dayton is not in ohio

Tim Gierschick commented on my previous post about the sadly prescient nature of this project, considering the two crane collapses this week in New York and Florida…

Here are some images of my MFA project as it progresses:

1) digital model

2) Crude Scale Model

3) Powder Coated Tower Sections

4) Installation Drawing

There’s a good reason for my infrequent posting lately. In addition to making plans and preparations for my MFA project, I’ve been hard at work curating a small show at Alogon Gallery here in Chicago.

The show is titled The Strange Place, a reference to School of the Art Institute art history professor James Elkins‘ book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. In a nutshell, the show presents the artwork of eight Christians in a venue that is not religiously affiliated. Considering the discourse surrounding ‘religion and contemporary art,’ my goal was simply to bring the two spheres together, not in an abstract sense, but in a concrete instance. It’s not meant to be understood as a solution to the very complex dynamics of the relationship, or even as a proposition, but simply as an intersection and point of reference in the ongoing conversation.

I’ve invited three people to write essays responding to the show, and to each other: Elkins, Kevin Hamilton, asst. professor of new media and painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Daniel Siedell, asst. professor of art and art history at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

The artists in the show are: Wayne Adams, Keith Crowley, Mark Dixon, Rubens Ghenov, Tim Gierschick, Rob Matthews, Alert Pedulla, Gene Schmidt, and Ben Volta.

Here’s a really good piece by Daniel Siedell if you’d like to read a take on this intersection of religion and contemporary art from a very thoughtful Christian perspective. This nails it for me.

Check Philadelphia’s Matthews the Younger for my post on John Phillips and Ken Fandell at Chicago’s Tony Wight Gallery.

Today I officially became a nerd. I was called by that name on occasion in middle school, but the truth is that while I possessed the dorkiness of a nerd, I couldn’t do any of the cool nerdy things that a true nerd does. Today, I graduated, by making this:

Now, to be fair, I am not a high ranking nerd, I have a long way to go before I make a fridge that can retrieve a cold beer and throw it to me from across the room while I lounge on the couch (and it will never happen wearing a Dook shirt). But this is what makes me a nerd (note the italicized terms): I built a circuit that uses three TIP-120 transistors, a 24vdc power supply, and an Arduino micro-processor to individually control the lights on top of my homemade communication tower. I wrote the code to make the lights flash out my wife’s name (as a test) in Morse code, which I then uploaded from my Mac to the board. All that, and I know what it means, too.

Here is a screen shot of the view I get from my surveillance tower, as well as some rapid oil sketches I’ve done of the view. The sketches are the exact same size (9 x 12 in.) as the small television monitor that I’m painting from.

Gene Schmidt is a New York based artist that I met last year at an International Arts Movement conference. I remember really enjoying his sculptures of irregular polygons fabricated from accumulations of rulers of various types. The rulers are cut to conform to the determined size of the object, rather than the object’s size being determined by a particular measurement. The ruler represents only its own shape, weight, width, and mass of material, no longer representing an abstract, external unit of measure.

[Auto Wheel and Rim, 9 x 6 in., 2007]

At that time Gene told me about a project he was working on called Manhattan Measure, that entailed laying red yardsticks (about 30,000 of them), end-to-end across the length and breadth of Manhattan. I’ve checked the website occasionally since then and saw recently that the project was finally completed (sans upcoming documentary).

[July 10, 2007, Central Park (photo Alicia Hansen)]

My affinity for snaking red lines aside, I just love the idea of hand measuring something of this scale. The obvious difference between this work and the works that I saw initially is that the rulers are actually being used for their capability to represent a unit of measurement. Initially there is something less appealing about this straight forward utilization of the ruler than the first works I saw, but Schmidt has taken the rulers and used them to create an object in his studio, essentially compressing the length and breadth of the city into a few cubic yards of space. I find this compelling when considering that we live in a world where actual spacial distance, as it relates to human action and interaction, has become a non-issue. Yet Schmidt’s project takes no shortcuts in spanning what is a great distance in relation to the human body, and the weight and mass of the final sculpture makes this difficult to ignore.

At the moment I’m simply referring to this latest piece as “the tower” but it will have a title soon enough. I’m really cranking on it because I can’t afford for it to eat up my entire semester, and with a piece of this scale, that’s pretty easy. I’ve made good progress, working on it during almost every unaccounted for waking moment. I’m really hoping, more than anything, to learn something from this that will spur an idea or set a trajectory for my thesis show/project. It is fun to finally be working with my space, rather than fighting against it.

