day two at dam stuhltrager

this is how i spent today, minus a pb&j break, and a cheeseburger with my aunt and uncle break.







until tomorrow

day one at dam stuhltrager

i arrived today at the dam stuhltrager gallery and this is what i saw waiting for me.
i was a little bit out of it since i got up so early to catch my 620 am flight, but after some coffee and a bite to eat i was able to start working.
i was immediately drawn to this old heating duct which is currently not in use and have started using it as a building off point for the piece. I will start again tomorrow and put in a full day and try and bring the form down and around at the same time. the lighting in the room is sort of nice because of the string halogen track lights in there.


this is bruiser, bruiser is a surly 17 year old cat, who removed the turkey from my turkey sandwich when i turned my back, trust me it won't happen again. apparently bruiser came with the building.

I know what will make me less nervous about new york

working on something else for a while
in addition to practicing my stir stick weaving i took a break and hopped back to work on the welded steel basket made with the scrap steel left over from that railing i found awhile ago. I still plan on changing this piece a bit and I hope to frame and display the drawing along with it since they developed in tandem.

Although I had planned on abandoning my attempts at making a booklet to take with me to new york, i did manage to get to kinkos with brooke so we could print out some black and white proofs, which actually look great and later today i hope to get some color ones run off.
my booklet review area on the coffee table at home. Nothing helps booklet editing like a nice bowl of special k with red berries.

The great thing about the way i designed it is that once i get the files and book layout finished i can have them printed anywhere and then i can just fold and bind them myself. they look exactky how i pictured them, sort of like a compliment to the website. Speaking of the website, I totally plan to update it with some of the new work once i get through the next couple of months with the Dam stuhltrager show in september and the SC State show in October. I had a great idea for a poster I want to print for the SC State show so i will get cracking on that as soon as i get back from new york. I still have so much i need to do before i leave on saturday but I am sure that if i forget something it won't be that hard to find it once i get there.

10 days until i leave for brooklyn, and some anxious ramblings

this is a new patterning system i am trying out on the rust prints. I was sitting somewhere the other day and started drawing some lines on a post it note and then i realized i wanted to try and recreate that pattern in rust so here goes. I will be making it in sections working my way across the paper as i go to complete the full stacked pattern.

this is the direction that my time trial stir stick piece has taken. I sort of like the continued folidng in of the work and will eventually make it meet as a big doubled over mass.

so i think i forgot to write it out to make it real, but i will be going to orangeburg south carolina in October from the 20th-25th to make a piece for Scotty Peek at SC State University. Well I won't be making it for him but he is the one who asked me to do it and i am totally stoked. Since i will be driving up for that show, I will probabbly take some already woven sections, or possibly even the piece seen here, and then weave for that whole week to attach the piece to a column they have in the middle of their gallery. I will focus on this more after new york, but knowing that i have the next thing set up after new york does alleviate some of the anxiety of the dam stuhltrager show.

I always get this nervous when i am ten days out from starting an installation. It may sound funny but I always feel my most anxious and insecure before an exhibition. It is probably obvious that i work in the way that i do so I can create work that the viewer will experience in almost the exact same way that i experience the making of the work. I tend to favor process oriented work because the method of making the work is evident in the end result, unlike more alchemical processes of art making that "magically" convert materials or chemicals into works. Given the opportunity it always makes sense to me to build the work in situ and work right up until the opening of the show because the work presented will be unique and new existing only in that space. I give myself such specific parameters mostly to combat my own anxieties and feelings of inadequecy as an artist. I know that if the artwork is created with a set amount and type of materials, in this case 100,000 7" rounded end birch wood stir sticks, and utilizes a specific process, again weaving with tension and no adhesive, I can focus entirely on the work itself and leave everything else alone. I had been trying in vain to make a little promo booklet, but as is always the case with me i lose interest in making promo materials and would rather use my time to create more work than to create more work for myself about the work i have already done.

heading in new driections, that are same as the old directions

so i keep shaping and weaving my "test pattern". I am ultimately trying to make this into a donut sort of shape. after fleshing out the mid section I will weave until the openings meet. I doubt i will get to finish this before i go off to new york, because i am working on a couple other new things.

it is hard to see from this photo but i sort of keep rotating this one around the central cylinder to work on it. I think i can make this it's own discreet sculpture once i am finished with it, and maybe then i will put it somewhere, like a coffee shop or something. In addition to this piece i have been developing some new patterns for the rust prints based on these striated lines that keep occurring in my drawings. I will post those when i feel more comfortable with the direction they are taking

The more i make work the more work i want to make. This seems like a logical approach, but at times it feels counter intuitive. For me i like the sense that everything i do feeds everything else i do. I like the fact that everything i bring into the studio or gallery space (physical or mental) is part of a big cross pollination process. While working at the museum, certain activities trigger different ideas about what can be done with space. Since the main gallery of the museum has such a tremendous ceiling height, somewhere around the 30 foot mark, the echo is remarkable. This makes me think a great deal about what could be accomplished with simple audio cues used to create an installation. This thought led me to another thought.(sometimes i just think my life is unfolding like the story of jerry and the dog, from edward albee's two man play the zoo story) I find the life i am leading today to be very poetic. I am not a big fan of poetry per se, mostly because i don't understand any of it other the works of james thurber, edgar allen poe, and shel silverstein, but i know poetry when i hear it. And to describe the physical and mental path of my life today is a bit like poetry. First, the commute to my job at the gibbes museum takes me by the hospital i was born in. This seems trivial to some but to me i know every time i pass this building it is where i was born. it sort of gives a closed loop to my life if you will, defying the notion that you can never go home again. Second, that job at the gibbes, gives another closed loop moment. When people ask me if there is some art that really resonates with me to the core, that i can point to as truly life changing, I immediately talk about my memory of the Roy lichtenstein sculpture show at the gibbes museum of art in 1986.

an image from the lichtenstein sculpture show in london in 2005 at gagosian

When I saw this show i was young impressionable, and under the belief that museums were dusty boring places with lots of boring paintings and boring experiences. Since I was too young to understand any sort of boundary between art and life, when i saw the Lichtenstein sculptures I just thought someone had brought the comic books to life. I was too young to appreciate the fact that he had filtered art history through the lens of comic books. That show filled me with an absolute sense of awe that I still look for in life today and strive for to a lesser extent in my own installations. With the Dam Stuhltrager installation rapidly approaching, I am hoping I can create an installation which inspires the same sense of awe and wonder I felt with the Lichtenstein. For me as the maker of the work, I experience a genuine sense of surprise as to where the process of weaving the stir sticks takes me. So as i get inside the less than 20 day till go time for the show i will continue to pace myself and focus on the task at hand in preparation for the building of the piece in brooklyn, but that is not to say i won't get even more nervous and anxious as the start of the installation approaches. I will try my best to just stay focused on the work at hand.