studio panorama

if you click on the image above you can get a pretty good view of the studio currently. I was shooting the panorama for a little booklet i was going to make to take with me to new york, but i have gotten more into the photo stitching software than i have gotten into the adobe indesign software i was using to design the booklet. i like getting up on a ladder like this and really stepping back from the work, sometimes i get tunnel vision because i am so caught up in the work and forget to look at the bigger picture.

studio ramblings and stir stick ordering

some frames i found braced up with c clamps

Somebody was throwing away all these perfectly good wooden frames. They are actually the frames used to brace acrylic vitrines that top off pedestals in sculpture displays( I get these from the various preparator jobs i have been doing around town). On the left behind them is a similar set of frames for bracing vitrines that have been turned into a spiral patterned sculpture. with these new ones i think i will be painting them a certain spectrum of colors related to the pigments i have been using in my drawings. Once they are in their final arrangement they should resemble some sort of 60's era art piece, far out! sometimes i am just amazed at the sheer amount of material out there in the world that has found it's way into my studio, and into my output.

So i keep working on my practice round of stir sticks, which are slowly becoming their own discreet piece. Now that i have a better understanding of the room i will be working in at the dam stuhltrager gallery I am pretty sure i will be building a structure that moves out from a central tube and wends it's way around the existing walls of the space. Although I still have not seen the space, I do have diagrams and have had a few explanatory conversations with the gallery owner and now have a better understanding of the space i will be working in. The primary focus of the installation though as always will be the transformative power of labor, namely mine over the course of 14 days. I am confident, as with past work that the process will dictate the end result of the piece. With only four weeks until i fly up, I have to be careful to focus my nervous energy on something other than the impending installation. So far it is working, I have been focused on other work around the studio, namely the never ending task of "getting organized". I used to be really hard on myself for not keeping my studio more organized and jumping around from work station to work station and piece to piece, leaving different piles of in progress work along the way. Now, though I understand that cleaning up the studio becomes a source of new work, as i get side tracked organizing the various detritus of other projects, and playing with the materials that are part of the never ending renovation of the studio, i discover new directions and material usage that i would not normally have found. When things settle i plan to tackle the parts of the mdf wall that got water damaged, but i keep getting distracted when i realize how cool the bulging shapes caused by the water damage in the mdf wall actually are.

Below the stir stick weaving is probably closer to the shape i will begin with in new york, but really won't know until i start. Brooke(the blurry red streak in the background) came to the studio so we could re-finish a couple bertoia chairs that i found.

The process of ordering stir sticks has been interesting so far. Of all the art processes i utilize consumer techniques and bargain hunting has become indispensable to my work. I am tired of trying to get different price quotes and may just go with a supplier that is reliable and sells the sticks i am familiar with so i don't have to do something like open an account with a whole seller or send a certified check to Canada, which scares me a bit. I am also anxious about getting to new york, starting the piece and then running out of materials, but then i remember new york is a big city and i should have no problem liberating additional stir sticks for use in the installation.

practice makes perfect

it has been a little while since i actually wove some stir sticks. since i am committed to a couple different woven installations over the next year and more might come up, i figured i should get back in to it. i thought instead of weaving them into existing architecture i would go for free standing piece. Honestly i needed to time myself again and see how many sticks i can weave in an hour so i can better estimate how many to order for the upcoming show in new york. I know i have about 12 days there, with ten hours a day average work time, and i am weaving about 1000 sticks an hour now, the piece below reprents about 2hours, with a few collapses along the way but now that the basic structure is made i can really sail through my time trials. so based on these numbers i should order around 120,000 sticks. that would make the piece bigger than the sumter piece. this doesn't make sense since i had more time in sumter, but i guess because i had to spend so much time weaving into the railings and going up and down on the lift that i didn't keep the kind of consistent pace i should be able to in the gallery. i think i will order 100,000 sticks though because it is a nice round number and if i get through all of them and still feel like using more i can always hit one of the several hundred starbucks in the new york area.




i like this structure and i will keep following it through to a logical conclusion.

