In the Spirit of the Text exhibition images

Here are some images from the exhibit, I'll be posting other views and other pieces soon.

View from the outside: we placed quotes from Calvino's Six Memos on some of the gallery windows.

My Spamwerk paintings line the entryway, well above eye level.

Looking from the South gallery into the North gallery. My piece untitled(backmount) is in foreground, Marc Willhite's "Diagram for a Gesture" and "A Grand Fragment" can be seen through the doorways.

Marc's "Two Widths Seamed" on the left, and my "History Painting 2" on the right.

Marc's "Diagram for a Gesture" on the right, and my "History Painting 1" on the left.

Marc's "A Grand Fragment."

Looking from the North gallery into the South gallery.

My "Ground Cover."

Blesse 1 & 2 set in the wall in the background.

A small drawing, and a plaster piece, both called "Ground Cover."

Marc's "A wall of differing shades of grey."

"History Painting 1" butted up against the plaster "Ground Cover."

In the Spirit of the Text opening reception images.

Here are a few images from the opening reception of In The Spirit of the Text at the Curtis Arts and Humanities Center on Nov 3.

Day of Rest

One of the ceiling sections at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse.

In the Spirit of the Text opened Saturday night (images coming shortly,) but on Sunday, for my special-after-opening-treat, I headed up to the Boulder TeaHouse for a little Sunday Brunch and quiet time. It's been years since I had last been there, but for a while, some time back, heading up there was my Sunday morning ritual.

The setting, and the significance of the time I've spent there means a lot to me, and to go back, downing a couple of pots of tea, writing and reflecting at the bar was wonderful. Plus, BMOCA is just next door, making for a perfect package excursion.

Mary Miss' "Connect the Dots: Mapping the High Water, Hazards and History of Boulder Creek."

I headed over to BMOCA to see "Weather Report" the exhibit on Climate Change curated by Lucy Lippard. It's a great show, and a sprawling one at that. There are several offsite pieces, the documentation of which is assembled in the lobby. The one site specific piece that I did see, as part of it was placed at the entrance of the Museum is Mary Miss' "Connect the Dots..".The piece consists of metal paint can lids painted blue mounted on trees and buildings around town at heights representing the predicted height of flood water in those areas. This piece initially grabbed me because of the use of the paint can lid. As I've been incorporating various castoff elements from my housepainting gigs as possible fodder for my artwork, I've often thought about those metals lids, not sure what I'd do with them.

The exhibit assembles a number of artists that are approaching the topic of climate change in diverse, informative and beautiful ways. Given the amount of work in the exhibit, one might expect that inevitably, some of the art work might exist simply as visual prop for representing scientific information, but I didn't find this to be the case. BMOCA is far from big, but I strangely began to drift mentally, distracted a bit as I passed into the rear gallery. Perhaps it was the load of information coming at me from the artwork, I'm not sure. Still, I think that the exhibit deals with the subject matter in a sophisticated and striking way.

Judit Hersko's "Seven Days of Dissolution"

How I spent my last ten days

I left Beacon on Tuesday, Oct 23. Pennsylvania looked incredibly primordial in a dramatic mix of fog, rain and fiery foliage. I wish I had snapped a pic. Early the next morning in Eastern Iowa clouds of birds far denser than I’ve ever seen danced beside and across I-80. I snapped a few pics, but they didn’t look so cool.

I rolled into Denver Thursday night and met up with Marc at an Old Chicago to touch base on preparations for the exhibit. An extremely friendly and inebriated gal sitting next to me at the bar took great interest in our conversation and scribbled notations. We told her about the exhibit, and where it would be held. She said “Oh I live down there.” It turns out she graduated from Littleton High eight years after I did.
Exhibition Battle Plan.

Here is the map she drew for me of the art rooms at LHS, and the path she’d take to sneak into her ceramics class when she was running late:

The rest of the time from that point for the next straight week - day and night until Friday afternoon, was spent preparing artwork and installing the exhibit at Curtis.

The in-progress wall building for the installation at the Curtis Center.


Day of the Dead at CHAC.

Art-O-Mart at Capsule.

Sidewalks of Santa Fe Dr.
On Friday evening I headed up to Santa Fe for First Friday. Friday was Day of the Dead, which augmented the usual carnival aspect of the gallery walk along that corridor.

Michael Zansky at Sandy Carson .

I stopped into several places. I was primarily interested in heading to the Sandy Carson Gallery for Michael Zansky’s exhibit. I had misunderstood when the opening was scheduled, and was expecting it to be that night, and that Michael would be there. Unfortunately, I was a couple of weeks late on that score, and he was no longer in Denver.

