thinking about game shows, and I hit the jackpot

this is a view of the soon to be brilliant studio1250 square feet and that includes this nifty little office
it is so beautiful i can't wait to start cleaning up and getting things working

I have noticed that game shows are everywhere. Everything is a contest now to win something. people are performing interventions in everyday life with such fervor that they no longer seem like interventions or disruptions. there was a time where going out in public and doing something disruptive seemed edgy or interesting, but now we expect people to be taping and documenting every move or thing they do. And speaking of documenting ones life, I found my dream studio. It is 1250 square feet, with a small office. I will be renting from these awesome bakers who will have their business in the front and i will have mine in the back.there company is called lady fingers, a pun on the food and the fact that they are two ladies. I am really stoked about the space and it could not have come at a better time. I just found out the dates for the sumter residency, they will be October 13th-28th, and the show will open on the 27th. The studio will give me a chance to continue working on new stuff, and prepare for the sumter gig, and focus because a month after the sumter gig I will be going to vermont. Tonight I am going to head out to see an opening at the modernisme gallery here in charleston. The show is a solo display of redux director/ and daily serving mastermind seth curcio's print, graphic, photo, and painting work. After the opening I am going to see "live free or die hard" with my dad, I can't wait to see the actor who plays mac in the mac vs. pc ads kick some die hard ass. Tomorrow I sign the lease on the new brilliant studio!

working in the studio and looking around charleston for another place

I have been trying to get some new work done in my screened in studio while I look for a more functional studio. The added humidity of charleston has aided the rust prints quite a bit. Another factor helping the new rust prints is that artist and craftsmen was having a paper sale so I was able to get some really nice papers. I have been trying to update my website but it is becoming more trouble than it is worth and until I finish the next couple of projects i probably won't mess with it. I have been developing poster ideas and promotional notions for the "making 2007 look like 1967" installation. I am still waiting to hear back from the curator in sumter, come to think of it a week has passed since I emailed him maybe i should call. I still haven't heard from emily kimball in santa fe about how the show went so I will probably give her an email. I have been trying to reconnect with charleston and figure out my place here and what I should be doing, but so far I am doing what I always do, working in the studio, researching, writing, taking pictures and filling out applications for residencies and what not. It is true that being constantly surrounded by water, and history has caused me to think about different things. I keep seeing all this beautifully aged gray wood on the side of the road and I want to stock pile it but do not have the room yet. I have been editing some old video as well, when the afternoon heat and humidity gets too unbearable i move indoors and work at the computer. With brooke gone on her archaeology field school for the next month I am faced with the realization that I don't know what to do with my time other than work on my art, oh well could be worse at least I love what I do.

we have a location and a date

in the quest to plan our wedding brooke and I have met our first challenge, we have a date and a location. here is our location, it is called alhambra hall and is on the waterfornt and has a nice open airy feel, our date is going to be sunday january 20th 2008.
our wedding location alhambra hall
the view from alhambra of a shrimp boat returning with it's catch

We have decided to have a brunch wedding so we can serve our favorite breakfast foods. and as if that wasn't enough check out yesterday's talk of the nation, I am the first caller on their wedding episode. I also got the great news that I will be one of the artists for the accessibility:sustainability artist in residence in sumter. I am really excited about the opportunity because it is an entirely site specific residency. I am probably going to do my making 2007 look like 1967 project, and recreate some of my favorite art from 1967 but use whatever materials I can get my hands on. Today begins the weekend long celebration of my mom's 60th birthday, which will involve lots of food and walks on the beach.

Pickles coleslaw and the kfc mashed potato bowls

I really hate pickles. I have never liked them and I can give several cogent reasons why. First and foremost they are nasty. The first bites of a pickle elicit a strong gag response from me. The second reason is a little more interesting. In the mid nineties I made my way as a line cook at a local charleston barbecue restaurant. One of the myriad responsibilities of a line cook at a restaurant is to keep the food line stocked with all the necessary ingredients. On a particularly busy night the line ran out of the ubiquitous pickles used for garnish on the barbecue sandwich plate. Being the sort of valiant team player I was, I offered to go back to the walk in and open up a new barrel of pickles. When I opened the pickle barrel I wretched not only at the initial smell but at the sight of the pickled face mask floating in with the pickles. I asked my kitchen manager what to do with the pickled face mask and he said throw it away and serve the pickles. To this day I can not bring myself to eat mass produced pickles. Number two on the list of foods to never eat in a restaurant cole slaw. I can’t really describe in words the visuals of watching cooks inventively mix cole slaw. I should stop here and say that if you enjoy cole slaw from restaurants enjoy, just know that the expression up to my elbows in cole slaw is based on fact. And the last food gripe is the new kfc mashed potato bowls. I saw an ad for these bowls and it seems like they have tried as much as possible to simulate the texture and look of vomit in their product. If you haven’t seen the commercial it is hysterical if only for the sincerity of the actors who exclaim that the bowl has everything they want. The deep throated announcer comes on
We take mashed potatoes, we top that with crispy chicken bits, corn, pour gravy over that and then top the whole thing with cheese, it’s the colonials new crispy chicken mashed potato bowl.
Vomit! I can’t believe the colonial is selling vomit in a bowl. Oh well. I ran into a friend last night who might have a lead on a live work space and I researched a grant I can write for to maybe get some money to develop a space for site specific installations, i sure hope someone else hasn’t put designs on that warehouse. In the meantime before brooke leaves for her six week archaeology field school in new hampshire we are meeting with another catering and event planner. God I hope we get a place and date nailed down soon. I really want to get to the part of wedding planning where we sample the food and cake that will be at the wedding.

