Part of Teaching Myself to Love is investigating the love made out of cherishing what surrounds me everyday. Sewing buttons onto old great coats, noticing the green on green painted house that looks like Kermit down the block, and meeting neighbors to ask if we can borrow their beloved disco ball, all meet at the intersection of availabilsm and loving to me. I’m compelled by hard use, maintenance, transformation and revisioning of the ideas and artifacts and bodies that collect around a lifetime from the lovely business of living. I think about the ethics of art and art making, and it feels most right and most accessible to work with sharing pre-existing forces. In America artists are expected to live on air, to work with dirt, to thrive and succeed through mythical logic. I dedicate this show to honoring my personal motley reality. There is a special joy in incorporating into art objects borrowed from places and people I love, the songs that remind me of my childhood and lovers and mother, the things that have lived with me through many seasons. This art is made out of the real relationships, inanimate and human, from my real life. It feels like the best manifestation of family to invite houseguests into collaboration and collaborators into co-habitation, to map the neighborhood and the city and the years through moments of joy connected to things and people I see regularly, to find a best use for something I don’t know why I haven’t been able to let go. I like and respect fantasy, but this tack of loving and acting is like fantasy inverted, instead of reaching out beyond to see the unseeable, it is delving into the well-known to really see and really know and really find the love that’s been nestled there all along.