One Person, Many Selves

    My brother has become an art blogger too! http://www.opticalbits.com/ He had previously focused his talents on music, computers, and communication.  It is really exciting for me to see his photography.  In his blog, his geeky side comes out too- in the best possible way- he is very knowledgeable about the various settings on his camera.  Then, he takes his readers through the post production steps that he took on his computer to get the final photographs to look like they do.  

My brother, Jeff Parkes took this photo and posted it on his art blog recently!

    In other news, last night I was at the DuPage Symphony Orchestra & Naperville Art League wine tasting and auction.  I was one of a few artists selling their work, and we donated 25% of our sales to the DSO.  It was a nice opportunity to get to know, and help out my community.  All of the other artists had very distinctive styles, most people were very surprised to learn that I had made everything on my tables.  Partly, that is because of my job- I teach 2D and 3D art to our freshmen, which means that I have to teach and be good at a wide variety of art media.  The other part though, is that is just how I am.  I love the variety of creating art with photoshop, sewing, painting, drawing, ceramics, carving, jewelry, etc.  It keeps my art and art-making fresh and interesting.  If I was forced to pick one thing, I wouldn't know where to begin or how to choose.  I feel also, that a lot of my favorite artists work in a variety of media too.  Warhol, Picasso, Richter, Michelangelo, Alighiero Boetti, Dee Clements, Cai Guo-Qiang, Tim Hawkinson,Diem Chau, William Kentridge, Do-Ho Suh, Kara Walker, and Rebecca Carter.

Me, with my art at the DSO auction.

     Speaking of art sales, you, dear reader, are invited to my annual Spring Art Sale!  Friday will be a bit more fun than Saturday with wine and snacks.  It is 'open house style,' so please pop by whenever you're free.

You're invited!

           On another note, I graduated from my yoga teacher training! I am now a 200 hour certified vinyassa yoga instructor. Yes.  We posted photos on Facebook, and there was so much interest in our shirts that I will hopefully print more soon and have them for sale on-line.

With my instructor Rolf Gates. 2 thumbs up because 'we want our students to be successful.'

The graduates.

     I recently altered a dress.  I was so fortunate to be a bride's maid in my wonderful friend Alex's wedding last week.  As you can see, we had unique dresses in synchronized colors.  I found a dress I liked in the right color, but it was the last one on clearance in a petit.  Out came the sewing machine!  I made a slip to lengthen the dress, and then added a belt, and hair clips in matching colors to create some unity.  It was a gorgeous wedding all around.

Third from the left, I was a bridesmaid in one of my best friend's weddings, in Jamaica!     

“I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again, reposing by my side. Her eyebrows, arched as I had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face. Whenever she moved her head, she created a fresh woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected. I seemed to possess not one, but innumerable girls.” ~Proust, The Captive.

“It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.”  ~Proust, The Captive.  All 4,000 pages could be yours on ibooks for $1

          I think it's very special that my recent posts have connected very much to what I'm currently reading.  Makes sense too, what I'm reading and thinking about are bound to be similar.  Throughout the entire book, Proust has given me much to think about in regard to the self.  Within each person, there are many selves.  It depends on the moment we're in in life, on our company, the time of day...  Even within my identity as an artist, as mentioned above, there are many, many selves.  I am also a yoga instructor, art teacher, a friend to many different people, a daughter, etc.  My brother has become an art blogger- I would not have predicted that 5 years ago! 
    I have other favorite artists who have committed to one identity in their art; Rothko, Frida Kahlo,Elizabeth Peyton,Egon Schiele, Klimt, Casey Ann Wasniewski, Deb Sokolow, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Cindy Sherman, Richard Notkin, and Ghada Amer.  They are artists I love, I have such respect for their ability to deeply explore one medium or point of view.  I know however, that that is not me. 
    This is such a rich concept in Remembrance; one that I have noticed, and enjoyed highlighting as I read.  We are all inherently, more than we think we can be.

