Feelgood fatherhood

(not coming to an institution near you)

THE WINDOW part 71

Who needs to go when your heart just glows

You listen for their heartbeat, ear to partner’s warm stomach, but feel their highland-dancing (or maybe taekwondo) tummy kicks. You catch them and cut the cord and sleep overnight at the hospital. You fall in love with them.

You go out at midnight in a blizzard to buy medicine. You change diapers, wear a babybjorn barely embarrassed. You become hyper-hypervigilant of an allergy, of asphyxiation, of a bite, a burn, a car, a cut, a dog, a disease…

You read them that same bedtime story and never skip a page, even on the jabillionth time. You laugh and laugh, at farts and boogers and tickles and the tinsel that somehow got stuck on their butt.

You rock them to sleep at 2 am when you finish working and get up at 6 am when they awake (you do it oddly on your arm, because you know your collarbone is hard).

You carry and carry them, across the street, at the store, in the studio, in the snow, over the mud, up and down airplane aisles, at the parade, up 3 flights to the loft 4 times a day, crying, laughing, fussing, screaming, singing, sleeping.

You let them paint your nails though you know the Lichtenstein-ish colors will take weeks to wear off. You invent stories from their suggestions — a fish and a whale who are best friends — so you tell the tale of an aging goldfish with a bucket-list wish to see the Bellagio fountains (despite deserts etc.), and how the whale recruits his pals to re-create an even better version of it with their spouts (and flashlights) for her at home. And six stories later they still ask for another.

You work in and around and between all of it, mutate into a maestro of multitasking, become a blackbelt in bitwork, get your PhD in ADHD.

You speed them to school in the stroller in the sun, snow, rain; sprint home, maniacally-work, then dash back again.

You invent games and games and games to occupy them (comic-book exquisite corpse, and spontaneous animal/job charades where both start with the same letter with only one rule: no guessing until you see both performed — no not Snake Surgeon but yes! a Cobra Chiropractor) and you marvel at their minds.

You insist on making them (though grumpy) practice floating and swimming so they don’t die in the lake.

You play hall-ball with them, and dodge-ball (don’t worry about my face), and air-ball (aka Team Balloonia) where the Earth will explode if the balloon hits the ground, and every tap to keep it aloft is different than the last (foot, nose, knee, wrist, left-hand pinkie, twirl…).

On winter days you try (holding hands together) to catch on your tongues snowflakes spiralling down from the sky, then spend hours with them building forts and micro-hills for sledding, and making Saint Phalle-esque snow-sculptures to admire. On a windy spring day you go to the park to improbably catch mid-air those helicopter-seeds that fall from the tall maples, and in the autumn it’s dandelion fluff you all leap to seize.

You go to school performances that run longer than Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”. You played the recorder like a star!

You try not to barf when you see, on the side of their leg, their kneecap that somehow got pushed there after a basketball fall, and try to make them laugh lying on the gym floor until the ambulance arrives. You make them mad. And sad. For things you didn’t intend. You get into a different ambulance another time after the electrical accident on the roof. You sleep beside them at the hospital again.

You relearn math to help them pass. You push back on every single tattoo (as duty not aesthetically). You feign sleep till they come home at 3 am from the parties. You help them float, grumpy, in the ocean of the pandemic. You remain calm teaching them to drive!!! You invent jobs to employ them.

They go. You remember how sweet it was when they used to hold your hand. You fall in love with them again, and again, and again. You catch them and cut the cord (but you don’t).

NOTES:

Institutional exhibitions on motherhood (last 10 years):

• “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” - Hayward Gallery (London, 2024); explored motherhood through self-portraits, addressing creation, caregiving, loss, and women’s health issues like miscarriage and abortion

• “Designing Motherhood”- MassArt Art Museum (Boston, 2022); examined the design and material culture of human reproduction, including objects like IUDs, breast pumps, and menstrual cups, highlighting reproductive health’s social and political implications

• “Picturing Motherhood Now” Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 2022); explored motherhood through diverse lenses, addressing themes like family, gender, slavery, migration, and Indigenous matrilineal cultures

• “Mothering: Between Stockholm Syndrome and Acts of Production” Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico 2022); this exhibition challenged romanticized views of motherhood, addressing gender equality and the tensions of being an artist-mother

• “Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media” Foundling Museum (London, 2020); explored 500 years of pregnancy in art, from drawings to contemporary works

• “Mother! Origin of Life!” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark, 2021); explored motherhood through themes like fertility, sacrifice, and surveillance

• “The Great Mother” Palazzo Reale (Milan, 2015) explores the life-giving creative power of mothers and the power denied to and won by women.

