Lizards in storage...

Hey K, 

     Love your post about the makings of a country song... and new work inspired by simple materials promoting big ideas. Today I had a word-feud with a fellow artist about the validity of contemporary art. After a heated debate, we agreed to disagree on the merits of craft, "low" materials and attempt at conveying an emotion through unconventional means. He is in the school of only accepting traditionally aesthetically pleasing work as "art". Saying "art should always be beautiful." I remain unconvinced. 

     If art is always subjective, then art can be anything. Aforementioned acquaintance seems to have rules as to what is beautiful, and he leaves no room for other options. This makes me crazy! Maybe we should publish your rules for a good country song as being parameters with which we judge artistic work?? Instead of the principles of design and antiquated notions of "the academy" - Structure, familiarity, character, drama and heart - all things that we crave in our lives and in our creations. 

     I've posted a few pics from wanderings of the last week. A trip to the zoo with S, and an evening of art in a storage center. I love the idea of art being shown in storage centers... think of all of the exposure we could bring to suburbia! One (of the many issues) that I have with suburbia is the lack of cultural contact. If we change the definition of viewing artwork - instead of just in art centers, galleries, museums - storage centers seem ideal. Small cramped spaces leading to more small cramped spaces, the perfect container for creation. Each space was interpreted by different artists, creating "high" and contemporary installations amid the sterile environment of sheet metal cubes. 

Predictably, I responded to the installations using natural fibers and themes. I seem to be on a white kick - hence the porcelain mushrooms as well as the condoms filled with sand surrounding a clock. Our clocks are ticking.... I can feel them. - But that's another post entirely!

xo, K.

gimme some lip! + Work Site

k!
yay! l-i-p is back! glad you had a book/art-filled weekend! i had some fun as well, and wanted to rave about one of my new fave artists. ;)

the show: Work Site
the artists: Chris Lin and Ben Brandt
the gallery: Estudiotres

There are a few key ingredients that go into making a good country song.
1. Structure: some sort of underlying form or loose system that holds it all together.
2. Familiarity: if the strange or absurd disrupts, often what we already know comforts.
3. Character: the personal, based on biography yet universalized (generalized) to relate on a larger scale.
4. Drama: exaggeration and elevation of everyday life--in an effort to make meaning, heighten, and slow those fast gone moments.
5. Heart: the sincerity and wisdom that only comes from someone who has truly hurt, lost, or failed.
And in this process, the writer finds purpose and release, romantically formalizing what might otherwise be a selfish tantrum.

This show is a good country song.

Lin and Brandt are both dealing with structure. More than the obvious architectural references, their work points to underlying surfaces, supports, and modular rhythm. The type of rectilinear plague we suffer daily (have you noticed?---everything is rectangle! ah!). The salvation comes in the imperfection of the system. The freedom lies in the cracks, the play is in the fissure. Brandt's scaffolds teeter with "almost balance", variable-sized canvases cluster together like loose communities or aerial shots of irregular plots of farmland. Lin's tenement blocks don't always match up, the chicken-wire foundation is exposed, and a city below is revealed.
An anthropological study would examine the layers, searching for clues of human life, the hand, the personal. In fact, the singular strange thing about this work is the feeling of people-less-ness. Talking to Lin about his work, he confided that several blocks are loosely based on places in Chicago where memory turned happy moments of the past into sad remembrances. His blues got to work, tediously constructing nondescript building after the next (he even lost sight of which was which soon after he made them). Tenements resting tenuously on a mountain of gray. The same gray of Brandt's textures. The same gray of the gallery utility doors. The city from the past is buried beneath, forgotten, and already purged.

This is a more serious play, wit is slight, less obvious. Yet there is humor in between. The sad homogeneity of the buildings (also goes for Brandt's surfaces) direct you to the "wonky" by contrast--holes, minute color details, dramatic peaks and valleys, scale, the tipping of blocks to extreme angles! They might just slide right off! Hee. Brandt jests, too, with a silly "walnut tongue" or tangled ball of string (noodles? worms? intestines?) protruding from the conservative tans, creams, browns, and grays (the colors of Eddie Bauer or maybe more poignantly, the working class uniform).
Both artists' work seem very much about material (low and high) and "boyness." Lin really knows his material. He should, he's been using it since he was little. It reminds me of one of my favorite students from Tally. Remember Jim Dolson, his cardboard space equipment, science experiments in the playground, and mission to the moon? Cardboard...it lacks pretension. There is a curious innocence in the meanderings of a 9-year-old boy with constructs, an erector set, Lego's or even just household objects. Brandt's work carries that mentality as well. Although his schooling is obvious, inscribing his name in every painting, he leaves a mark of naivete.

The "work site" is a place of vulnerability, unfinished thoughts and plans. Process and production. Surface and support. Creation from destruction (dramatic, I know, but that's history, man!). And maybe a few mountains out of molehills.

xo, k

More on the artists: Chris Lin---http://ahcri.com/splash.html
Ben Brandt---http://www.benbrandt.net/

The show will be up through Dec. 18---go see it! details---http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=36260886609

Back at ya, Panza...

