Practically a Wall

Hello blog readers!

2011-06-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

Thank you for visiting practicallyawall! You may notice that it has been a while since I've updated with any new work. That is largely because I have been more focused, lately, on projects that bear my real name, and have been doing less stealthy guerrilla work. Nonetheless, I hope you'll poke around and check out some of the work I've put up here, particularly from my shopdropping series Shell Game and my (librarydropping ?) series Post-it Books.

Quite a Cozy

2010-12-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

My own guerilla art output has been a bit meager lately, and so I figured I'd share a link to this piece that I enjoyed reading about recently:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/27/news/economy/crocheted_bull/

I feel like I've seen or heard about guerrilla knitting with surprising frequency recently, but this piece, by New York based artist, Olek, is by far the most visually and critically interesting and impressive. In brief: she knitted a cozy for the Wall Street bull:

It sounds like the piece didn't survive very long before park's caretaker unceremoniously removed it. It's a pity - I'd like to think that work with this much obvious care and craftsmanship, even if unauthorized, would give some pause to those charged with destroying it.

Too Googly

2010-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have to alter this alteration before returning. Here's the skirt from the outside:

And here's a little peek at the underskirt:

Googly eyes! Here's the full view with the skirt pinned up to show the googly eyes affixed to the underskirt with gel medium:

I had been concerned initially that the gel medium wouldn't hold the eyes on well, but it turns out that it holds them quite well... perhaps too well. The problem that I didn't anticipate is the noise that the googly eyes make. They all rattle when you move the skirt, which obviously won't work for returning.

So now I've got to figure out a remedy for that. I could try to slit the eyes and insert some adhesive so that the black parts stay still, but that would probably look messy, and ruin the fun of googly eyes. My first move will be to see if I can remove the eyes, maybe by soaking the underskirt and gel medium, in hopes that it will loose it's hold, then go back and paint something else in their places - possibly stationary eyes, or something else of similar size and shape.

Ahhh... That's Much Better

2010-10-28T22:07:00.000-07:00

The bad news is, I've been terrible about keeping up a respectable pace of posting here. The good news is, it is not for lack of making art - I've actually been working on a couple of cool projects lately that I'd love to share. But the bad news is, I did them under other nomenclature, and so will not be writing about them in this forum.

But the good news is, I recently undertook this 'weekend project' of painting my dresser, got a bit more carried away with it than expected, and now it is more painting than dresser:

Shell Game: Gap Skirt with Feather Tuft

2010-09-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy relocating lately, and haven't been keeping up with my shopdropping or blogging as I would like, but finally my first non-Manhattan Shell Game iteration has been returned to a Gap in my new hood. For my first west coast Shell Game I added a tuft of colorful feathers to the underside of a pocket on this sober work-a-day number:

Here's a scintillating little peek up the skirt:

And now a shot with the outer layer of skirt and the pocket pinned up, but with the underskirt still hanging normally:

And hey - why not include a close-up?

Feathers!

Further Ferris

2010-08-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I went to a reading by Joshua Ferris, after which I awkwardly gave him (further description here) a scan of the Post-it Book that I had done in response to his novel Then we Came to the End (further description here).

Remember that? My expectation of getting any response had long ago dropped to nothing...
But I actually just heard back from him. I had included my email address with the scan I gave him, and I just received a very nice note from him, politely thanking me for coming to his reading and giving him the scan, and saying a few nice things about the piece. Oddly enough, the fact that his response came eight months after I met him, makes me all the more impressed that he actually took the time to look the project over and write me a note!

Abandoned Coast, Abandoned Project?

2010-08-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

I have quit the east coast in favor of the west, and in doing so, have left my serial post-it story, which I'd been placing on post-its in books from the Brooklyn Public Library, hanging in the middle of its grandmother/granddaughter cross-country road trip. I decided to move so quickly, that I did not even get a chance to do the installment in Specimen Days, the next book that I had planned to use as a base, leaving this note a lie:

So now my "To be continued" is left hanging, presumably forever. I could pick up the story in a new library book, here on the west coast, and keep adding the installments to my blog until its finished, which would give the piece a sort of completion. After all, the likelihood that anyone ever actually found a segment of the story and followed it from one book to another, much less that anyone found the first segment of the story and succeeded in following each "chapter" from one book to the next, through four books, seems incredibly unlikely. But somehow, even though any real audience for the piece was always likeliest to be found online, now that I know that no one with be able to follow the story through the actual physical books, the impetus to finish it is gone. I'm not sure why my interest is so bound up with whether someone will experience the piece as it was "meant" to be experienced, rather than viewing the the documentation of that piece. And isn't it rather strange to be caught up in the loss of an audience of one?

Or maybe I'm just making excuses for writers block?

Old Navy Cropped Jeans: Fun with Size Labels

2010-07-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

I was walking the fashion district, looking for zippers, when I came across a trimmings shop with stacks of little boxes of these size labels:

I knew immediately that they would inspire all kinds of Shell Game fun. In the future, I may paint or draw on them or in other ways alter them, but for my first utilization I've sewn them, as is, into this pair of cropped jeans from Old Navy.

That photo is of the jeans turned right-side-out, after I altered them. I sewed directly through the fabric, but because I used a dark thread and did small stitches, my additions were nearly invisible from outside. Here is what they look like inside-out:

To me, the scattering of size tags works as an abstract composition, but also brings to mind a representation of people of various sizes grouping themselves, and in that way takes on an almost narrative dimenstion. Here's a closer shot:

The line at Old Navy was very long when I went to do the return, which meant that I had plenty of time to work myself into a nervous state by imagining being caught. I spent a while watching the people around me, trying to perfect a "normal" way of standing in line. But when I got to the front the clerk was so busy that quite literally said only two words to me, and the return ended up being one of the quickest and smoothest yet.

Message in a Bottle Project

2010-07-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

I recently met the instigator of Message in a Bottle Project. She, and the occasional collaborator, make small collages, paintings, and drawings which are then left in various public or semi-public locations to be found by whomever happens to chance upon them. She leaves contact information on the back, and encourages the finders to get in touch and let her know when and where they encountered her artistic dispersions. As she describes it on her blog:

"Our intent is seated in release, discovery, fun, exploration, stories, and connections between strangers. We like to think of MiaBs as movable, three-dimensional graffiti objects. "

Speaking of her blog, I stole this image off of it. It is one of my favorites of the MiaB pieces, although there is certainly no dearth of lovely samples:

The way that the cloud-form's colors echo the colors of the room, and how all of these elements inform the figure with his slumped far-away posture is really arresting and poetic.

Here are a few more examples of the aesthetic:

The project shares the playful art-in-unexpected-places ethos of my Shell Game project, but the two take very different paths when it comes to follow-up. While MiaB encourages contact and explanation, Shell Game works hard to preserve anonymity and mystery. Although I don't want to leave contact info in my work, I think the move works well for MiaB. I like keeping my clothing alterations difficult to explain, but I think that the MiaB project is served by an awareness that when one has found a "Message", they have found a discrete part of a more intricate and expansive whole. But maybe Shell Game would be served by that as well?

Top Five in Five

2010-07-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

After going to see Miranda July's 11 Heavy Things Installation currently showing in Union Square, I thought to myself, "That was nice, but it wouldn't quite rank among the top five art exhibits I've seen in NYC in the last five years." Which of course inspired me to reflect upon what the top five art works/exhibits that I've seen in NYC in the last five years would actually be. Here they are, ranked in what I feel to be their order at the moment.

5) Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum: Mueck employs the mechanisms of movie special effects production to make incredibly life-like figurative sculptures. Though intensely impressive from a technical angle, what really drew me into Mueck's work was how he played with scale to make me experience my own figure differently. A huge sculpture of a woman lying in bed, for example, brought back vividly the feeling of being a child crawling into bed with my parents, simply because of how it's scale related to my own.

Ron Mueck (Australian, b. 1958). In Bed, 2005. Mixed media, 63 3/4 x 255 7/8 x 155 1/2 in. (161.9 x 649.9 x 395 cm). Private Collection

(Photo from BrooklynMuseum.org)

4) David Byrne's Playing the Building, presented by Creative Time: Byrne's building-as-musical-instrument was smartly conceived, a great way to experience the battery maritime building, and fun to play/watch.

3) David Hockney at Pace Wildenstein: Hockney may have come to prominence in southern California, but East Yorkshire sure seems to agree with him. His large landscapes were lively and gorgeous in person, in a way that just can't be captured by a website.

2) Marina Abromovic's The Artist is Present at MoMA: Not only was it thrilling to have a chance to participate in an Abromovic piece, but the retrospective itself really fleshed out (sorry, couldn't help myself) my understanding of Abromovic's work. I appreciated the chance to see others performing her earlier works, although I know that that aspect was actually detrimental for some.

