My friend Leah is currently featured in an East vs. West Bookbinding Throwdown. Have a look, and vote for your favorite Pennsylvania crafty bookbinder!
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
of the Hexagon, your fave little DIY space on North Charles:
The Hexagon presents Meet the Members, an annual member art exhibition featuring work by Josh Atkins, Krista Faist, Andrew Geddes, Alex Ghinger, Carlos Guillen, Anna Jiongco, Torin Nash, Phuong Pham, Miguel Sabogal, Rick Weaver, and Marty Weishaar.
On view at The Hexagon Gallery from May 1 to May 29, 2009.
Opening reception May 1, 6:30 PM to 8 PM, followed by homemade dance music event. Light refreshments, all ages.
The Hexagon
Community-run Gallery and Performance Space
1825 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
Gallery Hours: by appointment and during performances. Performance times available at http://www.hexagonspace.com.To arrange appointment and for gallery inquiries, please contact artart
I have been following Rain Noe for years. He was dormant for a while, and then his most recent travels/photo essays popped up in my reader and I couldn’t think of more perfect timing.
I don’t even know this dude, but through his mottled web-presence I do admit I’ve got a bit of an e-crush on this writer/bachelor-cook/photographer/blogger/Kim Jong Il impersonator/sassy New Yorker type. I’m sure it’s a hip-companion cliche; I don’t care.
Do check out his blog and his photo essays. He’s got this way of capturing something magnificent as it exists in what is typically mundane. Urban, blue, clouds, funny pothole covers, that kind of thing. Do you ever find yourself walking around on a beautiful day, dragging your feet out of whatever it is that’s making you glum, and you see… the big hair sheep dog staring at you out of someone’s window begonias, or a little old man with his grocery cart, repositioning his hat just so… and you half smile/smirk without thinking that you’re supposed to be feeling glum. It’s a little like that.
happy spring/[already] summer, friends.
Life happens too fast sometimes that when you turn around, everything you thought that was slowly going by you is out of sight. Difference and unfamiliarity teeter between scary and exciting; I’ve always thought those things were the latter and then, worthy of chance.
I’m thinking I should just start blogging my ridiculous dreams since they affect me so and because they stay with me very vividly. Toss-and-turns of the last 48 hours, induced by the sudden heatwave and other lukewarm-to-cold circumstances:
1. Driving an old white car with a sun roof or convertible top, I don’t remember, and the road bends around hilly sand dunes. One dune, the highest, has huge mounds of grass at the peak (not sure how that works… isn’t it usually the other way around?), and I am burst out of my vehicle like a pilot using an eject-button. It’s become one of those falling dreams, but instead of the horizon moving further and further away from me, the ground is getting smaller and smaller. I land on a patch of grass and fight wind and sand until these weird hippie ladies start doing a funny little… I don’t know, wavy haired, waving hand, hippie dance around me and tell me to write my grievances on their notepads. with orange golf-course pencils, you know? I am thinking that these will go into a fire, that there will be Buddhist prayer wheels staked into the scattered patches of grass, and that I will lay in the sand, but the few grievances I manage to scrawl multiply into millions of tiny sheets of paper, and I wake myself up, away from a spiral of wind, sand, hair, papers, sloppy pencil marks.
2. Lately I have been thinking about my parents and their experiences of running. I used to write about them a lot in different forms, in artist books and vignettes, I’ve been thinking about them again, and the different reasons we all run or decide to stay. (Maybe a future re-post of their story, who knows.) In this dream they are running again but not young this time. they want me to run too. I don’t know what to pack. And we are not supposed to tell my sister. We decide that the white wardrobe in the attic (my parents don’t use the attic, and we don’t have a white wardrobe either, curious) is the best way to go and strap it onto my car. I have no idea where we’re going, but lucidly and somehow outside of the dream, I just watch my Honda, with a white IKEA wardrobe strapped to the top, speed away.
3. I am at an extravaganza-art, music, dancing, multi-levels, bars, see-through stair cases. Each floor has a schedule of events, and each event is running late. I show up at one stage, and the band is running 15 minutes late. I walk into the next gallery, and the artists haven’t shown up yet. I am hosting some friend and her British boyfriend whose ATM card doesn’t work anywhere. He has 60 dollars that never diminish no matter how much vodka he drinks. There are crowds of spectators but nothing to watch.
No coffee for me this morning. I hope I sleep a little better tonight.
Openings and closings, windows open, outdoor music.
Jot all these goodies down and get yerself the heck outside! So much going on this weekend!
Tonight!
MICA presents MFA Thesis III, featuring work by:
Amita Bhatt
Nina Glaser
Kat Rohrbacher
Katherine Mann
Scott Shanley
Karla Cott
Clarissa Gregory
Judy Stone
Pete Cullen
Alan Callander
Robby Rackleff
Emily Wathen
Sandy Triolo
Janna Rice and Charlie Hahn will also be presenting their MFA Exhibitions at the Center for the Arts, Holtzman MFA Gallery at Towson University, with receptions from 7:30 to 9 PM.
As a part of Baltimore Green Week, the Towson Arts Collective presents a juried exhibition of art made from found and recycled materials.