Institutional exhibitions on fatherhood (last 75 years):

• “The Family of Man”, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1955); photography exhibition with numerous poignant images of fathers and children portrayed globally

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo series by K.I.A. All photos are taken from a single location, and nothing is staged. The images are later arranged in sets as visual poems and narratives, interconnected and nested in a grand continuum, a single portrait of the times:

The Window, as arranged in a continuum:

(for father’s day)

Press: Magazine Profile on K.I.A. (Kirby Andersen) art - Weatherworks, The Window, paintings, installations and sculptures

Spencer Magazine (Matthew Modine cover) did a 25+ profile on the Weatherworks land art, The Window photo series, the CRISPR paintings, and recombinant sculptures and installations of K.I.A. (Click the link to order the digital or hardcopy versions.)

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Right: CRISPR Series of volumetric paintings

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Weatherwork series

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Shift/Drift series

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Recombinant series of painting/installations, and large works on aluminum (Palimpsest etc series)

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The volumetric CRISPR painting series (various sizes), “genetically modified” works

The Window, a 24/7/365 durational photo series of unstaged ephemeral photos, interlinked sets of narratives nested in a single portrait of the times (covering the humanity, hilarity, precocity, vanity of the 21st century through race, religion, wealth, fashion, technology, love, hate, and fights and fires…) Read about them at the K.I.A. Substack HERE

More at at Spencer Magazine HERE (hardcover coffee-table editions available too)

One-frame Films (The Window by K.I.A., pt 59)

“Titled Film Stills” series*:

“Arson, Incorporated”

“The Accidenter”

“Dazzle, Hero!” **

TO SEE THE REST OF THE “One Frame Movie” IMAGES IN THIS SERIES, (FOR TITLES/TEXT BELOW), SEE THE SUBSTACK SERIES on “THE WINDOW” HERE: LINK

“Assassin, Bikini, Cuccinelli”

“Two Clones Grown (One Gone)”

“Steven Dies Seven Times”

“Rock Paper Flowers”

“Hello, Halo”

“Wait When’s Payday?”

“The Last Temptation of Chris”

“The Second Last Temptation of Chris”

NOTES:

• * artist Cindy Sherman’s first major photo series (1977-80, and acquired in 1995 by MoMA) was entitled “Untitled Film Stills”, where she staged herself in various stereotypical female lead roles (bombshell, fashion victim, schoolgirl and so on). In each of the seventy photographs her characters seem to be caught mid-narrative, just before or after an important event, and, just as in the movies, they never look directly at the camera ****

• Sherman didn’t title her “films” because it would ruin their ambiguity (even though the photos are carefully staged with costuming and settings chosen to refer to existing films or genres, and are specific statements or critiques about culture and identity). The Window “films” above, because they are unstaged —they are real, ephemeral found moments — are titled to make them fictional and (even more) ambiguous as narratives, observations, or critiques. The subjects, unaware of the camera, also never break the fourth-wall (look directly at the viewer/photographer).

• “The Accidenter” above is kinda like M. Night Shyalaman’s movie “Glass”, because three different characters show up in the one pic. The man to the left who is painting, the man bottom left holding the cardboard sign up, and the man on the ground at right have all starred in their own photos, i.e. sign man from Protest/Antitest.

• Also “The Accidenter” is unlike “Glass” because Rotten Tomatoes reviewers like CelIn D couldn’t realistically say of the single frame “Too long, at any length”.

• Tagline for “2 Clones Grown, 1 Gone”: Me, Myself, and A.I. Tag for “Wait When’s Payday?”: Always the bride, never the bridesmaid and for “Hello, Halo”: Heaven, we have a problem

• Titlelists, aka professional movie-namers, can make — for coming up with great titles like “Back to the Future”— between $250,000 and $413,000 a year.

• “Pacific Air Flight 121” was a very vanilla title that got changed to the very visual and visceral “Snakes on a Plane”. The movie flopped. When a team of marketing specialists were analyzing its financial failure, someone in their focus-group responded “Great title! When I read it I saw the entire movie in my head.” When asked why he then didn’t go on to experience it in the theatre, he answered “It wasn’t worth seeing a second time”. Samuel Jackson, who had suggested the title change, had to give back the $413,000 bonus he had negotiated.

• The movie with the longest title (according to the GBOWR***) is: “The Sundevil and the Dragonmaker With Halo Duress Use Giant Sorcery, Magyck, and Dark Shroud To Turn Offensive Utopia Into an Eternal Burn, Part Two” (148 characters). Gary Busey came up with the title spontaneously (and sans bonus) when talking at the producer, insisting that the title needed to be too long to fit on a marquee. (The movie turned a minor profit, primarily from DVD sales in Norway).