the bird, brancusi and the artist studio

I am always looking for that overlap between the art world, the real world, the design world, and my world. Although brancussi is not a direct influence on me and my work i am aware enough of the history of art and contemporary sculpture to understand his influence and where it overlaps my production and work. I also see the re-emergence of his influence on contemporary design. I have pondered before the fact that art has begun to look more like design and design more like art. I think this trend might be the result of the re-evaluation of both disciplines undergoing scrutiny from within the ranks. I have seen an over abundace of imagery in the design world making use of the artist hand or rougher marks, and have seen fine artists move away from the presence of the artist mark moving towards a pseudo professionalism and high design aesthetic. I think for the artworld this is a reaction against the faux naive tendencies that swept the artworld a few years back. In the design world i think it is an absorption of the the faux naives work, which is a good thing. Design could stand to soften the edges. as the regular world gets over designed designers will experience the same disgust with slickness that artists have started to feel. For brancusi's part he stands as a good marker of design meeting art meets the early artist studio blog.

brancusi self portrait in his studio

embodied in his art were readily absorbed into the fabric of contemporary home design and products that his work no longer looks like art but rather like home goods, computer mouses, trash cans , light fixtures and anything else for me i know brancsusi more as the subject of an iconic photograph of the artist in his studio, than as the maker of a work of art. his art has always been easy to miss in museums , since it is usually cordoned off by ropes and can't compete with buildings it is housed in. the principalsmichael graves has designed for target.
new thought
although i doubt handwriting and the handwritten word will lose their immediacy as a graphic element, i have noticed that scrawl and handwriting have emerged as design elements. I guess this is the ultimate custom font. this reminds me, i am still working on making a font based on my handwriting since time and again i have been told i have "unique" handwriting(unique is code for sloppy and illegible). But back to why bracusi matters to my practice. every time i feel the tendency to set up my tripod and set the timer on my camera to document myself at work in the studio, it is not just an act of narcissism but is a connection to bracusi's legacy and the artist who creates and tracks his development within his own private world.

this is a sequence of photos showing what i did with an old railing i found on the side of the road recently
first i cut off the supports

then i cut the square stock steel into smaller bits
then i made a rough drawing of what i wanted the "basket " to look like. I think making the break from strictly process work to image based work provides a balance for me and helps me complete the circle between my drawings prints and works on paper and my sculpture and installations
For brancusi, the image of birds in flight gave inspiration to much of his output, and lately i have seen the bird image re-occur in contemporary design and packaging. i always ponder why this is and i think it might be part of a larger movement back towards nature derived imagery and away from design or purely computer based imagery for designers.

the quest for stir sticks

i have become an expert on wooden stir sticks. it started as an innocent exploration and blossomed into a full blown knowledge base of the tensile stregnth and construction uses of stir sticks. I know that in order to complete my installations i need the 7" rounded end wooden coffee stirrers, the birch ones, made in china. From various stages of trial and error i know the flat end and the 5.5 inch round end wont work, i know popsicle sticks are too rigid and too short. Knowing exactly what i need and knowing i need 10 or more cases(100,000 sticks and up) for my next installation in september, means i have to call manufacturers and distributors and research the cheapest and easiest way to get multiple cases from point A to me here at point B or to point C where i intend to make my installations. Most of the times the distributors i have been calling for quotes have just asked out of curiousity what i am up to with that many stir sticks at once. when i explain, they seem to understand, I guess as much as any one understands why someone would need 100,000 stir sticks.

george carlin vs. bruce nauman

it is no secret that i enjoy contemplting the orignal context works of art were presented in historically in order to better understand them, but it is unusual that the death of a comedian would prompt me to re-evaluate the context of another artist. George Carlin, was a wordsmith through and through, a punster with a penchant for opining his views on everything from drugs and suicide to the way popular prhases sound. His hippy dippy persona was in conflict with the way he used words. Carlin was truly erudite in his approach but down to earth enough to reach everyone.

