Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.
— Bliss Carman
In my work, I use a sewing machine to create thread drawings and installations by sewing into a fabric that dissolves in water. This fabric makes it possible for me to build up the thread by sewing repeatedly into my drawn images so that when the fabric is dissolved, the image can hold together without a base. These thread images appear as though they would be easily unraveled and seemingly on the verge of falling apart, despite the works actual raveled strength.
I am interested in the vulnerability of thread, its ability to unravel, and its strength when it is sewn together. I am interested in the connections between process and materials and the way that they relate to images and spaces. Tracing actions and environments through a process of repetition, translation and dissolving, I hope to trace absence. My work is a process of making as a way of tracing and preserving things that are gone, or slowly falling apart.
Statement by the artist, Amanda McCavour.
Oscar Loreto is from LA and was born without his left foot, left hand, and several of his fingers on his right hand. He hasn’t let that get in the way of him pursuing skateboarding dreams, though. Instead he has partnered with Adaptive Action Sports to help raise awareness and expectations for those living with physical disabilities in the action sports community.
(Source: adacs.org)
It Gets Better, a short film by Eli Guerron is a visual essay hoping to remind its audience that things can get better. It is about the hard times and it is about having the courage and endurance to push through them. It is about hope.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even the darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances for turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