• Movies are often retitled for overseas markets. For example “Zootopia” was radically renamed for the UK market, and called “Zootropolis”.

• ** US re-title of the hit Japanese movie “Power Man, Dazzle Stand!”

• In Norway, the Sundevil movie was retitled “Sundevil og Dragonmaker Med Thor Bruker Gigantiske Trolldom, Magyck og Mørkt Likklede For å Gjøre Offensiv Utopia Til en Evig Forbrenning, Del To”. The local profesjonell tittelist made the full 4,574,149.95 kroner that year (4,317,000.93 of it because he snikja’d “Thor” into the title, which significantly boosted DVD sales, especially in Svalbard.)

• “Untitled” was the original title for “Almost Famous”

• *** Guinness Book of World Records Gary Busey Owns Word Records

• After hearing about Samuel Jackson’s near-bonus, Gary Busey devoted the entire seventh chapter of his third biography to what he thought the title for “Snakes on a Plane” should have been. The chapter starts with: Snakes on a Plane should have been called and ends about 150 marquees-worth pages later. Had that sesquipedalian title been used, he would have gotten into both the GBOWR and the GBOWR. Busey has yet to be hired as a Titleist. He has, however, started writing his fourth biography. (The seventh, eight, and ninth chapters of which will be about what CelIn D should have included in their RT review of “Glass”).

• the first found film series photos from The Window, including the box-office hit “Vampires VS IV”, Palm d’Or winner “Annie May”, and Razzie-awardee “Angel Raguel”, can all be seen here: LINK . All of the characters are caught just before, or after, a narrative event, and none of them (alien bride, cam girl, angel etc) look at the camera.

• didactic panel: All photos in The Window series (unlike Sherman) are unstaged, shot 24/7/365/1 (single location), eventually grouped in sets as themed visual poems (w/ retinal rhymes), and ultimately interconnected as a recombinant installation explained in didactic panels.

• *****

  Sets, L to R: Crosswalk I, Singing Pi, Horses They Fly, What’s the Point, Crosswalk II, How Far the Man

BONUS IMAGE:

**** “Untitled Film Still #71”

Singing Pi (the long song)

FROM THE ORIGINAL K.I.A. substack HERE (with more images): LINK

Singing Pi:

Silence, still. He hasn’t sung for forever. No melodies, no lyrics have come to him for a very long time. No songs, so no singing. And so the days go. On and on.

One day, randomly, he comes across a website. A single page, very long: it shows the first million digits of pi. And suddenly… in his head he hears a faint melody. Using the numbers as the lyrics, at last he begins to sing.

A half hour later he’s interrupted by a call. (A job interview). Before he heads out to the meeting he downloads the pi page as a file to his phone. He bookmarks where he stopped singing.

A week later in a spare moment he opens the file, and, from where he left off, sings further along the number. Then over the days, here and there, he sings a bit more of the decimals. (Kind of loud when in the shower; sotto voce while in his tiny new office). His melodies and motifs evolve and circle and repeat, but the lyrics are always new — he only ever sings the next series of infinite digits.

He begins to sing them in the mornings, as a warm mantra to welcome the sun. And sometimes, as a muted melody, at night for the new moon. He tries the numbers out as a Christmas carol, as a hot dog jingle, and one New Year’s Eve at the uni pub (on a dare from a girl), he karaoke’s the next-in-line numbers to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.

For a Mardi Gras lark he tries some of the sequence out on the street with his brass band. To get his punk on he shouts pi out with his garage band. To do true justice to the number with hours-long jams he finally does the obvious and forms a math rock band. (Called “πhsh”. They gain an avid following. He is able to rest his vocal cords during the extended guitar solos, but he learns 0 to 9 in ASL because sometimes he loses his voice completely during their marathon performances, and so has to sign pi.)

And on. He croons a verse/chorus sequence of numbers as a love song to his wife (the darer) at their wedding. (She laughs). Increasingly life-busy he sings the number less-frequently, but he does yodel to his wife some epenthesized digits while in the mountains on their third-point-one-fourth anniversary. (She frowns).

He never yodels again.

But he does continue to sing pi over time. With a joyful series of the numbers he sirens his son out the womb. (As he catches their baby his wife frowns and laughs.) He also outsources the song — sometime on, he sponsors the uniforms for his son’s little league baseball team (the Pines) because they cheerfully agree to war-chant, at the start of each weekly game, a few more numbers down the line.

The song, now many, many decimal points in, is delivered (in French) as a jaunty chanson for the cancan encore of a local musical production that he directs. Also his favourite students (after checking where he is in the decimals in the updated file) include some numbers as the hook for their thesis rap.

