Amanda Wachob Tattoo Designs

Amanda Wachob Tattoo

I was three years old and sitting on a low 1970s style bench. Kicking my legs back and forth, I felt the skin on the backs of my thighs stick and pull against the mustard colored vinyl. My mother stood up next to me, and I stood up in turn. I watched distractedly as she extended a hand and shook that of a large man with salt and pepper hair and beard. His hand fell back to his side, just at my eye level. I grabbed it and, interrupting whatever conversation had been buzzing above my head, demanded to know, "What's that?"

It was a tattoo.

He was one of my mother's professors and explained to me kindly (crouching down low so as to look me in the eye) that he was allergic to metals, and when he got married his wife designed a ring that he had tattooed on instead. I declared then and there that I wanted one.

I love the beauty of tattoos, their artistry and symbiotic nature. A good tattoo works with the line and form of the body to accentuate and even elevate the beauty of both the design and the physique. Amanda Wachob's unique and avant garde pieces do just that.

Here, as above, the flow of what look like paint brush strokes echo the line of the body.

I decided I wanted tattoos when I was three. Now, I want one of these.

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair

Freedom of Love

 

I created this film in reponse to Andre Breton's poem, "Freedom of Love." I performed both the reading of the poem and the sound poem that forms the background. I also created each image by hand and incorporated it into the film via photoshop. I apologize for the quality, the file was compressed horribly when I transferred it to Blogger. All sound and imagery, in part or in whole, is © MacKenzie Edwards, 2010.

Avant Garde Class, 30 November

It's very simple: it shows you how a dream evolves without any censorship, letting your desire/dream unfold cinematically. Speak about the genesis of the images, modeling for you the way things are born. Anyone who tries to show you the reality of mystery is no narrator, not a thing that is actually there. It's a signifier, and it has no signified. The unconscious desire has to be perceived in all of its chaos. If you're trying to make sense of a donkey and a piano, you can't. And that's all. It is the lost object, a memory trace reappearing. It's erupting in the subconscious. These are phantom images that you see.

Avant Garde Class, 18 November

They have in them chess sets, or they could have condoms. You feel them and they are squishy or gushy. They touch back. I don't know if I'd want to play chess with them--chess men, chess women flying around the room smelling of coffee eggs, fish jello, shit pudding. They play with taboos. Or is this just upsetting you?

Passionate Discourse

"Passionate Discourse" is the second part of a three part series by Surrealist director Jan Švankmajer. This series, Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), addresses multiple modes of communication and language.

This short film affected me. Sitting in a darkened classroom as it played out on a projector screen, I found myself tossed from loving peacefulness to broken, betrayed tragedy; I nearly cried aloud at its close. I have since read a few reviews and analyses of the film. Some of the more pedantic ones have attempted to stretch this into a commentary on the political situation in Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer's home. Most revolve around the "child" lump of clay and the way its unwanted presence destroys love. I, however, shy from any such analysis. I reacted viscerally to this film. It is not what it is about, but how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like weeping. How, if I may be so bold to ask, does it make you feel?

Love Bug

VW Beetles

I call him Archibald

Archibald

He's so hideous that he's adorable. Apparently, Sphynx cats are a loving, curious breed. With the lack of fur, they lose body heat very quickly and so are prone to snuggles and typically unfeline-like displays of affection. They are also, for the sneezy, teary-eyed types among us (i.e., me), hypoallergenic. If only Archibald cost slightly less than the going rate of 1500 large...

Avant Garde Class, 9 November

It's called the hall of witnesses. They want you to experience what it's like to be in the presence of no one, to live in that indigenous region of the jungle that is a kind of Disneyland, a simulacra of people who live in that area. It is a special house for serpents and it looks like an ark. What attracted them to this place? Is it the hearing trumpet in the architecture that molds to the landscape? Perhaps.

They fantasized together. They placed this creation in the lineage of memories, where humans could honor nature. If you are being attacked by a watch or a tree or Camembert, you are being attacked by decay, by delirium--the secret road to paranoia and schizophrenia. For them, nothing is taboo, but madness can become a tool of knowledge. They don't always reveal what you're looking for, or even anything. They simply mean to show you the cycles of nature, blowing with dust, where you can make a living archive.

