gone with the wind

I'm working on this altered book, where I'm erasing the entirety of the text in Gone with the Wind, except the mentions of Rhett Butler. What can I say, survival of the fittest!

By "erasing," I mean I am using tape to pull off the ink of the book's text. This leaves me with these wonderful little curls of text-filled tape, which resemble toenail clippings, or little shredded locks of hair...perhaps I could put them in jars and label them "chapter 1," "chapter 2" etc. These are featured at the top of this post! and also in shambles, in the last pic of this post

"mechanical" drawings

I'm working on creating apparatuses which will draw for me...here is the first of my creations: a pen attached to a paper bag, attached to a running fan. It does create some beautiful lines. there are many variables to play with as well

book art

A couple Anselm Kiefers, one of his enormous sculptural books.

Laverne Krause show

Note: I'm still figuring out this resizing thing...some images will be enormous when you click on them o.O

Week 4: LaVerne Krause Gallery. James Herman, Evan Kornfeld, and me

This locker piece was so weird. titled Capsized...but i think i just needed to get it out of my system. It wasn't a particularly good piece, but I think it was an important one for me -- it was a template/mixing pallet for a lot of ideas I'd like to explore more. It's hundreds of screenprinted copies of a diary entry I made as a kid; all i ever wrote about were boys. in this particular passage i was infatuated with a boy named zach in my grade...it's about obsession, youthful infatuation, ideals of love, bookish people fantasizing about love, whatever. I love the sort of cinematic, spectacle, stagelike presence of the piece. When I was building the work, a friend popped in and said, "woow, this is, like, totally Goddard-ian."...i think this is due partially to the color schemes (very 60s-film, thanks Fellini), but also because of the clear over-shooting ambitions of the creator behind the work. does that make sense? yea, sorry i didn't think so. well, anyways i think my intricate folding method (turkish map fold) is a bit "displaced," if you will, (teehee), it's a little distracting. the lockers are perhaps heavy-handed (though admittedly humorous, the visiting artist, Jovencio de la Paz, commented).

This piece of Jamie's was really fun to photograph...feet upon feet of twisted mylar (printed with his top 100 velvet underground songs) with 100 mylar balloons perched atop. the balloons did great things for the space - they reflected the space in a wonderful way. in them you could see the other pieces in the gallery, and it brightened up the show. the piece was also placed across from the entrance, so they caught people's eye as they walked by. Click here for more of James's stuff:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameshermanart/

There's something kind of magical about the takedown too, which I did today (Friday, after the show was up for 5 days)...the gallery is such a transitory space. You take over for one week, working ridiculous hours into a piece, and then 5 days later, it's completely gone. As friend Jenny said, the student galleries are like the subconscious of the art department. If only these walls could talk.

laverne krause show, part deux

My weaving pieces, Corpus Delecti (featured elsewhere in this blog!), had a surprisingly good reception. I did the pieces a year ago, and they hadn't seen the light since then. Got a lot of comments on them. I'm still not sold on the display of them. I don't think they should appear in a row like this. They need to be spaced out, and less regular and predictable in their layout. Unfortunately I only had a little space to work with, and it was late on Sunday night (the opening being the next day :s )

Here's a close-up of the most worked-up piece, my fave of the series. Lotsa french knotting up 'n 'ere:

LVK, opening

Some pics at the opening

Yes, these photos were hung much too high *sigh*

Isami and Charlene came to visit

II thought this was really funny. as we were closing up, this woman with an umbrella peeked in the door...she looked a little skeptical. she didn't come any further than the doorway...

Ballen article

"Cut"
A nice article about Roger Ballen + Gogol in Frieze mag, here

studies

A working study, i.e. bad collage. I'm working on trying to integrate different materials, and working at a faster more intuitive pace. It started with an automatic drawing, then I was tracing some screenprints I made.

notes

Maurizio Anzeri. Embroidering on top of old found photos. I love these. Apparently his work is in the collection of Alexander Mcqueen :o

Perhaps similar is the work of this collage artist, John Stezaker.

<--

I love the clarity and decisive, yet ambiguous nature of this series. This piece is called Mask IV. It's such a decisive act, plastering a rigid landscape directly on top of a man's face, yet the affect is one, again, of instability and ambiguity

I'm officially obsessed with Fellini, and his wife for that matter. There's a great documentary that came with the criterion collection of La Strada. Included are some great Fellini interviews, where you see him at his most poetic, clever, witty, etc.:

"Perhaps the attempt to recapture, to hear once more an utterance that's been interrupted, repeated each time with a weaker and weaker voice, until I could no longer hear it. This feeling of grasping at the frayed ends of a broken string...straining to hear, with my ears and my heart, something that's been nearly forgotten."

Anch'io, Federico!

Discovered this artist, Shary Boyle. The way she's incorporating fibers into her work, in both her sculptures/ceramics and her drawings, is especially interesting to me:

I love the simplicity of the last one; I think it is how the crazy ex-wife in Jane Eyre's attic looked.

photo series, "representatives"

A portrait series of billboards, taken in MT (Billings and Sidney) and in OR (Eugene).

tintypes

Coffins for (preserved) bugs. Using a faux tintype process (a trad tintype would have a black background - rather than my almond color - and the printed image would flicker on and off the surface as you moved the print around). I put them into these mint tins (that's the first image)...trying to mimic the traditional Victorian daguerrotype portraits with the metal cases/frames. I need to embellish and decorate the mint tins though. They are bare bones right now.

Close-ups of the prints:

tintype samples

Some more of the bug-coffin prints. I was using a particular kind of liquid emulsion called Black Magic. As you apply it to your surface, it dries quickly. In the streaky prints, the emulsion dried before I fully coated the surface. Sometimes the streaks work for the image, sometiiimes they don't.

The print at the bottom is prob my fave