Others of the numbers are sung for him in numerous ways: at a conference he coaxes a visiting member of the Tibetan Dge-lugs-pa sect into throat-singing a deep sequence, and a Swede to perform the next numbers as a high mountain herding-song. On March 14th he pays a singing-telegram man to herald the following figures while riding a skateboard throughout the campus. And so on, till a last one at work: a long set of digits, in Italian, is lovingly sung to him by a teary, barrel-chested colleague, an operatic lament for him on his final day of teaching before retirement.

After that, less. He does, intermittently and with only half a heart, scat some numerals with his latest band (a jazz trio), but before long they break up due to the complications. Then a rest on the unlimited digits. An interlude on that irrational number, for a while. A certain caesura. A grand pause, and on. Permanently, he thinks.
But at last he returns to it, at his wife’s request. He sings it to her as a lullaby in the evenings (as she lives out her last days in the hospital bed).

So on, and along. With aged ears, voice gone, and a slowing heart, the last lyrics he ever hears in the long song come from his son in the next room. He is serenading his own young daughter, teaching her to sing the infinite numbers. In his head, in repose in his bed as his eyes close, he sings along with them in soft harmony, and he knows he has sung forever.

THE WINDOW:

PRINTS FROM “THE WINDOW”: HERE

NOTES:

• one million digits of pi, printed in a single line, is one mile long (font size 8 point)

• it would take roughly 5.8 days (139 hours) of continuous speaking to recite the first million digits of pi, average speaking speed of 120 digits per minute without breaks (vocal font size 8 point)

• pi (3.14159 …) has been computed out to 10 trillion digits with no evident pattern. (but there is no mathematical proof yet showing there isn’t a pattern, so we don’t know for sure… maybe it all repeats after three hundred and a fourteen trillion)

• Possible “The Window” exhibition wall arrangement: a group of three (space) then one (space) then a group of four (space) the one (space) and so on….

• the above story came from a dream of mine where souls from different dimensions sing their pi to each other to signal where they are from — cuz time and space work differently in every dimension, and so circumference ÷ by diameter (the formula for π) is different for everyone’s home dimension. I also had a dream where music was my DNA. You could play it like a harp. (I made that song real; it’s prob. the aural equivalent of this post… if curious you can hear it here: Music Is My DNA (Spotify, Apple etc) listen for the hum that runs throughout all the changeups

• why pi? cuz it’s both random and infinite and impossible but actual— which are the themes (and/or working process) of The Window photo series. And also: music is eternal. Archeologists have found playable flutes that are 40,000 years old. The oldest known song (that can be reconstructed) is the Hurrian Hymn #6, from 1400 BCE, in Canaan (Syria), performed on the lyre (a small harp). Greensleeves — a pop song, still sung today — is nearly 500 years old.

• math rock is a real thing. math rock makes use of more non-standard, frequently changing time signatures such as 13/8 . Some bands are: King Crimson, Game Theory, Weapons Factory, with hints of Pearl Jam, and other two-word groups. (There’s even one from Taiwan: Elephant Gym.) a subgenre of it is mathcore. like, harder math. calculus rock. none of the bands, to my knowledge (and a halfhearted google search) have ever recorded pi, or used a 3.14/8 time signature, so maybe only they are only mathsoftcore…

• obv. every shot in this set of pics is a musician - unposed, candid, and caught by chance, improv jazz, like all photos in The Window series. (music is another sub theme of the project — each photo like an individual note in a bigger song. the various sets/groupings that resonate with each other I suppose are the chords). anyway the guy on the skateboard has an operatic voice and sings beautifully as he shoots through traffic on his skateboard. you can hear him for blocks and blocks. as for the 2nd last photo (b&w): not sure if the guy on the left is a “somebody” in the music world, but the guy on the right hustled across the street to shake his hand and enthusiastically ask him lots of questions — that’s why he’s playing air guitar. and as for the last photo, as she danced on the chessboard playing with her dad, the little girl sang away in some language only she understood. maybe singing out her home dimension.

