct, as I feel that my education as an artist and a person has come mainly from Providence & from the communities I’ve become involved in here, rather than from RISD!

In 2001, I got involved in a struggle to save a group of historic industrial buildings from demolition, initially under an inarticulate, historic-preservation-y, “I love these old decrepit buildings, they are so beautiful, it’s so sad to see them get knocked down!” feeling. This emotion quickly developed into standing up for the rich potential engendered by cheap & flexible spaces that provided places for artists to live for little money while making whatever kind of work & noise they needed, as well as places for other project/business initiatives that didn’t necessarily fall under the “art” umbrella, but were equally important to a lively city full of possibility.

Suddenly I found I had a political stance about local initiative from below vs. corporate development imposed from above. My awareness rapidly expanded further to include an understanding of capitalist development & gentrification as affecting more than just “artists” but entire neighborhoods, especially Black & Hispanic populations who were seen as not-worthwhile, un-important residents by the city government, developers, & police. So my initial attraction to the beauty of these old industrial buildings led me to a very intensely humanist and radical political stance about the value of every person’s life & the unjustness of a system that reduces us to what we produce and purchase, that attempts to control us based on nationality, ethnicity, or class.

I love old buildings (not just industrial buildings, but any building made by hand and/or before the onset of mass-manufactured building materials, roughly pre-World War II) for the strangeness of their dimensions, the way every one is different, the ways they’ve been changed over time through being lived in, used, & modified… These slight differences, the visible effects of aging and living, connect them to our bodies and to us, they feel human like us, we give them the metaphorical attributes of our own structure (outer protective skin, windows as eyes, internal intimacy, etc)… Newer buildings, about which the construction decisions are made according to the pre-determined machine dimensions of their materials, are less compelling and have less correspondence to our human lives…

In Western/European society, there’s a extremely long tradition of artists & weirdos being drawn to ruins, decrepit areas, and decay as an inspiration for their work — the Italian Renaissance (which was inspired by digging up Roman-era ruins & scuplture), Dürer’s & Piranesi’s engravings, the European Romantic poets & artists, British landscape architects creating fake picturesque ruins on the estates of rich landowners… (to name the examples that come immediately to mind, I am not really an art-historian…!). I see the artists currently working on imagery of decaying industrial buildings as a continuation of this fascination with ruins, for the same reasons as Western artists since the 1400s — because they bring our humanity and our mortality clearly to mind. For instance… wandering through a decrepit building evokes our imaginations of the lives that have been lived in its now-empty spaces. As the structure is exposed through decay, the craft of the human labor that has gone into it is eloquently revealed. The invasion of moisture, rot, and growing plants make clear the ultimate futility of humans’ bold attempts to create things, and the building’s final collapse shows what will be the inevitable result of our continuing efforts to create right angles and vertical walls.

So all this stuff has a long-standing place in our cultural imagination, our Western/European concepts of human vs. natural, death vs. life, chaos vs. order, etc. Right now, there is especially fertile ground for US artists inspired by these buildings: the scale and hubris of 19th- & 20th-century US industrial development and its subsequent rapid collapse following the multinationalization of corporations, the exploitation of non-unionized workers around the world, and the abandonment of industrial installations here in North America. Buildings built 70 to 140 years ago, which stopped being carefully maintained in the 1960s or 70s, are quickly reaching the end of their structural life, and I appreciate the initiative of skilled photographers and artists who are rushing to document these soon-to-be-lost places!

I think there’s also a growing awareness of the irrelevancy and destructiveness of 20th-century capitalism, and these buildings are a relic of & metaphor for how capitalism’s ideology of progress — and the revelation of the emptiness and disaster behind that ideology — have utterly changed our world in the past 200 years. This is our history, embodied in these structures, so we are working with it & processing it through art. In my own work I find myself turning away from documenting or romanticizing these old buildings. Even though I feel their beauty & emotion, I’m more interested in imagining a future beyond and past and separate from capitalism… what do we build next? If we can use & re-inhabit these old structures, great! But we still have to keep living, whether it’s in the ruins or on the ground where they have crumbled, so how do we deal with their polluted history (literally and figuratively, chemically & emotionally) and work towards reclaiming our lives & supporting our friends & building new families and societies? To echo Durruti, workers built those buildings in the first place, so we can build new & more beautiful things if those are destroyed. That’s what I find myself thinking about these days…

So yeah, this is me remembering that I am a political artist, & feeling more politicized now than ever (mostly thanks to amazing friends / conversation partners / co-conspirators!). Listening (and re-listening, and re-listening) to amazing interviews with Judith Butler and with Dean Spade & Eric A. Stanley while printing Plant Sale posters this last week… Also along similar lines, I got to see some David Wojnarowicz screenprints today! Whoa. Extra super inspired about the possibilities of and necessity for political art… hopefully I can actually accomplish & work on the things I am thinking about…

(my past posters for SCLT: 2009-2010-2011)

Sneak preview.

letters (click for larger, in the upper-left-hand corner check out the pinpricks I used to transfer the letters from tracing paper):

more letters, all related:

laying out the drawing on the kitchen floor so I can make a vanishing point that goes *way* off the [very large] page!

