the hands knew first
A catalog of evidence ... Things the body did while the mind was still getting dressed ...
Carving, Sanding, Rasping, and Scraping
Rough Carving Pole Of Tablets ... Two chapters of the same argument between a blade and a log ... The log loses both times but looks better for it ...
Carving Vesutas ... Whatever a Vesuta is ... it needed carving ... and now it exists in the world whether the world asked for it or not ...
Sanding Vesutas ... Because after you carve a thing you did not plan ... you sand it ... You commit ...
Rasping Tablet Stack ... The sound of disagreement between metal teeth and flat wood ... A conversation that only stops when someone gets thinner ...
Scraping To Get By ... This one is not about wood ... Or it is about wood in the way that everything is about wood when you are broke and making art in a garage ...
Priming Structures
Priming Structures - Birds Eye View ... God looks down at white paint being applied to something that does not know what it will become yet ...
Prime Time ... Not the television kind ... The kind where you coat a thing in white so it forgets what color it used to be ... A fresh start for objects ...
Chopping, Smashing, Busting, And Crushing Things
Dowel Box On The Chopping Block ... A box of round sticks meets its sentencing ... No appeals ...
Smashing Bullet Bricks ... Two rounds of destroying small rectangles that apparently resembled ammunition ... The kind of therapy insurance does not cover ...
Busting A Concrete And Pipe Sculpture Into Three Parts ... Making one thing into three things ... Which is either destruction or the Trinity depending on your morning ...
Crushing Mirror Fragments ... Three volumes ... Because once you start crushing a mirror you learn something about yourself that takes at least three sessions to finish ... Also the reflection gets smaller every time ... which is the whole point ...
In-Between Making Art
Art Garage - Turn Up The Music ... The part nobody photographs ... Sweeping sawdust while something loud plays ... The real studio practice ...
Sweeping and Sweating ... Exactly what it says ... The body cleaning up after the body made a mess ... Honest title ... Honest work ...
Cutting Down Structures
Six videos of cutting things that were standing up so they are no longer standing up ... I through IV plus two bonus rounds ... The persistence suggests these structures kept rebuilding themselves overnight ... Or that cutting things down is its own form of prayer ...
Painting With String And Rope
Painting With Strings Holding Red Enamel ... The string does not know it is a brush ... The red does not know it is being held ... The painting does not know it is happening ... Everyone involved is surprised ...
Art Garage Incidences
Useless Umbrella ... An umbrella that has given up on rain and is now art ... The career change we all consider ...
One Side Primed Flashing Tin ... Half-committed metal ... The side facing you is ready ... The side facing the wall still has questions ...
Some Kind Of Mystic Face ... The title admits it does not know what it saw ... Which is the most honest description of a mystic face there is ...
Baby Robin In The Garage ... Life arriving where life was not invited ... Between the sawdust and the screws ... a small mouth opens ...
Arm And Hand Test ... Testing to confirm the arm and hand still work ... After everything they have been asked to do ... a reasonable check ...
Behind The Camera Pointing ... The one who films is also the one who points ... Pointing at things is the oldest form of criticism ...
Bright Amber Garage Artifacts ... Objects glowing the color of old medicine bottles in afternoon light ... The garage as museum ... The museum as garage ...
Sorting and Grabbing Fasteners
Sorting Steel Rod ... Organizing metal by length or thickness or whatever principle steel respects ... The quiet dignity of putting things in order before you use them to hold other things together ...
Grabbing Construction Screws ... The violence of reaching into a bucket of sharp spirals with bare hands ... Every screw grabs back ...
Outdoor Workspace Incidences And Scenes
Outdoor Workspace Box Fans ... Two fans blowing sawdust into the yard ... The neighbors calling it a mess ... We call it ventilation ...
Work Shoes And Autumn Leaves ... The shoes have paint on them ... The leaves do not ... Both are on the ground ... Both are evidence of seasons ...
Structure With Circle And Swing ... Something round and something that moves ... The playground of a person who builds things and then watches them sway ...
Birthday Balloons ... Color and helium in a workspace that usually contains neither ... The balloons do not belong here ... Which is exactly why they do ...
The Woodcarver's Intentionally Creepy Mask ... Intentionally is doing all the work in that title ... Without it ... just a creepy mask ... With it ... art ...