1) Antony Gormley's Blind Light at Sean Kelly Galery: The only piece on this list that I went to go see multiple times, Blind Light offered a simple gesture, an interactive room-sized glass box filled with dense white-lit fog, that created a complex and indelible experience - exploring the human experience of vision and space - as well as an aesthetically beautiful object.

(Photo from oobject.com)
Now, this list may well deserve a place in the ranking of the top five most self-indulgent posts I've ever written, but still, if any of those works show up in your neck of the woods, check them out...

Shell Game: Green Shorts from Express

2010-06-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

I finally returned the Express shorts to which I had added text. I actually went by the store, but then chickened out a couple of times before I finally did the return. Express is the one store that has previously caught me; the clerk noticed a pocket I had elongated mid-return, while searching for the tag to scan the item back into their system. That was quite a while back, and at a different Express location, but nonetheless, it has made me have a kind of superstitious nervousness about doing Shell Game there. This return went fine, though. I had purposely chosen a particularly stealthy alteration, in order to lessen my panic as much as possible. As I posted previously, I added text to the underside of a pocket. Here's a shot of the shorts turned inside-out, with the pocket pinned up:

And here's a detail shot of the text:

As per a blog-solicited suggestion, I decided to use Lorem Ipsum (the standard place-holder text used by type-setters, printers and graphic designers) for the piece. After completing the first pocket I felt like it might look too much like a purposeful design element - like perhaps Express just decided to spice up the pockets by using a text-y print on part of them - so I also added more Lorem Ipsum to the underside of one of the button-flaps on one of the back pockets. The orange on green looks a little more obviously hand-wrought and out of place than the black on white text.

After all that stalling, the return went quite easily. The clerk didn't even give the shorts the customary cursory once-over before taking them back.

Key to the City: Part One?

2010-06-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'd heard rumors about Paul Ramirez Jonas' Key to the City - excited murmurs from other artists - before I read any of the press about the piece. The idea - public art piece/scavenger hunt/award ceremony hybrid - is a fertile one. Here is how Creative Time, who sponsors the piece, describes it on its website:
"One to one, one at a time, all of the time, thousands of keys will be bestowed by thousands of people on thousands of citizens for thousands of reasons that deserve to be recognized. Keys to cities are traditionally given by a mayor to a hero or dignitary, symbolizing that they can have free entrance to the city. This new Key to the City belongs to us, and is awarded among ourselves. And with this new key, we gain an opportunity to step back and reflect on common space in the city. For not only does the key open up specific sites, but it can also make us aware that the city is a series of spaces that are locked or unlocked."

What this boils down to is that if you go to Times Square with a partner and perform a little ceremony, you can get a key that opens a variety of locks with a variety of results, and a little passport-like booklet showing where to find these locks.

Key to the City kiosk in Times Square (Photo from ArtObserved)

I went to get my key the week after the piece opened. I didn't have any friends available at the time that I wanted to go, so I decided I would just head to Times Square, and draft a stranger to participate with me if necessary. I didn't end up having to work even that hard. Upon asking a volunteer if she knew of anyone else in need of a partner, she matched me up with a woman who was already partway through the line. Score!

Flora, my recently acquired partner, was very personable, and we passed the forty-five minutes or so that it took to make it through the line by chatting. She ran in-house catering for an advertising agency, and had read about Key to the City in the New York Post. She wasn't a big follower of contemporary art, but had a friend who was, and so had recently been to the Whitney Biennial. We compared notes, and talked of the city in general. It was a nice venue for getting to know a stranger.

When we got to the front of the line we read the ceremony script, exchanged keys, signed the register, and said our goodbyes. So far, the piece was living up to my expectations: it created a reason to go somewhere that I wouldn't normally venture (Times Square), and a new and interesting social situation.

The actual deployment of the key, however, has been less successful. It took a couple of weeks before I made it to the first lock. Many of the locks are located places that involve time constraints. The one at Gracie Mansion is only available on Wednesdays, and I ended up in that part of town on Sunday. I was near the site at Cabinet Magazine on a date it was open, but too late in the day. My time and location finally aligned in DUMBO, where I went to the site in a locker at Gleason's Gym.

When I arrived at the Gym, I told the receptionist that I was there for the Key to the City. She asked if I wanted to look around for the locker, or have her tell me where it was. I looked uncomfortably at the array of large men boxing intently throughout the space, and asked her to just tell me where it was. She pointed me to the opposite corner of the room, and I made my way past boxing bags and rings and people ignoring me. The locker unlocked to reveal boxing gloves and other gym accouterments, along with a box full of a bunch of copies of a small magazine related to the sport. Next to me a few trainers were looking at pictures on a computer and chatting. I pondered what they must think of a person making a pilgrimage to their gym unlock this space. I made a half-hearted gesture of touching a few of the objects in the locker and then left quickly. I was disappointed that the locker contained exactly what one would expect it to contain. The appeal of the locked door is that there could be anything behind it. And anything surprising would be of interest. But my visit to Gleason's did not feel like an award or an adventure, just like being a tourist in a place that is not an attraction.

I'm still optimistic that some of the lock sites that operate differently may be more engaging to me. For example, the key is supposed to allow you to turn on and off a lamp-post in Bryant Park, which sounds fun, and perhaps some of the boxes that are in more artistic locations will have more artistic contents. If I manage to visit any more sites, I'll 'part two' this baby.

Hey Beautiful

2010-06-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

I've just about finished my smiling people painting, which I've taken to calling Hey Beautiful. I may go back and do a few touch ups here and there, but for the most part, I feel done with it. Here are some process shots as well as the final one, the lowest on the page being the most recent:

Time Lapse: Step-By-Step Painting Construction

2010-06-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post process shots of a few of my older paintings that I thoroughly documented while in progress, and since this last week has mostly been activity not worth reporting, it seems as good a time as any. I always find it interesting to see how paintings actually develop - the way that color, layering and composition change over time. Here is how I constructed my painting, The Party-goers:

Since my paintings are often inspired by a narative situation or moment, I almost always have all composition and imagery in mind when I start a piece. Colors, textures, and details may vary, but the arrangement of shapes stays the same throughout. Because of this, I basically end up making huge coloring books for myself - a process which is, as far as I can tell, somewhat unusual, and perhaps more constricting than it ought to be, but it is what feels natural to me.

Grrrrrr

2010-06-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

Jessica's big head is giving me problems. After many hours of work on it this weekend, and several attempts at retouching, I finally went back in and scrubbed it out to start anew. I think that the biggest issue is, well, how big it is. Because Jessica sits a couple feet in front of the other people in my source photos, she is by far the largest figure. But as true as the perspective may be, it looks strange when painted. This is partly because I chose to paint the people on the couch, where most of the sitters are located, approximately life size. Jessica, in the foreground, needs therefore to be larger than life size, and so ends up looking like a stray figure from a mural or billboard instead of a cohesive part of the composition. On my next attempt, I'll have to figure out a better balance between the suggestion of perspective and what fits in with the rest of the painting.

Here are a couple of process shots to give you an idea of how things were going before I got entangled in scale issues. My first layer of color:

And the first few flesh tones applied:

Further Workshopping Some Green Shorts

2010-05-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

In my last post I asked for ideas of what sort of text to add to the under-pocket of the Shell Game garment on which I am currently working. I quite liked Jon's suggestion to use Lorem Ipsum (the standard place-holder text used by type-setters, printers and graphic designers), and so have gone ahead and done so. Here's a shot of the shorts turned inside out, with the pocket pinned up to reveal the added text.

Here's a close-up of the Lorem Ipsum:

I painted the text in my approximation of Times New Roman, and as a result I'm concerned that it may look too much like a purposeful design ellement. Since workshopping this piece worked so nicely earlier, I'm going to do so again. What do you think - does it look like the text is just a standard mass-produced design element, or would someone who found it know that it had been altered? If it looks too standard, what would you suggest to make it less so? Some ideas I have considered include adding color to part of or around the text, sewing small beads onto the text to dot some of the 'i's, and adding more Lorem Ipsum to other hidden pocket areas. But I would really appreciate it if you would just be creative for me again.

Looking for Ideas

2010-05-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

I've just purchased a new pair of shorts for Shell Game, which I've decided I want to alter by adding text. I've never added text to a garment before, and am not at all sure what it should say. The shorts are the type that have two overlapping pockets.

This picture shows them turned inside out, with the second (white) pocket pinned up so that you can see the space underneath. I intend to add the text to the underside of that white pocket. Anyone have any good ideas of what it should say?

A Lap Full of Happy

2010-05-20T12:12:00.000-07:00

My most recent clothing work may be the closest that the Shell Game part of my practice has come to the painting part. I purchased this dress from H&M:

And because I've been preoccupied lately with wanting to make images that look lovingly at their audience, I added this group of smilers to the underskirt:

Although populated by different people, this is a very similar set up to the large oil painting that I'm currently working on. In fact, the background from the source photo for this one (which I omitted on the underskirt), is the background that I'm using for the large work. Here's the above painting in context:

As I selected this dress, and then waited in a very long line, I imagined putting figures at the bottom of the underskirt, atop the hemline, but when actually purchasing I realized that that spot was where the electronic theft-prevention thing had been clipped. Assuming the clip would be re-attached after the piece was returned, here was yet another way that my alteration could potentially be found before returning to the racks. So I opted for lap placement instead, which also has a certain suggestiveness to it.

