The old dime bag collection

Is really coming together.

Verdigris

Verdigris Triptych, 2012

Verdigris oozing in The Prague Metro.

I am getting excited for my show in Denver at the Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design. I will be showing a collection of tassel-based sculptures in solid colors, and collages that echo them. The biggest will be the green group, with a collage called the Vertigris Triptych. It is finished now, and is 86" long.

http://www.rmcad.edu/event/temporary-institute-emancipated-objects

Sandy Cane

We survived the hurricane, the post-tropical-cyclone, the tropical storm, the winds, the floods, and the rainbows. 

In truth, we were very, very lucky. We live in Evacuation Zone B, surrounded on two sides (at each end 

of our corner-shaped block) by Zone A (very close to the water's edge, as any good New Englander should.) 

I've been swooning, bleary, coughing, out-of-it sick for five days, and barely knew what was going on. George 

saw the light from the explosion at Con Ed, we watched the tacky aluminum awning rip off the vinyl siding 

on the house next door, we shook in our bed, the tree hit our windows and our chandelier swung. We watched 

zombies on the laptop until we lost tv and internet. We drank lemon hot toddies until we ran out of lemon. 

Then we drank orange hot toddies. Very good. That's it. Very Lucky.

Today we walked around and saw the sights. Angry, wet street cats, branches, leaves, weird street detritus,
high high water lines and lots of gawkers. The gawkers streaming onto the pier in ill-chosen wild-weather garb,
looking down at their phones and buffeted by the still-gusting wind reminded us of the zombies from last night.
Best of all, all of the boards protecting vacant lots have been knocked down. The revealed openings look like
portals into worlds of green we never realized were there. Beautiful, weed-y, lush lots. I can also see who has
a back deck, a pool, a backyard- it's total Brooklyn Voyeurism.

Very, Very Lucky.

New Collages, Let's Get Tropical

These new collages are inspired by my trip to Miami and Key West in the winter of 2010. I started making them tentatively then, and have now come back to them in earnest. Instead of exclusively using images from recycled luxury magazines, I began to combine them with images from found National Geographics of undersea creatures like tropical sea slugs and octopuses. Octopi? Octopod? One of the old Polish men selling mysterious junk and treasure every day on Manhattan Avenue has become my Greenpoint magazine benefactor. He likes to be involved. He keeps secret vintage copies of Nat Geo for me under a tarp in his flatbed.

One of the older collages has been purchased by Solange Knowles (yesss), and three of them are brand spanking new as of this week. I don't know if it's the cool fall air, making a sale, having my studio table in the apartment, or having a new show to work towards, but I am pretty into it. I should also credit a great studio visit with Erno Enkenberg last month, just before he boarded his flight back to Finland, that was pretty inspiring. I loved his idea that I make various series of collages, culled from different types of magazines: nature, science, fashion, art, etc. Thanks man.

Shout out to G. Herms.

Collector List

Last Night

Last night I saw Grizzly Bear at Radio City Music Hall. We arrived early. We were seated, close to the stage.  We drank clandestine tequila from a flask and ate some kind of candy-nerds-encrusted-gummi-rope that was nothing short of miraculous. The show began.

It was soaring and angelic. Parts of it were dreams of Beach Boys and Supremes and Zappas. It was something new. The gold-fanned clamshell that masquerades as a ceiling pulsed the sound around. The sonic boom shook my ribs just like it should. I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes.

Blogroll Part Two

http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/

http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/

http://holdthisphoto.tumblr.com/
A special mention to holdthisphoto.com for bringing me Gertie Millar:

Fabio

Because of the fervor at my new job and my desire to fit in, I have become re-acquainted with Project Runway. This season, I am particularly enamoured with this real deal freegan designer named Fabio. I hope he wins. Keep the downtown dream alive, man.

RAZZLE DAZZLE DAZE

When was the last time you found out about something, and thought "Oh my god I have to know everything I can about this as fast as I can I want to eat and drink this oh how can it be possible!" Maybe you are so excited that you are thinking in typos. You wish you could afford the book about it, but even used copies on Amazon are expensive. 

On Friday night I went to a really good party. Parties like those seem few and far between lately. So thanks, Antonio. While I was there, having a blast, Laurel told me about Razzle Dazzle ships from World War One (I guess she thought of this because I was wearing so many patterns at once).  Apparently, during WWI, war ships were painted with these OUTRAGEOUS patterns in order to confuse the enemy. "How big is that ship?" "What direction is it moving in?" These are the questions the enemy might presumably ask. This bonkers and beautiful theory was invented by one Norman Wilkinson of the UK. By the time it reached the US, female art students at RISD were asked to paint the boats. So, I am having a pattern-based Providence-located major kinship moment. 