Sandy Lane at Sandra Phillips.
From Santa Fe, I headed over to the comparatively sedate Golden Triangle and stopped in to visit with Michele Mosko at her newly opened gallery on 12th and Bannock, Michele Mosko Fine Art. Michele and I met in Peekskill, NY when we were both invited to join the Advisory Board of the HVCCA. We quickly developed a connection as we’re both from Denver, and at the time we were both frequently travelling between NY and CO. Angelika photographed Michele for one of the portraits in her Menschenkunde series. Michele made a permanent move back to Denver earlier in the year, and opened her space last month. After visiting at the gallery for a while, I headed for home and stopped by Jerusalem for a “Super Dish” and a baklava. I just now went to the restaurant’s website for the first time. Next time I get take out, I’ll be sure to load up the site to better replicate the auditory experience that is had when dining in. Jerusalem’s is my treat to myself, at least once when I’m back in Denver. I’ve been twice this week, and I still have four weeks here in town.

Pertinent Information

Here is the postcard with all the details on the upcoming In the Spirit of the Text exhibit at The Curtis Arts and Humanities Center in Greenwood Village, CO. The opening is happening from 5:30-7pm on Saturday, Nov 3. Marc and I will be giving a gallery talk on Thursday, Nov 15 at 5:30pm. click on the images for an enlarged view.

And, you're soaking in it

I've been hashing through pieces for my upcoming show out in Colorado in November. I'm doing the show with my buddy Marc Wilhite who just moved back out to Denver from Boston.
The show is a meditation of sorts on a series of speeches written by Italo Calvino that are collected together in the book Six Memos for the Next Millenium. In this collection, Calvino explores five elements (he died prior to writing on the sixth piece) that lend to the timelessness of certain works of literature.

The process of developing this show has been a challenge for me conceptually. We're certainly not interested in creating a series of visual examples to illustrate Calvino's concepts. The exhibit is being called In the Spirit of the text, and that is really how we're working; within the spirit of the considerations that characterized Calvino's approach to both his own work and the appreciation he felt for the work of other writers.

Outside of the specific elements dealt with in the writings, I've been considering the notion of how knowledge and even taste, are passed along and experienced, and how much do we rely on secondary sources to gain our sense of the world. I've been thinking of our society's arbiters of taste or morals and how we absorb knowledge through primary experience or filtered through these arbiters and aggregators - the Oprahs, self help gurus, and John Tesh's of the world. And as artists we process this stuff into application that find their way into the our work.

From that strain of thought, I've been ruminating on how I pick up and absorb snippets of visuals or ideas in my working process. It's like an open ended, scavenger hunt where one discovery or clue opens the door to the next one, creating a zig zag trail of significance within the resulting work.

In one aspect of this current work, this meandering path has led from thinking of the relationship between literature and visual art, and they can stand on equal footing side by side. On top of that, I looked at a passage in one of the memos where Calvino bemoans the inexactitude with which language is oft employed. That ineffectual use of language led me to look at the jumble of letters that arrive in my mailbox as the subject lines of spam. I've been noting these subject lines for sometime for their bizarre, funny language, and often abstract letter combinations.
ligature studies, gouache on paper, 3" x 8"
In the process of applying this spamwerk to the task of creating work, I happened to listen to a podcast lecture given by font designer, Matthew Carter at SVA. Carter spoke of ligatures and construction component in fonts.to an instance where he developed a font in response to text he saw in the paintings of Mantegna, the process of assessing and absorbing elements of similarly ...With all of this in my mind, I learned via Bad at Sports of the 50th Anniversary of the Helvetica font and so it goes.

This trail is indeed meandering, but it's paramount to my reading of Calvino's Six Memos, and the way I'm approaching the exhibit as an appreciation of discriminating immersion. The thrust of my sentiment is that as a critic of writing, Calvino is foremost a lover of writing, a metabolizer of literature. In his Memos, Calvino doesn't enumerate the commandments of writing, rather I feel, he's sharing his joys of his immersion in the stuff. It's the trip you take in the soup, and when you're in it everything's in the mix. With experience and discipline, one is able to discern what sticks, and what gets carried downstream.

I'll get into more of this later, but this sheds a bit of light onto where I'm at currently with this work.

Please rewind tape before returning

Blue painter's tape has become an almost ubiquitous medium for artists. It's a pretty, cobalt kind of blue. Light filters through it nicely...

Well, I use a lot of the stuff when I'm doing my decorative painting gigs. Regular masking tape too. As I wrap up a job, I roll the tape into a glob, sticky side in, as much as possible, for easy depositing in a trash bag.