a classic george carlin bit playing with words and their meanings


Bruce Nauman is also an artist of george carlin's generation who drew ideas from the sounds of words and the way we say them. Like George Carlin he based his work on his own direct observations of the artistic practice.like george carlin, bruce nauman's early youthful experiementation paved the way for the rest of his career. In this piece nauman has actors conjugate a series of action verbs in monotone repetitive phrases. in the same way that carlins rythmic recitation of the 7 words you can't say on tv creates content, nauman's script for his actors creates the piece
a nauman piece playing with words

thinking about george carlin's passing and nauman's develpoment i realized that wordl play and reevaluation of meaning were actually generational during the sixties and seventies. I think in a less profound way the new wordsmithing of compulsive text messengers is also changing the way we perceive language like carlin and nauman did. I think a good contemporary representation of both carlin and nauman's influence is this video by julia bradshaw

to see bradshaw's complete explanation go to her website juliabradshaw.com

for my part i have been working at my new job at the museum,
here are a few shots of my desk

these are some of the office supplies i found strewn about

and this is a monument to september 11th utilizing some of the other office supplies i found laying around

trying to play music and keep my studio in order. after the big rainstorms several of my walls got soaked with water and now a small growth of mold is on them. i will either have to pull them out completely or cut out and replace the moldy sections. I went into the studio recently thinking i would work on some new stuff but instead i made a shelving system for my drums

so i could store them in the apartment. I have been working on some new ideas for objects but got too focused on searching for new imagery. I feel pretty good that in the coming months i will resolve the water bottle works and create a cohesive suite of work out of the large bottle, the small cast bottles on the shelves and some works on paper. once i resolve them i will set them all up as one big installation in the studio and photograph them together.
this is a picture of the storefront i was going to renovate and turn into the brilliant gallery.
I had even made this photshop image of what the gallery sign might have looked like with the blinking red arrow(if you can't tell the text says "brilliant gallery").

The building owner was talking to me and i told him i needed to think about it and he rented it to some one else, but the other day i drove by and the for rent sign was still in the window, so who knows maybe i will still get it. I had all sorts of ideas and designs and i even had a nice mission statement worked up for the gallery. so the next time a little store front comes up for rent i will not hesitate to jump on it.

when it rains it pours

this is a view of the street in front of our apartment after a short summer cloud burst. Typically multiple areas of the city flood after a good rain. People who are native charlestonians are used to these happenings, but new arrivals are panicked at the thought of being a little wet. Some people even stupidly drive their cars through this and then are surprised when the car stops working. I think it is still one of the charming things about living in a less than modern southern city, that we pause to respect mother nature.in the above picture the women on the porch of the store is actually stuck temporarily until the waves recede(the store is in the front of the building we live in). this is not global warming this is just charleston, a beautiful city that is mostly at or below sea level.

this is the view from the gallery prep area at the gibbes museum of art where i am now working.

this is my desk at work, it's weird that i have a desk, but oh well. the one thing about working in an office that is universal is how similar things are to the tv show the office.not to sound like pitch man for that show, which i did not find super funny the first couple of times i watched, but the show grew on me and seems to represent the truth of the world in a way that seinfeld captured life in the mid-90's . To extend this line of thinking if seinfeld, and shows like it reflected our comic desires in the nineties, hanging out in our friends apartments, coffee shops, and diners, then the office reflects our millenial desires to be hyper productive and vigilent in our pursuit of normalcy in the post-september 11th global world we live in.

this is the rest of the prep area where i will spend a lot of time matting and framing historic prints. you can see the racks of frames, awaiting art. i can't show you any other parts of the museum since that would require clearances and what not, but this is the part that i will see the most.

about of good news and opportunity opening up all at once. in my life right now i have multiple examples, even though my studio flooded a bit in the recent rains damaging some drawings and works on paper i have been working on, and i keep getting a steady stream of rejection letters from various things i applied for, i do have a couple of i also like the expression "when it rains it pours" because it can describe an overwhelmingsignificant occurrences. the first positive storm on the horizon is the peoples art center, which as an ad hoc organization of artists, gallerists, developers , and other interested parties trying to develop a vision for a unified arts center for charleston's arts community. one of the exciting ideas being tossed around is making a temporary model art center, but nothing is set in stone and a panel is being held next week to discuss ideas of what is possible. the second thing, which i don't want to jinx but may help by talking about is my hopes of finding a viable space downtown. Tomorrow i am looking at a storefront space downtown, that has me really excited about the possibility of opening my own gallery. but as with everything i am keeping my expectations low so that i won't be disappointed if it does not turn out.