Bark Husk And Glass Shards ... The tree's skin and the window's bones ... next to each other on a table ... becoming relatives ...
Rubber Rocking Horse ... A childhood object made of something that bounces ... In this context ... it is not for children ...
Deliberate Messes
Mess Of Objects And Artifacts ... The difference between a mess and a deliberate mess is whether you meant it ... This one was meant ...
Major Mess Hit The Target CB Babble ... A title that sounds like a police scanner during a fever dream ... Citizens band radio and destruction and accuracy all at once ...
Two Flashes Of Light At Unfinished Art ... The unfinished art gets photographed twice ... It does not get to decide when it is ready ... The light decides ...
Major Mess Technology Tones Propeller ... Something spinning ... Something beeping ... Something on the floor that used to be somewhere else ...
Fans, Metallic Enamel Drips, And Pipe Movements ... Three things happening simultaneously that have no business being in the same sentence ... Which is why they are ...
After Grabbing And Art Mess ... The aftermath of reaching for things and missing ... Or reaching for things and catching too many ...
Working With Expandable And High Density Foam
Breaking High Density Foam ... Foam that was proud of being dense gets humbled ...
Filling Ping Pong Balls ... Three volumes ... Injecting expanding foam into small hollow spheres and watching them become something grotesque and wonderful ... The balls did not consent ... The foam did not ask ...
Wrinkling And Curling Metal
Four rounds of convincing flat metal to stop being flat ... The metal resists at first ... Then remembers it used to be ore inside a mountain and was never flat to begin with ...
Painting Scenes
White Enamel On White ... Two videos of putting white on white ... Trying to make nothing more visible ... Or everything less ... Either way the brush keeps moving ...
Loose Experiments
Tossing Tin Forms Towards A Halogen Light ... Objects thrown at a hot bright thing to see what shadows they make on the way ... Science conducted by a person who does not write lab reports ...
Walking On Eggshells ... Not the metaphor ... Actual eggshells ... Actual walking ... The sound is the piece ...
Tangled Wire And Water ... A knot that cannot be untied meets the only thing patient enough to outlast it ...
Fence Wire And Water ... Same conversation ... different wire ... The fence is no longer fencing anything ... The water is still water ...
Crushed Writings
Three volumes of words being physically destroyed ... The paper holds the sentence ... The hand crushes the paper ... The sentence survives in the wrinkles ... Pressure Ghosts before we had the name ...
Sawing, Drilling, Hammering, and Ratcheting
Eight videos of the basics ... The percussion section of making things ... Ratcheting alone ... Hammering and ratcheting together ... Hammering and turning hex head screws ... Twenty inch nails ... The body as rhythm instrument ... The garage as concert hall ... Admission free ...
Tarp
Untarping A Pile Of Parts ... Revealing what was hidden under weather protection ... The unveiling nobody came to see ... Which makes it more honest than most unveilings ...
Weeds and Art Objects
Art Objects And Pulling Weeds ... Two videos of the garden and the studio refusing to stay separate ... The weeds grow between the art ... The art grows between the weeds ... Nobody is winning ...
Bungalow Attic Hideout
Vent ... Looking into darkness through slats ...
Fast Fingers And Light In Darkness ... Hands moving quick in a space with almost no light ... Trust ...
Ember Yellow And Orange Skeleton Mask Light Show ... A skull glowing the color of a campfire in an attic that probably should not have open flames ...
Upside Down Skeleton Mask ... Death inverted ... Which might be birth ... Or just a mask that fell ...
Light In The Darkness ... The title that everything else in this section was trying to say ...
Crawl Space Articles ... Objects found in the part of the house that requires you to get on your hands and knees ... The house's unconscious ...
Night Bedroom Hours
Going Crazy Nightmare ... Filmed in bed ... The bedroom as confessional ... The camera as witness to what sleep does when it stops being kind ...
After The Storm Dream ... The dream that comes when the noise finally stops ... Not peace ... Just the space where peace might eventually sit down ...
Sideways View Abstract Dream ... The camera tilted because the dream is tilted ... Honesty of angle ...
Blinds And Synthesizer ... Light coming through in stripes while an electronic sound hums ... The bedroom as instrument ...