I hope that I placed it high enough to avoid detection. This painting is the most involved figurative intervention that I've done. What do you think - good direction to head in, or should I focus on more structural/sculptural additions?

Why Hello There, Gorgeous

2010-05-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

I've just finished the under-painting for my next large oil on paper painting. I've generated this composition differently than most. Instead of starting, as I usually do, by thinking of what image I would most want to paint, I began by thinking about what image I would most want to have on my wall. I decided that if I were being honest, the image that I would most want to encounter everyday would be one of a bunch of people looking at me as though they love me and are joyous to see me. So this is the feeling that I'm setting out to evoke with this group of smilers. I want the painting to gaze with love upon it's viewer.

Do you think I can manage to complete a painting that smiles affectionately at it's viewer without its veering too deeply into the creepy?

Maps and Cookies

2010-05-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

Wandering the internet, I came upon fakeisthenewreal.org, where artist and urban planner Neil Freeman has posted some lovely and intriguing mapping work. I think my favorites are Streets Centered, Street Gradient, Contextual Calendar, and Symbolic Alphabet, but really, it is difficult to choose.

And, and in line with my love of playful art projects in public space, Jane McGonigal is writing out the myth of sysiphus, in cookies, one word at a time, all over the world.

Serial in a Sequel: Chip Kidd Post-its

2010-05-12T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm about to return the fourth installment of my serial post-it note story to the library, nestled inside of Chip Kidd's The Learners.

I chose The Learners based simply on wanting to read it, but the fact that it features a recent college graduate dovetails nicely with the situation of my Maddie. The novel is a sequel to Kidd's first book The Cheese Monkeys, which means that both his story and mine start off in the midst of the tale.

You can read a pdf of my post-it note additions to Chip Kidd's The Learners here.

Grocery Store Gardening

2010-05-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'd been meaning, for quite some time, to participate in Planting Seeds, a shopdropping project of bay area artist Hang Nguyen. Nguyen makes whimsical mock-fruit-stickers, and sends them out upon request for others to leave on grocery store produce world-wide.

I received my stickers in the mail a little while back, and finally took them out for a jaunt while shopping at Fairway, in Brooklyn:

The produce section was pretty congested so I did not manage to use up all my stickers, but I made a dent:

Too literal? I may not have been considering placement all that carefully. It was fun, though, to participate in someone else's art project, and nice to do some shopdropping that did not make me as nervous as returning my altered clothing does...

Old Navy Skirt

2010-05-01T16:14:00.000-07:00

My latest return is a skirt from Old Navy:

I added a zipper to the underskirt:

Which unzips to reveal a little tuft of aberrant decoration: a crease of tulle, sequins and crystal:

Those views show the garment with the outer layer flipped up to reveal the underskirt. Here's the garment turned inside out, from which vantage the alteration is visible, but not terribly noticeable:

I was feeling nervous about this one, so I cashed in a favor to have someone else return it for me, but all went quite smoothly.

Done with Grandma

2010-04-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm not really done with Grandma, of course. She seems, in fact, to be a surprisingly persistent muse, and I am even currently working on one other Grandma-related piece: the serial post-it note story of grandma/granddaughter road-trip that I've been inserting into library books...

But I'm done with Grandma in Brush. Here's one last process shot:

I was pretty nervous after adding that bright minty green to the foreground. But now that the painting is complete, I think I'm happy with the final product:

This is the first painting in a long time on which I've used more brush than palette knife, and I was evidently having fun with the brush strokes. I was thinking about David Hockney's recent work a bit, and also a little about Laura Owens, although the end result is pretty dissimilar. Here are a few detail shots:

Grandma is Getting There

2010-04-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

I've picked up some steam on the painting that I've taken to calling Grandma in Brush. Here are the next batch of process shots:

Sadly, because I'd been doing so little painting recently, "picking up steam" really just means working on the piece for about three hours a day, every other day. Between the first image above, and the second one, I spent about five hours painting. The difference between the second image and the third one represents about six hours of painting.

Detail Shots

2010-04-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

Given popular demand - one comment - here are some close-up images of these paintings I did a little while back:

Bonus points if you can name the poem that was used for those text fragments.

Silly Guess Pants

2010-04-15T13:29:00.000-07:00

I chose these high-waisted cropped-leg harem-pants from Guess for my latest Shell Game alteration, based both on the strength of their over-all silliness, and the fact that they have pockets:

(I forgot that I've decided numerous previous times to stop buying black clothing for Shell Game, because the photos never turn out well.)

I also didn't know that Guess' return policy was so arcane. They will only refund cash with a check sent by mail. Since I'm trying to stay as under the retail radar as possible on this one, I think these pants are going to be added to the pile of clothing that I've altered and been unable to return - a pile I am saving to display alongside the documentary photographs, in a currently purely theoretical exhibition of this piece.

Here are the pants, after I altered them, turned inside out:

Pretty mundane, huh? At least until you look under the pocket:

I had intended to use full color for this, but I found that I quite liked how I could build the image on the black cloth, simply by adding layers and thicknesses of the white gesso. Here's a better look at the image:

It is my first truly figurative addition to an article of clothing. I decided that a reminder of silly, high-waisted pants of yesteryear, was an appropriate intrusion on this particular garment.

More Parasitic Story: Carson McCullers

2010-04-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

I've just finished the third segment of my book-jumping serial post-it project. I've added a little slice of Phyllis narrative to Carson McCullers' slim but lovely The Member of the Wedding:

Since McCullers' story is one of youth grappling with being young, I thought an addition of the elderly grappling with being old created a nice symmetry.

I'm still having difficulty with the task I assigned myself of creating a story that jumps from book to book, and so functions both in discrete clusters and also as an ongoing tale. I've become convinced that no one who finds one segment of the work will put in the effort, and have the luck required, to find the next segment. But part of me still likes that this is a theoretical possibility - that the piece could lead to a sort of cross-book scavenger hunt, however unlikely it is to actually unfold that way.

And meanwhile I'm becoming a Times-New-Roman-drawing machine.

Scans of my additions to Carson McCullers' book are available here, in three parts: one, two, three. It's been split up because I used a new scanning method, which resulted in a larger than usual file size.

Detour Posted: A Foray Into Public Art

2010-04-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past week or so on a bit of a painting detour - making a couple of pieces to illustrate a proposal I submitted in response for a call for works designed to be installed on a construction fence. The paintings are on wood panels, and draw heavily upon the materials endemic to plywood construction fences: pasted, torn and stapled posters and notices:

The bird silhouettes, for example, are made of little stapled fragments of torn magazine and newsprint.

This one used a lot of razorblading and sanding, as well as tearing and painting over the collaged elements:

The paintings were fun to make, although the submission itself called for such low quality photos, that I am concerned they won't come accross properly. But on the plus side, I've become adept at making wheat paste.

The Artist is Present: An Appropriatly Exhaustive Account of Staring at Marina Abromovic

2010-03-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

When I learned that Marina Abromovic was doing a performance piece at MoMA, I knew I had to go see it - to go participate if at all possible. Abromovic is one of the few performance artists whose work I've bothered to know and respect. When I first learned about her in art school, I was particularly arrested by this image, from Rhythm 0, a piece where she provided a table of various implements, then stood totally passive for six hours, allowing the audience to decorate, pose, and abuse her:

For her current piece at MoMA, Abromovic sits in a chair, and museum-goers take turns sitting across from her. The edict is to be silent and still, simply gazing at one another, until the museum-goer decides to leave and the next takes their place. Abromovic stays seated in this way from open to close, every day for months. Here's a link to where you can see a live feed of Marina Abromovic's performance, whenever MoMA is open.

I arrived on site (in the atrium on the second floor) at about 10:35AM - five minutes after MoMA opened. There was a line, but not a long one - about fifteen people. However, with a piece like this, length means very little. Rumors moved up and down the line of a previous visitor who had sat for seven hours. How quickly the line would advance was going to depended upon how long visitors sat, and how many people dropped out after it became clear that this was not a speedy endeavor.

Detailed account of the experience after the page break:

The first museum-goer to sit is a balding man in a striped shirt and argyle socks, who gives the impression of being an accountant. Abromovic herself wears a dark blue turtle-neck dress that pools on the floor below her, covering her entire body, except for her head and hands. Both Abromovic and the accountant sit with their feet apart, hands on their thighs, their gazes fixed and solemn. His posture is one of challenge, and I get the feeling that he will try to outlast her, but after about 20 minutes he relinquishes the chair. Though his face is still impassive as he leaves, it also seems somehow lit up, vivid.

