dayton is not in ohio

Check out the small t-shirt business that my friend Wayne Adams and a friend in Brooklyn have started. To be honest, when I first heard the idea I thought that the world probably already had enough t-shirt companies. But Wayne’s a sharp guy, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Enter Umami. I like it. Three forms: Sheep, Goats and the Jolly Rogers. Two colors: Black and White. Hand sewn. Check it out. Umami.

Karen and I just negotiated a trade of one of my smaller sculptures for a painting by Jonathan Anderson. Jonathan teaches art at Biola University. Here’s our new painting:

Contraction, 2007, Oil on Panel, 21″ x 15″

My work to prepare for teaching at Trinity Christian College is really ramping up. I’m teaching three courses this fall: 2-Dimensional Design, Figure Drawing, and a combined 3-Dimensional Design/Sculpture.

None of this stuff is new to me, except the 3-D/sculpture stuff.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was camped out in the old maintenance-building-turned-art-department at Belhaven College beginning my first semester by taking 2-D design. No. It actually does feel like 15 years since I drew in black and white, cut construction paper and learned the nuts and bolts of picture making. I remember my teacher, Jon Whittington saying, as we freshmen lamented the drudgery of such a course, that once we had mastered these elements and principles of design we had our entire lives to go about bending and breaking the rules, or forgetting them altogether. The problem with internalizing these very important concepts is that while you retain the concepts on an intuitive level, it’s daunting to dig them up for the purpose of teaching. So I’m reading and digging, and enjoying having the particularities refreshed.

As far as the 3-D stuff goes, I have a bit of work. See, I never actually took a 3-D design class. I had a one-semester sculpture class, within which I learned several technical skills that I’ve never used, and since forgotten. Most of my sculpture education has taken place in the real world, or translated in my own way from an understanding of designing in two dimensions. But I can’t “intuit” things to students, so it’s going to be a year of tremendous learning for me. I stand to come out a very different person by the end.

This is the three bar logo of Trinity. I love it. I was really drawn into sculpture by the work of minimalist sculptors, in particular Donald Judd. They would have approved…

Donald Judd

Dan Flavin, The Nominal Three (To William of Ockham), 1963

Eva Hesse, Aught, 1968

Carl Andre, Three Right Threshholds

– Thanks, to those who have left kind comments on my previous post about my thesis installation! All is well, and my thesis defense/final critique went well. I was given plenty to process by the crit, nothing overly bad (I know some folks that had nightmare crits). I wasn’t showered with sunshiny praise, or attacked — just constructive criticism and feedback, which is helpful. A few folks asked about the title, which is Seasons Such as These, taken from a famous monologue, and favorite of mine, in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The thrust and motivation for the piece was driven by the original installation of the tower, with surveillance cameras mounted on top to grant me a view of the outside world from my studio. My early critiques were focused on the cameras and the implications of surveillance. These were very good critiques and had me thinking of the nature of the tower’s being, and its read as an artwork, wrapped up in the structure’s function. There was little to no attention paid to the form itself. I, being interested in form and structure, was a bit dissatisfied with this. The solution to reinvigorating the tower formally was removing the tower’s function. By toppling the tower I hoped to push an engagement of the tower as an object, and also raise some questions related to being, and purpose. A long time ago (my sophomore year of college) I was part of a formal debate surrounding a paper that a friend wrote, arguing that a wristwatch which no longer told the time was not watch. I disagreed (still do), but it was that conversation that first got me interested in philosophy.

– I finished my final day as a Teaching Assistant yesterday. This was the end of my official career at the School of the Art Institute. All that I have to do, from this point on, is clean out my studio. It’s been very a good education. That might be it for my formal education, which makes me a little melancholy.

–I have applied for a teaching position here in Chicago, and I have an interview for that next week, so I’ll update the blog on that as I have news.

–In the “news of the strange,” I discovered that I was mentioned in an article in the Dayton Daily News of Dayton, Ohio, as a Dayton-Chicago Connection. Kinda funny. Now, do I put that in my vita?