In Chicago!

   I currently have work in a show in downtown Chicago called What Those Who Teach Can Do, it is through the Illinois Institute of Art.  I went to the reception with my friend and fellow art teacher/artist Kathy Parenti.



At the reception with "Lyon, France: Birthplace of Antone de Saint-Exupéry."



At the reception with "Free to Love"



At the reception with Kathy, her painting of her grandmother is on the right.



    At the show, Kathy spoke beautifully about her work, and the way that her grandmother slowly reversed her memory as she passed from Alzheimer's. She became a young Italian girl again, and was fortunate to remain very happy and optimistic throughout.
   As I continue to read Proust, my favorite character has emerged as the grandmother.  For herself, but also for what she allows others to see and feel.  This is one of my favorite moments in the book:

“Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself — thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,— there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over. So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and shew us, in place of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and cheating likeness. And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his own reflexion, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.”  ~Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, from The Guermantes Way.

        I feel that this idea has been very true in my own life.  I see people in the way that I feel about them and remember them, far more than I see them objectively.  Especially for myself, sometimes I feel I have no idea how I look!  (Like the heavyset person who doesn't realize it until they see a photo of themselves)  I don't feel this about weight so much, as I sometimes wonder if I appear to be the person that I am.  In my art as well: can other people who see it catch the same idea and feeling that I hope to inspire?  I will never know what it is like to look at my own art.  I will never know that because I slowly watched it being formed.  I already know my intentions, and hopes for the viewer.  It is an interesting thing to have one's art on display with no explanation, no knowledge of myself- just one work out of a series added to the mix.  At the reception each artist took a moment to talk about their art, afterwards several people commented that it was so much more interesting after they heard the explanation.  I think that's ok.  A virgin read of the art, and then a more considered response. 
   In March I was a part of 'Writer's Week' at my school.  I wrote a 15 minute speech with a powerpoint essentially about becoming a blogger, and how writing has helped me as an artist.  Here is an excerpt about my favorite painting, it also needed an explanation before I realized how much I loved it.

 " While writing my blog, I was thinking about the story I had intended to tell for writer’s week.  It was about my favorite painting:  A painting of a large, orange square, with a thin yellow rectangle underneath it.  Are you on the edge of your seat with that description???  Exactly.  If my favorite painting needs a little explaining, my own art would probably benefit from a few words mixed in as well.

 You see, it’s a large orange square, but it is also so much more.  I grew up going to The Art Institute of Chicago all the time.  My mother took me at least twice a year, and I walked past my favorite painting, “Untitled,” by Mark Rothko, all 9 feet wide of it, without ever noticing it at all.  By the time I was 19 years old, sitting in the Modern art room of the Art Institute, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that I had likely been in the presence of this painting on at least 40 different occasions.  40 times, I had seen it, without seeing.  Eventually, in 2002 I was a freshman at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  I was on an in-museum field trip with my second semester art history class.  Quick side note, did you know that the school existed first?  They built that huge art museum in downtown Chicago (With a train running though the middle of it) just for the art students.  They built it so that art students could have the experience I was about to have.  Sitting, for the first time in my life, with my 15 classmates, and our Teacher’s Assistant, I finally saw Rothko’s untitled painting.  I heard about the intention of the artist.  He wanted to create a meditative space for his viewer.  It was not about the color orange, or about geometric shapes.  The painting was about filling the viewer’s whole eye and only that.  At 9 feet wide I can see the whole painting, and only the painting.  Throughout my 4 years as an art student, the bench in front of that painting was my favorite place in the world.  Better than a beach, better than a restaurant, better than the study trips I took to Florence Italy and Switzerland.  Rothko had tapped into something magical.  To this day, I think that it is the best place in the world to sit and think.  It is not just a square, there are drips, and fades, and transparent areas everywhere; so many interesting places for my eyes to roam, and rest across it’s 81 square feet.  The orange hovers weightless over the yellow, they both float towards me as the peach background hugs the wall.  For me, it is the perfect meditative space. One day as a junior, while sitting with my Rothko, a man with two young children walked past.  I chuckled to myself as I heard him say to them, “Now some people debate if the paintings in this room are really even art.”  I’ll have to teach those children one day, I thought -they will need to learn to see too.