So who cannibalizes whom? My life does not fit into their frontier of survival, into an English picnic on the grass. It is embarrassing. But as fate would have it in my life, it slides off my back like wearing a raincoat. I am a cabinet of curiosities, synchronicities; you should hope to live as long. The provenance of the works in Wonderland is their thing; it does not have to be mine.

Beautiful Angle

I have lived in Los Angeles for over five years now. For the ten months of that time that I lived abroad, I located home and my longing for it in LA, the place that many, if not most, of my loved ones inhabit. But back, in sunny Southern California again, I would give anything to trade palm trees for pines, the sun and sand for drizzly overcast and the slimy rocks and wood pilings of Titlow Beach. I miss Tacoma. The statue of the Native American in the Antique Sandwich Co., the sound of howling wolves from the Point Defiance Zoo, October pumpkins at Tacoma Boys, and the footpath between Garfield Park and Park Drive.

So, here is a little bit of it, one of my favorite bits, in fact:

Beautiful Angle

Beautiful Angle is a guerilla arts poster project in Tacoma, WA, promoting Tacoma as the holy city on a hill, helping to make it so. I can't wait to be back and go on poster hunting parties at 4AM with my best friend.

I'll be there soon.

I promise.

Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie

Cumulus

Cuppa

The Fur-Lined Teacup

Avant Garde Class, 12 October

They put the poverty of descriptions, if you want to call it fiction, on Facebook and all of that. Such a farce disgusted me. I wanted truth, tangible and tasty. I told him so. I said I wanted to meet a real salon woman--I thought that would be wonderful. There would be memory, pure and uncorrupted by technological sophistication.

"But, isn't that a bit of a kind of a rational thing," he asked? How could that be? It's such a noble thing, wanting to meet this mistily solid woman of my mind. I could see it--good wine, good food, good literature, staying at this island. I made it happen.

You can imagine how nervous I was. And when I told her so, this not solidly solid woman, as I'd expected, but sort of solidly misty instead, she snapped back, "But that's nothing, and this is a good thing to have in your life." Of course, she was right. It was.

And now, in their naturalism, they've created also a moon out there. Here we've been laughing for four months straight and what it's all about? Psychological novels try to create dimensions of the great chance events that erupt, but that makes destiny linear, there's no other dimension that enters in. No, once upon a time there will be anti-adventure, and you will tell tales, like this one, of your own.

La Fourmi

Robert Desnos, Chantefables et Chantefleurs. Illustrated by Olga Kowalevsky. 1944

Avant Garde Class, 28 September

Logic ends, or the contrary, by means of which not to confine myself in the depth of my mind to the control of my reason. Give everything to your dreams. Refuse reality more than I expect. In other words, I would like you to consider it a phenomenon of interference with the continuous narrative kept like diaries for forty years. As you go over life, it's sort of the fullness of it. Dream and reality, a surreality if one may so speak, are posted on the door of my house: "The Poet is Working." It's on simmer--it's not off.

Only the marvelous loathe the form of the novel, at the same time being sort of a novel themselves. I go on about the removed, the sound of any voice, a phrase which was knocking at the window. But when its organic character is a man cut in two by the window, an image of a fairly rare source is the raw material that goes into the poetic phrase with only brief pauses. Beautiful phrases--they were excellent. Namely, a monologue for writing surrealist language is spoken thought. The way in which this phrase and that thought immediately, in this frame of mind, decide to blacken some paper when they put me in a trance.

This is an enormity of a journey, proven to be remarkably similar, very special, picturesque, slightly critical, a defect. It's psychic automatism, the actual functioning of thought. Put yourself in a darkened room and then you use that. Language has been given to humanity, probing whatever the real, true people in an insane asylum have to say. It's seizing the last word.

If you ask me, the answer: forty-five houses. You can't do it consciously. Day unfolds like a white table cloth. It's mysterious. It is, as it were, the light of the image, consequently a conductor--limited expanses made manifest, which enrapture. Day compared to it is night. All the insurmountable risks free our salvation, or our perdition. It is not yet too indisposed to me, and I am not yet lost.

Try it.