Upcoming: The Artist Project

It's been a while since I posted. Busy getting ready for The Artist Project. Even tonight, I am varnishing pieces, which is taking a fair bit of time. I am excited about how the work has come out, both because it feels consistent in theme and because it is visually interesting. The pieces I am showing are scavenged memories, predominantly made from materials I have scavenged, especially from my parent's home as we packed up the house following my mother's recent passing. It's a combination of refined and unrefined.

A couple things happened as the show neared. One, I've had this piece I have been working on mentally for a while with styrofoam heads I got at a garage say for a couple bucks and a newspaper shroud. The heads have really turned out, in a way that makes it somehow wrong to cover them, and the newspaper shroud itself is an interesting sculpture. I'll try it in different arrangements when I set up at the show, but my sense is the heads will not be shrouded. Two, I've let loose my prehistoric art references, for the most part, for these pieces, using instead my own interpretation of modern animals (ibex from Serengeti/Ngorogoro Crater and eland) and chairs. There's carryover in method and depiction but not literal animals from the caves. Query if it will still seem literal to some... even though the work has never really been about being literal (as opposed to carrying representational elements into abstractions) but rather, at best, symbolic.

Preview Apr. 24, 6 to 9, exhibition Apr. 25-28, Merchandise Mart, Chicago. Booth 8-3123.