UV Portfolio opens tonight @ Matteawan Gallery in Beacon, NY.

The exhibition of the UV Portfolio opens tonight at Matteawan Gallery in Beacon, NY.  The reception is happening from 6-9pm. 
I've mentioned this project in a previous post and last week Phillipstown.info did a write up of the UV Portfolio.  There's a UV Portfolio facebook group, and images from the project can be seen at the Matteawan website and the totemic 17 website.

The show will remain on view through Dec 22.

The whole thing has been thoroughly enjoyable, and it's been great to see what the other artists in the group have come up with.  I was over at the gallery Thursday night to help Karlyn with some of the installation and it was then I was able to take a peek at some of my colleagues' output.

In the studio:  Kimberly Loewe & Jeff White

On the press:  I played with spraying water on an inked block to get a varied layer of color.  Here you see that wet mixture bleeding through the paper, just prior to running it through the press.

I'll post images of some of the individual finished prints soon.  It's been exciting to see these things I made again since I spent relatively little time with them after completing them.  This is different from how I related to the paintings in my studio where they tend to hang around in state for extended periods of development, and I become so very accustomed to their presence.  Seeing these wood block prints again after just a short interval had the quality of the jarring excitement that comes from a lack of familiarity.  That feeling alone is a wee thrill.

The incidental offshoots of the creative process hold great interest for me and in this endeavor has reaped such stuff in the unconscious prints made on the newsprint I used as blotter paper and to block areas of the woodblock, both front and back as I was printing both sides of the block at times, to keep from making a mess with unwanted tranfers of ink to the press bed or paper.  Most of what makes them compelling to me is that they are the embodied platforms for future mutative actions.  Below are a few examples of these unintended impressions which I dig.

 

 

Dead Hare Radio show # 43 is out...

Two weeks ago, I released the most recent episode of the Dead Hare radio Hour.  This one took a long time to get together, for technical reasons, and it's, by far, the longest episode thus far.  The matter at hand in this installment is the commemorating the 10th Anniversary of Dia:Beacon with a an audio project in which I asked several folks to record themselves reading yelp reviews of the museum.  More details on this episode are on the Dead Hare Radio Hour blog, or you can listen to the episode here:


Thanks to everyone who lent their voices to this project:

Rich Armstrong

Ilka Omdahl

Angelika Rinnhofer

Anthony Easton

Lorrie Fredette

Desiree Maikranz

Peter Teraberry

Matt Stolle

Pastor Ben Larson-Wolbrink

Cynthia Nalley

Fritz Zernike

Hadrien Dussoix

Yoko Malbos

Olga Dekalo

Jack Siman

Jenna

Steve or Steven Read

Laetitia Wolff

Amanda Morales  

In the studio today

Walking charted territories

This long weekend has afforded the opportunity to execute a project I have long been waiting to get around to doing.  Advent 2011 was the final exhibit at kork.  I asked 31 artists to "rework" my 2001 painting THA - pictured above in this weekend's makeshift driveway studio.  Each participating artist had a 4x6" photograph of the painting which they manipulated, then sent to kork for exhibit as a daily advent calendar in December 2011.   Somewhat of an afterthought, I decided I would take the suggestions of all 31 artists as a possible solution to this image.  Over the past 3 days, I photographed the process of executing these artists' manipulations on the actual painting - essentially taking this painting through 31 days of collective imagination in just 3 days.

Though frustrating that it has taken me so long to get around to this, I appreciate the poetry of this moment falling on Columbus Day weekend, as I'm "discovering" terrain already tread by others as I reach a new state of this painting. 

This part of the task out of the way, I'm not completely finished.  The next step entails creating a documentation of all the artists' postcards in a publication that will include images of this weekend's painting performance.  I'll also be posting a time lapse video of this weekend's painting very soon. 