• …The Window , for the noobs, is one massive infinitely recombinant portrait of the times composed of sub-portraits (grouped sets by theme) composed of single portraits — individual photos of people shot randomly in unstaged ephemeral-but-eternal moments:

  The Window : the long view

NSA Keyword Poem: Deadbeef Atomicraft (Immaculate Constellation tee shirt edit)

New limited edition wearable artwork: a wordwork by K.I.A., a poem using only top secret keywords used by the CIA, NSA, (and so on), on the below (numbered) t-shirt. Guaranteed to start a discussion. Or a rendition. Or an abduction.

click to go to store

DEADBEEF ATOMICRAFT  KH-11

The chameleon man, the alchemist,
the eternity server, a mole;
with visionquest, by retinal fetish,
a scanner of the keyhole

Spies not daisy, iris, hollyhock, or rose,
but something maverick (or from the Weekly World News),
unclassified, anonymous, explicit, rogue,
veiled forthcoming but with an unlimited view

Pornstars plus ninja on calliope indigo,
a cowboy, redheads, and a sharpshooter with a glock,
with a dazzler predator debugging the concerto,
and in the sidemirror, an elf, a gorilla, and sphinx with a lock

Eavesdropping jazz jargon and pinknoise passwords,
he flashbangs a merlin -- phreaking XS4all,
ramjets past jupiter, then a megastar, and at last bursts
through diamondchips and galaxydust to breach nightfall...

There, in sugargrove sweetdreams to see
reddawn & bluesky crystallize a white sea,
but suddenly, to stun, comes temblor, whirlpool, tsunami,
to scissor inspiration, sing disaster sagacity

Comes a crazytrain to babblequest the conundrum,
and thinkchew thunderweb’s doublevision,
no noblequest just atomicraft, warstock bullion
of immaculate constellation

Then the virus messiah — the tarot card reveal
deadbeef frozentundra, a blizzard,
a blacksnake in firelake with the 777 seal,
in derby hat with third chance, a mockingbird

The Sundevil, the Dragonmaker, with halo duress,
white giant sorcery, in blackflesh,
using magyck and darkshroud, all trojan, to turn
offensive utopia into a chemical burn.

NOTE: The poem, now in quatrains (cuz Nostradamus), has been edited to include the latest UFO / UAP secret project name (Immaculate Constellation) recently revealed by a whistleblower, and the rhyme tightened. The original poem appears in this painting (which also contains Area 51 landing-strip map, blueprints for a listening device bug, and digital camouflage patterns), more about HERE:

up the long slide (even jack black)

TL; DR: below the surface & to the sun (Verticality, Part Two, by K.I.A.)

The original “Verticality” image arrangement (post) became concrete because of a synchronicity. I’d selected a series of photos of ephemeral moments — of disparate content, and taken with separate intents — which were captured over the course of a year, and then grouped them by elevation (how far the subject was from the ground). A vertical visual poem.

Just after I’d curated that grouping, by chance, I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. Here’s its last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The poem’s last stanza resonates with the themes of The Window (continuity, infinity, with hints perhaps of both despair and transcendence… ). And, of course, the main hook was that all the photos in this series (of series) are, literally, taken from a high window.

So I used the poem as the connecting thread for that first post some time ago, but for a while now I’ve wanted to do a Verticality sequel. (Or… or maybe a franchise, at some point merchandising the IP with toys, maybe a gin or a tequila line, and possibly a cologne or a perfume — with signature top notes of transcendence, and base notes of despair). But I’ve held off for dittophobia.

Then a few days ago, out of nowhere, this famous line popped into my head:

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND READ MORE (SUBSCRIBE!) AT THE K.I.A. SUBSSTACK HERE

Balenciaga Winners

(Holiday) At bottom is a stack of ‘stacks from over this year, in case you missed some; many have also been refined post-post, i.e. the Dick Cheney bit re: Cthulhu prompt in the Notes of the AI for an Eyesubstack.

But before that listicle, some silent “product placement”* shots: Balenciaga, Ferrari, Porsche, Enfants Riches Déprimés, iPhone, Anthropologie, Ford, Roger Dubuis, Winners.

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES (AND SUBSCRIBE) HERE: K.I.A. SUBSTACK

All The Hills Echo Ha Ha He He (The Window by K.I.A. pt 54)

An angst-antidote — excerpts from Songs of Innocence by William Blake, paired with images from The Window photo installation series:

Merry, merry sparrow!/Under leaves so green/A happy blossom/Sees you, swift as arrow,/Seek your cradle narrow, /Near my bosom
-THE BLOSSOM

Pretty joy! / Sweet joy, but two days old. / Sweet joy I call thee: / Thou dost smile, / I sing the while; / Sweet joy befall thee!
-JOY

When the meadows laugh with lively green, / And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene; / When Mary and Susan and Emily / With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!
-THE LAUGHING SONG

SEE THE REST OF THE POST AT THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK (and subscribe!): LINK

Nuns to Gnostics (Buddha, Baphomet, Jah, Jesus, Yahweh, Waheguru... ) The Window pt. 51 by K.I.A.

All the below so close (within a 15’ area), and not so far apart.

