opening walls - closing windows

April
October

We started dismantling the Habitats for Artists located at Spire Studios last week. Above are images that bookend the existence of my hab. Below are images of the dismantling of the structure. Matthew Slaats helped me take it down. Interacting with Simon on this project has been rewarding. Time spent in my hab was less that I'd hoped, but it did provide some quality secluded time, and conveniently so. It has brought to the fore thoughts on the true essentials for my artmaking experience, as well as the nature of space, and ownership of space, both financial, and aesthetic. Also of paramount importance for me was the reflection on impermanence, as so much thought in life- and in art- is given to the importance of permanence. Permanence is simply an indeterminate impermanence, after all, and much of what is sold, including art, is accompanied by the illusion of permanence. I struggle with my own reliance on the security that permanence provides, but I feel it ever more important to me in my practice to strip away this crutch. If you buy something, you want your money's worth and you want it to last. If you spend your life in an endeavor [art], you want it to account for something, you want it to endure. Would it not be for nought if nothing comes of all this effort? Get over it. Nothing is, nor should be a precious as this very moment - except the one immediately following it. As I'm writing this I'm that this is one of the lessons of my time in my habitat over this Summer, and I think those lessons are present in the depletion drawings I made inside the space.


This first Summer at Spire was really the preamble to the project. As new habs are formed out of the recycled materials from this first group, and new artists are thrown into the mix in future incarnations (we delivered a reconstituted hab to The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, where it will stay for two years, and another will be going to the Scenic Hudson site - Poet's Walk in the coming week.) will deepen and become more exciting visually, and conceptually as a vehicle for exchange between artists and communities. The structures themselves will embody the six degrees of separation paradigm in an unplugged facebook for artists, linked through the transitory experience in an ever changing space.

Video Memento from the hab that was.

As a sort of farewell to my habitat, I recorded some of the surfaces within and without the structure.

My interview on Globatron.org

I recently did an interview with Globatron.org, an art website based out of Jacksonville Fla. Over at maykr, I've posted details about the struggle that Globatron founder Byron King is facing, and the effort to lend a hand.

Art in the office of Bailey Browne CPA and Assoc. and launch of kork

A current installation of work by Michael Pilon (l&r) and my own in the center.

Over the past several years, I've installed various selections of artists' work in the offices of Bailey Browne CPA & Associates. Deborah Bailey Browne, the firms principal has been very supportive of our efforts to tinker with the context of art in an office.

Deborah and her firm is a recipient of the 2008 Dutchess County Executive Art Award for a business or corporation that has shown leadership in supporting the arts.

Here is a link to images from the second iteration in 2006.

2007: above, a Peter Acheson painting in the conference room. below, Michael Pilon paintings.
2007: a painting by Jen Bradford, audio piece by einlab, both on the wall to the left, and on the ceiling, a portion of a work by Peter Iannarelli.

2007: a sculpture by Matthew Kinney.

kork, featuring Angelika's postcards as installed by Deborah Bailey Browne.

The most recent endeavor, kork, grew out of an idea Angelika had for a possible piece. She had wanted to work with the format of a bulletin board, which would be expected in an office, but using it in a way that may not be so obvious. Eager as I am to ever to marry artwork to its environment for specific periods, I co-opted the idea and have created a project space within the parameters of the cork bulletin board hanging above the photocopier. Angelika's postcard sized prints on which she wrote messages to Deborah and mailed to the office from NY and LA, then arranged on the board by Deborah, constitute the first kork project and it will be on view through the end of October. Every two months another artist will move into kork, and will see what shakes out. Up next on the board is Elia Gurna, followed by Marc Willhite. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with these projects, and the reaction that the staff will have to it. As I'm thinking of it, some artists will work directly on the bulletin board, but for other artists more distant from the office, mode of conveying and applying the artwork the board will become more important, and perhaps more collaborative with the office staff.

Above and below, my work currently installed.

While kork will be rolling on in two month rotations, the office wide installations of work will proceed at about one or two change ups per year. The artists that have participated thus far in the three or four iterations are mostly usual suspects if you follow the events around Beacon NY, ie.; Simon Draper, Marnie Hillsley, Alexis Elton, Peter Iannarelli, Michael Pilon, Peter Acheson, Angelika Rinnhofer, einlab, Claire Lofrese, Jen Bradford and Matthew Kinney, and going forward, the roster will be expanding. I congratulate Deborah on her award, and I thank her and the staff at the firm for allowing us to tweak their space.

2007: A daily dose of art when the mail arrives courtesy of Peter Acheson.

Sailed away.

Untitled, 2008, cardboard, puzzle box 

 

I'm in Denver for 10 days. I think I'm on day 3. The other night I met up with Marc Willhite. We went over to see the "Above average show" at the Lab at Belmar, then over to Pirate to see Marc's show in the associates' space. Below are a few images. A few of the pieces were in last year's SOTT exhibit. A few others are extended explorations of work he began for that previous show.