Elevator Wall And Noise ... A wall that goes up and down ... A sound that does not ...
Hot Day Video Self Portraits
Hot Hot Hot ... Three words ... All the same ... Because heat does not have synonyms when you are in it ...
Hot Day Delirium ... The thinking that happens when the body overheats ... Which is better thinking than most meetings produce ...
Sweating In The Roofless Shelter ... A shelter that does not shelter ... A body doing what bodies do when the roof is gone ... The title is architecture criticism ...
Sound Of Sawing Self Portrait ... The artist is the sound ... Not the face ...
Hand And Power Tools Up Close
Band Saw Blade And Sound ... The teeth of the blade magnified ... Every tool is terrifying when you look close enough ...
Sharpening A Small Ax ... Making a small dangerous thing more dangerous ... Carefully ... With love ...
Cutting Different Types Of Material
Emergency Crosses ... Rounded ... Cut out twice because the emergency did not end after the first one ...
Cutting Coated Wheelchair Spokes ... Taking apart a machine that carried someone ... The spokes remember the weight ...
Cutting A Stainless Steel Pot ... A pot that cooked meals becoming raw material ... The meal is over ... The metal continues ...
Cutting Steel ... No modifier ... Just steel ... Just cutting ... The title has been stripped to what remains ...
Cutting Tin ... Twice ... Because tin is thinner than steel and still puts up a fight ...
Dead Of Winter
Below Zero Drinking Straight Vodka Performance ... The title is the piece ... Minnesota ... January ... A body and a bottle and a temperature that wants both of them to stop ...
Chopping Ice Shadow ... Not chopping ice ... Chopping the shadow of ice ... Or chopping ice and filming the shadow doing the chopping ... Either way the shadow does the work ...
Ice Chopping Wizard ... Promoted from chopper to wizard ... The ice did not vote on this ...
Watching Snow Melt ... The slowest video in the collection ... Patience as practice ... The snow takes its time because the snow does not know it is being watched ... Or it does and it does not care ...
Late Winter Perennial Decay And Ice ... The plants that come back every year ... caught in the part of the year that tries to kill them ... They will be back ... They do not know that yet ... But their roots do ...
Heavenly Sunlight And Shadows
WSR ... Three letters ... No explanation ... The kind of title that trusts you completely or does not care if you follow ...
Blue And Gray ... Two colors that Minnesota knows better than any state should ...
Artifacts And Objects In Wire Cages ... Things locked up for display ... The cage says do not touch ... The object says please ...
Nails, Sunlight And Shadows ... Three things that cost almost nothing and make almost everything ...
Sun And Shadows Side ... The side of the garage where light does its best work ... Free of charge ...
Box Fan Variations ... Twice ... The box fan as subject ... As sculpture ... As wind machine for a theater with no audience ...
Composing Objects
Five rounds of putting things next to other things until they agree to mean something together ... The composer does not use notes ... Uses nails and tin and whatever the garage offers ...
Arranging Structures
Stained Boards ... Two episodes of wood that has been colored being placed in relation to other wood that has been colored ... The stain is the memory of the liquid ... The board is the memory of the tree ...
Doctor Shuffling
Doctor Shuffling Coated Tin Forms ... Twice ... Moving metal around like a card dealer in a clinic ... The doctor is not a doctor ... The shuffling is real ...
Art Soldier Flashback Performance
Art Soldier Flashback ... Two parts and a mesh nightmare ... The body remembering a war it may or may not have fought ... The performance does not clarify ... The mesh is real ... The prison is real ... Whether it happened to this body or another body does not matter ... The flashback does not check identification ...
Interpreting Desperate And Frantic Motions
Art Going A Little Crazy With Rims ... The rims are from wheels that no longer roll ... The crazy is the kind that makes things ...
Getting Ready For Untying Rope Knots ... The preparation before the untangling ... Which takes longer than the untangling ... Which is true of everything ...
Undoing Rope Knots ... The actual untangling ... Less dramatic than the getting ready ...
Shiny Silver Nail Heads ... The last image ... After all the smashing and cutting and crushing and chopping and sawing and drilling and hammering ... A close-up of something small and bright and perfectly still ...
Source material: pre-2009 video catalog
Composed: February 4, 2026
Witness
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Chanson
Oyparaploo