It was only three years ago I began to paint.  When I started painting it was because I thought about my favorite art to experience, and I wanted to create something that made people feel the way that the Rothko made me feel. 

However, in the cold world of cyberspace, where viewers click through images a couple seconds at a time, who would ever give my art the time it needed to be understood?  All paintings are so much better in person, the scale, the texture; so much is lost when they are photographed.  I needed to find a way to regain what was being lost, and the way to do that, I realized was with words!" ~Writer's week speech, Heidi Parkes 



Weaving! Turning! Spinning!

Check this out:

Herron: S/S 2013 is here!: The spring thaw has begun here in Maine and with only one week left until the official first day of the Spring season the transition f...

     I met a fellow blogger in early March!  Artist Dee Clements taught a weaving class at the Chicago Weaving School.  It was hard work- with all the yoga I practice, my back was so sore from just a few hours of weaving.  We began by spinning a bit of yarn, the yarn I spun is shown on the right side of the photo below:

A close-up of the cloth I made.

My view at the loom.

Dee and I, both wearing scarves we wove ourselves!

    The week after, I visited my Dad in Madison, Wisconsin. A few years ago I tried a little something on the lathe with him, but this was my first real attempt at making something to keep!  He is a very talented woodworker, and has made many things in his home.  I wanted a handmade bench, and feeling inspired from Dee's workshop, I wanted to spin my own yarn for the seat of the bench.    

Me, using the chisel to cut my spindle.

Not exactly, the same, but pretty close!  

While I was on the lathe, my dad made the frame for the bench.

My dad stained it for me, and it is ready to pick up in April- now I have to start spinning!!!

     I am still reading Proust too, I'm on volume 3.  This small phrase struck a cord- it is so nice to have the time to make art whenever I please.  To be able to travel, and visit friends and family when I want.  Perhaps one day compromising will be nice too, but for now: the delights of solitude are many.  I truly value, and appreciate the time that I have available to learn new art techniques, and to create.  Especially in the spring, with summer so closely approaching! 

"I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of consecrating myself to another person, as by forcing me to live in absence from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me, forever, of the delights of solitude." (Proust, The Captive, Life with Albertine)

Om

An om that I made for my yoga teacher training program with Rolf Gates, Adobe Photoshop.

    In less than 4 weeks I will graduate from my year long, 200 hour yoga teacher training program with Rolf Gates.  It has been a transformative class with thought provoking lectures, a wonderful reading list, and a great local yoga community.  The om I created will be for our class graduation t-shirt.  It is composed of some of the most significant phrases from our class.  To the 40 of us students, it calls to mind many important principles of teaching yoga, perhaps most important, that, "We want our students to be successful."  It is a beautiful goal to enter a classroom with.  I believe that by incorporating these details from the class on our shirt, that it will help us retain the things that we want to embody most as yoga instructors.  Rolf speaks often about finding skillful ways to move in a yoga practice, and to be as a teacher and in life.  I hope I have achieved that in creating a shirt that is both aesthetically pleasing, and mentally/spiritually significant.
     My favorite quote from Rolf is the following:

“We show up, burn brightly, live passionately, hold nothing back, and when the moment is over, when our work is done, we step back and let go.” -Rolf Gates 

         I think that this is a beautiful way to complete my posts for the month of February.  It is about love for others, and love for the self.  When we practice, we often begin or close with a meta meditation, expressing love for all beings.  