While the sitters are switching, Abromovic bows her head and closes her eyes. The next man to face her wears a dark blue shirt, a dark blue sweater, and dark blue trousers - all a shade close to that of Abromovic's dress. after a couple of minutes of watching them, I am sure that he has planned this outfit to match Abromovic's, but I'm sure what the motive of this would be - to perfect the aesthetics of the moment? In hopes of recognition from Abromovic? After about fifteen to twenty minutes, the man in blue leaves.

(Image from MoMA.org)

The next man to sit down is wearing all black, with a punk flavor: tight black jeans, a black leather jacket and strange black leather boots with triangular flaps on the front that look like sails. When Abromovic raises her head and looks at him, she cracks a small but very definite smile, which lingers for a moment before her face resumes neutrality. To those waiting in line, the smile is very curious. Does she know this man? Is his punk look surprising after the smiles that came before? Or is she returning a smile from him that we can't see, from our station behind his back?

The line has started to talk amongst itself in little sections. There is a little chit-chat, but mostly we discuss the piece that we are waiting to enter. We search Abromovic's face. Is she really connecting with these people, or looking past them? She looks tired - how does she endure this? Now she's moved her hands from her lap to the side of her chair. What does this signify? We speculate about the museum-goers sitting before us. How long will they stay? Are they challenging her, communicating with her, simply watching her? Are there differences across gender lines? We make jokes about them. We discuss our own expectations, strategies, and background knowledge. And we watch the audience around the perimeter of the piece. Some sit watching, some sketch Abromovic, or take notes, some try to take pictures but get scolded by guards. What do the guards think of all this?

After about fifteen minutes the first punk-styled man is replaced by a second, this one with long hair, tattoos and chunky rings. When he sits it seems at first that there will be no smile, but then Abromovic's mouth lifts ever so slightly. He stays only five minutes. He is followed by one woman who sits for about five to ten minutes, then another. So far everyone seems to be in pairs. I had considered inviting a friend to join me, but am now glad I didn't. Not only is it unlikely that I would have brought someone who'd wait out the whole line with me, but it would change the piece itself for me. As it stands you have three layers of audience when you sit in the chair. The museum-goers who watch you from the edges of the atrium, as the unknown variable in this equation. People who watch the live feed online from afar. And Abromovic herself, who's gaze is the foundation of the piece. To add a friend who knows you - who has expectations of you and commentary and an agenda of their own, is to add a whole other layer of audience, one I was glad I didn't have to consider.

Next up is a slightly bulky man with white hair, a white beard, and glasses, who gives a professorial impression. He lasted about forty minutes. I started to get irrationally upset with him after he passed the twenty minute mark, afraid he'd camp out all day. Abromovic did some head-rolls and moved her hands from her lap to the side of the chair after he left. Abromovic is starting to look more tired and removed than she did at first. Or I may be projecting my own tiredness and remove onto her.

The next participant is a woman, who sits for about a half an hour. While she is seated, Abromovic closes her eyes for a short period. This is the first I have seen her do this. Later I learned that the woman had been closing her eyes while up there, in hopes that it would allow Abromovic her own vision break. The woman's eyes are tearing up as she leaves, but she explains that this is because of the lights, which are diffuse, but bright.

After this woman is another man, her companion, who takes about twenty to twenty-five minutes, and after him a Lithuanian journalist with whom I'd chatted for quite some time, who lasts about the same. While waiting for the journalist to tire, I learn that of the couple behind me, an older couple that I assume to be married, with whom I've been speaking for quite some time, only the man intends to participate. The woman has waited out the line with him for over three hours, but is not going to sit herself. I find this very interesting, as I cannot imagine giving up so much time, only to neglect what is presumably the climax of the experience. I cannot help but ask her questions that border on rude about this. Her answers are varied and at first a little wishy-washy, then a bit more pointed. She's not really that invested, so why take up time that someone more so could be experiencing it? She would probably just sit for five minutes anyway. Besides, she can experience the piece quite well from the perimeter. Then she mentions that she had had chemotherapy not terribly long ago, and is concerned that the lights would be particularly difficult on her eyes. I stop pushing the subject.

My turn finally comes next, at 2:00PM, three and a half hours after I got in line. by this point I've gotten pretty dazed by waiting. I've stopped looking at Abromovic much at all, and my chief concern is whether my stomach will rumble audibly while sitting across from her.

While waiting at the edges I had wondered if Abromovic and sitter could hear all the conversation going on about them at the periphery of the piece, but once seated I forget to note this, and in fact, don't notice the sounds of the audience at all. I sit down with my hands in my lap and my ankles crossed, which is a mistake, comfort-wise. It occurs to me that my head is slightly cocked. I think that I've done this subconsciously, to present a receptive, curious air, or perhaps to mark myself as still being audience rather than participant - a way of keeping myself at some remove.

I try to smile a little in greeting. I'm not sure if the expression registers correctly on my face - I certainly get no answering smile. For the entire time that I am seated, my mood and focus shift continually. I am jubilant to be here, a space I've waited hours to occupy, an experience I never thought I'd be offered. I am hyper-aware of how I appear to the crowd - can they see the muscles in my legs twitching? I've moved my head a couple times - do they think I'm about to leave? What judgements are they making of my outfit, demeanor, execution of this task? I'm hyper-aware of how I appear to Abromovic. Can she see that I'm chewing my lip a little? Is she tired of looking at faces? Is she registering me at all?

I cannot see any sign of connection or communication - nothing directed at me in particular. In line, others had spoken of a transfer of energy, but I experience nothing of the sort. I become worried about how long I am sitting. Should I get up after five minutes - give the people behind me their turn more quickly? Will I look like I've abandoned post too quickly? And most importantly - have I gotten all I can out of this? Have I completed the task that brought me here? I have no way to know. I start to see Marina's look as one of disapproval. She can see how I've idealized her, and finds it contemptable. She can see that I am shallow, dense, and petty. I start trying to send her telapathic signals - aim words at her with my mind - despite having absolutely no belief in telepathy at all. I try to make my mind blank, be totally receptive to the moment. After what I judge to be about ten or so minutes, I leave. The next person in line says that my time was closer to twenty minutes.

Although staring into the mirror that Abromovic presents is certainly interesting, I find afterward that the most vital part of the experience was the line: it's anticipation, specutlation, and sense of community. Contemplating the piece in advance of participation was fascinating, afterward, meerly informational.

Painting Progress

2010-03-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

I've done some more work on this painting. It didn't feel like it had been that long since I'd worked on it, but it is a bad sign when you need to dust your pallete off before use.

Here's the current status:

I have always loved cropped details of my paintings. The way that the colors and textures interact always feels surprising to me - like something I didn't intend, but just happened upon when I wasn't paying attention. Here's a detail from my recent efforts:

I tend to feel like details like this make really nice abstract compositions, and yet I very rarely paint abstractly, and when I do, the results lack interest for me. Abstract painting in general lacks interest for me. As with poetry, where I love a good turn of phrase or pairing of words, but cannot get into work that is all about the aesthetics of words without any larger story or image involved, I love the abstract details of interacting paint, but need it to be couched in a discernible narrative, image, or idea.

For a as long as I've been painting, that larger image has almost always involved the human figure, but in this painting so far, and in my last one, I actually ended up paying much more attention to the background. As if the figure was an excuse for painting bushes and wallpaper. It makes me wonder if I should try doing some work that is not abstract, but not figurative. Work where I abandon the figure altogether, and focus on what I've been putting behind them.

Turquoise Esprit Shirt with a Little Pink Fur

2010-03-13T10:29:00.000-08:00

I just returned a shirt to Esprit that cost under $20. As I was on my way there I started to wonder if I would actually raise more suspicion returning such a cheap clothing item. I was never one to return clothing before doing this project, so I still don't really understand the culture of it in a normal situation. When the clerk at the register asks "why are you returning this?", I'm never sure what seems like a strange answer... "It didn't fit"... "I changed my mind"? I have come up with much more intricate stories, like "I got it as a present for a friend, but then we had a falling out, so now I don't want to give it to her". It is probably a good thing that I am generally compelled to brevity by nerves.

Here's the Esprit shirt, before returning, after alteration, right-side-out:

The turquoise shade guided my purchase. I thought it would go really well the pink fake fur that I like to use. I sewed little tufts of fur into the seams. I wanted to give the feeling that it was sprouting from the interior of the shirt, like something organic spreading. Here's an inside-out shot:

Just little bits of fur, tucked into places that the clerk wouldn't see when I returned it, even if they had to look into the shirt's neck a little to find the tag. Here's a detail shot:

I had considered also adding some little branching forms, the sort that I would cut out of the little sheet paintings I've made with palette scraping and acrylic gel medium:

But once I'd sewn in the fur, I felt like there was a nice simplicity, an almost parasitic feel to it that I an additional element might disrupt, so I returned it with only the pink tufts inserted. What do you think? Should I have added more?