This all made for a full holiday weekend, but that's not all that I've had to fill these last few days.  I was at the Garrison Art Center's printmaking studio for the second of my three studio days, developing woodblock prints for the collaborative project between Matteawan Gallery and T17.  Fruits of this labor will be on view at Matteawan Gallery in November and December.  Below is one of my woodblocks, in its current state.

.t 17 coming to Matteawan Gallery

I'm excited and honored to be invited to participate in a print project organized jointly by Karlyn Benson of Matteawan Gallery and Jeff White of totemic 17.

The t17 woodblocks.

Jeff came up to beacon last Sunday to present the parameters of the project to a group of the participating artists.
With totemic 17 Jeff has devised a strategy of creating discreet print portfolios that follow a very specific format which carries forth as the constant from project to project.  The portfolio consists of 17 prints which conform to the prescribed sizes and shapes that together constitute the body of the conceptual totem.

An example from the tug 17 portfolio.

The first t17 portfolio centered on a theme of the tugboat as subject and was created as a community based effort.  This current project, with the working title, UV portfolio (for Unique Variant), looks to the interface of abstraction and natural forms as a thematic conceit.  Another aspect of this project is experimenting with the process of reductive wood block printing.

One of Jeff's own prints from the tug 17 portfolio.

Over the course of several weekends, the participating artists will be using the printmaking studio at the Garrison Art Center to create our reductive woodblock prints.
When we first moved to Beacon ten years ago, I entertained fleeting thoughts of using pursuing some printmaking at the Garrison facility.  I'm grateful that this project is finally giving legs to those thoughts.

Within the parameters Jeff has laid out for the form of the project, there is much room for experimentation in the pursuit of this effort.  In fact I believe most of the artists participating have little experience in working in this form of printmaking, so it will be interesting to see what everyone comes up with.  The fruits of this labor will occupy Matteawan Gallery for the months of November and December.

Beside myself, the participating artists are:
Lorrie Fredette 
Jen Bradford
Matthew S. Kinney
Susan English
Karlos Carcamo
Joseph Ayers
Kim Loewe
Leslie Kerby
Ryan Magyar
Thomas Huber
Kathy Moss

Geneve Journal: Low hanging fruits

Last December's trip to Geneva has developed a crispy golden crust o of nostalgia. Going over my photographic and video material has me wistful, especially the views out the window of my apartment - most especially when dusted by calling snow - which recall for me the open days of being in a certain element, even when that element was uncomfortable, playing around with scraps of paper h and scraps of ideas, In previous posts, I've shared some of the physical fruits of my labor in the form of the postcards - the altered ready-mades and CH Missives . which I sent to my Kickstarter supporters. It's past time for me to post images of the drawings and watercolors I also made during my stay. Those imaged here are the works resolved while in Geneva, there are more that were started, not resolved not pictured.

All of these pieces are largely some combination of watercolor, pastel and sometimes collage and they are all in the size neighborhood of 9"x12" or 11"x14.  Also, with one or two exceptions, titles have not been assigned, so I'm not adding captions with info for each piece - since I'm lazy.  I have however placed the images in this post in two different sizes to denote their place in either the of the two size groups.

 

Elements of Paul Klee and the forms resting in and around the harbor of Geneve were the influences floating around in my head and those are the components that more strongly bled into these pieces.

At the moment, I'm slowly reviewing the photos, videos, writings and sketches from  the trip for components which will make up the meat of the publication and video im creating for Kickstarter supporters

I'm also working on pieces born of the trip which are deeper explorations of aspects of the trip and the entire project.

Self Portrait As a Recently Departed Nun

As a form of daily exercise, I thought to create gestural responses to a series of photographs by Mari Mahr called A Few Days in Geneva.  I found Mahr's book of the same title in the MOMA Library and connected with them via the strong pull of my experience of looking out the window from my '92 trip.  But given everything on my itinerary, this endeavor was was dropped pretty quickly.   The images below are paper constructions attached to the window of the apartment in which I was staying.