stretch princess
molly goes to LA, viral butterfly pix, dressing room antics
Good morning and (happy?) Friday everyone! The sun is shining, I’m about to spend the weekend in my studio (living room floor), and my hot pink Stanley cup is filled to the brim with room temperature tap water. Sometimes, I entertain the idea of drinking a Celsius before writing. I’ve never had one before and I wonder if it would help me focus, like so many claim it does for them, but the risk of it having an adverse effect and bringing upon an anxiety-induced meltdown is not worth it to me. I’ll continue to plug away, vintage caffeinated style.
A week ago, I went to Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair to procure the fifth issue of Superstars Only magazine, which features an interview with me where I impart such wisdom as “being cool is really easy; just don’t post anything” and run my mouth about Emma Chamberlain. I’m not just saying this because I’m in the magazine, but I really think Superstars Only is one of the most interesting publications out there right now, both formally and conceptually. Their latest issue can be worn as a purse and is aptly called BAGAZINE. If you would like to purchase a copy for yourself, you can do so on their website. I didn’t stick around long at the fair—I left after the precious BAGAZINE was in my possession. So, in lieu of a proper NYABF book haul, here’s what I would have purchased:
Nolly Babes by Tochi & Ebele Anueyiagu, published by Random Man Editions
“Leave at my door” and TIK TOK + THE PATRIARCHY + THE 4TH DIMENSION by Zarina Nares
the last person I want to speak to. by Raque Ford
I’ll be heading to Los Angeles soon to do an installation and performance at Heavy Manners Library. My show, “I’m not really a waitress” opens on May 16 (7-10 PM) and runs through June 6th. This show is a continuation of my ongoing vision board series. My first vision board, Chick Magnet, was published with the library in 2023.
In addition to the show, I’ll be doing some programming at the space that weekend. On Friday, May 17, we’ll be screening Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard’s experimental 1992 road film No Sex Last Night (Double-Blind). I’ll be introducing the film as well as screening a few short video pieces of mine beforehand. You can purchase tickets here. I’ll also be teaching an I ❤ Files workshop on Saturday, May 18. We’ll be paying special attention to the various files we accumulate digitally: that thing you saved for later; a forgotten screenshot; a treasured document. You may not leave feeling any more organized but we will have created something beautiful together. Sign up here. This will be the first time I’ve been to LA in 7 years! I am accepting recommendations of all kinds and am open to linking and building with you while I’m there <3.
I know I haven’t been on here much, and sometimes I wonder if I shot myself in the foot a bit by writing so many essays. Who knew I had so many essays in me for so long! I’m trying to find a way to write that feels more lighthearted and less like another task I have to do. I often operate in different modes depending on where I’m at in my creative process: consuming, collecting, making, editing, promoting, etc. Right now, it feels like I’m tasked with doing them all at once. When my studio time is feeling open-ended, especially when I have multiple items on my amorphous to-do list, I’ve been “pulling a card” (clicking a link) from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. One that reads, “Repetition is a form of change” prompts me to scan. I might film a video of myself vacuuming after pulling “Do the washing up.”
Recently, I noticed that one of the images from my haircutsfolder project had been getting a lot of attention on Tumblr. It’s a photograph of a creek with a monarch butterfly flying through the frame. From what I recall, I took it sometime around 2006 on a hike. I can’t remember if my friends and I were en route to a quarry or if I was somewhere in Kentucky. Either way, it’s the kind of picture that is just nondescript and dreamy enough to do well on a platform like Tumblr. As a seasoned Tumblr girl, I can see an image in the wild and know that it will “do numbers” on the platform. A picture of a foot in white stockings covered in mud? A suburban interior with floral wallpaper? A woman with really, really long hair with her back turned to the camera? We love that shit.
I like thinking about how these images circulate and become recontextualized, saved, and integrated into someone else’s world. This is often why I come back to my own archive, looking for new things to pull out and work with. I dig through the trove of images and always end up with something I hadn’t considered before, while building upon the existing archive in the process.
I’m currently working with a series of images from 20 years ago that my friends and I would take in mall dressing rooms. We’d go into stores that we didn’t actually shop at because we were “alt” (Deb, Abercombie) and try on outfits we thought were too silly or too sexy or too preppy to actually wear out. We’d photograph each other in our costumes, making kissy faces and over-the-top poses for the camera. Occasionally, an employee would tell us to stop taking pictures, so we had to be sneaky about it. There’s a very charged quality to these images. Not only are dressing rooms a common movie makeover trope (the dressing room montage) and a place where body anxieties run rampant, but it’s an adolescent site for performance that feels strictly pre-Internet. Posting eventually took its place. I noticed the volume of dressing room pictures decreased once I started sharing pictures of myself online. I tried to find a clip from my favorite movie dressing room montage: Mary Kate and Ashley’s Passport to Paris (1999). The best I can do is share the song that soundtracks it, which has no business being as good as it is. TGIF!