You Are Not a Market

2010-03-04T19:15:00.000-08:00

Even favoritism aside, this video by musician Scott Alexander provides a critique of branding and marketing that dovetails nicely with some of the shopdropping work I do.

More Maps of Every Place I Can Remember

2010-02-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

A few more places that I remember:

I don't evidently don't remember very much of that one.

The strange collection of shapes mid-top of this one is supposed to be a playground, but I found that as I was drawing my memory of how parts connected shifted and blurred.

Please pardon the off-kilter nature of these photos. These drawings are currently in a sketchbook, though ideally Maps of Every Place I Can Remember would be displayed differently. I think I've mentioned it before as an internet-based project. If displayed on a wall, I imagine an expansive smear of maps all pinned overlapping and crowding one another, like the crazy collage on the wall of a servial killer in a movie, or the committed detective.

Grey Banana Republic Skirt

2010-02-20T08:41:00.000-08:00

I was so happy with my last Shell Game alteration, which used an old slide of one of my paintings, removed from its casing and sewn into an underskirt, that I decided to do something similar to the pocket of this skirt from Banana Republic.

I went through my old slides, and soon realized that I had so many that I wanted to use, that I could easily stop doing other kinds of alterations altogether, and start just adding slides to things.

To resist this temptation I decided to glut myself on slide additions for this one skirt. I sewed as many as I could fit to the underside of one of the pockets. (To the left are photos of what the skirt looked like, turned inside-out, after I added the slides, with the pocket pinned back)

When I returned it, the salesperson who handled the transaction was very concerned about my experience with it. It went something like:

Salesperson: Why are you returning this?

Me: Oh, uh, it didn't fit.

Salesperson: What was wrong with it?

Me: It wasn't the right size. I didn't try it on before buying it.

Salesperson: Oh, I'm just asking because I had the same problem with this skirt. It looked really cute, but didn't fit like the tan one. Did you get the tan one?

Me: No...

Salesperson: I had the tan one, but it was sized differently, and this one bunched a bit in here.

Me: Oh, that's weird.

Salesperson (looking at the receipt): Oh and you just got it!

And so on. Apparently my attempts at showing genuine interest in the fit of the skirt were unconvincing, because I looked back from outside the store as I left, and saw her hold the skirt up to the light for scrutiny. She didn't turn it inside out and flip the pockets, though.

It's Only Part Two? An Almost Perfect Moment

2010-02-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've been working on my serial post-it note story about road-tripping grandma/granddaughter for ages, and yet I've only just returned to the library the second installment, secreted inside of Binnie Kirshenbaum's An Almost Perfect Moment.

I'm not sure why I'm having such a difficult time with this story. Perhaps the serial nature of it makes me feel locked in, like I can't do any other post-it books until I'm finished with this tale? Or perhaps it is just that I don't have as much appropriate experience to draw from? At any rate, you can read the Kirshenbaum borne part here, if you want to.

Plaid Gap Skirt

2010-01-30T11:22:00.000-08:00

The Gap just got this skirt back:

With this slide:

Of this painting that I did when I was going through a non-objective phase:

Sewn into the underskirt:

Over a little window that I had cut into the fabric:

Which means that it's one of my rare clothing intrusions that can't be reversed. The slide is pretty subtle, visually, but I imagine it may be odd on a tactile level. Here's one with the skirt turned inside out. The slide is at the lower left corner of the underskirt:

I like it. Now I need to find more of my old slides.

Being One of Those People to Joshua Ferris

2010-01-21T14:34:00.000-08:00

Joshua Ferris gave a reading from his new novel this week, and it occurred to me that this might be a chance to give him a copy of this Post-it Book that I did based on Then we Came to the End. This is very much against my nature, which is very uncomfortable with self-promotion or even anything that could be considered self-promotion, and tends to view people who approach more successful strangers about their own work with an unfair level of scorn. (This blog doesn't count, because it is so easy to ignore if you are not interested in what I'm doing.) The thought having occurred to me though, I knew that if I wussed out and did not actually approach Joshua Ferris, I would go home feeling disappointed with myself and vaguely depressed.

The reading itself was really good. The new novel, The Unnamed, seems compelling and well-written, and Ferris was refreshingly opinionated during the Q&A afterward. (He was quite strident on the point that the disease in the novel is a disease, not a metaphor for anything else, and mentioned how high school English teaches people to read all wrong). Once that wound down, he signed books, while I stationed myself in a nearby chair, catching fragments of the fragments of conversations he had with book-buyers and trying not to clutch insanely at the envelope enclosing the print out of my project, with a brief explanatory post-it on the front.

After the line was exhausted, I made my approach. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi
Ferris: Hi
Me: I'm really nervous.
Ferris: Why are you nervous?
Me: I want to give you a copy of an art project that I did based on your last book, and it's weird.
Ferris: That's not weird.
Me: It is weird. (I put the envelope with the copied project on the table in front of him)
Ferris: Is that it?
Me: Yes, it's a copy. I liked your last book a lot, by the way.
Ferris: Oh, thanks.
Me: I was nicer to it in my project than I was to other books.

And then I basically bolted for the door. I was very nervous and self-conscious throughout, and
by the time I was sitting watching the last few people get books signed, my nervousness had reached the pitch of discomfort that I feel when waiting in lines to return clothing that I've altered for Shell Game. The sensations were so similar (the sweating, the feeling that I'm creeping toward panic), that it made me think that the Shell Game nerves might be not so much fear of being caught, but rather a strange reaction to the act of giving my work to someone else. But I still don't want to get caught.

Hhh&mmmm

2010-01-07T15:07:00.001-08:00

I just read this article in the New York Times about H&M destroying and then throwing out unsold clothing.

I have done my shell game returning at that H&M location on multiple occasions. So aside from ridiculous waste and corporate greed issues...they may be trashing the art! I'd assumed that if my pieces failed to sell in a timely manner they went on to other lives at outlet malls or something. I didn't realized they were threatened by the dumpster!

Green Dress from H&M

2010-01-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

I'd been sitting on this party dress from H&M since November, but luckily return policies are in my favor this time of year, so even though I've only just taken it back, I didn't run into any problems. I was rather nervous about braving the Christmas season shopping scene - the claustrophobia of lines and crowds compounded by the claustrophobia of being much too over-bundled for indoor temperatures.

Perhaps as a result, my alteration this time around was quite subtle: a painting of a pair of eyes on the underskirt, at right around lap height. I kinda like the idea that someone could pull up their skirt to flash a look:

That image has the dress pulled up and pinned to reveal these:

My main concern about this piece, is that someone could actually mistake it for part of the clothing design. At a store like Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters, shoppers would be almost sure to. I considered sewing buttons, beads, snaps, or some other interrupting object over the pupils to make them a little stranger, a little more obtrusive, but it had been a while since I'd painted a nice detailed pair of eyes, and I kinda couldn't bear to disrupt them.

Grandma in Brush

2010-01-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

Although it is not a crowd scene in the way I'd earlier envisioned, I finally started painting the long-prepped canvas I'd been neglecting since, what, September?

Christmas with the family got me thinking about my grandma, a subject I've painted on multiple previous occasions. In this 48" x 60" painting she will be enveloped in a crowding riot of flowers. Below are a few process shots.

I started the painting last night, largely as a way of entering the new year on a productive note. I'm surprisingly happy with what I've done so far - all work that I had intended to be under-painting, but to which I am now growing attached. It has me thinking that I should temper my use of palette knife with more brushwork this time around, and not just for the sake of puns.

Maps of Every Place I Can Remember

2009-12-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

One of my perennial projects - started long ago and occasionally returned to - is a sketchbook in which I endeavor to draw maps of every place that I can remember. The scale and boundaries of these maps are dictated by my recollection. I've started with the locations I my earliest memories: Grandparents houses, elementary schools, etc. As a result, though a few are quite detailed and complete, most have large gaps.
Particularly in these earliest spaces, I find myself surprised by how often a space that seems completely remembered in my mind, turns mercurial once put to paper. I will start a drawing of the first house I ever lived in sure that I recall, if not every cupboard and molding, at least the placement of rooms and doors, only to find myself rapidly flummoxed. Did my parents closet face east, or west? How large was the living room compared to my room?
My ideal version of this project is actually a website, where others could upload their own memory maps, and a cumulative diagram would form - a country delineated by the experiences of all involved. Although it would be intriguing to see how far this country would stretch, most interesting to me would be the places where the maps would overlap (although I imagine that such overlaps would often be unrecognizable without labeling).

Red Gap Shirt

2009-11-29T15:39:00.001-08:00

Finally, I have gotten a new camera! There has been a distinct backlog as far as documenting and posting about my work recently, on account of my previous camera entirely giving up the ghost. But now I am outfitted anew, and can once again produce lovely pictures like these:

This is a shirt from the Gap, which I've sewn an assortment of ribbon loops. I'm not sure if there is a technical term for these loops. They are the sort that you often see inside shirts and dresses that have a wider neck or are sleeveless, or otherwise require assistance staying on the hanger. I've always found them kind of obnoxious and superfluous, and so thought it might be fun to have them sprouting like weeds from one arm of the shirt.

