Dennis Hollingsworth

Silos Everywhere You Turn

This week, I launched a project that I have entitled "See I See". I will elaborate further about this endeavor in a future blogpost, right now I want to talk about how proliferating projects like this across other online platforms such as Substack, has me fine tuning the mission of this particular weblog, a project that has been in the running now for 23 years and counting.

Early on, it was a genuine diary, a log online memorializing the great and small in my everyday life. Most times it was about the work progressing in the studio, other times -especially when my wife Stephanie first lived in Spain for an initial extended time, making our house and studio there a home- I was sharing with this audience what life was like in Northern Spain, Catalan Spain. Afterwards, when we returned to Los Angeles, I uploaded snippets of life in the then nascent art community in Chinatown, LA. When we moved to New York City in 2012, the day to day reportage started to dwindle and I started to take notes at the events where thinkers would debate the state of play in the art world at the time.

This blog will certainly maintain its' diaristic function, but the recent adventure in self publishing via the Substack platform will have its effect on the ongoing function of this weblog. See I See will be about the art I see and the thoughts not only I have about it, but ultimately the objective is to capture the dynamic, fleeting, rich dialogue that I have enjoyed with my friends along the way. Until I get to that place where I can attract my fellow artists, curators, writers and friends to clamp a microphone on their lapels and tolerate the camera's gaze... I'll have to go solo. That's no problem, I will enjoy the learning curve even though there's lots of bumps and bruises along the way (to my ego!).

And here I am getting to the thought that started me typing this post in the first place: porting out thematic sectors to other avenues such as art reviews in Substack, and grumbling about the folly of the West in creating the war in Ukraine exclusively in X (formerly know as Twitter), using Instagram as a community bulletin / billboard... and well, that's about it, my little online panorama... I'm going to use this weblog to port portions of my Notes application more often than not. My Notes is the place where I can capture fleeting thoughts when I first arise from bed, those shower thoughts, musings that tend to float while I'm commuting to my studio. This means that sometimes these blogposts might appear more fragmented, maybe aphoristic if I'm lucky, but overall, I'm going to siphon the thoughts that I have been filling into bladders in my Notes, into this weblog. For an example of what I'm talking about, check out the next post.