"May all beings be safe, may all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be free." -a meta meditation

          Namaste (the light and best in me honors the light and best in each of you), Heidi

"Free to Love"

"Free to Love," 6x7"  Drawing with thread, based on a Meissen porcelain figurine.



"Free to Love," 5x7" Framed.  Drawing with thread, based on a Meissen porcelain figurine.

The origional Meissen porcelain figurine that inspired my drawing

    So, I flipped the image from the original because I wanted the bird to be in the woman's dominant hand. (assuming she's right handed of course, sorry lefties!)It seemed a little dark otherwise, the woman with a bird, the man waiting to trap both in a cage...? A bit of googling led me to believe that the birdcage was most often used as a symbol of marital fidelity.  Irregardless of the past, I think it is a very rich subject: Commitment could potentially feel like a cage, you are free to do as you please until saying, 'I do,' after-which you can no longer change your mind.  Also, it brings to mind the dilemma of who to love and why- pre-arranged marriage anyone? Even today, we have a long list of priorities in the people we love: beauty, humor, money, chemistry, character, shared politics, hobbies, lifestyle, mental & physical health.  Sometimes we love in spite of those qualities! Why do we fall in love with people who are wrong for us?  Perhaps love itself is a cage that traps us with someone that if we could think straight we would avoid!  This brings me to my most recent quote from Proust, as I have begun the 4th volume, 'Sodom and Gomorrah'

"Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations, and on the strength of various qualities and advantages."  -Proust (SG)

   I'm sorry to say that I have heard of some marriages that were chosen 'on the strength of various qualities and advantages'- the marriages did not last.  It is almost funny to read when written in that way, the narrator is imagining this thinking in his friend Saint-Loup.  We already know that another character fell in love with, and married, 'someone he wasn't even attracted to!'  Love is a funny thing, and therefor of seeming endless potential in art.  I will promise too, that I will post images of some of the love-themed art I made in college.  I just need to photograph it well...
    I think though, that we do not choose any of the people whom we love the most.  My parents, my brother, my family- I adore them.  I might not have met them otherwise, and might not have taken the time to really know them, forgive them their faults, uncover their truest qualities.  I don't necessarily love my mother because of her personality.  Right?  I must, in the end, love her because she is my mother, by coincidence.  (I did hit the jackpot as far as Mom's go though, just say'in)  My point is, I did not choose my family, and yet I love them.  Maybe, my unborn soul knew them and chose them- who's to say?  But, it was not a conscious choice that I am aware of.  Why then, should it be any surprise at all, that the friends and lovers we encounter are not consciously, deliberately, purposefully, chosen either?  Maybe it really is just about the way they smell & if their immune system is compatible with ours? (Oh you know I'll be researching images for that concept soon...)

    Maybe, our hearts are wiser than our heads.  I am in a yoga teacher training program now with Rolf Gates, and sometimes at the end of our practice he will say the following, "Bring your hands, palms together to your third eye (the space between your eyebrows), and experience a mind that has remembered the way.  Now, bring your hands to your heart, and experience a heart that is the way."  Also, even though I've posted it before, my favorite quote from my favorite book: "It is only with the heart one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  The image of the bird outside of its cage, choosing to stay with the lovers, calls to my mind more than anything else, exactly that.  It can go anywhere, do anything, and it is choosing to be with two people who are in love. (Two people who I've decided are similar, but not wearing matching outfits- they're a little bit different from each other too!) Above escaping to freedom, hanging out with other birds, eating yummy worms instead of seeds- above doing the logical thing, the bird chooses love.  (oh, if you've read The Little Prince, you'll guess it: The bird has been tamed...)

“…if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince  

       I am pleased to share that if I possibly have any internet fans who don't know me yet, you can see my art in person, in two locations!!!  "Free to Love," and "Lyon, France: Birthplace of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry" (posted here on 1/28)will be on display at the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago's show, "What Those Who Teach Can Do," with the reception on March 14th. (I am a HS art teacher...) http://whatteacherscreate.com/Chicago/  
  Also, I received a merit award this month for my submission to the Monthly show at my local art league, woot! http://www.napervilleartleague.com

Currently on display at the Naperville Art League

    

hot from the kiln

Porcelain candlestick holders.  10-12 inches tall.  Thrown on the potters wheel and assembled in sections, each piece is completely different from the next, while still maintaining a sense of unity in the set.