– I have a couple of friends in a drawing show in Philly at Jenny Jaskey Gallery. The Drawing Narrative opened last night. It was curated by Rob Matthews. Rubens Ghenov is one of the Church Studios artists, Rob and Rubens were in The Strange Place, and Jenny is a friend as well. Rubens is detonating. He just got into the grad painting and drawing program at the Rhode Island School of Design (ranked #1 in the latest US News grad rankings), and he had a pretty awesome video profile done for Studioscopic by David Kessler, a Philly-based artist and video producer. Studioscopic simply presents artists in their studios, talking about their work. Rubens gives a nice shout-out to the Church Studios. Thanks, bro’.

– Finally, I’m excited to be able to post a little bit of Karen dancing. Most friends know Karen dances, but very few have ever seen her do it. I think this is the first time that we have ever had any decently shot video of her doing what she does. Here she’s working with a small company here in Oak Park, performing the work of Ron deJesus:

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.

Currently my studio is undergoing a transformation. I’m packing up, and emptying it. I’m erasing it. I’m stamping around it. I’m looking for an advantage in the metamorphosis from my own very specific workshop to a generic graduate studio. It’s the difference between our houses, and Plato’s house. One is where we live, the other is where meaning lives. In some places space is a utility (galleries, for example). In other places, space is a metaphor (old prisons, for example). I’m looking to find the studio where meaning lives. Mine just happens to be the ideal studio to search for meaning, because what’s meaning without an audience?

I’ve been floundering in my fishbowl for a while now. I’m looked down upon daily while cutting, hammering, gluing and making a terrific mess of my artistic practice. The occasional passerby will condescend to knock on the glass. We wave and smile. I don’t mind, I just go back to my crafts. But just up the street at the Shedd Aquarium they mind. “Please don’t tap on the glass,” the signs say. But what if the fish began tapping on the glass? What if, rather than just going about their business, the fish assembled in a row along the glass, and stared back? What if I stare back? Well, there’s nothing like a thirty foot tower, a four camera video surveillance system, and a digital video projector for finding out.

More soon…

Probably, about a year from now, I’m going to travel to Philadelphia to dismantle my Eastern State Penitentiary sculpture, and haul it off to sell it for scrap. This is the unfortunate necessity for the non commercially viable sculptor that I am: eventual destruction and disposal.

So it goes with my chopstick bridge. I’ve needed to do this for a while now. With the scale of the piece, the difficulty of transport, no storage space, and no takers, it had to go. It was the first project I did in grad school, it took a lot of time, and I liked it quite a bit, so it was kinda sad for me. I’m wondering if this is what it feels like to shoot a faithful injured horse that you’ve loved and ridden. I don’t know, but I had to grit my teeth to smash the thing, and it certainly wasn’t any fun. OK, maybe a little fun…

The class that I TA for is currently doing a mapping project. They are supposed to come up with some kind of autobiographical map. There are several shows in Chicago dealing with the same idea such as William Pope L. at the Art Institute and Mapping the Body at the MCA, as well as one on maps in general at the Field Museum. They all correspond to the Festival of Maps taking place this winter in Chicago.

As is often the case when I TA, I came up with my own, (not autobiographical) idea. I may develop it into something more, but for the time being I decided to see what would happen if I began plugging the Illinois Lottery Mega Millions Jackpot numbers (six numbers between one and fifty-six) into Google Earth, as GPS coordinates. I chose the north and western hemispheres since this is where the lottery takes place. After discovering that most of them were located in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, I decided to plot the boundary of all possible lottery combinations. To find the four corners I plugged in the following lottery coordinates: (1 2 3 N 4 5 6 W) (1 2 3 N 56 55 54 W) (56 55 54 N 53 52 51 W) (53 52 51 N 1 2 3 W). I then plotted a path connecting these locations and creating a boundary. I ended up with a trapezoid that covers approximately 12 million square miles. The lower boundary sits right on the equator, and the Mid Atlantic Ridge runs right down the middle.

Each unique combination of numbers represents about 1000 square feet. But there is some empty space in there because numbers can’t be repeated, meaning, finally, that within this 12 million square mile area there are 176 million evenly-spaced 1000 sq/ft parcels of land (or mostly ocean, in this case) that you can stake your claim to for one U.S. Dollar. Being a visual/spacial person this gives me a much better idea of how ridiculous the odds are for winning the lottery. It’s like guessing exactly where our current apartment is located if given an area about the size of, oh… Asia.