“Dayton, what am I actually looking at?” Good question. The tower is made of steel. It’s 6 x 6 inches, and 25 1/2 feet high. The cross beam on top is 10 feet long. The tower is supported by 1/8″ steel guy-wires attached at the floor and at 15 feet on the tower. Mounted on the cross beam are three tower beacon lights, and four closed-circuit video cameras. None of the electronics is wired up yet.

tower from front entrance of the school

view through windows to front porch of school entrance

Matthew Fisher recently blogged on Chicago artist Jeni Spota (#2 of 52 artists in 2008), which brought her to my attention for the first time. She received her MFA in painting from the Art Institute last spring, but I don’t think our paths ever crossed, though we have a number of mutual friends. I saw her 12 x 12 show at the MCA this Saturday.

Her work is amazing, and there’s just no good way for words to make up for what’s lost in a photograph. The paintings are lush, voluminous, relief sculptures in oil paint. Spota’s generosity with paint is lavish, and the viewer is the benefactor of her philanthropy. They’re delicious (culinary metaphors just keep coming to mind)… I don’t often get excited about paintings.

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), 2007, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 14 inches]

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), detail]

The thing that seals the deal for me is the subject matter. Crucifixions abound. Madonnas, haloed saints, angels, and throngs of onlookers fill the canvases. Most surprising of all is the absence of any easy sign of cynicism, bitterness, or even casual dismissiveness that often accompanies Christian imagery in contemporary art. The paintings are quite straight-forward, even tenderly painted, and the absence of any obvious antagonism is what makes the work so ambiguously palatable. It leaves me wondering what the catch is. It must be there somewhere. Right? It is in the MCA, afterall… It’s unclear, and that’s what makes the work powerful and unique.

The main exhibition at the MCA right now is Gordon Matta-Clark. I just love the guy. The show is a really broad look at his work which was great to see. I saw his piece Bingo/Ninths (video here, sandwiched between two other works) in 2004 at David Zwirner gallery in New York, and was really impacted by it. The piece is a video of Matta-Clark (and crew) cutting nine rectangular sections from the side of a house in Niagara Falls an hour before it was demolished. The video is accompanied by the actual wall sections cut from the house. This type of work was all new to me at the time, but I’ve come to really love his works of architectural intervention.

[Gordon Matta-Clark, Wall sections from Bingo/Ninths]

There was something strange about seeing these particular objects again, in a completely different setting. It made me want to see the crates that these dissected wall sections travel in.

To wind it up, there’s also a show of Alexander Calder models for his mobiles, including a model for Ghost, which hangs in the Great Hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This brought to mind Tylenol heir and Philadelphia collector Hank McNeil. He named his daughter Calder, and she has a small Calder mobile (a real one, not the museum gift shop variety) hanging in her bedroom.

There’s also Mapping the Self, a show of artist “maps.” It draws on both blue chip artists and Chicago locals, including a couple of folks I know, making for an interesting show.

Oh, Brother…

Oak Park has an arts district that’s located two blocks from our house. It’s a community based endeavor that includes a few small galleries of the mid-level commercial, and arts and crafts variety (you know, the kind with names like “Art Gecko”). It’s not exactly my thing, but fantastic for what it is. It’s got the perfect independent coffee shop, boutique maternity clothing store, high-end thrift shop, mom and pop barber, yoga studio, and a few nice little restaurants.

And now it has new signs demarcating the little corridor on Harrison Street. I think the signs are a great way to establish the district, draw in more businesses and help it grow… There’s just one little annoying thing: they look a lot like gigantic, red, disposable razors.

These drawings don’t illustrate too well that the signs arch back at the top, finishing off the razor design. It is beyond me how designers, arts district coordinators, and community leaders can work on something like this, and no one notices in any meeting (or has the jewels to say it) that you’re about to pay $120,000 for something that looks an awful lot like a gigantic shaving tool. I can understand the community folks, but the guy who designed the thing? The artists? It reminds me of the first time I saw a Mexican guy in a sombrero on the front grill of a Toyota about 15 years ago.

(The fun part of this is that I have an idea brewing for some guerrilla art in the form of a giant Barbasol can.)