I feel like everyone knows about this already. Did you?

 

Add caption

I love this Paste Magazine Contest Pcture

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/07/infographic-the-color-wheel-of-album-covers.html

George got 20. I got 37. Seemed like we were doing pretty well until we counted it all up. How 'bout you?

They Do What I Do, Part Two

Judith and Richard Lang

Street times

"what is he, like dentally retarded or something?"
-pre-teen girl to her mother, in all earnestness and outrage.

Arm of an Archer

 Any self-respecting Sagittarian would love an archer's arm like this.

Her Royal Majesty

I was excited to se that my interview with Her Royal Majesty magazine was online this week. As I was doing an intense juice fast (my very first and possibly last), I couldn't celebrate. Still though, it was a pleasure, and I didn't even mention to those ex-pats that run the magazine that I am a dual citizen. Maybe if I get big in Paris I will finally have to make use of that second passport burning a hole in my drawer. Hah.


http://www.heroyalmajesty.ca/unnamed-colors-in-the-gloaming/

Apply Yourself, Windham

In my application to be in an upcoming exhibition, under the field "Detailed technical specifications, budget, and plans for installation" I found myself typing "Access to Power." So true.

Welcome To July

It's 97 Degrees in North Brooklyn and
there are chicken feathers on the sidewalk,
but that's nothing new.
There is no shade this time of day,
and I wander to the studio, to the bank, to the grocer.
Almost in a fever, I buy bags and bags of fruit for the blender.
I don't want to talk to anyone.

I can hear the neighbor kids playing in their little above-ground pool through the back window,
down the lane of gardens,
and from their glee you'd think it was olympic-sized.
I blend watermelon, sugar, ice and lime and pour it into a cold jar.
I spill some on my shirt.
I sit on the couch and think of you.

For Allison

Unicorns

Don't show me no more unicorns,
I seen too much in my life.
That's why I'm thinkin' of goin' back to drivin' the bus.

So said the man in the red shirt
whom everyone thought was crazy.
But he had golden eyes,
and he was just talking slow.


For Allison

10:45

When you ride the train a little bit later in the morning,
Things open up.

There's the girl with the yellow-lined boots,
The man with a hole in his house.
The boy with the skateboard, and
The girl with the bow shooting a scatterburst of arrows all across her back.

There's the man in the suit with the bike,
The man in the suit with a radio, a hat and a bucket packed tight with wooden flowers.

There's a grey parrot riding underground with me,
and we both miss the sky.

swooning in the heat

I love that there are fireflies on my block. Fireflies seem like an imaginary creature from childhood;
it's surprising to see them now. I caught one on my hand tonight, strolling, on my way for an
emergency italian ice.

On my way across Calyer Street with the firefly in my hand, I thought about the difference between
a stroll and a ramble. Strolling is safe, easy, relaxed. Rambling can be dangerous, darker with every
step. Rambling is persuasive, will try to convince you to walk forever, to walk into the river,
to walk into the cars.

Rambling can make you weave and stumble, to lose the lightfootedness so common to the stroll.
New York is good at turning a stroll into a ramble.

Rip Tide

This video is the best contender for unapologetic romantic beauty I have seen for a while. There is
no one steering the boat. There is no preamble, no explanation, no narrative. All the places my mind
wandered while I watched it provided the best untethered, stream of consciousness narrative possible.
I have always liked Beirut, but was worried that their sound might be stuck in 2007 for me: It is,
but that's not neccessarily a bad thing.

High Beats Low

Yesterday, while I was at work, the hundred-degree heat slowly melted my shitty be-vinyled windowsill. Hot, soft vinyl tore away from the house under the power of relentless sun and the weight of my favorite window box. Finally, the basil plants I grew from seed went plummeting down to the landlord's stinking garden below. The molded plastic box cracked open, and the fragile plants died on the cement among the dog doo, weeds, and garbage.

But then. One of my very favorite people in the whole world left me a phone message, saying that she won a huge huge grant for her beautiful work. Her work, which is so genuine, intrinsically and vitally links the making of art with the growing of gardens. The work is alive, it's growing, it looks like alchemy. I appreciate the karmetic loss of my sad mini-garden in trade for a true and ecstatic garden lover's gain. I am so totally proud and excited for her.

Go Apple!!!  (photo from the pleasure of gardening)

Open Studios is Tomorrow

Tropical Brooklyn

I've lost count of how many rainbows there have been this month. Could this June be the Brooklyn Rainbow Record? I've tried to see as many of them as I can, but they're shifty.