looking forward to new experiences and still working on old ones

i started working on this "electric xylophone". it consists of sequentially smaller pieces of square stock steel mounted on a resonator box made up of birch panel scraps left over from the blackjack tables i built for ooh events. I mounted a contact mic inside of it and it is kind of like a chime/amplified woodblock depending where i hit it. I plan to polish the steel a little bit just to help and then i will figure out how to mount it so i can add it to my drum set.

on monday i start working at the gibbes museum of art. this should be good for me since it will mean i will divide my time between a museum gallery setting and my studio. I also got confirmation last week that i am going to do an installation at the dam stuhltrager gallery in brooklyn in semptember. i am really excited and nervous about the show, but as long as i have enough stir sticks waiting when i get there i should be able to build something cool in the ten days i have to make the installation. on top of this brooke and i have begun the painful process of looking for a new apartment. one of the unique things about living in charleston used to be that you got to rent an apartment in an older building for around 500 a month. by older i mean at least 200 years or more. but lately the rents have sky rocketed to such an exorbitant amount that it is harder and harder to find a unique living situation on the peninsula. but brooke and i will persist. we have been in our unusual apartment for six months and it seems to have reached it's useful limit. our upstairs neighbors are noisy at 2 in the morning, the restaurant/coffee shop we share a wall with emits an unusual smell which leeches through our wall(but so does their wireless signal so we can forgive the smell) and nothing is quite level in the apartment(on a positive note all the aforementioned issues also comprise the character and charm that make us want to stay downtown). we were just looking forward to the idea of starting over since we kind of took this apartment in desperation when we got it and we still haven't completely unpacked from when we moved back from california. but the cold reality of the bloated charleston rental market is sinking in and we are determined to make this apartment more livable and hospitable if we can't find a suitable replacement. i guess i should document all the modifications and things we made for the apartment and any more that we will be making if we decide to stay in it.

these are just a couple of pics from a walk brooke and i took last week at the caw caw interpretive center. the park is actually an old rice plantation and was the site of a massive slave rebellion.
today it is just a scenic walk in the woods, no more rice crop but they do have a nice set of trails and for only 1$ you can walk them, so we will definitely go back.

here is a shot of the blackjack tables i was making for oohevents. i need to get some finished shots of them. it was kind of nice for a little bit to be working on them, but once i finished i couldn't wait to get back to work on my own art.

so i have now determined that i will never finish working with this thermoplastic cast stuff. I still haven't solved the problem of stability. I keep building larger and more precarious constructions with it and making them so big that they collapse under their own weight. after years of messing with it I finally have to do something different. but even if i just keep building stuff out of it that collapses it keeps my dexterity up and it is kind of fun building stuff with it knowing it will eventually collapse.

this is the new beginning of the thermoplastic sculpture i think this time it will sit on this heavier footing and move up in this column like formation filled with coffee cups.

on a whim i painted the bifurcating line sculpture purple and i think i like it.

below is an example of pure serendipity. i have been manufacturing these cast water bottles and low and behold one day i found this old watch display case behind a store. it turns out that my painted water bottle sculptures fit perfectly on the shelves.

there is a recessed area in the top of the display case that can accommodate a light fixture which will create some really nice down lighting on the bottles and help to pick up the pearlescent white i mixed into all of the colors. i hope i can eventually display this case with the related drawings and steel water bottle sculpture as some sort of homage to the consumer fetish of the water bottle. I was thinking i would make more coffee cups and related works to go with it and then make a show and an artist book called coffee and a water please:a meditation on portable consumer fetish objects.