On the autumnal equinox the woman above and five others danced through the streets at sunset, wearing flower crowns, celebrating Mabon (“The Witch’s Thanksgiving”) in honour of nature’s abundance.

“May good thoughts come to us from all sides”, a Hindu prayer.

A Sikh principle is sarbat da bhala (“the welfare of all” or “may everyone prosper”)

This woman is going to a Powwow (an Indigenous gathering to celebrate culture, tell stories, sing, and perform traditional dances) somewhere downtown. On her regalia is the circular Four Directions symbol (white N, red S, yellow E, black W), one meaning of which is the interdependent relationship between all living things.

The tefillin is a small black box containing verses from the Torah, worn by Orthodox and traditional communities by wrapping the attached leather straps around the arm and forehead. The purpose is to keep one’s focus on spiritual development, not worldly desires.

An Apostle …...

READ AND SEE MORE ABOUT THIS SET OF IMAGES FROM THE WINDOW AT: SUBSTACK (and subscribe and share!)

Get the entire Nuns to Gnostics set HERE (and other sets HERE)

The Window as “networked” installation showing complex connections across images, time, people…

ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion (a la Graham & because Baselitz)

TL; DR: if the sky were ground
(ʇɥǝ Mᴉupoʍ by K.I.A., p.50)

“New York City 1 (After Mondrian)”

For 75 years, the Mondrian painting “New York City I” (a grid of red, yellow, blue, and black linear adhesive tapes) was hung upside down. Research eventually proved that it should be shown the other way around. However, due to possible damage, the painting would continue to be displayed the wrong end up. “If you were to turn it upside down now, gravity would pull it into another direction. And it’s now part of the work’s story,” said curator Meyer-Büser in 2022. “Once I pointed it out to the other curators, we realised it was very obvious” (italics mine):

“New York City 1” (Mondrian): Left: right; Right: wrong

Georg Baselitz is famous for exhibiting his paintings upside-down — or rather, right-side up, but with the subject matter inverted — to create unease and/or to make the content more difficult to interpret. His first inverted painting was in 1969, “The Wood on Its Head”. Flipping a traditional landscape of a tree made the work overcome representation, its artificiality highlighted, and left-brain analysis of it disrupted. The subject of the art was not as important as the work’s visual insight. It is immediately obvious that the tree, or in later works, the human being, is not the right way up. Genius, or gimmick? Bravado, or branding?

"Untitled" (Baselitz) - "Titled" (K.I.A.)

Rodney Graham is well-known for his photographs of trees hung upside down. (This presentation method evolved from his use of camera obscura, where a pinhole in a wall is used to isolate and cast the image —upside down and reversed, because light travels in a straight line — at large scale onto a facing wall). Of these works Graham said “I was also using a kind of readymade strategy based on the disputable assumption that a photograph is not art but an upside down photo is.”

"Welsh Oaks #1" (Graham) - "City Trees Two" (K.I.A.)

Some of the photos for The Window project/portrait/installation were shot upside-down. This was due to: 1) mistake, 2) the need to see around an obscuring object, like overhead wires, 3) not wanting the subjects to change their behaviour as a result of noticing the photographer’s movements 4) wanting to stay alive. (Meaning sticking the camera out the window without looking in order to avoid stray bullets from shootings, prevent rocks thrown from drug dealers or molotov cocktails from motorcycle gangs, and not garner a deadly look from that socialite after she stole flowers from a planter).

These images would usually be re-oriented when editing… unless visually it would enable two or more simultaneous readings — that is, a perceptual shift: is the skater dropping down into the flowerbed as if descending from a balcony above, or across it, launched towards the bottom of the photo from a crash…

READ & SEE MORE about the “Inversion Set” from The Window by K.I.A. (& SUBSCRIBE) AT THE SUBSTACK HERE

The Geometries of Taylor Swifties (THE WINDOW by K.I.A. pt 45)

TL; DR: Taylor Swift Dance Party participants, in polygons (PRINTS HERE & BY REQUEST)

I hear shrieks outside. It’s early evening, spring. Shouts, cries, and loud exclamations in big cities are alarming… but in rare cases, like this, they are joyous — the sounds from down below The Window are emanating from a flock of Swifties, in line for a Taylor Swift Dance Party. They are laughing loudly, and eager to shake it (off).

According to statistics, there are about a shibillion Swift fans worldwide. Here are a few of them — sequinned, blue-jeaned, braided, cowboy’d, lumberjacked — free-range, in their various geometries:

SEE THE REST OF THE PHOTOS AND SUBSCRIBE TO SUBSTACK click> HERE

IMAGES:

heXXagram

acute triangle

90,100, 60, 120 degrees of swifties

quadrilateral non-parallelogram with purses

biPhonic right angle

15 degrees ensequinned

theoretical investigations on geometrical structures of swiftie clusters

Geometries and glyphs of fans and fame, and the infinite mystery and magic of celebrity — Taylor’s a symbol, or sigil, for positivity, that’s why the lineup.

