pile-o-scrap to coffee table in 24 hours

the coffee table materials pre-assemblyin progress/design phase

post sanding and ready for assembly and finishing

the finished product features a custom mixed organic pigment top coated with all natural shellac

Brooke and i have been getting settled in our new apartment, which means making new furniture and stuff for our apartment. So i made this pile of old wood i found on the side of the road into our coffee table. The work has been good to get me back in the routine of working in the studio. That routine will be disrupted next week when I fly out for a campus visit for a job i am interviewing for. I am really excited about the opportunity to do the interview since it will force me to create a new powerpoint presentation of my work that will incorporate new work and ideas i did not have in my powerpoint the last time i gave a talk a couple of months ago. I also have to generate a detailed proposal for an installation I am trying to do for early 2009. On top of all this I have the usual deadlines and what not that I had happily postponed for the wedding.

While i was shaking the sawdust off of this giant rust print i have been working on forever i realized i really liked the motion and sound of the paper. the imagery on the print is a series of bifurcating coffee cups growing out of a series of lines, but I am still not satisfied with the image and I anticipate hanging it long way so it goes from floor to ceiling in a gallery space, hopefully in an upcoming show, or maybe i will just get impatient and host my own opening here in the studio.

got hitched then we got ditched

on sunday brooke and I got married in what can only be described as a perfect wedding. We of course have no other measure of the success except for the guests reaction (which has been gushing)and the permanent smiles on our face. I am putting a few unofficial audience taken pictures up but we are anxiously awaiting our official wedding photographs. My uncle andy also put up a weekends worth of pictures on his website, you can peep them here (link to andy brilliants wedding photos) we have spent this week setting up our new apartment, which is a combination of store bought, found , and homemade furniture and accessories. on wednesday while shopping for a couch, which we still haven't found, i backed a bit too much and ended up in the ditch.

the wedding is upon us

here are a handful of images from our final tasting at the caterer.
there was so much food we literally could not sample it all

that little puff on the right is a brie en croute, which is french for some good ass shit to spread on your crackers

this shot is actually after the tasting and notice how little of a dent we put in the food, I hope people come to this wedding hungry.

this is the cehf explaining to our coordinator and brooke exactly what we are about to gorge ourselves on

these are samples of the crepe flavors that will be available for guests to have made on site at the reception following the ceremony

our Ketubah(wedding contract) complete with typo, which was corrected on final printing

Well we have been so busy with working, moving and last minute wedding planning that I couldn't find a spare 5 minutes to blog, but yesterday gave me something good to talk about. Brooke and I are planning on having a relatively traditional jewish wedding. One of the major aspects behind a jewish wedding is the adherence to certain traditions and rituals. The ketubah, or marriage contract is a piece of paper signed and witnessed by the community and serves as authentication of the marriage. Since Brooke and I have tried to design and control as much of the wedding day and ceremony as possible we also planned on designing and writing our own ketubah. Typically a bride and groom will select a fill in the blank pre-made/pre-designed ketubah and simply give their information to the ketubah printer and presto. In today's world this means logging onto any number of ketubah printing websites, entering the bride and groom's names and presto in 2-7 business days you get your very own "personalized" ketubah. We decided it would be fun and meaningful to type and design our own ketubah. The only problem with this is that normal word processing programs don't support hebrew characters. So with the assistance of our rabbi we purchased melell a hebrew enabled word processor. We spent several hours with the rabbi and on our own hunting and pecking our way to the complete hebrew text, which is actually aramaic a slightly different form of hebrew. With the rabbi's assistance we checked and re-checked the hebrew and determined it to be error free. We then composed our english text and merged the two into our design. We dropped the file off to the printer feeling a great sense of accomplishment and anticipation for the wedding. No less then an hour later i get a call from the printer letting me know there is a typo in the english text. In our haste to get the hebrew correct we neglected to check the english. Fortunately for us the printer was able to catch the typo and today we will pick up our ketubah. Now that we are officially done with our jobs until after the wedding and wedding prep is out of the way, i suppose this marks the beginning of our wedding weekend as guests will arriving regularly over the next 24 hours.

old year out like a lion new year in like a blur

these are our wedding caek samples, we had a friend over to help us make the decision
so on the plate is a red velvet cake, a chocolate with german chocolate filling, a carrot cake and a blakc and white marble cake.

i have somehow found myself in the midst of wedding planning, moving, and studio work suddenly working full time for the halsey gallery at the college of charleston. Well more accurately working at the musc ashley river tower where the halsey gallery is installing the art. The work is painless enough and pretty stress free since i am not in charge of any of the details, I just get to hang art like some sort of multi armed monkey/octopus preparator. I am kind of enjoying the work as it keeps my mind off of everything else that is happening. That is one of my favorite things about hard work, whether i am working on my own stuff or someone else's stuff time seems to move at a different pace. Unlike preparator gigs in the past this one is moderately amusing because the curator is trying to cram art into every available space in the building. The work that was selected for the hospital is of a slightly higher quality than typical waiting room art. Somehow it is a week into the new year and i haven't even noticed the change, i guess when i have to sign and date something i will start to notice.