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"Exhibitions and opportunities"
In the middle of working on the Morbid Anatomy Museum, which has begun to occupy a seriously overwhelming amount of my time, I’m also making new work in the studio and finding time to work on interesting projects with amazingly talented artists like Nicole Antebi and Alex Branch.
On that last front, next weekend is the final act of Alex’s darling project, the Winter Shack. Nicole, Ben Miller, and I have worked out a fun, low-tech way to convert the shack into a giant Magic Lantern, and will be performing a moving panorama within it for one night only.
The shack has proven to be a great place for innovation and play, and I suspect this event will be more of the same.
I’m doing a piece with Becky Sellinger at the Winter Shack later this month. Look for updates, but count on there being something panoramic, something crazy performative, and something involving hot chocolate.
I’ve been working for months on a show in the gallery at 60 Wall St about the Utopian possibilities of art in an amusement park. A group show about artists and fun! It’s full of ideas that I’ve been thinking about for ages. We finally hung the show last week and there’s a public reception on July 10.
Everyone come. (Here’s the link to the evite)
Even as I get ready to leave for India, there’s still a lot going on in New York, including a nice little show at Recession Art, called American Daydream. Go there to see one of my latest paintings, a palimpsest featuring the text from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street manifesto and a Russian map of the trip across the country that Eugenie Petrov and Ilya Ilf, Soviet journalists, took in 1936 when they drove across a United States in the midst of the Great Depression.
“What do these things have to do with each other?” you ask? Well, that’s up to you. I just look through one and onto the other.
American Daydream at Recession Art, from December 19-29, 2012.
Opening event December 19 from 6-10pm
9 Clinton Street
Manhattan
Life is a Whirlwind (In a Whole Lot of Ways).
It’s been a ridiculous and hectic fall. First I found out I’d been awarded a residency in Mumbai (which is fantastic and I’m planning on being very excited about it as soon as I have time). And then there was a hurricane. And a nor’easter. Squished together. The storm completely wiped out the ground floor of my institution. The museum is unharmed, but all of our money-making facilities were inundated. It’s an unmitigated disaster, and reconstruction is going to take a long time. There’s a fundraiser here until December 2, and donations can be made here.
But in the meantime, here I am still trying to make more work before I leave for India! And I’m framing and wrapping pieces to go into the various shows I’m a part of in December. So when it rains it pours!
Two December Shows Before I Leave:
I’m pleased to say that one of my newest pieces will in in a show at Recession Art on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, opening December 19. That piece is a mixed media work on canvas and acrylic called “Ilf & Petrov/Occupy”. It’s a part of my “palimpsest” series – works on canvas, bound into their frames, with drawings on acrylic suspended in front of them. In these paintings, I’m taking two unrelated texts and positioning them over top one another so that they interact (visually as well as intellectually). The idea is to see how words and images relate within a work and to experiment with how various marks create meaning in conversation. The piece that’s going into this show has a map of a trip taken by Soviet authors Evgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf across the United States in 1930’s above the text from the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Manifesto. The map shows the trip that was the basis of Ilf and Petrov’s 1936 travelogue, “Little Golden America”. The Occupy Manifesto is an interesting text, partly because it is so clear about its aims, and partly because it’s really not a foundational document, since that movement tends to be based on actions more than words.
The other show is at Brooklyn Fireproof, which I have to admit I don’t know much about, and is called “The New America: A Vanishing Landscape“. The works in that show are both landscape drawings of my beloved Coney Island, one from 2008 and the other from 2011. It sounds like its going to be a nice show, even if it is quite short. The show is up from December 6-8, with an opening reception on December 7 from 6-9pm. Come find me there!
A trip inside the mind of an artist.
At the same time that I’m still trying to explore this idea of palimpsests, I’ve been working on a new series of paintings. The idea came to me as I was driving back from a visit to Sigrid Sarda’s studio in New Palz. Sigrid is so interesting and her studio is such a mindfuck that I thought, “I really want to write a review of this studio visit.” Like an art critical essay. Like a meditation on my brief time inside Sigrid’s head. But I’m not really all that excited by adding to the world of art reviews I have to say. And I’m really focused on making art right now. So it seemed like the right thing to do to combine these things into one endeavor.
So a new series was born! And the first painting in that series is happily sitting in a gallery in Jersey City waiting for people to look at it. I’m very pleased about that turn of events I have to say.
I’ll get some photos of this series up as soon as I can.
So go see the show. It’s at Curious Matter, it’s called “Dangerous Toys”, and it runs until November 11.
I’m excited to say that I’ll be spending a month in Bombay this winter. I’ve been talking to the Dr. Bhau Daji Ladd Museum about collaborating on a project with them and thinking about ways to get the quality time I really need to research and write for that. So lucky for me a group called Last Ship offers a studio residency to international artists in Bandra. I’m really looking forward to working alongside other visual artists from around the world in one of the last remnants of the little fisher villages that used to line Bombay’s shores. My plan is to spend time drawing the landscape and built environment while I do research into India of the 1930’s – so I can compare and contrast that history with the Great Depression in the US as well as the current economic landscape.
Should be amazing!
