Happy new years eve, whatever that is

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Brooke stopped by the studio to pose with this piece and give you a sense of scale
this is a project where I am turning bullets into food, that is a 25 pound sack of winchester lead shot melted and re-cast as corn, just doing my part to help with the war effort






So I am heading off to charleston on thursday with brooke, and then the following week to greensboro for the closing reception of the show. Mostly I have been cleaning up around my studio and discovering little projects i abandoned and wrapping them up. Like the above object which was a rusting armature for a piece, and I covered it in that thermoplastoc stuff, also above is the line peice with the parts of a wooden bed frame. well today I am doing laundry and cleaning around the house with brooke, and tonight we are going to watch fireworks, happy new years everyone, and don't forget to check the video and performance section of my website which has just been updated.

R.I.P. James Brown, Happy Kwanza, and Next week in Charleston

this is the piece I have been working since i got back from thanksgiving


this is a little somthing I found at Ikea


Well I spent the first day of kwanza working in the studio, and thinking about James Brown. It is true that everyone is rushing to tribute him, which is important, but I think that with James Brown it is important to look at his art and not his personal life. I have noticed of the many moving tributes I have heard, both on the internet and on the radio, no one is mentioning the obvious; that from this moment forward December 25th will forever be known as james brown memorial day. as a South Carolinian myself, I am grateful that he still claimed S.C. as his home. Too often the many talented artists and musicians who come from the state of south carolina, distance themselves from it, but not james brown, he always blessed our state with his presence. But I digress, next week we will be going to charleston for a bit, so that will be great. this past weekend we went to ikea, and you can see some images from our ikea trip on my flickr page, a really huge storm has rolled in here it is kind of weird since this is the land of awesome weather to have such un-awesome weather.

happy birthday Morton, and more holiday parties

well I am still working on my ongoing rehabilitation of the gallery at work, and brooke and I went to our next to last holiday party of the season at james of arsvirtua's house. Tonight we are going to yet another holiday party at Dr. Lorna Pierce's house., she is an anthropologist at SJSU I also wanted to let everyone know that yesterday, december 21st was my brother morton's birthday he is now 34 years old, wow. Today I will be waxing the floors at work and finishing up the last of the painting. Yesterday I left work early and went into the studio to work on some ideas for a large scale proposal I am trying to submit in january, as soon as I have some clear ideas I will post them here, otherwise have a happy festivus.

new video, more to come

Here I am sanding the walls in the gallery, stay tuned for the exciting conclusion where I will paint the walls in the gallery. I have three more videos planned for the next month and I hope to get them out by january.

Been busy at work, and happy 26th birthday to brooke

this is a working model for a larger stack piece I have plannedthese are a couple of soap dishes I got in japan town, the stickers say "made in china", and "79cents"

a quiet moment in between the chaos that is the end of the semester, and the holiday season.

I have been busy with the end of the semester cleanup at work, restoring the student galleries and de-installing the show in the thompson gallery. i snuck into the studio for a moment, and Brooke and I have been holiday shopping as well. While we were in japan town looking for gifts I found the wooden soap dishes above, which are ironically made in china. I think I will enlarge the scale of them 25 times and use 4x4 and 2x4 pieces of wood to create a large soap dish sculpture. Today for Brooke's birthday we are going to get bagels for brunch, then go to the hakone japanese garden and then wander around the village of saratoga. Tommorow since brooke got another day off from work we will go into the city(again san francisco, not manhatten) and go see the legion of honor, and I have to return an old painting of mine that I reframed to my friends steve and carol. Last night we went to another holiday party, but this time there was a gift exchange, and I got an i-tunes certificate, which was great, I purchased a couple pavement songs, some puff daddy songs and a the samples song "my town", well that catches everything up. I hope to finish up with all the cleaning at work soon and get some more dedicated time in the studio I really need to make some progress on these new projects, I hope to have them finished by may for the group MFA show here in san jose.

the rainy season has started

here in northern california the weather only has two modes, neutral and wet, we are now in wet mode. I spent today in the studio listening to the rain hit the roof as I worked and that was nice, tonight we are going to the city (san francisco not manhatten) to attend a holiday party at Steve and carol and zinnia spector estes' house. I have to spend tommorow editing a paper, and catching up on things around the house. ButI also wanted to take a moment to put in a shout out to my old instructor Loren Schwerd who just launched her new website lorenschwerd.com, so check it out and tell her Brilliant sent ya.

no news is good news

well I spoke with phoebe from the gallery in nc and she said she will send me pics as soon as she gets a chance, but that show should be open for viewing starting today. as for me tonight brooke and i are going to the primus and gogol bordello concert after work, should be fun.

spent some time thinking, and making

I made some progress on the washer sculpture but as the old man says " and miles to go before I sleep", to the left is the armature for the amphora style sculpture, which is being covered in thermaplastic cast
you can see some of the box in the corner and a view of the washer sculpture
a possible installation option for this one
the spout on this piece is actually what I cut off of the washer piece, it just seemed like two seperate peices

just a nice image of the light coming into the bedroom through the colored acetate that brooke hung on our windows


I spent saturday working on some new peices, which gave me time to think, which is always nice. at the end of the day artist david Kimball anderson came by the studio and talked to me about the idea of juxtaposition, and the notion of artist as curator. Saturday night Brooke and I went to crate and barrel, which is always a pleasure for me because it shows me how the boundry between art and life and design and art is completely false, just look at the furniture and design elements on sale at crate and barrel and it is hard not to see the effects of minimalism, and process art on design. Today I have to edit some writing I am working on and take some time to rest, I have been fighting a cold and I want to be well for the Primus concert on tuesday, where Gogol Bordello will be opening up. It is weird but all the bands from my adolescent years have now reunited for reunion tours, just one more sign that I am getting old, when I have lived long enough to see my favorite bands break up and get back together.

a slight modification, some new decoration, and a small realization

this is a detail of the pattern on the new object I am making, I am really getting interested in the shapes created between the circles, more than the circles themselves

this is the view from the living room in our apartment lookin towards the newly illuminated neon bedroom, it's like our very own custom james turrell installation

I saw this on the way to work this morning and it seemed interesting

working on a new construction

notice the slight modification on the new washer sculpture

here zero is showing off her keen instinct to curl up on top of any bag you need, that is my laptop bag under her
this is the foot I cut off of the washer sculpture, I realized it could be a whole other sculpture, and it will be in time

after work I ducked into the studio for a couple of hours and changed the washer sculpture and worked on another steel box construction. I realized that my main interest in pattern and mark making in sculpture and on paper, relates to a latent interest I have in psychodelia and beautiful visual phenomonon, in short I think I really like staring at beautiful things. On the subject of beautiful things I hung up the neon signs from my thesis show in our bedroom. Brooke decided that the best glow comes from the mfa purple neon, it creates a very soothing atmosphere in the house, and I am inclined to agree. For dinner brooke prepared a delicious meal of sauted butternut squash with fettucine tossed in oil red pepper flakes and garlic and topped with breaded goat cheese...yummy. then we watched the end of 1 vs 100, and caught an episode of growing pains of all things, tommorow it's off to the studio for an early start.