The activity has sometimes taken on aspect of a short term challenge (similar, I'm sure, to the spirit that spawned the world's largest ball of twine) to see how large a ball I can create given the amount of tape use on a job.

Recently, though, I've taken to seeing this as an opportunity to create some small impromptu sculptures. Without getting too fussy about the shape, I try to be aware of the form as it develops. The added color of paint on the edge of the tape informs the process, adding variety. It's an activity that's a sort of meditation on the end of a project, and the refuse produced by the process.

These images represent a few of the pieces I've done in the tape. A friend came to visit my studio last week, and I told her that at the moment, I find the possibility of these small things more exciting than the thought of painting. As with the skins of dried paint that I've used both as subject in my slough paintings, and as sculpture itself, as with the Blesse wall pieces, I think there's room to play with these things.

Lunchtime Show and Tell

Back in June, I was working on the installation crew for the Martin Creed Feelings exhibit the Hessel Museum at Bard College.

A couple recent Peter Acheson pieces.

Through the middle of the install, I brought in a few small pieces for feedback from my buddies, Daniel Berlin, and Peter Acheson during our lunch break. This began a daily showandtell/critique session with each of us bringing in our work.

This is one of a series of stick paintings that Peter does. I took it home to live with for a week. I placed it over a doorway.

This added a nice perk to the work day and it was something I looked forward to each day.

I photographed a couple of the sessions. Toward the end of the install, we mutually decided on an assignment where each of us would create a piece using some trashed luaun that we came across.

Dan Berlin's luaun assignment.

My luaun assignment.

Attitude Adjustment

Weekend before last, I had the pleasure of meeting Ed Winkleman of Plus Ultra/Winkelman Gallery, and the Ed Winkleman blog. I've mentioned Ed's blog here, and on maykr before. It's one of the most insightful and engaging art blogs around, both for Ed's takes on issues as well as the conversations his posts spawn in the reader posted comments. He's an accessible individual, and clearly a thoughtful advocate for artists.

Ed was part of a panel discussion on collecting at the Affordable Art Fair. The panel was moderated by Lisa Hunter and also included Lindsey Pollock and Tom Delavan of Domino Magazine.



I ran through the fair, waiting for something to catch my eye. Only two things did. Ross Bonfanti's cement filled stuffed animals, and Nona Orbach's messy collages.


I then hustled down to Sperone Westwater to see the recent Richard Tuttle exhibit, Memory Comes From Dark Extension and was instantly disappointed. The work in this exhibit it is a multitude of small collage/assemblage work all of which is mounted to the wall using a small bracket of wood and hand tooled bronze that holds the work 3" off the wall. Most of the work in the front gallery uses heavy stock watercolor-type paper that is occasionally bent and creased and painted with watercolor and sometimes collaged. None of the work exceeds 5" in dimension. These pieces felt crafty, not inspired, and looked better in the website photos. There were a few pieces in the front gallery that incorporated oddly shaped scraps of wood that I preferred, but still, I was not impressed.

I proceeded back to a rear gallery, and the first piece I saw was a rounded triangular shape of torn paper about the size of a quarter with some blue crayon scribbling on it stuck to the end of the bracket. I was struck, and the light entered my brain. The interaction of this scrape of paper with the hanging support was in wonderful, messy proportion, and for the first time I noticed the element integral to all of the work in the show; the shadow.



I returned to the front gallery and was able to see that work with my eyes and sensibilities properly adjusted. Still, the work of this series, was the least favorite of the exhibit, but I was able to appreciate them for what they were offering.



This exhibit is full of the wonderful moments that Tuttle allows to happen. Fortunately, the work was patient enough with me to allow me to take the time to calibrate my senses and perception to receive all that it had to offer. Walking through the galleries of this exhibited provided a viscerally learned lesson on the power of art, and the rewards that can come when one takes up the responsibility of meeting the work on its terms.

Some artwork from Skin Trade

I am about to create the beginnings of a new main website. One that will allow me to put the artwork in a new context, and update it with greater frequency without imposing on my buddy, Chad Smith who graciously put my original site together....that should happen in a couple of days. In the meantime, I'm posting a few images of the pieces in the current show at Go North.

Genesis 18, 2007 oil on paper 8"x11"

Genesis 9, 2007 oil on paper 8"x11"

Jumpsuit 2007 oil on canvas 20"x24"

Genesis 11, 2007 oil on paper 8"x11"

Skin Trade installation shots

Here are a few installation shots of "Skin Trade" at Go North in Beacon.

Angelika dressed coordinatingly at the opening.
Go North partners Greg Slick and Karlos Carcamo, with A. and me.

Athough it is not evidenced in any of the photos above, Greg Slick is able to stand erect.