Next I plan on plugging in all of the winning combinations for 2007 and seeing where that takes me… I’m also gonna buy a few tickets.

In a recent post I mentioned that my parents were on an American Airlines plane whose engine caught fire and almost crashed. When they finally arrived in Chicago the news crews were waiting to interview passengers. Well the ABC affiliate in Chi-Town decided to do a little vignette on my folk’s reunion with their granddaughter.

Now, usually the excitement surrounding being ‘on the news’ amounts to a whopping 1.3 seconds of screen time, and turns the family gathering around the TV into an inevitably anti-climatic moment. There’s a pause for a moment, then someone says something nice about it, but no one says how really disappointing it can be to have minutes of interview time turned into a one word quip. Who’s to complain? It’s better than nothing. I had prepared myself for a flash of screen time for Anna and the folks…

And speaking of disappointingly brief exposure, if you look really closely, there’s a part where I’m on my cell phone and you can briefly see one half of a Rob Matthews drawing on the wall behind me…

When I arrived at the Art Institute I got a pretty good draw in the ’studio lottery’ where student’s names are drawn at random and you may pick the studio you want from what’s available. We first year student got to pick from the dregs, but I did end up in one of the nicer of the studios that was left. I’ve enjoyed it.

Last week on the drive to a Bible study during rush hour, I called in for a contest on ESPN 1000 radio here in Chicago. I won. Now just in case you folks that live way out don’t understand, a whole lot of people listen to sports radio in Chicago. I’ve tried before and never gotten through, but this time I was caller 10 and won tickets to a Fantasy Football Convention. Oh, speaking of fantasy football, I got home that night and I had been randomly selected to pick first in the draft. I’m on a roll here…

So now comes the ‘07-’08 studio lottery, and, face it, Fortuna’s wheel spins both ways. What goes up, must come down.

There was a studio that I have coveted ever since arriving at the Art Institute. Our studios are in the basement, so while we get 15-foot ceilings, we get no natural light… except this one studio at the front of the building. Its ceiling is two stories high, about 30 or so feet, and so it has huge windows high above so that folks can look down on you from outside the building while you work, and the sunlight can stream in. I like two things: natural light, and company. I also don’t mind 30-foot ceilings.

I wasn’t picked first. The first four or so folks were pre-set for various reasons, but then the real lottery came and someone else was picked. They picked me next. I seriously couldn’t believe that that studio was still left. Some folks are just bothered by people spying on them, I guess. Understandable. This studio is nearly twice the size of my previous one (not counting the ceiling) and the studios got a lot smaller after that pick. I’m a very, very happy camper.

Studio from up above, outside.

Looking up.

From the hall.

The closest I ever got to seeing the kinds of indie rock bands that are the regular fare of Rob Matthews and many of my other Philadelphia friends, was a little bar/club located in a double-wide trailer in a borderline bad part of Jackson, Mississippi called W.C. Don’s. This place was small, hot and dark, but it was one of the places I ended up occasionally my freshman year of college (1993). Over the years many, many unknown bands played there, and I’m sorry to say that I missed such unknowns as REM, Widespread Panic and the Flaming Lips, as mentioned in the linked article below. I did see Galactic, a New Orleans based jam band that ended up becoming much more well known. I think the cover was $3. The other draw was that they accepted school IDs as proof of age. My fake one said I was 21, and it’s hard to believe that anyone bought it (my age, not the ID… the ID was perfect…) because at age 18 I looked about 15.

Don’s came back to me recently because The Spares, folk-country-americana band of our pastor’s wife, played there on a recent tour swing through God’s country. She said it was the worst show of all time, and hates Jackson. Now she certainly should know better that to judge a city by it’s most seedy rock club, but having been put on a double bill with a hardcore band probably didn’t help her impression. You should check out the Spares, Jacksonites, buy a CD and maybe she’ll feel better about the town.

Anyway, that little reminiscence is just a lead in to saying that, perhaps as an act of divine judgment, W.C. Don’s is closing forever. Here’s an article about it.

