New drawings online

I just added my new collage/drawings to my website...you can see them a bit closer here. Size is 11" x 11" each. Mixed media on paper mounted on board (gouache, pencil, graph paper, ink, joint compound and wood putty). Despite the variety of materials, I usually just call them drawings.

Above is a picture of 12 of them together because I like the way they look when displayed in a grid, but they are individual works. I finished them earlier this month. They came out of the smaller studies that I made in March. These 12 drawings are square format, but I also made some rectangular ones that I didn't post on my website. Here's two of them, both sized 10" x 12" (these are NOT from the group of 12 above):

The funny thing is that these drawings have very little to do with most of the new sculptures I have planned, although my intentions when I began working on them was to develop ideas for new projects. Instead they became a self-contained project, but there is a loose relationship to a future series of sculptures which will use the form of tenement buildings to explore ideas of emergency preparedness.

Oh yeah, all of this stuff is for sale (and reasonably priced), so if you like the drawings, contribute to my "build the sculptures" fund. I even accept PayPal. Just sayin'.

Open Studio pictures

I've received a few requests for pictures from the Open Studio, but I personally didn't take any. Luis Fonseca, one of the other artists, posted a bunch of snapshots on his website here and here.

Here's one of the pictures of my studio:
photo credit: Luis Fonseca

Thanks for visiting!

Thanks to everyone who came out this past weekend and visited my studio. Overall, I'd say it was a success. This is my first studio space that is not associated with school or a spare room in my apartment, and having so many people come to visit and show interest in my work is encouraging.

I met a lot of people this weekend and had a lot of interesting and insightful conversations. I've gained some new perspectives on some of my past projects which are worth further exploration. This weekend really fueled my imagination, and I have a handful of new projects in mind on which I will begin work this summer.

I still have a lot to learn about some of the practical parts of being an artist. I met so many people this weekend, but through the chaotic environment, I didn't really think to have a sign-in book so that I can remember who visited and invite people to future exhibitions.

So, this may be a bit too late, but if you were at my studio this weekend (or even if you weren't there, but maybe you read this blog), please send me a message and sign up for my mailing list. I won't share your contact info and I only send out email invitations a few times a year...no spam!

MUTO by BLU

Check out this very impressive wall-painted animation, MUTO by Blu. The invisible art of graffiti is the performance, the action of making the painting. Normally all you see is the end result. This animation is all about the action, however it's much more complex than simply documenting a process. In this case the process of painting is what's important, perhaps more so than the final painting residue leftover from the completed animation.

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Reminder: This weekend I'm having my Open Studio, so please stop by if you're free and in the NY area.

Mapping NYC by Photograph

Currently on view at the New York Public Library: Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City. The exhibition consists of six New York based artists who have each put together a photographic project with his/her own take on surveying the city.

Bettina Johae (a friend from grad school) contributed Borough Edges, NYC, a multi-faceted project consisting of over 2400 photographs documenting the boundaries of each of New York's five boroughs. I've had the opportunity to see this project in various forms as Bettina developed it over the past few years and this current manifestation is the best so far. The installation consists of a hand drawn wall map alongside five synchronized digital slide shows (one for each borough), and a wall-mounted book of framed prints for each borough, pairing selected prints with their respective locations on the line map.

In addition, there is a comprehensive website mapping all of the photographs, and Bettina is leading various bicycle tours along sections of each borough's edges (yesterday was The Bronx tour). The Internet component and the bike tours are integral in a way, because they span the full spectrum of the project. Bettina made her photographs while cycling around the city and as a result the project is in some ways limited to her own personal real-life experience of the city's edges. The only way to really get that is to travel the map and see it for yourself. On the other hand, Bettina accumulated a large amount of visual data which couldn't possibly be fully represented or absorbed in a gallery setting. In that sense, the project has really become about organizing and disseminating this information in a meaningful and useful way, and the Internet is particularly well suited to that end.
http://digital.nypl.org/boroughedges/

All photographs from Borough Edges, NYC, by Bettina Johae, selected because they are of the Bronx & Manhattan borders surrounding my neighborhood.

Second post today, still no original content from me, but this cartoon by Rex Babin is too good to not pass along:

Politics as usual or take the exit?
(...found the cartoon on Streetsblog)

Obama vs. Clinton

With the race for a Democrat presidential nominee narrowing, as well as the Indiana and North Carolina primaries today, I thought it would be a good idea to recap the differences between Obama and Clinton, especially when they appear to be very similar on paper. But I'm not going to do that because Ran Prieur did just that on his blog yesterday.

I think he really gets it right, so I'm just going to re-post some of what he wrote. I would just link to his post, but he doesn't leave everything online permanently and there is no direct link. Scroll down to his May 5 entry for the full text and great links to related articles. I've re-posted the meat of it here:

<snip - from Ran's blog>

Clinton is a relentless fighter, but she's not good at working with people, she's not good at adapting, her campaign has shown she's not a good manager, and she's not even good at winning her fights. Her Senate career has been balancing symbolic gestures on social issues with full-on neoconservatism on foreign policy. We are entering a depression, and when the strikes and riots start, Clinton's first instinct will not be to work with strikers and rioters, but fight them (us). She is owned by lobbyists and will take her actions from the interests of lobbyists and take her words from pollsters and focus groups. And worst of all, while she is doing all this, everyone will think of her as a pushy liberal, and we'll get a huge right wing backlash in 2012, just like we got in 2000 after the first Clinton presidency.

Barack Obama is a good listener, an excellent manager, and has done more in two years in the Senate than Clinton has done in six. He has spoken again and again about bottom-up change and transparency, and he is largely owned by the 1.5 million individual donors who have financed his campaign. When the depression hits, Obama is far more likely than Clinton to work with the uppity rabble. He is setting himself up as a tool that we can use to change the system (and we have to, for his presidency to be effective). On foreign policy, he is less likely to attack Iran, and more likely to make peace with the rest of the world in an age where continuing to fight would be catastrophic.

</snip>