Three of them are loops that I'd cut out of other shirts, one was constructed of green felt, just to make its appearance all the stranger. The sewing was not entirely disguiseable, as there was no seam where I wanted to add the loops, and so little clumps of red thread create tiny divots that you can see from the outside of the shirt. There is an example at the middle of the picture below.

Camouflaging my stitches has been rendered somewhat moot, though, by the fact that I didn't return the shirt in time. This means it gets added to the collection of clothing that, were I ever to show this piece, I would include for sale as artwork (amid the documentation of successfully returned items, which would make up the bulk of the display).

Charles Dickens and An Attempt at To Be Continued

2009-10-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

I feel like I need a new graphic for my posts about my sticky-note stories. One image of text on a post-it in front of text looks much like another. I did like how this one was interloping below "Interlopers" though.

I've just returned my latest sticky-note story to the library, pressed between the pages of Bleak House, A sprawling coming-of-age-ish novel by Charles Dickens.

In the spirit of Dickens' novels, which generally appeared in newspapers in serial form, I decided that this story would be a serial one, spanning several library books. At the end of the book I made a "To be continued" sticky-note:

Which means that I'm committed to this story being at least a two-parter, even though I've had a rather difficult time even getting out part 1, which you can find here, should you be interested. Let me know - do you think it deserves much in the way of continuation?

Old Navy Jeans

2009-09-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

I so thoroughly liked how the denim birds sewn into the American Eagle jeans worked that I decided to do another piece where I sewed directly onto the inside of a leg in a pair of jeans. To the right is how they looked like from outside - a denim so dark that I could use black thread without it being noticeable, and then below that is what they looked like inside out.

This time they were from Old Navy, but doing something seafaring themed was a little literal even for me. Instead I went with an abstract pattern made up of little circles cut out of different materials:gray corduroy, blue wool, pink fake fur, and the sheet paintings that I've been making with scrapings from my palette encased in gel medium. The pink fur was the most difficult to sew into the denim without it showing from the other side, because the needle would pull little tufts of pink fiber through, that I would have to cut and pluck after I was done.

Before the pants were returned, I showed them to a friend, and got a different response than I usually get. Either because of the general demographics of the people who become my friends, or because of a uniform desire to be supportive, they are usually enthusiastic at the idea of unknowingly purchasing one of the items I'd altered. In fact, most say, "I wish I could find one of those." Not this friend. She said that if she ended up with these she would return them. Not because the utility of the pants were in any way changed, but because she didn't like the idea of some unknown person having touched the inside of her clothing so intimately as to have added things. It is interesting to me, because although it is a response that I can understand once explained, I would not have intuited it. She said that she would think an alteration of the sort were interesting if she found it in an accessory, a handbag or a hat, but in the context of actual clothing it is too unsettling.

Muses Wanted

2009-08-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Now that I've finished the eavesdropping painting, I've got a blank canvas staring at me, and need to figure out what to paint next.

I'm sort of in the mood to do a crowd scene, but no particular scene is calling to me. I've done a couple of crowd paintings in the past. Both deal with an individual who is in a crowd, but for some reason separate.

There was The Party Goers:

And, the rather uninspiredly titled, Crowd:

So, anyone got any ideas for the next one? (I'm unlikely to ever use them, but you never know what will lead somewhere.)

Post-adolescence Notes: The Eagle & The Nightengales

2009-08-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

I completed the post-it note story for Mercedes Lackey's The Eagle and the Nightingales, and returned it to the library. It took me quite a while to write the story for this book, because I wanted the story to in some way address the relationship I had with Mercedes Lackey's books when I was in High School - the heyday of my Lackey reading - and it turns out that I find it very difficult to make high schoolers interesting. At least without making them act like twenty-five year olds.

You can read the complete addition to Mercedes Lackey's novel here and here (it is in two parts for ease of upload).

At Last!

2009-08-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

I've finally finished this painting:

Of which I still can't seem to get a very good picture. (The dark line at the left edge of the photo is just the camera freaking out, and it's a little darker, and well, blurier, than the painting is)

The painting is about 48" x 60", oil on paper. Here are some detail shots, though, which should give you a slightly better idea of what's going on, at least as far as texture and palette goes.

I always find myself very attracted to detail shots of my paintings. So much so that sometimes I want to make a much larger painting just based on the detail shot. But I know that I would end up finding that painting rather boring, as I end up finding many purely abstract paintings boring. It has to be part of the larger whole for me, even if, in the end, it is the details that I find most satisfying.

Staying Inside the Lines

2009-08-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a link to this color-in dress by Berber Soepboer & Michiel Schuurman.

I'm very curious as to how it works... Does the color wash out? Or is it permanent? Unclear, but intriguing.

Berber Soepboer's website also has a lot of other smart and rather beautiful work - some done with Michiel Schuurman, some without. Some of it made me think of new avenues for Shell Game. Some of it just made me want to design clothing myself. All of it is worth a look.

American Eagle Jeans

2009-07-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

I need to remember not to do Shell Game with American Eagle anymore. They require ID when you return something. As an attempt at subterfuge, I gave them my old college ID, which doesn't list any address, and then when they asked for my address, I changed one of the numbers when dictating it. Not a terribly smooth deception.

One thing I did like at American Eagle, was that although I didn't notice it until I'd taken them home, the cut of jeans that I chose to alter was called "ARTIST". Someone suggested that I should have added a question mark after the word, but unfortunately I'd already returned them.

Perhaps the ARTIST jeans got me in a literal mood. I made a flock of bird silhouettes cut out of denim, which I then sewed into the inside of the pant legs. This proved to be some of my most challenging seamstressing yet - instead of sewing into a lining or a seam, I was sewing directly into a single layer of fabric.

I used a dark color of thread and very small stitches, and without knowing what you were looking for, it was very difficult to perceive my work from the outside. To the right is a picture of the pant leg turned right side out after my alterations, and perhaps if you look carefully you can see a couple of greenish dots (one toward the bottom left of the photo is most apparent) which are my stitches.

Here's a picture with the legs inside out, of the denim birds close up. After sewing them into the jeans I felt like the denim on denim look was a little more subtle than I wanted, so I went back and painted some shadows and highlights on them with acrylic, to give them that ARTIST touch.

Here is a full view of the completed pants turned inside out. The flock seems to be moving from one leg to another - and here's what I mean when I say I was feeling literal - as I made them I imagined them to be a flock of smaller birds, hiding from the eponymous Eagle.

My Shell Game garments tend to fall into two distinct categories. There are the more representational or graphic ones, like these jeans, or the pants where I added lips, or the tiny acrylic paintings sewn into seams, and there are the more sculptural / structural pieces, like the pants with elongated pockets, or shoulder pads added at the knees, or pockets lined with pink fake fur. I am curious: do you have a preference for one vein over another?

The Genre Explored

2009-07-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

I happened, quite by accident, upon this website the other day:

http://www.postitnotestories.com/

Which contains a collection of stories illustrated by Arthur Jones with drawings on post-it notes. This piqued my interest for what else is being done in the post-it note genre. A few google searches revealed:

http://www.keyholemagazine.com/sherrie-flick/post-it-note-stories

http://www.rictus.com/post-it/

The emphasis for both of the above seems to be on post-its as a way of limiting word count, and perhaps as a way of disrupting the feeling of preciousness that can make writing difficult.

And here's a visual post-its piece at UCSC that uses the sticky squares as pixels:

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~inio/dk/

Here's a really odd office supply website (there is a version of lolcatz done with chairs that I kept finding in various connected pages) that has posted a nice collection of mosaics made out of post-its.

http://blog.shoplet.com/office-supplies/post-it-notes-art/

Oh, and wait, here is yet another cool Web Urbanist post that has quite a few nice examples of Mosaic type works:

http://weburbanist.com/2008/01/24/more-unusual-art-from-everyday-materials-16-post-it-note-pranks-sculptures-and-murals/

I have yet to find any pieces displayed or referenced that seem very close to my post-it note books in concept or execution, which makes me happy in that way that I probably should try to rise above or something.

New Post-its for a New Book: The Little Stranger

2009-07-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

I've finished my symbiotic story for the new Sarah Waters book. Unlike her previous novels The Little Stranger has no lesbian romance whatsoever. So, in a move that I hope doesn't suffer for being obvious, I've inserted a lesbian love story. Or, to be more precise, a lesbian flirtation story.

Since I've been feeling pretty uninspired when it comes to writing (still puzzling out what to add to the Mercedes Lackey book I checked out of the library over a month ago...) instead of creating a new story for the occasion I simply altered the first story that I wrote, for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, substituting a girl protagonist for a boy - and of course changing the references to the host book that are part of the story. Changing the gender of a character in an already written story was an interesting exercise. The primary challenge was differentiating between the characters when they were suddenly both "she"s. I also changed both the characters appearances, but left their interactions pretty much the same. I'm curious if the scenario seems strained or not.

