Coffee Break + Art

I was standing in the gift shop at MASS MoCA on Wednesday, about to pay for a new over-sized Moleskine to take with me to the ashram later this month (notes! sketches! the fancy notebook will force me to be neat) when a guy wearing shades of gray and black and thick framed glasses approached.

"Are you a visitor here at the museum?" I hesitated. Yes, I was visiting, technically, but from only a couple hundred yards away — and I wasn't looking for artistic inspiration, but for an iced coffee and a notebook. Did that still count?

"Um, kind of." seemed to sum that up.
"My name is Michael Oatman, would you mind if I took a photo of your tattoo to use in a video for my art installation?"

Moi? A photo? Of my beloved tattoo? Hell yeah. Sounds a lot better than going back to the office. Lead the way.

I followed him up the metal staircase and through the KidsSpace gallery (suddenly wishing that I were a kid) to a back office where he introduced me to his intern (with a beautiful name I swiftly forgot) and took three or four photos of my back while I faced the white door I'd just come in through.

"Don't worry" he said as I unzipped my dress half an inch to reveal the length of the inky stem, "this won't go on the internet." I didn't bother to mention it's already been there...

Oddly enough, I took a photo of Michael's installation in its early stages, and posted it here last November...

The winged airstream trailer had taken me by surprise that night, perched high above the buildings. I'd been distracted on my way to the parking lot by the red glow of that autumn sunset, and followed it behind the museum. And there it was.

Given that first glimpse of the piece, I love that images of my tattoo (and others) will symbolize constellations in a video relating to the sun and its mythology, flickering to life on the instrumentation panels in the cockpit of this "satellite." It's also another interesting manifestation of a tattoo that started out as a simple sketch in J's notebook, 15 years ago.