Quiet

I am about to watch a man on the TV wire-walk across Niagara Falls: His sponsor made him wear a harness.
Earlier, I listened to the concert in McCarren Park, as it travelled up throught the streets, bounced off of the
houses behind us and in through our back window.

I can hear my love walking up the stairs, fresh back from the country.

Make it Green

Spicy basil sweet basil bee balm rosemary
lemon thyme spicy mint sweet mint
lavender nasturtium lemon thyme parsley

Wednesday Morning Essay After Hearing a Lot of Shit Talk About New York Lately

Growing up, we had a LOT of literature, novels, art books, cook books and garden books in the house. I devoured as much of them as fast as I possibly could. But every week, we also had The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine noisily barging into the house, demanding attention.

The New Yorker shaped my idea of the world, reading from our sunny tree-house-like living room in Providence. I remember graduating from the cartoons to the music and art review "short lists" (and I would sit, curled up in an armchair, all of 13, and think about how great my life would be if I could go to all of these rock shows and art openings every week. I would be transformed into a cool bohemian rock New York Kid). Soon the other pages beckoned, and I moved onto the short fiction (which frightened me in a way that I could not yet understand), and then to the movie reviews, which I loved for putting into beautiful, accurate prose just exactly how I felt about a certain movie. I learned quickly not to read those before I saw the film. The first time I read one of the lengthy profiles was in that same armchair: Jon Krakauer's excerpt from Into the Wild, chronicling Christopher McCandless' doomed exaltation of nature. From that moment, I was converted.

I loved New York Magazine the least, but was drawn to it like a crime scene, specifically by the extensive and graphic ads for cosmetic corrections in the back section. Breast lift tummy tuck stomach staple cellulite removal and the horrific varicose vein repair, all of them fed my developing and insecure teenage self-image, until I was twisted into knots I don't know I've ever untied.

Finally, every Sunday, I would read The New York Times arts and social pages, trying to imagine myself at the parties and openings, and being allowed- or even applauded- for wearing outlandish outfits. If I wore anything out of line at my boring prep school, I was labeled a hippie and asked if I was "on the mushrooms" (this actually happened).

 Is it any wonder that I moved here, and stayed? When I moved to New York, and came to visit my friends in Brooklyn for the first time, I finally felt it: HERE IT IS! and HERE ARE MY PEOPLE. They had not been in Providence, or Amherst, or Florence, or North Carolina. I could never find shoes I really wanted to buy until I moved here (sorry, I know it's been said before, but it is remains true). It has been 13 years, (albeit with a two-year break for grad school) and I have not yet been able to effectively re-imagine myself into any other city. And not for lack of trying.

My true and deep love for being in nature has not been able to trump the image I had of myself as a kid, strutting cool and lean through the streets of New York, with a loft on Great Jones and a boyfriend who looked like Basquiat. I never became long and lean, am not sure if I will ever feel cool, and have made a lot of painful discoveries about the cruel realities of the place since then. (I would love to be able to remark on my admiration for any actor or artist at any dinner or drinks without someone immediately telling me what a cheat or a shit or a liar that person really is. I would love to be able to afford ANYTHING. I would kinda like to have a last name that opened doors. Gross, but also true.) The gentle Virginian boyfriend I am lucky to have, and the modest apartment with the beautiful weirdo cat on the edge of Greenpoint is pretty far afield from that initial reckoning, but some kernel of belief in the magic of this city runs deep.

Ain't She Sweet?

George and I have been trying to learn to sing this together, with him on Ukelele.
We also like the Beatles' version.

Re-commitment Ceremony

I almost gave up on the blog, but my comrade in arms JJWIII has reinvigorated me with his awesome. I've been reading his live posts from his road trip with Dan down to Penland, and I know those dinner-jacketed boys and that southern route well enough that I felt like I was sleeping off a good drunk in the backseat, going in and out of consciousness just long enough to hear snippets of their conversation.
Read him here:
http://jjwiii.com/journal/

Rainy Sunday at home with George

..and the record player's finally working.

Jesus and the The Pawn Shop

 

 

Two little boys, ages 7 & 9, came into the Museum of Art in Bangor. Have I told you this story before? They were greeted by the gallery technician, who helpfully held the door for them. Inside, the docent gave them a children's scavenger hunt, and let them loose in the galleries, even though it was posted that children must be accompanied by an adult. The went in armed with a blade, and found my piece, Rosary, on their scavenger list of things to spy. They took out some kind of a blade, sliced off eight items, and pocketed them. At some point soon after (within the hour) they arrived at the Frati Pawn Shop up the hill, and presented part of their treasure: 

one peacock feather (crown only)

one "brass knuckle" (actually a paintbrush holder)

one antique key

one glass prism 

one rhinestoned bow-shaped pendant

one washer

and one very shiny, bling-y Jesus medallion. 