happy fodder's day

Today is father's day and i thought i should take this moment to honor my father. Here's to you dad, thank you for everything you truly are awesome. I should also add that this week we will be celebrating mother's day since my mom will be turning 60 on saturday. So Brooke returned from her short course in forensic anthropology at mercyhurst college last night and she will be here for a week before she goes off to an archaeology field school in New Hampshire. During this week we hope to secure a location for our wedding. On friday I was riding around the island with my parents and we saw this building





I am going to try and find out who owns this building and see if they would be open to having it used as a place for site specific art. I am pretty sure the town of sullivan's island owns it and that they don't use it very much,but I think it would be prefect as site for sculpture or installation. I am still working on my new website and as soon as I have the postcard for the santa fe show I will post it here. Today me and brooke are doing laundry and making lists of wedding related stuff for tomorrow. I hope we can get the rings, the location and the caterer figured out before she leaves, but our track record seems to say otherwise, since we have been trying to figure out locations since january. On thursday night I went out to cumberlands to see this local band a decent animal, who are really cool. Their music is kind of like lake trout mixed with some tom waits and really slow pink floyd with 3 part harmonies. While I was at the show I ran into all sorts of people I knew and including the amazing cary ann hearst

a little video of cary ann and the gun street girls in action(this is like one of a dozen bands she plays in)

On a side note brooke and I really want to have cary ann play at our wedding. So when I saw cary ann I asked her and she seemed open to the idea. As soon as we have a date for the wedding I will make sure to book her.

high tide in the lowcountry

It is hard to describe to outsiders but there are two factors that make life in the lowcountry a pleasure. One is the humidity. The air here is thick, I mean you can feel it when the breeze blows it has substance. When I was in california it was always the thickness of the smog, here our air is thick, but it is just thick with air. the second factor is high tide.

I have to admit I was always laughing at northern californians fear of water. whenever it would rain they would freak out concerned about flooding. Flooding is just a way of life here. Every month on the full moon tide the marsh and the oceans rise pushing floating docks to their limits and flooding neighborhood streets.

It is truly beautiful. So to celebrate the full moon I of course worked on some more residency applications and started some new work. It really does make a difference working in the salt air. Yesterday I built a platform for making rust prints then began a large three panel rust print.



I also began making some new work with these paper bags i have.

being near the ocean has effected my creativity because i find myself composing more music than I did when I was in san jose. On Monday I wrote a new song based on the rhythm of the swaying palm trees. I am still adjusting to the sounds here, where san jose provided the constant din of cars and mexican street peddlers, south carolina is giving me the white noise of the ocean and the clattering of the ceiling fan.

getting a little southern back in my system

Today we went on a southern culture blitz. we began our day with a visit to the sweetgrass festival. The sweetgrass festival is an entire festival devoted to the sweetgrass basket.

the sweetgrass basket was a traditional slave basket used in the fields for gathering various crops. Today the tradition of weaving sweetgrass baskets can be traced through generations back to africa.





I love these baskets and have been fascinated with them for a long time. Like the quilts of geez bend however the actual sweetgrass basket today is an extremely prized art object. the festival wasn't so much an educational or celebratory event as it was a collection of 20 or 30 different peddelers each with a slightly different spin on the tradition of basket weaving. To give you a sense of the value of the baskets the average basket is $900, with some as much as $3000, and smaller ones $100-$300. I have mixed feelings about this phenomon, on the one hand these are trmenedous displays of craft but on the other hand until the collectors showed up these weavers would never have signed their work with a sharpie. but I digress. Our next stop in bewteen looking at wedding locations was the charleston farmers market. at the farmers market I had my first barbecue sandwich last year and it was good, I even think my accent came back after i finished it.



the barbecue sandwich

After spending the rest of the day looking for wedding sites we returned to the island and walked to Poe's tavern, named for Edgar allen poe, who once lived here. Tomorrow brooke leaves for her class in pennsylvania and I am going to began setting up my studio.

leveling off

yesterday we managed to get the oil changed on the truck.

this proved much more complicated since everyone seems to be jacking the price of an oil change but eventually we found a place that was reasonable. We went and looked at a few places for wedding locations and took a couple more walks around the area. It is funny how just a few days in a new environment can fuel new ideas. Now that I am out of silicon valley I am beginning to think less and less about the internet and more and more about south carolina. It is funny how the environment here can envelop a person as quickly as the fast paced environment of san jose. It is true that the pace of life here in the lowcountry seems strangely and self consciously out of sync with the rest of the world.