The actual imagery of the poster (slightly visible in the photo above) is much more developed now, that photo is from a week or so ago…

I get super melancholic when I think about how many beautiful buildings & places & spaces have disappeared from this city since I moved here (1999).

I’ve (finally?) turned to photography as a consolation for this, and as a way to remember that things are always changing & to be okay with that. I used to really look down on carrying a camera; I was against “instant nostalgia“, against “making memories through taking pictures rather than remembering”, and all: “I can draw it better than I can take a picture, and I’ll learn more about it while I draw it!”. I still mostly believe those things… but at some point I realized that I can’t draw fast enough and ultimately just can’t draw *enough* to document all the beautiful disappearing things that I will want to have a record of in the future. So photography becomes a necessary-yet-incomplete resistance to the constant forgetting that life in a changing city consists of…

But yaknow, it’s also springtime so what better moment to bike around & take pictures of hand-designed, yet still-not-all-obsolete, signs in Providence!

Hey, this website and server friends Meg Turner & Chris Monti are finally back after a while out of commission having been taken over by a wordpress virus. :C (super sad face.) Now I’m doing some serious server maintenance/cleanup with the help of generous tech whiz Chris Erway, & I’m also updating the old wordpress installations featuring my brother Rich’s projects from a couple of years ago: Iraqi Stories (travelogue) and Abu Wilyam (his notes on Damascene culture & language interactions – no link since not quite updated yet!)… at the same time as I’m doing business accounting & my taxes! BLURGH

Also I’m wrapped up in other logistics: organizing events & conversations around town, non-art things that involve other personal progress & are pretty logistical… Also I’m working on some posters, one majorly overdue, one just on time! And I’ll be selling prints & postcards with the above-mentioned Meg Turner at the RISD Alumni spring sale on May 5th. Possibly that’s it? but it feels like a lot.

Anyways, glad to be back & present on this corner of the internet. At the top is a picture of me with Albert, my downstairs neighbor’s cat who disappeared a week ago… :C (super sad face again, sadder than the dumb internet stuff…) If you see this guy, pick him up & bring him back!

Peer-pressured intimidated inspired by a bunch of 17-to-22-yr-olds (& some older folks) I know who are super active & self-expressive on their tumblr blogs, I re-started mine.

I’m still mostly using it as a snapshot collection as opposed to an internet-bookmarking visual-hunting neat-stuff aggregator. You’ll see a lot of buildings, letterforms, punks, queers, cats, kitchens, light & shadows, manhole covers & other ‘street metal’, process work, and other sights seen… I think the “stuff I like” part at the bottom is going to be my collection of other people’s images…

BUT we’ll see where it goes…

Also having another person around is great for me to be able to look at my process & see where I’m not so organized or putting things off to ill effect, and to be aware of how I’m focusing or failing to focus… Also Alison is good at seeing where distraction and chaos come into the space we’re working in, and good at saying “hey, let’s take steps to take this distraction away”… Which, sometimes, it’s hard for me to say about my own time/space… but when I’m working with somebody else, it legitimizes creating clear space for us to work in, and then gives me an example of how to create that space for myself in the future / when I’m working alone. Hmmm. The upshot is, Alison is great & I feel lucky to get to work with her!

Here is some of her work, just my snapshots of the slightly random selection that happened to be within thirty feet of my desk…

A poster she designed & printed for a show at Witch Club, the mill space she helped create & run this past summer & fall (a slightly mis-printed version, I believe):

A typography zine that she made this fall (cover & selections from internal pages):

She drew the fonts & letterforms for this poster collaboration with Julia Moses:

And this is the flyer she made for the dance party we had at the beginning of January:

She also does “non-poster” CMYK silkscreen work based on her photography… here’s her tumblr page… oh wait & did I mention she’s a radical femme, with at least one secret scheme up her sleeve, and an outspoken queer feminist at RISD (which is an institution that sometimes feels very lacking in queerness or feminism, & can be a difficult place to be either of those things)? Anyways, SO AWESOME.

Right now we’re collaborating on a poster for the *next* queer dance party (second Saturday in February, mark those calendars!).