The colors and forms were so beautiful that I had a little fun on Instagram.

And, there is a matching stoneware set in green.

Handbuilt

I have finally made some more stoneware birds, these we made with lace.

These are a totally new idea, I made the textures with some glass items I found while thrift shopping over winter break.  I'm very excited that they turned out so well and differently from the lace and buttons that I have been using.

An Instagram bird conversation!

 As I continue to read, "Remembrance of Things Past," I have found another beautiful mention of an artist.  

"Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter.  But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist.  To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting for his pros acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, "Now look." And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear.  Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women.  The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest- more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created.  It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world."  ~Proust (GW, Part II)

   After having experienced a work of art, the rest of the world does not look the same.  It is forever connected to the way the art has changed your view.
   I feel that this passage connects a bit with my candlestick holders.  To some, they may appear lopsided, the glaze has cracked, they are not all the same height.  To me, those are the very qualities that make them beautiful.

"Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional...

It is also two separate words, with related but different meanings. "Wabi" is the kind of perfect beauty that is seemingly-paradoxically caused by just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a ceramic bowl which reflects the handmade craftsmanship, as opposed to another bowl which is perfect, but soul-less and machine-made.

"Sabi" is the kind of beauty that can come only with age, such as the patina on a very old bronze statue."  From http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi   

  In short, what I learned in my Asian art history survey while at SAIC, is that Wabi is a 'perfect imperfection,' a 'beautiful mistake.' Since learning about this aesthetic in college, I have seen the world through a new lens.  It cannot be removed.  Why should I (the artist) make something that I (the thrifty shopper) could buy machine made from Target?  I wouldn't.  The trace of the artist's hand, for me, is essential.  Believe me too, striving for a perfect accident is not so easy!  They are forever falling over, cracking, coming apart.  In fact, since I took these photos yesterday, the two tallest white candlestick holders have cracked at the base.  I believe, due to the clear crackle glaze that I like so much.  As the french say, "C'est la vie."  No medium is so fickle as pottery, and yet that causes it to be one of the most rewarding for me when it turns out well.

10x8"  My new garbage can!  Not for sale, I'm keeping it.  I never knew a garbage can could cheer my day as much as this one does.  Of course, I intend to make a few more, and then I'll share :)

Baby!

Yesterday I was at my first ever baby shower for a friend (rather than a family member).  It was so exciting to prepare to welcome the little one into the world, and I did so with a drawing.  The theme for the baby's room will be elephants, which I think was symbolically and otherwise, an excellent choice!  The yogi in me immediately thinks of Ganesh, 'the great destroyer and remover of obstacles.'  Indeed, their current life and love will soon change into something different!  I'm sure into something wonderful.  Elephants are also very auspicious, especially with their trunk up.  

5x7" pen and watercolor on yupo.

The personalized version for my friend Kristi. The words are written on plastic, so she can write the real baby info on a different sheet of plastic when he arrives!

In other news, I've been working with clay a great deal recently, nothing has been glazed yet- so no photos at the moment.  I finished reading Volume 1, Remembrance of Things Past in a week; it was completely wonderful.  Many more quotes, and works of related art are sure to follow.  Finally, I have begun another drawing with thread!

“There is no man,” he began, “however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young people, the sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. They may perhaps have nothing to retract from their past lives; they could publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrines, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.  I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly be pleasing to contemplate in later life.  But we must not repudiate it, for it is proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups- assuming one is a painter- extracted something that transcends them."  ~The artist Elister, from Marcel Proust (page 923)