Yesterday while we were sitting on a bench outside the oil change place a van full of people pulled up and asked us for directions to the beach. The exchange was incredibly revealing and the driver confessed she that she was afraid to drive over bridges. It made the routine exchange of directions seem a bit friendlier and more personal. We keep noticing that people are a little friendlier around here. The picture above will probably serve as the source for an installation I am planning later this year, It was too perfect when I happened upon this stretch of marsh it matched something I had been envisioning already.

starting to get settled

the soon to be brilliant rust print studio after three years in a windowless space, I finally have nothing but windows, screens actually

a few of our personal effects to keep us company

every time i visit my parents beach house i do these funny little interventions, now that i am living here, the interventions are going to be a little more frequent and elaborate

Yiddish porn(you need to read the text on the animals for this to seem funny

the zen mocha center piece

so we sold alot of our stuff on craigslist and our car to a friend, put the rest in storage, and only unpacked one bookshelf and some clothes for the summer. we are living in a beach house on Sullivan's island south carolina and we are going to try and simplify our life. I hope the change will help my work, what am I saying I know it will. After three years in a windowless industrial space it is nice to be working somewhere else. Yesterday we saw a beautiful thunderstorm, something you never see in california. we were really taken with it, the lightening was the kind that shoots across the sky from cloud to cloud. This morning we woke up and went for a walk on the beach. After the walk I began making designs and plans for the screened in utility room under the house, which will serve as my new rust printing room. I am really exciting about working in this space. It has been a few years since i worked outside. Next week I will try and go into to charleston and meet with people to see what is going on and try to reconnect with people. I have one more application to send off, and then my application binge will be over. I hope to locate some industrial space in north charleston, to do some fabrication and dirty work, but if I can't no big deal. today we are going to look at wedding locations, and try and start to make some decisions about when and what form our wedding will take.

we've landed, and I have a backblog of material

this turbine was somewhere in oklahoma, which is about the first time we saw clouds again

and the clouds

over stating the obvious, isn't that why they call them accidents, because people get hurt.

I now have internet access and I am going to catch my blog up to date. i have been keeping it offline and i hope it still makes sense.
June 1, 2007
So on Wednesday night we camped in red rock canyon state park, in Hinton oklahoma.

The park was nice enough, the campground was cool, until the evening. While we were trying to sleep the squirrels and raccoons came to life. We could actually hear them sniffing outside our tent all night.


Thursday morning on the way to little rock to see brooke’s grandparents, we stopped in Norman Oklahoma.


We went to norman to have breakfast and coffee with Jonathan Hils.
Hils is a professor of sculpture at the university of oklahoma where he has been since 2002. Before he went to U of O he was at the college of charleston which is where I first met him. It was nice visiting with him and he is staying very busy with his work and his teaching. It was funny to see him now since i first met him when he was right out of graduate school and he was very intense, like most of us right out of graduate school. Now he is a little less intense, but still an amazing artist and an inspiration to me and the many students who have been fortunate enough to work with him.
here is a shot from his studio


After breakfast we made tracks to little rock.
i saw this en route to little rock

One of the best moments of this trip so far was opening Brooke’s grandmother’s refrigerator and finding a tub of homemade pimento cheese spread. At that moment I knew there was a god, and that he must be southern. For more on my ongoing love affair with pimento cheese see my other cheesy blog entry. Today we are taking a day off from driving. And tomorrow we make tracks for columbia south carolina.


June 3rd
We made it into columbia about midnight last night. We have been reunited with our cat zero who has been staying with the nicholson’s for the last couple weeks. She seems less than excited to see us, although I don’t blame her. The last time we saw her we put her in a crate and put her on a plane to south carolina. Internet access continues to elude me so I have been keeping my blog offline and waiting for a chance to update it. We hope to get into charleston by Monday or Tuesday and then brooke leaves on Saturday for her class in pennsylvania. I hope to get settled into my new studio sometime by the middle of the month. I have a long list of things to work on and i should have the new website launched by the end of july. The road trip really afforded me time to think about my next couple of projects and exhibitions. Speaking of exhibitions I have a piece in a show in santa fe, that opens later this month. As soon as i get an internet connection I will upload the rest of the pictures from our trip to my flickr page.