Some thumbnails & sketches & color test & figuring out the action steps:

Drawing elements for the poster, being combined…

Combined sketch & beginning of letters (& look at that glossy black paper we are going to be attempting to print on, ha ha!):

Okay, well needless to say perhaps, I would most likely have not thought of using this color scheme or this kind of imagery if I were not working with Alison. But I’m generally excited these days about pushing myself in a different direction, or in a bunch of different directions… and I’m reminded again about how collaboration is super useful as a spur to get you to try things you’ve been nervous about tackling….. !

Okay in unrelated news, here’s a snow fort / doorway that I built over & around the basement door for the punk show that happened there this past sunday…

… and Chris Gang, come home already, teen punks are cooking plantains in the kitchen and weirdos are watching VHS tapes in the living room and mr. orange is biting everyone’s face and look there’s a cute queer reading Foucault in your bed!

A lot of things happened and now I am working on a bunch of projects at the same time as per usual, rolling forward with some experimental / totally new & unknown-territory stuff while I try to ACTUALLY finish long-unfinished things and push myself to work harder on comics (right now, in the form of lots of ink/brush/wash experimentation / practice / fooling around) and keep putting on events that help build the queer community in Providence (right now, a series of monthly queer dance parties in our basement, next one’s February 11th, mark those calendars (or contact me for details)!).

Also I started a one-day-a-week coffee shop called “Coffee Club” in my friends’ office/gallery, partly as a way to have “a job”, and partly as a way of creating a warm creative community space where people can meet & be sociable through the winter months… come join us! Fridays, 186 Carpenter St. Providence, 12-8pm.

I should be writing about all this stuff as it happens, instead of doing giant summary posts three months apart, um well I’m a terrible blogger.

This (and the photo at the top) shows the beginning of an experimental project, which I’m working on with my truly awesome intern Alison Nitkiewicz, who is a printmaker, feminist, student, & part of my community of friends here in Providence. These giant sheets of bond paper, printed in various gradations of transparent ink, are collage material: they are going to go out into the world & be used to construct worlds.

[as seen with the toes of my boots; Alison, you were totally right about having some full sheets of each of these blues & not just printing them on the small paper!]

[as seen with Alison's boots]

Pink & blue were just the first colors, there will be more, never fear, we’re not trying to stick to an essentialist binary here!

Also I haven’t really posted lots of pictures of friends on this website at all ever but here’s us dancing around in the kitchen to the music of the pop star who just had her baby the night/morning of our basement dance party… and yes, my housemate is holding the empty shells of 30 eggs… breakfast was delicious…

…and this is some beautiful people (there were more out of the frame of the picture and taking the picture) in the living room of our house the morning after the party, there was a sleepover…

…so maybe later I’ll write about what I’ve been thinking about regarding putting on events as an important path towards creating community, and how making social spaces is “real work” and totally meaningful, even though they are ephemeral and don’t fit into the standard definitions of what is productive… but I can’t write about that right now, there’s stuff to do!

I can say two words about pink, though, which is this: I used to hate it because I thought it would make me look girly and that people would categorize me with other girls if I wore it… now I like it, I think mostly because it reminds me to keep reclaiming things I am afraid of… and because it is super gay, and guess what?

so am I.

More soon!

Also, more excitingly::::: a potentially large number of people, including myself at some point, are going to be occupying Burnside Park in downtown Providence (next to Kennedy Plaza) starting at 5pm on Saturday, ongoing into the future until we build a new society of some kind that doesn’t feel so broken, and doesn’t make us feel that we are broken. How about that? Sounds good, right? I am excited. But it’s not just about camping out & yelling at the cops and the Bank of America skyscraper… we also have to listen to each other & actually hear each other… and I think the white non-trans guys (and probably the trans guys, too) are going to have to shut up.

On Wednesday night, I was at a ‘teach-in’ (that happened at the fancy liberal arts college up on the hill), which was three.5 hours long, and overall extremely great & extremely inspiring, and which got me excited about the potential of this occupy thing happening here. A young female-bodied person of color stood up in one of the question & answer sessions and asked the question [deeply paraphrased]: “In any activism project I’ve ever been part of, my questions & my voice are never heard, my concerns are never listened to. How can this movement say it’s building something new if it’s still not listening to women / people of color / queer people / poor people / etc?”

One of the faculty speakers, also a female-bodied person of color, answered her: “Basically you have to call them on it every time it happens. Every single time. You can’t ever let that erasure of your voice go un-confronted. Because then, at least they can’t say they didn’t realize it was happening. And maybe eventually they will realize they need to change.” …. It was a pretty intense, brutally realistic answer; and the only answer given during the talk that was actually in the form of advice: ‘this is what you should do.’ I was pretty stunned by it. I wonder if anybody else heard, hidden within that answer, its converse that the professor did not state: “White people, male people, non-queer people, people with money, you need to shut up & listen. And you, too — YES, YOU — need to confront the erasure of the voices of others… every single time it happens.” Did anybody hear that? Or does the burden rest only on the shoulders of the people whose voices are already not being heard?

