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!
