Catch Up

Wow, it has been months since I've written! Words have not been there for me in the midst of considering a transition that would have moved me across the country. I also went for over a month without creating any art (not even a drawing). The hiatus was a frustrating thing, but in the end, breaks can be fruitful. One is always thinking even when one is not making work.

In the last couple weeks, I finally made a spate of pieces. What I am working on:

- See-through cave like mini-installations -- drawing in acrylic boxes -- playing with spatial and historic timelines.
- A series of digitally degraded photographs verging on painting.

Some events coming up:

October 3 (evening) is the opening of Inspiration in Andersonville, and the exhibition at the Swedish American Musuem. Several artists, including me, created pieces inspired by items in the museum's collection. I picked two items: a well-aged sled that looked used and cared for and two delicate Dahl horse earrings that were personally connected to one individual (a very interesting fellow who built his own working viking ship). The simultaneous personal and iconic nature of the items drew me to them.

The museum hosts a panel discussion with the artists on October 5. We'll talk about our inspirations.

And:

I stopped by Ossia Fine Arts Space to check out the Five Artists Project and talk about the exhibition with Amy Rudberg, who organized the show and is writing a blog as part of exhibition. I recommend the stopping by the show. September 12 is 2nd Fridays at the building, and a performance will take place in the gallery. You can read my thoughts about the show on Amy's blog installation: http://happyfaceschicago.blogspot.com/

Looking Around

It can be a struggle to watch what becomes "in" ... sometimes it's so out of one's aesthetic, one cringes. Other times, it's a pale version of what could be one's aesthetic, one groans. And once in a while, it strikes an exact chord with one's aesthetic, one remembers.

There's little point in giving examples of the first two, but for me, the chord was struck the first time I saw Cai Guo-Qiang's gunpowder drawings at the Hirshorn . I stared at them for a long time ... when I turned around, my friends already had moved on to another room, impatient with me. The gunpowder drawings were perfectly on the line between abstraction and representation. I saw Cai-Gio-Qiang's recent installation at the Whitney ... unfortunately, it was overload, which lessened the impact of both the individual drawings and the stuffed animal natural history museum reminiscent installations.

I revisited (online) Art 21's interview with Richard Tuttle. I was surprised, and refreshed, to realize that his thinking on drawing, particularly about the border between drawing and sculpture and the notion that the 2D plane is more real than 3D, paralleled my thought process independent of reading his views.

Updated Images On myartspace.com and artreview.com

Another one of my pieces, What Comes of This, was selected for the front page viewer on myartspace.

I've loaded new images there, and also to my artreview.com page.

Image Projection and Subtleness

I was reminded again last night how different a projection looks from the image on a computer.

I attended an artist salon sponsored by the Chicago Artist Coalition at Hyde Park Art Center The difference between the color of the images as seen on the monitor and the color as seen on the projection was image-altering for much of the artwork. The projected images were significantly fainter. The detailed line work of one artist almost completely dissappeared in the projection.

This matters even if one is not a projection based artist because juries often project the images as they jury them. Images need to hold up to projection, yet another difficulty for works that play on subtle shifts that don't easily carry over, if at all, into jpegs in the first place. It's a problem, too, for color relationship work, as color calibration of the systems used by any given jury is not in the artist's hand. Images also need to hold up as small jpegs on a website screen. Often, one can't email larger files, and the dpi that shows online is low.

One wonders if visual subtleness, at least in the lowest range, will disappear from art entirely as we proceed in our digital age. Meanwhile, tools have long helped us "see" what the naked eye cannot perceive, for example infrared ranges or the inner workings of the brain through MRI and CATscans, and will continue to do so.

Alchemy and Irony

The power of art lies in alchemy, I think. Not some new age turn lead into gold nonsense or magical chemical notion or magic. But rather, the simple idea that transformation is possible, the taking of one thing or set of things and the making of another out of it. Art materializes this, reflects it, sometimes engenders it.

Part of the problem of irony in art is that, after the irony, there often is nothing there. Hitting a dull note, or even the perfect tone that rapidly loses sound. Often enough, the irony itself escapes the viewer: the work then is soundless. I'm tired of irony.

Article On Women, Art and Gender

An interesting article by Jeannie Shubitz, Woman, Art and Gender: A History:

"An old New Yorker cartoon depicts a group of prehistoric women painting images on the wall of a cave. One of the women suddenly pauses in her work and asks: “Does it strike anyone as weird that none of the great painters have ever been men?” (Heller, 1987) This, of course is a parody of the long-held assumption that all prehistoric art was created by men. Why should we assume this, when we don’t even know why this art was created, much less by whom? It is because for many centuries, we have been taught that all great art was the product of men, and that art created by women was merely an attempt to copy the masters that came before."

Click the title above to read the rest. Good points about some faulty assumptions and the difficulty female artists face having artistic identity that is not gender linked.

Overload ... In A Good Way

I was at the Swedish American Museum here in Chicago...

Task at hand ... to select a piece from their permanent collection ...

The Swedish American Museum Center maintains a permanent collection of history, art and artifacts dating back to the mass immigration of Swedes to the Chicago area nearly 200 years ago.

... to inspire a piece of artwork for an exhibition at the Museum in October as part of Chicago Artists' Month

Myself and 9 other artists will be making pieces inspired by the Museum's collection.

So, tonight, I had the opportunity to meet the other artists, the Museum director, some of the jurors, and Jason from the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce.

And, the opportunity to look through the collection to choose my piece. That's the overload ... so much was inspiring. So many different shapes, artifacts, and story elements.

It was hard to pick a place to start, and even after I had selected my inspiration -- I selected a wooden sled and two small horse shaped figurines (white with delicate blue markings, with one horse standing and the other fallen over in the display case, feet in the air) -- this horse I will have to research and think about as I think it's quite symbolic of the Swedish American immigration experience, an icon of sorts -- many other items sparked interest. A 1955 Nursing School graduating class photo, with all the graduates wearing old fashioned (not so old fashioned at the time, I'm sure) nurse's caps, plus old medical implements. Many tools that looked very worked with, expressing the labor - and care, really -- that undoubtedly was made of them. Very different looking furniture design -- a chair with a triangular seat, for example -- all holding up well to time. A Swedish bread making circle that was very abstract on the wall -- a circle within a circle, with the diameter of the larger circle stopped by the circumference of the circle. Wonderful embroidered samplers that a Museum board member was kind enough to translate. A wedding cake making device that had a crank handle and looked a bit like a wooden blimp form -- oval, bulbous.

Some days, and some places, creative neurons fire, and this was one of them.