Dearest K, 

Hello, long lost friend. Don't fret, I never forget about you, even when I don't post. Things have been quiet and crazy at the same time. Sometimes life gets in the way of art... except this past weekend! I had a great time at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair in Silver Springs, Md. It was great to see so many books and bookish people. It gave me a little kick and I came home wanting to feel the sweet tactility of paper, the smoothness of my bone folder, and the intricacies of hand-bound texts. I have many new things to post about! Before I post a few links to fellow friends and new contacts - in addition to going to the fair, I squeezed an hour out for myself to visit the Hirshorn Museum and their newest exhibit, "The Panza Collection". It was a quest in text, linguistics and a feat in vinyl lettering. After spending a few hours installing vinyl lettering at my job last week, I was quite impressed with their largely scaled fonts splashed onto walls and around corners. 

I particularly liked a work, Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass- A Description by Joseph Kusuth and a wall drawing, Wall Drawing #3 of Sol Lewitt. (I'm a sucker for Lewitt's wall drawings that he famously sends directions to install, not even making the actual work itself... This brings up issues of ownership, the delicate nature of the artist vs. the artist assistant, the role of the museum and the curators.) Other artists displayed included Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long's rocks and the above blue-light installation of Doug Wheeler. 

Although it was one of my quickest in time-duration museum experiences, it was lovely to be in such a space. Every once in awhile, I crave those massive museum's to stroll around, it always makes me remember my semester of exploring art history in London.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post on book arts and artists. Hope you enjoyed your weekend of fun and art!

Love ya, 

K.

Lazy?

k,
we're slackin' (like Coco).
let's get back into it!

<3,
k

St. Louis Light Project

K!
I've been missing you! and blogging!...almost "back in business" as my favorite boss used to say. I have several posts on back order, and I'm not sure where to begin. Here's a little one:

When I was in St. Louis, A drove me to the St. Louis Light Project. A red-headed Social History Professor suggested I check it out, explaining his current writing and research over breakfast and toys in Edwardsville the day before. After 2 days of corn fields, a harvest fest, 4-year-old princess antics, an anxious lecture, and threatening racial tension, it was the perfect "relevatory" experience.

The church was a ghost, a grave for a historical social foundation. Only the main walls of the structure remained---the frame for so many. Within the old body, was an organized skeletal scaffold. Hardware, metal and stone, cold and vacant. Floating effortlessly above, in the form of the pitched roof, hung more than 200 lights. Warm liveness. A variety of shapes, colors, styles--they looked great together, a unified community of difference. Beautiful, magical, and conceptually minded--it reminded me of the majestic light that enters the stained-glass windows of a deeply Gothic cathedral, the sort of sensationalism and dramatic theater used to create an awakening of spiritual experience from an otherwise dark, wordly existence. Only this was outwardly glowing, and not consquentially pointed. It was like a memorial of the very human connection, the dynamic life that exists within a tired (and in this case, dead) institution. What's more, the lamps came from people in the surrounding community. (you know how I'm a sucker for inclusion!) With each lamp, personal current histories combined to reflect on the history of the church, dialogically celebrating the past and present. You can see many of the lamp donors and their lamps here: http://lamp-collection.pulitzerarts.org/category/lamp-project-at-the-spring-church/collection-process/donors-and-their-lamps/.

And learn more about the artists and other light projects around the St. Louis area here: http://lightproject.pulitzerarts.org/completed-work/kehres-hungerer/


You have some cute nostalgic lamps to offer, right k?
Good to be back!
k

Home Page

Dear K, 

Bookmarks are in! Check out my "Devouring a Book" here. It was oh so exciting to receive a full set in my mailbox recently. I loved being a part of this project... it got me making, thinking and making and thinking in multiples. 

Just keeping you in the loop. Busy times. How are you? How was your exhibit?

We should start noodling on our "Home Page"

Love, 

K.

Alternatives to the alternative

Dear K, 

Whoo.. We have both been so busy lately. In addition to everything going on down here, wanted to post about a major project happening in good ole Rochester that I worked on while assisting Nathan Lyons. "John Wood: On the Edge of Clear Meaning" is a major retrospective exhibition that is traveling around Rochester, NY spaces this fall as well as the International Center for Photography. A major project including a DVD with interviews of the artist, a forthcoming book published by Steidl and a plethora of mixed-media, photo-based prints, artists' books and drawings done by artist, John Wood. My mailbox is waiting patiently for my pre-ordered copy.

I particularly enjoy how Wood incorporates drawing into photography... a difficult task. From the VSW website: "John Wood's style refuses to be shoehorned into one category. A master of straight photography, collage, cliche verre, solarization, mixed media, lithography, drawin and more, he decisively incorporates a variety of media." 

Other things are swirling.. my life is so very mixed media these days. Talk soon. I promise to post again shortly.

Love, 

K.