In progress collaborative drawing between Joshua and I. At this point we each have had two turns with it. He has it now.

Sketch 03/29/2010

Sketch 03/29/2010

Interior front left corner of cardboard structure 03/29/2010

Hoop dreams.

Joshua's Haircut

Sketch 03/22/2010

Joshua has come to visit this week.

Stuffing balloons 03/22/2010

Doll hospital circa 1926. The doctors pictured are Charles F. and Ada E. Turner. This image is from the Durham Museum's Camp Fire Girls exhibition.

Sketch 03/19/2010

The sun has come out!

I like to stand on this bridge and watch the trains. The bridge undulates as the trains pass underneath.





Here I am 03/17/2010


Mel Chin Artist Lecture: What Mattered THEN, Matters NOW: Part II Projects compelled by Crisis and Dreams Re-framed

Mel Chin is coming to the Bemis tomorrow. He will be giving an artist talk on Friday and leading a community workshop on Saturday. Chin is coming in conjunction with his Fundred Dollar Bill project and Operation Paydirt.

"The Fundred Dollar Bill Project is raising nationwide awareness of the environmental threat of lead poisoning by collecting the funds necessary for a model remediation effort in New Orleans. Students and community members across the country are currently creating Fundred Dollar Bills -- original, hand-drawn interpretations of $100 bills. Completed Fundred artworks are sent to regional Collection Centers -- that are securely holding the valuable drawings. The project will collect at least 3 million Fundreds, or the equivalent of $300 million, the estimated cost of making the soil in New Orleans lead-safe."

Omaha also has one of the largest residential Superfund sites in the country for lead contamination.

Superfund is the federal government's program to clean up the nation's uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.

It has been many days since the sun has come out here in Omaha. I think I am losing my mind a tad bit.


I didn't mean to look so serious, I was concerned about the camera timer.


A birthday party happened last night, I didn't go. However, I did hear that a pig was roasted. As it was being carried into the house where the party was happening it was dropped on the front steps and exploded. Pig flesh went everywhere and the people dressed as animals were grabbing at the meat and eating it with their hands. The theme of the party was petting zoo. The birthday boy was a pig he has turned 21 today. There were cages and fire eaters. A bare chested man covered in pig grease caught on fire (he is okay, by the by). There was hay in the house, the house did not catch on fire.

I instead stayed in the studio: inside my fort. I spent the night cutting up pictures watching Russel Brand, Eddie Izzard, and French and Saunders on youtube.

Maybe I like my experiences mediated?
Where is the danger? Where is the fun?
I was using and e-xacto knife, on edge?

Finishing the outside of the structure 03/06/2010


Starting to move in 03/08/2010


Yesterday Heather took Jia-Jen, Jessie, and myself to the Kruger Collection at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The collection is of miniature furniture that belonged to the late Eloise Kruger. We received a tour from Dianna L Hemsath the curator of the collection. Dianna took us into the room that part of the collection is stored (the other storage site is off campus). The room was filled with cabinets containing furniture and tiny home goods. The cabinets were the ones used by Kruger in her home to store and display.

Eloise Kruger was an accountant who started collecting miniature furniture as a hobby in the late 1930's. It soon became a serious endeavor. As an aside, Kruger had a rough childhood and from a purely speculative place in the car ride home we talked about how interesting it was that she collected miniature domestic objects and would set up her dolls in scenarios and would write little stories about them.

Dianna was saying Eloise Kruger's collection was meticulously documented in regards to provenance probably because she was an accountant. The paper work in regards to the collection filled five large filling boxes. Dianna was saying that when Kruger's collection was donated to the school that also included was her collection of over 800 books covering topics of architecture, historical costume, furniture, construction, and textiles.

Here is a link to an audio slide show about Bill Robertson the person who was commissioned to make many of the pieces in Kruger's collection.

ps. Burns Maxey of Project Elements Easthampton wrote a very nice piece about my work this week that can be found here.

Under the train bridge, most of this has now melted.


Side of the Bemis Center that my studio is on.


Missing brick from a building's facade 02/26/2010


sketch 03/01/2010


Progress 03/03/2010

Tonight, Thursday, March 4th Jia-Jen Lin and I will be presenting our work for the Bemis Center's First Thursday Art Talk. If you happen to be in Omaha the presentations start at 7 PM. The Bemis is located at 12th street and Leavenworth street.

I am coming close to finishing the outside structure of my building (fort/nest). I am excited to start working on the inside.

The Cave - Sean Ward's A Pre-Conscious Space is an installation/performance venue located on the Bemis Center's campus. I just got to go in last week for the first time for a music show. I really love the space. I want to say it is comfortable like sitting in warm water. If you follow the link you can see pictures of it during construction and the finished space.

superstition
1. An irrational belief that an object, action, or circumstance not logically related to a course of events influences its outcome.

protect
–verb (used with object)
1.to defend or guard from attack, invasion, loss, annoyance, insult, etc.; cover or shield from injury or danger.
–verb (used without object)
4.to provide, or be capable of providing, protection: a floor wax that protects as well as shines.

(I looked these up on dictionary.com, I didn't bring my dictionary with me)

I have been watching Guy Madden's Careful at least twice a week for the past month. Sometimes I watch it back to back with the commentary on the second time through. My favorite scene right now is when Grigorss spills the candle wax on Count Knotkers' dead mother's face. It makes me so uncomfortable but I also think it is so funny.

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.