Here are two good essays about the potential of the “Occupy” movement, and about white people shutting up: one from the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities of LA… another by Manissa McCleave Maharawal.

I don’t have energy right now to write a lot more about this all (got a bunch more to do to get ready for the sale)… but I’ll just say that I am excited for this scenario, the occupation, to happen. However, from what people have said about the Providence general assemblies, & the occupation in New York, I have the feeling that there will be a lot of male voices & male privilege in effect there… as there is usually in an activist context… which is why I have avoided many activist contexts in the past. And I know that I won’t be able to be part of this occupation for long, unless that privilege is confronted whenever it becomes apparent.

HOWEVER

I am very intimidated by speaking up against white male privilege, as a female-bodied & female-raised person who now is in this weird place of being accorded some aspects of male privilege & camaraderie, while still not actually being listened to or taken seriously in many ways. I still find myself wanting to be polite & not say things that will insult or offend people — and especially not say things that will make people “not want to be my friend”. Hmmm. I also am worried, as someone who has always been a person who talks a lot, & has opinions & a certain amount of confidence, about becoming or already being “that guy”, who dominates conversations and silences other voices.

I’ve had a bunch of run-ins lately with unseen & denied privilege… the very strong phenomenon of people not being aware of the ways they are privileged, and then “people getting defensive when they are shown evidence of structural inequalities which benefit them” (as my housemate Chris & I wrote about in the print we made recently… more on that later…). I’ve been trying to find conversational strategies to bring these things up to people in a way that allows them to think about it instead of reacting defensively. But there is a little ambiguously-gendered faerie sitting on my shoulder saying “it’s not your responsibility to educate these assholes…..!”

Well I don’t know what’s going to happen, we might make a ‘faerie camp’ as part of the occupation (inspired by Sean Minteh)… we might just end up being “those obnoxious queers/feminists/women who call everybody out on stuff” or we might end up bailing & realizing that something that is dominated by white non-trans men doesn’t have a chance of building a society that has a radically different structure. We’ll see. I don’t want to be pessimistic. Hells, I spent the last two days working on making a poster for this darn thing! But I want to put my energy where it can be used… I want to support my friends, and support people whose voices are not being heard… but I don’t know if I have the stamina to continually be trying to educate people who should be educating themselves about privilege.

oh and on a less serious note, remember:

Then it got chilly, then we had one final weekend of hot weather, now the temperature is dropping by 10 degrees every day and the Buio cat is curled up in a tight little ball & it looks like Fall is For Real. Which means that it’s not time to stop living life, or time to stop being wonderful: it’s just a time for doing work & getting serious & wearing sweaters & buckling down to the task(s) at hand. Also I’m broke so it’s convenient that now there is much less temptation to go on long bike rides or hang out on rooftops or talk late into the night next to bonfires…

I just put up a big re-organizational update to the main Secret Door Projects website.

I did most of the work on this re-organization back in February and March, to get to show some different priorities & new directions that my work has taken since 2007 when I first made the SDP website… so there are new sections for comics & zines, fonts I’ve drawn, a “practice & process” section grouping process work & creative practice stuff together… and also a thing with a little bit about my gender identity & the fact that my name is now Ian!

It took me so long to put this update up because I was attempting to write all my family members actual paper letters about my gender stuff & name shift. This was totally overwhelming (I have a lot of cousins & second cousins) & I ultimately realized I was being held back professionally & creatively by not being able to be out — as trans and as Ian — on facebook & on the internet. It surprised me how much I felt like I was existing as a partial person, not being able to be be consistent & public about my name & my gender & identity…

So… unsurprisingly maybe, my cousins, aunts, & uncles did not all get letters from me yet… but I went ahead and changed my name on facebook (personal page, art page) and put up the giant website update. To my family who may be reading this (and anybody else who is confused), I’m sorry for the lack of more personal communication… but I’ll see you soon & we can talk about it then. Real quick: I identify as a boy (also occasionally as a man!), I use “he” pronouns, my name is Ian Gilpin Cozzens, I’m a queer which means (among other things) that I’m not interested in assimilating to any idea of the ‘normal’ in the realms of desire or gender identity… and I love you.

xoxo

— ian c.

…from my travels…

oh also now that things are more consistent for me on the internet, you can probably expect more regular updates of this page here… and I’ll probably be writing about gender & identity & stuff too… we’ll see how it goes.