my computer before it died

my computer before it died
Originally uploaded by jonathan_brilliant

so this is my 2004 ibook g4, before the hard drive completely failed. like a cavalier idiot i hadn't been backing up all my data and figured it would be fine to just keep clamping it to the table to by pass the short in the logic board instead that short shorted out the hard drive and now i have to send the drive off to get the data back. such is life. if i had acted sooner i could have synced the machine to an external hardrive before it died and recovered all the data myself. i am slowly trying to get back up to full operating capacity, but so far i can't get my new computer to connect remotely to my website, and i seem to have lost all the powerpoints i made of my work, and other such stuff. who knew lost data could give a person that empty feeling in the pit of their stomach and cause them to lose sleep. among the data lost were drafts of writings, images, and photoshop collages in progress.

my computer died 5 days ago and i am still without but not too much longer i hope

my computer crashed. i have been busy making stuff for other people and i miss writing here. i feel weird blogging without pictures. one of the blogging rules i gave myself, was never post without an image. i don't know why but something about an image on my blog feels more true to my experience of the world since i am primarily a visual person. so here are some pictures(borrowed from my flickr page) of some things i have observed in my landscape

i am left to question the proliferation of these Orange line elements around town. I wonder why this cable has to be so long and obvious on every building that it is installed on

sometimes when i see this stuff i see it as the most beautiful sculptural intervention possible

i guess i should explain what happened. my computer crashed, and not just an ordinary run of the mill easily recoverable software crash. the motors that turn the internal hard drive actually quite being able to turn, so no data can be recovered unless i have the hard drive rebuilt(which costs as much as a new computer, and besides i am praying to the data gods that i backed up the essentials). i thought i would be more upset by the loss of my computer, but day 5 of having no computer of my own, after 4.5 years of constant use has not been so bad. i am not saying i am giving up having a computer just that i am learning to make do(between mobile web on my cell phone and checking email once a day on an old dell desktop at my parents house i am getting by). at the moment though i can't update my website, i can't work with my digital images and i can't finish the proposals i was working on, but i will be okay. Mostly i am okay because i got two really great pieces of news last week, so the total loss of my digital iLife has been less devastating. as soon as i get my old computer restored or my new one arrives i will resume blogging and discussing what i have been doing, but for some reason i feel less comfortable writing on a computer that is not mine, or maybe writing on one that is fixed in place after the total freedom to write anywhere afforded by the laptop.

an organ, some signs, a carnival booth, a southern home facade, and some thoughts on life in the city of charleston

so i found the guts of an organ on the side of the road and i totally plan to hack into it and make noise with it, or failing that it will become raw material for a future sculpture installation project
and as luck would have it i found this very appropriate sign, just in case i forget what to call the place i work in

and i found all the magnetic signs from a cold stone ice cream store and put them up on my metal wall. I figure on those painfully hot days i will look at the ice cream menu and think cool thoughts.

i also tinkered around with the line piece some more, once it is finished i will clean it up and paint it and then it will really pop.

last week i gave a lot of my building energy to the out of hand events company. I have been making sets and props for them like this southern home facade built to house a 9'x12' rear projection screen. I was given a very basic drawing and idea to work from. in the end the illusion was carried through.

i like this kind of work because creating a simulated environment really interests me.

my other bit of magic was making a "carnival" booth out of two sheets of 1/4" plywood. I hacked this together in a couple hours and then plastered it with printouts of coney island posters to give it that authentic carnie vibe

I have been thinking alot about how charleston functions as a city and it's relationship to the idea of a simulation. I have always seen charleston as the perfect example of the simulacrum that baudriallard speaks of. Charleston is more the image of a city than an actual city. Because the city is designed to cater to tourist, college students and young professionals the city landscape reflects that. The city fosters a locust approach to living. Swarm in, go out to clubs, restaurants and disposable non-essential retail, go home and think nothing of it. Because Charleston maintains the appearance of a city everyone assumes it is a city. But it functions more as a version of one than as an actual city. and speaking of simulations of things, i am still working on my army of water bottles and as soon as i finish with those i will post them here.