First of all, it’s finally warmed up a bit here in Chicago. By warm, I mean low 90s, which, by comparison to where I grew up (New Orleans), is like a nice late fall day. It’s really not hot at all, y’all. I think it’s appropriate to pay homage to Chicago summer weather to atone for my snide attacks this winter (1, 2). It has been, by far, the most comfortable summer of my life. Frankly, I think it makes the winters worth enduring.

Work is going well for me, although between my working and Karen dancing I have very little time to spend in the studio. I’m OK with this, actually. Summer has always been a slow time for me regarding production of work, but I tend to do a bit of the important reading and thinking that make fall and winter my most productive seasons. One very exciting part of my summer job has been learning to use some of the advanced fabrication equipment at the school. Had I not taken this job, I would have had to take a class to learn some of these things — and probably not as thoroughly. I actually conducted a CNC orientation yesterday. Here’s the machine we use. To know it well enough to teach it is very exciting. And I’m getting paid!

Karen is out of town right now, for a dance workshop in Houston. Karen’s folks are here while she’s gone. It’s a great exchange: they get to spend lots of time with Anna, and I get to retain my sanity. I can remember how difficult it was surviving without Karen while she was traveling with Momix, and I’m happy that Anna is spared being subjected to life as the daughter of a bachelor, if even for one week. She does like mac and cheese and “Ronald Donald,” but no healthy, growing kid deserves cuisine like that for an entire week. She already generally looks a bit like Ronald McDonald when I get her dressed. That is, like a clown. A final note on having help this week: I’m a pretty good craftsman, and I can build, or learn to build/fabricate most things while working pretty naturally with a variety of materials, but I think God created long, silky hair to keep folks like me very humble. I have NO idea how the women in this family install a hair clip so that it won’t fall out within five minutes. I’m in awe, and I’m grateful Grammy is around!

Sometimes I second-guess my frequent sports posts. (how’s that for a non sequitur…) I think that perhaps it’s not good to follow a sports team so closely. Professional sports really is a fantasy world. That’s why I can’t wait for college football season. Seriously, my main reservation about following sports is the time it takes up to listen, watch and to read about. If I spent all of that time reading good literature, exploring the library, and doing other kinds of research, I’d probably be better off as an artist. To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. Part of me wants to respond that this makes me more well-rounded, but that’s probably hogwash. I’m sure there are plenty of well-rounded people out there who become well rounded by learning to play the piano, not listening to ball games. The Romans had a phrase that I remember from high school latin, Panem et Circenses: Bread and Circuses. I remember it vaguely as referring to the means by which the Roman ruling authority was able to keep the citizens pacified. As long as you keep the people fed, and keep the people entertained, then you can do what you will. I think fed and distracted is even more accurate. The one thing an artist cannot afford to be for any long period of time, is distracted. I willingly distract myself far too frequently with infinite, meaningless rabbit trails (”reading the news”) on the internet, and keeping up with baseball, football, golf, auto racing, cycling, etc… I so willingly and easily distract myself with all of the distracting offerings that life in America affords. Panem et Circenses… gotta give that one some thought.

I’m currently reading Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, on my brother’s recommendation. I’m finding it fascinating, and very enjoyable to read. It’s an imagined account of Jesus as a seven year-old. I think I’m enjoying it so much because, as a former atheist, Rice explicitly affirms the incarnation in her introduction. It’s allowed me to relax reading it and know that I’m not reading some veiled attack on orthodox Christian theology.

I’m currently listening to Bach arrangements by Leopold Stokowski. Karen is currently rehearsing a reconstructed Doris Humphrey modern dance work titled Passacaglia, set to Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. We searched iTunes to find the piece so that I could listen to it, and stumbled across Stokowski, who arranged the version the dance it set to. I love Bach, but I have never heard Bach played like Stokowski conducts it. I’m tempted to say that I’ve never heard Bach before. It’s just unbelievable to have heard a particular piece of music so many times, to have loved it, and then hear it one more time and marvel at the fact that it can become so completely brand new, so completely, completely sublime.

I’m off to the studio today, for a bit. I need to begin cleaning and organizing for the school year. I also might try to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute to see some shows that I’ve neglected seeing yet.