Here is the scan of my entire addition to the Sarah Waters novel.

So As Not To Entirely Loose The Habit

2009-06-25T19:10:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of drawing up the post-it notes for a Sarah Waters library book, have somewhat stalled in my endeavors to write the text for a story to add to a really unimpressive Mercedes Lackey novel, have a pair of American Eagle jeans waiting for additions inspiration to percolate, and haven't touched a palette knife in weeks. Since none of this is very post-worthy, I'm going to stray from my own work to offer up a few links.

Here is the work of Rebecca Campbell - probably my favorite contemporary painter.

Campbell grapples with beauty and transcendence, without straying into the cheesy or maudlin.

And here is an article from the New York Times that I read today - the renegade cabaret it describes seems nicely in the spirit of some of the guerrilla art I've linked to before.

Gap Dress Return

2009-06-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

Today was the first good chance I'd had to return the black Gap sundress since I altered it, and so was dismayed to realize that I was one day past the receipt announced thirty day limit on returns. Of course, I know that Gap often has very lenient and forgiving return policies, and it seemed unlikely that the clerk would even check the date, much less do the math, but still, any hitch in the returning process revs my nerves into high gear. So I summoned all my artistic fortitude, gathered my courage... and got a coworker to return the dress for me. She wasn't nearly the stickler that I was for return dates, and had no trouble at all.

Even if the dress had been unreturnable, it would not necessarily have been a loss. I've made two other pieces that I haven't gotten a chance to return before the deadlines were quite past, and so I kept them. One is a dress from H&M where I painted geometric patterns on the underskirt:

The other is a pair of pants with an elongated pocket, also from H&M (the preponderance of unreturned H&M sprouts from a thirty day return policy plus stores that are inconvenient to my usual schedule).

I imagine that if I were to show Shell Game in a gallery setting, aside from the photographic documentation, one component of the display would be a rack with a collection of clothing that I altered, but either didn't get a chance to return, or was for some other reason unreturnable. The clothing on this rack would have art prices on their tags; hundreds or thousand dollar prices, instead of the twenty to eighty bucks that my altered pieces go for at the Gap, H&M, etc... in the instances that they are presumably successfully resold.

Gap Black Sundress

2009-06-04T03:50:00.001-07:00

In case you were racked with suspense, returning the shorts with the lip paintings went just fine. I now have a new piece ready for return: a black sundress from Gap.

I chose the sundress because although it had a nice substantial underskirt, the top layer was not at all diaphanous, making the space between the two layers relatively secure for my purposes. I sewed a zipper to the top side of the underskirt with a little fold of fabric in between gripping sides, to which I then added a strip of bright white lace. Here's a shot with the skirt hiked up so that you can see the underskirt, and the added zipper, in its zipped state:

Here are some shots of the zipper opening, peep-show style:

And another shot, to give you a sense of overall placement and scale:

Visually, the addition is nearly imperceptible, since nothing shows on the outside, unless you pull up the skirt (and even then it is black zipper on black fabric), and when turned entirely inside out, you would only see the black stitching used to hold on the zipper and lace, which is again highly unnoticeable against the black fabric. I am, though, less certain about how obvious the addition is in tactile terms. Thankfully, the fabric is rather stiff, so it is less likely that odd bunching, or a little more weight on one side than the other would give me away.

Some Progress

2009-05-25T10:16:00.001-07:00

A few more progress shots of the figurative painting I'm working on:

People with Problems

2009-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

I have just returned another post-it note book, The Paris Review Book of People with Problems. At the suggestion of a friend, this time around the post-it notes that I added were not drawn in Times New Roman, but instead rendered to appear as if they were actual notes to ones self, accidentally left in the library book. I scrawled them quickly and cryptically, and doodled on many of them as I do most notes that I write to myself.

Some of the notes are basically description and scene setting - most of these are the sort of notes written as reminders of professional tasks, little to-do lists, etc. - and exist as an armature for more personal notes, which are mostly things like phone numbers, addresses, shopping lists, etc.

The personal notes are intended to work as the narrative arc of the story, although I am not sure that the intended narrative comes through at all, given how much is written as I actually write notes: with the bare minimum of information required. If you give it a read, let me know what you make of it. As usual, the full PDF for the post-its that I added to The Paris Review Book of People with Problems is here.

Next Sticky Pages Book: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End

2009-05-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

I finally finished adding post-it notes to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To the End and returned it to the library. By my estimates it takes me about twenty minutes to draw-write the text for each post-it note, which means that for a story such as this one, which had 39 post-its total, that's about 13 hours of draw-writing. That's not counting actually writing the script for the story itself, or all the false starts.

My point is, these little post-it notes add up to a more intensive project than I had realized. And I did't even redo all the ones I messed up...

If you'd like to see/read a PDF of the entire story I added to Joshua Ferris' novel, you can find it here and here. (It's split into two parts for ease of upload.)

More Fun With Sticky

2009-05-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

I decided to make a larger version of the little canvasless paintings that I had been making and occasionally sewing into clothing recently.

To do this, I spread a large layer of acrylic gel medium over a glass table top, placed colorful scrapings of old paint from my palette (also, a little confetti here and there) in the wet gel medium and let it dry, then put down another layer of gel medium on top.

The medium is white to start with, but turns clear and glossy as it dries. Once it's fully dried it can be peeled off the the glass.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I've considered stretching it over stretcher bars, cutting it up to make jewelry or other crafts, or using pieces of it for more clothing insertions, covering an older unloved painting with this painting like a shroud, or tacking it to the wall as is. This is one of those times when I make something just to make it, and whether any art that I am particularly happy with will ever come out of it is entirely unknown.

One fun property of these all-medium paintings is that when dry they still adhere to glass, like a giant color-form. I tried mine out on the window, but feel like it would need to fill the whole frame to really look right there.

Going Back a Little

2009-04-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

Since writing the text for my Then We Came To The End sticky notes is taking longer than expected, I haven't had much to post, so lets go backwards a little.

Here are a couple of process shots and then the final product for the last painting I finished:

(I'm particularly embarrassed by the bad coloration and lighting of this last photo - I badly need to get a new camera/photos skills)

When I first conceived of this painting the idea was that when finished I would cut it up into a bunch of two or three inch by two or three inch squares that I would then send to galleries as "samples", along with my portfolio, so that they'd be able to see the rich surface of a painting that a photograph just can't convey (especially when there are stickers in the mix). Subsequently, the overall image or narrative of this painting was much less important to me than usual - the priority being instead that every square two inches had enough visual interest to stand on its own. Here's a detail shot.

As you can see, after five or six unsuccessful attempts, I used the choppy future of this painting as an excuse to give up on the nose entirely, covering the space instead with a butterfly sticker epicenter. Hopefully you can also see a little better how the strokes of the palate knife that I use to paint look, though the way that the stickers mix with the paint is still difficult to discern. Just imagine what a good idea of the final effect you'd have if part of this chunk had been exacto-ed out and mailed to you...

I've been feeling more recently that the whole slicing and sending plan may not have the most efficacy, which is a long winded way, I suppose, of saying that I've wussed out on the cutting.

Post-it-note-Lichen-Parasite-Sticky-Story-Books

2009-04-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

This evening's project is working on writing the story that I will soon be drawing onto post-it notes and sticking into the library copy of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. I'm a little bit stuck, as it were, on what to call the piece in general. I've been going with Post-it Books so far but don't particularly like that title. Here is what I've come up with so far, in the way of other naming options:

- Sticky Note Books - It's like Post-it Books, but without all the product-placement...

- Parasite Stories - Except that they really aren't parasitic so much as symbiotic, which brings me to:

- Lichen Books - Which the dork in me is drawn to because when said aloud it sounds like "likin' books", and implies a more organic synthesis of original book and added story, but may not make sense to those who were not raised by a lichen enthusiast?

- Story Books - Simple, but perhaps overly so.

Any suggestions? Votes?

Banana Republic Shorts

2009-04-13T17:38:00.000-07:00

I got these shorts from Banana Republic last week. I chose them because they were a dark color (much to my dismay, see-through fabrics seem to be all the rage for spring), had pockets (always promising), and at $44 were pretty much the cheapest thing in the store aside from some tank-tops.

When I got them home I realized that the right front has a double pocket, which gave me a great little secret space to work with. Even when the shorts are turned inside out, you have to peer intently to see any indication of my handiwork.

Here are before and after shots of the shorts turned inside-out:

I used the little secret space between overlapping pockets for the first representational painting that I've ever added to clothing for this project. Here's a picture of my handiwork with the innermost pocket pinned back so that you can see the space in between:

I sewed a few beads at the center of each pair of lips to give a little more of a tactile hint of their presence, as my main concern for this iteration is that my insertion might be so well hidden that it's owner never notices it. I'll return the shorts soon. At the moment I am entirely confident that the return will go smoothly, but I'm sure I'll manage to psych myself into a lather of imagined scenarios of capture soon enough.

