This is the cover to the catalog from the group show Release the River I was in last summer. The show was curated by Raphy Griswold. I just found out today that the catalog is now available at Printed Matter. Participating artists, whose work is reproduced in this handbound catalog, include George Myers, Bill Nace, Phinehas Roy, Joshua Vrysen, Jess Goddard, Dan Cashman, Jeff Hartford, Angela Zammarelli, Lauren Pakradooni, and Crystal Regan.





I'm sorry not to brag but Joshua (my partner) also has two books at Printed Matter. Wheel of Doom / We Love Doom. No. 3 : How We Melt and Wheel of Doom / We Love Doom. Nos. 4 and 5 : Grast Ghost
Pictured above is the cover of Wheel of Doom / We Love Doom. No. 3 : How We Melt.

I am sorry for the tiny pictures, this was the best I could do at this time.

Studio as of 02/22/2010

Sketch 02/22/2010

Here I am.

Yesterday I stuffed a small batch of balloons with lentils, wool, plastic doll wigs, rope, and pony beads. This is the start of a costume for one of the beings in the story I am working on. The brick structure above is the place that this being will inhabit. I don't know if you noticed but the bricks were around the base of the cardboard structure in images from the last post. I decided that these where two different structures and they house the two characters I am working with separately.

"If I was a pine I would ooze tar and shine in the moonlight moths would all swarm but they'd do me no harm and it's only for you I'd be shining. but I am no pine I'm a man in my prime and I'm pining" I have been listening to "Coral and Tar" by Alasdair Roberts over and over today. It is on the mix tape I received from Joshua this week. The song can be found on The Wyrd Meme

I have noticed that I haven't posted any pictures of the Bemis Center. I will try to remember to take pictures of spots in the building that I frequent for later in the week.

My studio/living space on 2/20/2010


Sketch 2/20/2010


Gift from Joshua


Start of collaborative drawing between Joshua and myself. Joshua began it now I am working on it.

My studio/living space on 2/16/2010

Brite Ideas

Durham Museum.

Covered Wagon

1949 Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation

Italians

Grate under former ticket booth.

Birds

Exercise


Today I finished with the collage portion of 9 drawings. I have posted images of them here. They are portraits of characters I have been thinking about and some of them are mutations of beings that I have been working with.

I may very well ruin them in the next layer of working.

Desire and gifts.

I am starting to work on a structure and costume (top image 2/10/2010). Hoarder fortification.

Friday afternoon I visited the Durham Museum. The museum is housed in the former Union Station. I received a brief history lesson on Omaha. I didn't know about the Omaha Stockyards and was surprised by the picture of the Stock Exchange building set in the middle of hundreds of livestock pens. The building is now condos. When I walked into the room that housed information on the Stockyards a sensor switched on a recording of a cow mooing, I was startled.

There is a diorama of the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International. On the wall there is a sample of how the buildings were constructed to look like white marble. The structures where made of wood slats with three layers of plaster and fiber spread over them.

One of my favorite things in the museum was a 3-D black light mural of the Italian section of the city. It was housed in between a trolley car and the wall. When I entered the trolley car and had a seat it looked like I was riding through a neighborhood. The mural was made by Bill Shook.

At the end of the month a new exhibition opens called "Are We There Yet?". There will be dioramas and 30 pedal cars: I will go.


ps.Wuthering Heights

Sketch 2/10/10

Sketch as of 2/10/10

Washing Mylar (Biaxially-oriented polyethylene terephthalate [boPET]) chip bags.

a sketch as of 2/7/10


a sketch as of 2/8/10


I have been trying to substitute images of objects for hoarding actual objects in my studio (I can tell you it is only working so-so). This weekend I decided to lay out about a quarter of what I have cut out onto pieces of paper.

A rule that I have for myself is that I am not to purchase the magazines. I have to find them or they have to be given to me. This is to, hopefully, diversify what I have in my stock of images. But I will admit that while going through the magazines I tend to gravitate towards the candy colored glossy "girly" shapes and colors.... and to the images of food.

I am a vegetarian but I am so attracted to the images of animal flesh in magazines it is unreal. I don't desire to eat it as much as sit down and stare at it. It is a combination of horror and desire. I always think of Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy and how it made me so mad the first time I saw it but also how I desired to be naked and have a chicken slapped against my body.

The problem that I am finding with my collection of cut-outs is that I am being a bit fussy about them. I am a little afraid to use them and worried that I might run out of them or not use them to their fullest extent. As a kid I would cut images out of catalogs and newspapers and just staple them right into the wall, my room was covered from floor to ceiling and on the ceiling with cut-outs (my parents let me because I was afraid of the oak walls with their knots that looked like fierce faces). I think that I need to approach my current collection in a similar way otherwise they are just going to keep being tucked away in envelopes and eventually yellow and crumble....we'll see.

On magazine images Isa Newby Gagarin has a collaborative piece up at the Rochester Art Center. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a collaboration with students from the Rochester Art Center on collecting pictures and appropriating them into an artistic book/installation. The show is up until April 11th, 2010 in the Atrium Gallery.

Blanket I am sleeping with.


My studio/living space on 2.2.10


My studio/living space on 2.4.10


Book on Lucas Samaras. I never really read anything about him until now. Feel like this was a mistake on my part and should have read about him a while ago.


Tonight was the Bemis Center's ArtTalk Lecture. Callyann Casteel and Ben Kinsley presented their work.

Callyann creates these incredible costumes/sculptures that are amalgamations of pattern and shape. They are distortions of the figure and many are bound or have layered objects placed upon them. These beings are very large, around 8ft tall. She doesn't have a website at this time so the selection of images at the link I provided is limited in scope compared to the images she showed tonight.

She began and ended her talk with images of the landscape near Eugene Oregon. She and her fiance just moved to Omaha from the Eugene area. She talked about while she was in Oregon she didn't produce a lot of work but instead spent a lot of time hiking and being out in the landscape. She showed pictures that she had taken of the Oregon landscape.

Ben's work is very exciting to me because I am too shy to ever orchestrate anything like it. I find his work funny but also thoughtful. Tonight he talked about three projects: Skagaströnd Yee-Haw!, A Sea-some Medley, and Street with a View

Street with a View was a collaboration with Robin Hewlett. The project injects situations into Google Street View images of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, PA. I recommend going to the website and looking at the google street view.