Here are a few images of his show. It's on view through this weekend:

My first parade

The Spirit of Beacon Parade was held this past Sunday. I participated with the Beacon Artists At Large to create large scale reproductions of drawings made by children in the Beacon Community Center's after school program depicting what each child wants to be when he/she grows up.
I don't know what vocation my chosen drawing was intended to depict. Perhaps it's simply a projected desire to be much larger than his is now. And larger it is. The figure stands at about six feet (before attaching the carrying stick), and as I carried the piece over my shoulder down to the parade starting point, I understand it looked like I was enacting the stages of the cross. Aside from one guy who yelled out a window "what kind of dinosaur is that," The other comments were fairly Jesus-centric. Wanting to subvert any possible allegations of sacrilige as the parade got underway, I made certain to not rest it on my shoulder, but to manuever the structure in a jaunty fashion to appear as if he was walking in a spirited way and not languishing on a pair of crossed timbers.
I've posted a few additional images from the group's creations at maykr.

This image gives a better sense of scale.my source drawing, created by Joseph.

Seared into the peripheral

There's a construction site on East 53rd St in Midtown Manhattan that has a covered pedestrian walkway plastered with vertigo inducing banners representing renderings of the finished structure.

I passed by there a couple of weeks back on my way to Rich's for dinner. From the corner of my eye I was instantly and viscerally stunned by a caught glimpse, recognizable by way of the hard wired memory of a vision that is still so disturbing, so powerful. The thought of those conditions that precipitated the unimaginable choice made by so many is still terrifying.
The power of an image: an illusion set forth for the mind to complete, and the mind completes it unsparingly, and convincingly that for that second I believed that what I saw in two dimensions was real and it was happening at that very moment.

In the Promised Land

Above: Dar Williams performing at her CD Release party on Sept 9 at Spire Studios for her new album Promised Land. There are more images of the evening at maykr, and on the maykr flickr page. Below is the the cd liner notes page featuring the reproduction of Vantage.

Dar Williams CD Release Party at Spire Studios

Vantage
My oil on canvas triptych 'Vantage', from 1998, is among the artwork that is included in the liner notes of Dar Williams' forthcoming CD 'Promised Land.
Dar, who as her own writing shed located at Spire Studios as part of the Habitat for Artists project will be having a CD Release Party at Spire Studios on Tuesday, Sept 9 from 6-9pm
Beside myself, the other artists, many of whom are also involved with HFA, whose work included in the cd booklet are Maureen Beck, Richard Bruce, Sharon L. Butler, Val Clark, Aidan Draper, Kathy Feighery, Marnie Hillsley, Matthew Kinney, Grey Zeien and Simon Draper.
The party at Spire will include an exhibit of the artists' work, and most certainly, a sampling from the new album performed by Dar.

Depletion Drawings

I've recently been semi-conciously obsessed with consumption recently. My own material consumption to be exact. My well intended desire to recycle, not to be wasteful and in general be mindful of the resources I use has tapped into a deeper instinct to horde.

These are but a few of many drawings I've begun doing in my habitat that respond to this mini personal crisis and the spirited intention to deplete these material resources by fully consuming them in the furnace of artmaking.

The blue tape adds some nice puntuation.

The weekend afloat

This past weekend took on very much of an aquatic theme. On Friday, I visited the Met to see the Turner exhibit (and an exhibit of Pre Colombian feather work). Both exhibits were worth seeing, both populated by traditional, in the first case and antiquarian in the second that exhibited strong contemporary affiliations.

Peace—Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842

I had only just seen isolated paintings of Turner prior to this retrospective. I think most of what I have been exposed to have been the watercolors. I was struck by the brutality of the later paintings. The handling of the paint was far more aggressive than I'd anticipated. Interesting to me was that the gallery layout was exactly as it was for the previous Courbet exhibit, and there was an analogous arc of development in the work of the two artists from the academic to the iconoclastic. It's pretty amazing how Turner presaged both impressionism and expressionism, and much of the later, and unfinished work exhibited the scrawling graffito of Twombly.

One of the Swimming Cities vessels.

The next day marked the arrival in Beacon of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, the Hudson River flotilla instigated by the artist SWOON. I've got a bunch of links, images, etc. of that project at maykr. The crew had been on the water for a week already, and spent two nights in Beacon, taking up residence in and around Spire Studios. It was cool to see the tents nestled around the Habitats.

Live/work at the habitats..

The rectilinear forms of the sails in Turner's pieces, particularly those in silhouette in the Burial at Sea, above infiltrated the drawings I was doing over the weekend.


The light filtering into my habitat.

New worque

It's been a while since I've posted images of recent work, so here are a few of the various forms of tinkering I've been doing of late. One thread of this tinkering is a riff on several patterns from African textiles.
These top three images are all small, 11"x14", painted on canvas.
Some of the many paperboard boxes that I've been hoarding have been receiving the pattern treatment. These are granola bar boxes.

A day in June spent in Manhattan

The view from our booth at Sammy's Noodles.

Hometown boosterism

Feral sculpture in Chelsea.

Stopped in quickly to vist it MOMA. The galleries were pulsing madly with the strobing of camera flashes. I had my camer with me, so I too chose to shoot a few things, sans flash.


This Ryman represents all that is or needs to be in painting.

This Rothko evoked a wonderful slap to the head, in a disarming way. I imagine it's the greater plum field that transported me back to my visits to the chapel in Houston. The voices in my head were quelled briefly while standing before this piece.