I go downstairs and join it.

love vector

I shriek a little (but joyously).

The Window w/ Swifties Geometries

NOTES:

-“Siri, Siri, in my hand, who is the famous-est in the land?”
“Taylor Swift, Of Course, is the famous-est in the land. There were 10,751,000 searches for her on Google this month, twice as many as the next famous-est, Ronaldo.”

- in the pic w/the pink cowboy hats, if you could “enhance enhance enhance” (as they do in movies) the girl’s iPhone image on the right, you’d see me leaning out the topmost window, 25’ above, taking photos. The only person to actually notice my actions was the girl who gave me the peace sign.

-The Window (all images in the photo series 24/7/365. from the one window) is mostly about interconnections across single images over a span of time. This post is one of the few showing multiple photos of a single moment (others were of a shooting, and a fire; while How Far the Man and UHaul Psalm were multiples of a single subject, but across a span of time.)

-the panoramic photo shows a few people in the lumberjack phase

-re: Google AI debacle, I queried it to generate images of a Swiftie & it made this:

-apparently the next Taylor Swift album “The Tortured Poets Department” comes out April 19 2024. So I asked Chatgpt to write a tortured haiku using Swift song titles, and it gave me this: Endgame without you / Haunted by blank space, lost love / Teardrops on my guitar

in praise of fails: Weatherworks - land art installations by K.I.A.

TL; DR: 30-foot art done-30° (“The Window” winterlude)

On Horizons

The newly frozen bay, somewhat snow white, sounds out as it warps — ringing, and singing, like an ice siren, alarm and allure. I jump, stomp, and kick down while walking onto this winter canvas. I’m holding a broom sideways — if I fall through, maybe it’ll save me. Should I be wearing a life jacket?

F1: Cities in Dust

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time in ten, there is no ice. So “going-with-the-no-floe”, I shifted my colordrifts and glyphs to nearby snowy fields and frozen flora. But because the art is not at the time-honoured site, and I can only work at a much smaller size… all attempts are fails. (F1-F4):

F2: Color…Elide

Every December I make enormous weatherworks. The process is physically demanding — a duel, a sport, a dance — due to the difficult conditions (which are different every year). This art is always in cooperation with acquiescent to nature; i.e. this year, for the first time…

READ THE REST OF THE POST & SUBSCRIBE TO THE K.I.A. substack HERE

The Window: a portrait in a thousand parts

Below is a view of The Window art project installed as networked photographs, showing the connections across the images, subjects and themes (diversity, time, technology, velocity, beauty, movement, dance, Tarot, entanglement… etc).

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“The Window”, institutional installation view of themes branching and massing from linear spine (proposed)

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo project capturing life in the 21st century city. (See more of the images and ideas-behind: HERE). Above is just one of its many infinite arrangements.

Much of the art by K.I.A. is one larger work composed of smaller elements, allowing iterative presentations. Here’s an installation whose content changes according to setting and arrangement; here’s a painting whose 30 individual paintings are to be decentralized; here’s a recombinant sculpture composed from many discrete parts, and here’s an intercombinant wall installation (this same approach later arrived at by El-Anatsui).

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Verticality (The Window Photos Pt. 9)

TL; DR: A photo poem, from zero to 1,261,161,417 feet.

An ‘ascending arrangement’ of some images selected from the meta-metropolis-mega-photo project The Window (LINK).

Earth to heaven (via influencers and window washers), and also some synchronicity — after thinking of connecting images vertically, by happenstance I came across the poem “High Windows” by Philip Larkin. The title, imagery, and the themes resonate somewhat. Here’s the last stanza from it (& all of it at bottom):

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

So rather than words:

NOTES:
• Besides verticality, other possible future sub-groupings of shots from The Window are: gravity, velocity, vanity, precarity, ethnicity, hilarity, historicity, U-haulicity…

• I heart “the sun-comprehending glass”. The window’s job is to let light pass through

• More posts from the Window (all ephemeral moments captured from one SUBSTACK location, pls. subscribe):
Possible Pareidolia
Here Come the Future
What’s the Story?

• K.I.A. website feat. recombinant sculptures, snow collages, gen mod paintings +

• HIGH WINDOWS by Phillip Larkin:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide   
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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Possible Pareidolia

TL; DR: A pairing of enigmatic images of couples from The Window project, third one at bottom.