This is only seven items. The eighth one they kept as a souvenir: a brand new condom,

 still in it's wrapper.* Even so, the pawn shop owner took one look at their curious loot and called the police.

The police brought the little brothers into the station and questioned them. It has been reported that they alternately claimed that they thought the museum's scavenger hunt wanted them to take the items, and also that the list of  rules I printed on aluminum which accompany the piece, told them to "pick up one object a day." ONE object. I am not buying any of that nonsense, and apparently the cops didn't either. At that point the Bangor Police Chief called the Museum Director at his home, and let him know what had happened...and the museum staff still had no idea that anything had transpired.

Since I declined the offer to sue or press charges, the cops were free to sit on their hands and forget the whole thing. I was refused a copy of the police report (requested with the names blacked out) because the anonymity of the children needed to be protected (?!). I asked that the cops demand answers to three questions (How much did they think they would get, where did they get the idea to go to a pawn shop, and what kind of art do they like), and the cops refused. I was told that the parents were "not so good."

I liked my friend Autumn's idea that the kids spent their afternoons at home watching Pawn Stars.

When George and I went up to Maine to take our shows down this weekend, I was presented with a cracked plastic to-go container with my items inside, and a childishly scrawled handwritten list of contents. (Condom omitted again**) We went to the pawn shop to thank the owner, and maybe take his portrait, but the shop was closed. It looked like all he sold inside were guns and guitars, but more on that later. When we returned to the gallery to resume our laborious packing, the museum tech showed us an article in the local paper over lunch. The article recounted a crime, perpetrated by two little boys, ages 7 & 10, who had stolen a laptop from an unlocked room at the local middle school. Perhaps one of them had a birthday?

* ** The purple wrapped Lifestyles condom was one of the multiple offerings left by visitors at the RISD gallery where I first exhibited the piece two years ago. Easy come, Easy go.

What a Difference a Month Makes

My aura has changed. At the end of January (Aura on the left), my head chakra took over and tried to turn me into a foggy,
swampy pink ghost, caught up in a cotton candy cloud of my own anxiety and pensiveness. I was so internal that I
was barely moving, blood was barely circulating. Yesterday I went back to have another reading (Aura on the right), and my
root chakra was moving and shaking things up. I have energy and money and relief coming my way next month. But my
heart is still dark, dark dark dark. Where is the color over my heart?

Wow

Painting by Kime Buzzelli

The fabulous Madame Fortuna, AKA my astral sister, is going out to LA for a trunk sale of her drool-y jewelry on Sunday March 25th, 2-6 pm @ Model Citizen Studios!

Superstar and former purveyor of my favorite LA store (Showpony) Kime Buzzelli made her a gorgeous invite...
NICE ONE!

Madame Fortuna's not-so-secret mission from me is to scope it out & see if our future creative empire,  COLOR COMMUNITY, should be founded amid the sunshine and succulents of Southern California. March in New York is always rough, and this one might be warmer, but as usual I feel damp and broke and ready to bolt. But look at the colors from Ms Buzzelli! She's clearly not damp at all.

George Herms Broke My Heart from 3000 Miles Away

The LA artist George Herms, who has been making work since the 1950's, started making collages last year. When I prop-styled a Paper Magazine fashion shoot for a friend last month, I was given a courtesy copy of the previous issue. In a taxi on my way home, I discovered what I thought was my own work on the back page. It was, in fact, a George Herms. After some more research, I discovered that all of Herms work is wonderful (installation, sculpture, collage, etc), and all of the press he's been getting is so great for an overlooked artist in the cannon.

However, it also sent me into a tailspin. His new foray into collages look exactly like the collage series I have been working on since 2008. Now, to be fair, there are some differences. Where I let recognizable objects sometimes creep into the collage, he does not. My pieces therefore have more narrative content. He is looser and more fluid with his resulting edges and shapes, and I have started to control them more. His collages may be a bit better than mine in their fluidity and total rejection of the source imagery's origins. His collages are also more directly relatable to his found object sculptures, which he doesn't disguise and alter with resins and paints and plasters, as I do.

I think the takeaway here is that as a younger artist, I must accept the fact that I am not yet visible enough in my career to be recognized in the discussion of his new work. He should gain recognition for his long and disciplined practice, and maybe I should be more nimble – I should be able to switch feet and dance a little differently in response to these recent developments. It burns, but it's maybe it's a challenge.

Windham

Herms

Windham

Herms

If only I lived in Prague

Good Advice from Henry Valentine Miller