Links Undermining My Creativity

2009-04-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

Recently, still unsure of what to call what I've tended to refer to as "my more performative pieces", I started looking up some of the words that were at the edges of my vocabulary - words that I had a sense might apply, but had no strict definition for - like "guerrilla art", "shopdropping", and "culture jamming" .

After doing some reading I've come to the conclusion that the most applicable word for my recent non-painting works is "shopdropping". The real discovery, though, was how little I've known about guerrilla art. I could probably have only named (0r pseudonymed) three or four guerrilla artists, and the only shopdropper I knew anything about was Banksy.

Turns out there is quite a vibrant and diverse world of transgressive art projects going on around us. Two sites I found particularly explore-worthy were shopdropping.net and weburbanist.com (which casts a much larger net than just guerrilla art, but has good "intro to" articles on many subsets of the genre).

While tooling around shopdropping.net I came upon the work of Zoe Sheehan Saldana, and my stomach turned over. There are few responses when I talk about my work that I like less than "oh, that sounds like so-and-so's piece...", and Zoe Sheehan Saldana's Walmart shopdropping piece comes way closer to my Shell Game than anything I'd seen before (and predates it...doubly blasted). She bought clothing from Walmart, made exacting facsimiles with impressive sewing skills, put the tags from the legitimate items on the one's that she'd constructed, and then slipped her douplicates back into the store, for people to buy without ever being the wiser. I've since consoled myself, though, by focusing on the many ways in which her work differs from mine. Her work is more technically demanding and conceptually rigorous, but mine is more, well, fun? I'll stop being petty any moment now.

The one other artist introduced via my shopdropping.net reading that I wanted to mention is Hang Nguyen, whose Planting Seeds made me smile, and after so much reading on anti-corporate, anti-conventional, anti-etcetera was refreshingly sweet (but you know, still in a transgressive way).

I Think I've Figured It Out

2009-04-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

A PDF of all the inserted post it notes in Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage is attached to the site linked below.

https://sites.google.com/site/practicallyapdfcache/

I imagine (or at least hope) that my ability to both draw Times New Roman, and write stories suited to this library book piece, with improve with further iterations.

New Project: Post-it Books

2009-04-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what I'm calling this project yet. I've been provisionally going with "post-it books", the provision being that this is less a title and more the most basic unit of description I can come up with.
The project is another in the art-in-unexpected-places vein. I am taking books from the library, writing stories that are parasitic (or maybe symbiotic) to the book in question, and inserting these stories into the library book via post it notes.

The first story I've written/inserted is intertwined with Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage, in that much of the "plot" of my story revolves around the circumstances surrounding two different people reading Murno's book. Munro's short stories are largely explorations of the relationships between people, so the story I wrote for the occasion is also relationship-centric .

This project, aside from the quasi-guerrilla-art appeal, has the fun bonuses of requiring that I read lots of library books, write lots of assignment-like short stories (stories that begin with a "site" rather than a plot) and practice drawing Times New Roman. You can find a scan of my addition to Alice Munro's book here.

Fatties

2009-03-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

This blog has been getting a little bit non-painting heavy with all the performative (/guerrilla? -I'm not really sure how to label it...) work I've been posting, so here is painting to even the scales a bit. I completed it a while back, but it is still (sadly) one of my newer pieces, due to the fact that I've been so inactive on the painting front. Its 60" x 48", oil on paper.

Green Dress Return

2009-03-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

I've been much more nervous about returning items since Express caught me trying to return pants with an elongated pocket a while back. Nothing really came of it - I turned and walked out of the store and that was that - but I am so adverse to being on the spot, that I have been much more prone to having others return for me ever since.

I intended to return the green dress yesterday. I got all the way inside the door and up to the line for the cashier and I panicked, sure that they would find my little sewn-in paintings and detain me, chastise me publicly, ban me for life, etc. I turned and left.

Today I tried to get a couple of friends to do the return for me. One declared that she too would be too anxious. The other thought I needed to do it on my own for the purity of the piece (and perhaps for the sake of character development?). The window of time in which the dress could be returned was soon to expire - for H&M it is only thirty days - so I focused on how small and unobtrusive my paintings are; how it was close to closing time and everyone just wanted to get home, and went to return.

All went smoothly. There wasn't even a line for me to sit and stew in, though the cashier did count out the change with excruciating slowness.

This is a different project to be doing now, than it was when I started it a couple years ago. I found myself wondering, while waiting for my change, if it were more likely that someone buying this dress would be stretching their budget to do so. For a moment I felt a little guilty - perhaps my little interventions are less an intriguing surprise and more a disappointment in a time when people are taking their purchases more seriously and making them with greater care. It's hard to feel bad for long, though, as the little paintings can easily be cut out of the seams without damaging the dress at all.

Green Dress Altered

2009-03-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

My additions to the green dress were little painting widgets :

I sewed them into the seam that ran along the waist of the dress. Here's what the dress looks like turned inside-out:

I also added one to the tag where the spare button is sewn, sort of as the button's surreal counterpoint:

I'll return the dress next week. This time around I'm not very nervous about my alterations being discovered - they are pretty unobtrusive. However, I didn't notice until I'd gotten the dress home that it actually has already garnered some sort of smudge/stain, which could lead to returning difficulties of a more straightforward sort than usual.

Green Dress Alteration Prep

2009-03-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

To alter the green dress, I am going to sew little abstract paintings into the seams. I make these paintings by setting down a layer of clear acrylic medium on glass, placing little dry bits of paint (collected habitually from my palette scrapings), then adding another layer of clear medium, so that the arrangements of color dry into a plastic-y sheet, which can be peeled off of the glass, creating a painting purely of paint.

I've cut little widgets out of this larger fruit-roll-up of a painting to hide in the dress.

Green Dress from H&M

2009-03-02T19:09:00.000-08:00

I bought a new dress for Shell Game, though I don't know yet exactly how I intend to alter it. I think the bright color may have seduced me a bit, because the dress does not have the sort of hiding places that I usually look for: pockets or underskirts or other lining.

The aim, as usual, is to alter the dress in a surprising and intriguing manner - a manner that takes is from utilitarian or fashion object to art object. Sometimes I do this by erring more toward the language of fashion, as when adding migratory shoulder pads, vestigial zippers, or elongated pockets. Sometimes I cleave more toward the language of art, by painting on underskirts, or adding little abstract paintings that can be sewn into the seams or lining.

Here's one such alteration of tiny paintings that I sewed into the sleeve of a shirt a while back. I'll probably use a similar sort of tactic with the new dress.

In Progress

2009-02-26T19:14:00.000-08:00

Although I've admittedly had more emphasis on performative types of art projects lately, I do still try to paint every so often. I'm rather out of practice, but here is what I'm currently working on.

It's pretty large: 48 x 60 inches, oil on paper.

Much of what is here is underpainting. It will look very different when finished.

Grey Pants from Gap (2)

2009-02-25T18:46:00.000-08:00

My coworker returned the shoulder-pad Gap pants for me without incident.

I waited outside, leaning against the corner of the building, trying to read a paper nonchalantly. I was too nervous that not only that the pads, but my own anxiety, would be palpable. I was sure that if I went in with her I would blush inappropriately, or stammer, or otherwise draw attention to the transgression.

My coworker had no such problem. She says that the trick is small talk. She said the cashier actually folded that pants a couple of times, perhaps feeling something odd, perhaps absentmindedly.

I lost a couple of dollars to mark-downs, but the pants should be back on the shelves by now, or at least on the clearance rack.

Shell Game: Grey pants from Gap

2009-02-19T17:31:00.000-08:00

I've been doing this project slowly for a couple of years now.

I buy clothing, alter it in little quiet ways that are not outwardly visible, and then return it.

The clothing is from basic, mid-level mall-type stores: Gap, Express, Banana Republic, etc. This is a before picture of some pants I just got from the Gap.

Here is what they looked like inside-out, before alteration. They have this great layer of black lining that only goes down about three quarters of each leg. I look for elements like that, because it makes it so easy to add things without stitches showing on from the outside.

I sewed a couple of shoulder-pads into the lining of the pants, so they would hit just the right spot to be knee-pads.

I am a little concerned about returning them, because although they are not really visible from the outside, you can feel their odd squishy addition when you fold them.

I have been telling myself that it is unlikely that someone working at the Gap will be folding so conscientiously. Still, a coworker of mine has offered to return them for me, and I think I will take her up on it. Hopefully tomorrow.

This is what they look like now, when turned right-side out. They hang a little differently, but it is really the feel of them that has me looking for a proxy-returner.

The First

2009-02-19T17:22:00.000-08:00

Posting art on the internet is just as good as hanging it on a wall these days, right?