Pairings, juxtapositions and patterns. Across the time span of The Window series (LINK), context emerges which generates (accretes?) considerations beyond each individual image.

Two photos taken months apart, at different times of day, of different situations, when juxtaposed within the context of an exhbition (virtual or institutional), suddenly obtain more layers of meaning.

For example in the project there is a photo of a woman in high heels and fur at 11 p.m., arms outstretched, smiling and posing for a photo as she leans back against a stretch limo. Months later I captured an image of a woman at 6 a.m crammed into a kid’s bike trailer, immobile (sleeping, sick, dead?), as her partner cycled from dumpster to dumpster looking for bottles.

Placed side by side, each image becomes a tuning fork that resonates to the other.

Another example: separate shots over months of 3 different groups of 3 women crossing the street together. Each group is ethnically homogenous and of the same age within their triplet, but when the photos are placed sequentially you notice that each group’s pattern of walking is significantly different — one group is close, almost shoulder to shoulder, arms and legs in synch; the next group somewhat matching in stride and arm movements, but a little farther apart from each other; and the last group of three is dispersed and with no physical cohesion of motion. Is it culture, age, season, setting, time of day, or happenstance that causes this phenomena?

One of the images by itself is just a word, but the three together are a poem.

The Window: Poetic Sets

Themed groups of images from The Window: Velocity, Dance, Motion, Walking, Woman, Men, Trans, Night, Smokers, Selfies, Technology, Diversity, Equity, Beauty, History, Weddings, Dogs, Verticals, Time, U-Hauls…
Ediitoned signed archival prints: https://www.nu4ya.com/store?category=02+The+Window

morse-code forest, general stealth and argent armor

“e dot tree dot” by K.I.A. , is 84” x 60”
-black/gold/silver oilstick on scratched and scored aluminum.

Whenever I see a birch forest, the patterns of white and black feel like an encoded message being sent by the earth. So I took a poem by e.e. cummings “when by now and tree by leaf”, translated it into the dots and dashes of Morse code, and overlayed and image of a birch forest with it. I then translated key nouns from the poem (i.e. “snow”) into secretarial shorthand symbols for the cursive part of the painting.

The lines that make up the drawing are more than just decorative or structural -- they are themselves information. (The broader implication: behind everything we see there is a higher, or at least different, order of reality.) They are palimpsests — information layered on information.

General Stealth Car River 84 x 60”, oilstick on aluminum by K.I.A.

Tom Thomson x Emily Carr ÷ General Idea x Agnes Martin = genetically modified Canadian art. Taking the forests of Thomson and splicing them with organic shapes of Carr over the t.v. bands of General Idea, and beneath the minimalist lines of Martin.

There is a horizontal, as well as a vertical, tracking of light as the aluminum reflects with movement and illumination, contrasting the velvety matte of the oilstick.

Argent Silk Armor 84 x 60 x 5"” oilstick on faceted aluminum

A palimpsest— layers of textile shapes from Japan, Africa, Victorian era Europe, and a North American Indigenous breastplate, overlayed. The bends in the aluminum are the folds used on a kimono for storing.

CRISPR SILVR - genetically modified paintings

New work in the CRISPR series of genetically modified (spliced) paintings, “CRISPR SILVR” 50 x 40 x 2”, acrylic on paper on panel. The sculptural painting consists of thousands of discrete slices of paper spliced togethe, with the work shifting and optically changing with the light and angle. See the ongoing series HERE

(The work below is the yang to its yin, same dimensions)

The Window by K.I.A.: compilation images

Compilation of photographs as grouped by theme into a single image.

The compilations range from two up to 60+ images. Dimensions variable and flexible — portrait, landscape, square, etc. Inquiries welcome.

Here are a few examples of the “visual poems” compilted from The Window, a 24/7/365/1 project documenting the diversity, velocity, and humanity of life at this moment.

See more of the compilations HERE (and more being added over time.)

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“ultimulticulti” (39 image compilation):

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“Views From the Six” (36 image compilation):

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“Happiness Is Motion” (aka “Wheelers and Wheelies” (6 image compilation):

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Other compilations: Gravity/Antigravity, Wraiths Below the Window, Sequences….

General Stealth Car River

General Stealth Car River 84 x 60”, oilstick on aluminum by K.I.A.

Tom Thomson x Emily Carr ÷ General Idea x Agnes Martin = genetically modified Canadian art. Taking the forests of Thomson and splicing them with organic shapes of Carr over the t.v. bands of General Idea, and beneath the minimalist lines of Martin.

There is a horizontal, as well as a vertical, tracking of light as the aluminum reflects with movement and illumination, contrasting the velvety matte of the oilstick.