Andrew Geddes exhibit, Conventionalized Calculations for Primary Structures closes tonight at the Hexagon (1825 N. Charles St, from 6:30 to 8), as does Wise Guise, the inaugural exhibition at the new Nudashank Gallery, on the 3rd floor of the H&H Building.
If wine and mingling aren’t your thing, you can still entertain your eyes at
Star Trek, Wrath of Khan The Play at the Annex Theater.
and The Charles Theatre will be showing John Carpenter’s film, They Live as a part of their midnight movie series.
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!! And don’t forget Saturday’s Station North Spring Festival. This awesome, FREE block party comes to you courtesy of the many fabulous venues in the Station North Arts District. What timing, too, in light of recent developments with the Baltimore City Council’s Arts & Entertainment legislation. Come celebrate Baltimore’s diverse music scene on Saturday from 5 until midnight! There will be beer, tunes from many of your favorite local acts, and free pizza provided by the block party mastermind, Joe Squared.
Hope to see you there!
I have been toying with these darn lights for a couple years… When I experiment with them at home, they look totally Boss and Fly or whatever the kids are calling it these days, and every. single. time. I use them on a larger scale, the motion sensors just don’t work right, or they look completely lame, or one LED flickers out of sync from the others.
We’ll call this LED false start #43854732085743082574089470 because once again, they are not going into my upcoming installation. I was bummed for all of 3 minutes because I was so excited about everyone else installing and I think the artists in this show all respond to each other really well. Catch a sneak peak at the new Whole Gallery Blog. or even a little sneak peak here, because I just dumped a ton of photos from my cell phone onto Flickr:
I’ve been playing with different levels of accumulation and concentration of the line, and I’m please with what I have so far. The next element is a layer of ink dots that play against the density of knots throughout the installation. See for yourself this Saturday!
and just for fun, here are some more photos from the cell phone:
Continue reading ‘No other sound is quite the same as your name’
I have been having a lot of fun making fake stop-motion .gifs on my computer. I made a couple tonight while playing around with these LED lights attached to night light motion-sensors:
Check out this freaky one! I was trying to slow down the final sensitivity by using duplicate frames, while my cat was going through his usual late-night craziness. Looks like a ghost!
You can make your own here. (word of warning though: most of the .gifs in the gallery are fun and cute, but some are not safe for work.)
Fleurs de peau or Skin Flowers
In 2005 (or was it 2004?) I was in this photography/print seminar, and every morning as we thesis students slowly and sleepily trickled into class, the professor would pass around the visual Things he’d stumbled upon. They were mostly clippings or fliers from his fancy double life teaching and seeing art in New York, but he also shared his bits of inspiration from other places.
One book (Skin flowers, above) really stayed with me. There wasn’t much text from what I could remember, and the book was just a bunch of photo diptychs by a French dermatologist in 1930’s Lyons, who paired photographs of Frenchmen’s prison tattoos with photos of various skin disorder. (Eczema-havers in the house say Heeey) Kind of gross and beautiful all at once, which is how I tend to work no matter how hard I try to resist. I remember that quick sleepy glance at the tattoos of gypsies with red and yellow flowers in their hair next to these odd pink blooms on the forearm and how much they informed my work at the time.
Stitched and Stripped in progress
Fast forward to now, I completely forgot about the book and how much I loved it. I was listening to something on the radio about prison tattoos, and that familiar phrase took me back and back, and by some Google miracle, I found the book again! It should be mine in a week or two. Scans to come, for those who aren’t easily queasy.
I woke up this morning with the sensation of an elephant on my chest. Oh, Stress.
Work:
understaffed, taking on a lot, some exciting, some not-so exciting, paperworkpaperworkpaperwork
Art:
Show goes up this week or next… can’t find silk gauze anywhere… may go completely bonkers and use tulle or even burlap instead. no fiberfil; this stuff needs to be portable when it’s over.
still need to:
knit more wrap around things
wrap wires in glue
get more seed beads, ink, and monofilament
Craft:
two book commissions in one week!
Gallery:
have been sitting on designing the call for entries for weeks. text is all done, just need to lay it out and I Don’t Wanna.
had a friend on facebook offer to be a “personal assistant” in exchange for craft… I was half joking about getting an intern but I might actually take her up on her offer
installing friend’s vinyl lettering tonight
installing member show at the very end of the month
press releases press releases press releases
Other:
writing for a small local art magazine
writing for a local art blog now too I think?
I’m not sure if this garden thing is going to work. maybe I’ll just do some shrubs instead.
Life:
I have a lot of Feelings. and little nice-thing plans that I hope will succeed if I can figure out the logistics of everything.
if that didn’t stress you out, just remember that it’s thesis season and I strangely miss it. for a second.
I keep describing this installation with some combination of the words Serpent, Knitted, and Hairy, but the more my little hands wind and wind this yarn, the more I think it’s going to be Bulbous, Glued, and Hairy.
Slow-going, but going.
If you’re in Baltimore, check out this month’s issue of The Urbanite! For their green issue, they’ve given a sweet little shout out to the Charm City Craft Mafia and our green and eco-friendly crafts.