Holy crap. Blogspot is still here . ha.

Cobwebs!

Here come the posts! Summer approaches, a mere seven weeks away, and my studio is almost revamped/ retooled. The next show's pieces are underway, and all of them are kinetic or electronic. I am involved in an exploration of motion and light. I will make sure to document them here, as well as cover this insane year in culture and politics from the perspective of an aging American anarchist who is obsessed with obscure nonsense.

Instruktor

So the school year has started once again...and I find myself teaching completely different classes this year. Science, math and Digital publishing (yearbook) and each brings with it a set of hopes and dreams. Science especially, I think i have dreamed about teaching science most of my adult life. hopefully this year My class and I can do at least a couple things that they (and I) will remember forever. Hopefully blowing up my classroom will not be one of those things. oh...and i have only ridden my bike twice so far to work, which is truly miserable. Especially because I watched the Sylvia Earle documentary this weekend, which makes me really feel personally responsible for the sad state we have produced here on Earth.

Lights back on...flickering

So now here in PHX summer is upon us. Two days of the last week (May 12-16 2014) saw temps edge above 100 and today it is above the c mark again. Summer for me means time away from teaching which means time spent in the studio. Putting this in print means I have to stick to it-6 pieces by the first day of school! Today I spent about an hour sweeping, listening to Lapalux, gathering scrap for recycling, occasionally stopping to jot down small sketches...glad that I'll be spending the bulk of my days in here for a while.

Really good shew.....

 These images are of pieces of mine that are hanging on the wall at R.Pela Contemporary Art. A couple of the pieces are reconceptualizations of pieces formerly shown. i love being able to do this because it satisfies my inner dysfunctional Mom...Doing this to a piece that I have "let go" of already can be kind of like stuffing a child back into the womb with the express purpose of casting the dice again. If you have seen any of these before it should be instantly clear that they have been chopped apart and shocked back to life again.

 Robrt Pela, who curated the show, owns the eponymous gallery, picks the wine at the opening, builds gallery support teams that are incredibly skillful and dedicated, has a wickedly dry sense of humor...you get the picture. I met Robrt (although apparently both of us barely remember it) during the eighties when both of us lived self-defined charmed lives as record clerks. We met again when he was gracious enough to give me a two-man show at Willo North gallery. Record clerks are only slightly less persnickety and opinionated than artists. But Robrt is living proof that only sometimes they can grow up to be jovial, tolerant, classy human beings.

Two paintings are in the show, both stencil paintings, a process that I posted about earlier. They each are about completely separate ideas, but end up seeming connected to each other thematically.  This gallery, being in a very new space, seems stark and minimal. Music never seems to happen in galleries, at least not during openings, which to me seems a bit sad. If i could soundtrack this gallery i think the collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto would be perfect. The echo-laden acoustics of the gallery would be ideal for these streamlined and minimally beautiful pieces.          

Cut Above

I've had these for a few weeks and have wanted to post them... i have a horrid website that I use as a teacher, and tried to use this as a project to fine tune my skills manipulating photos in a blog. Clearly that didn't happen, I will have to revisit and tweak a bit.

These are stencils and resulting images from a World History class I teach at New School for the Arts in Tempe. There is a push for projects that blur the lines between classes in the curriculum, so I asked the young artists in my class to choose images that interested them from a culture, modern or otherwise, that had inhabited the new world. Some of them clearly have visual arts experience. Others claim to not be visual artists but patiently and methodically worked through the steps involved in projecting, tracing, cutting, and painting a stencil. Additionally they kind of accidentally were forced into learning to be patient and adapt to a very breezy Spring day that was selected  as painting day!

this is a small selection  of the images that were produced. They appear on a wall that runs alongside a sidewalk that acesses the rear of the main building at the school.

Today as i post this I am listening to crushing, almost non-melodic noise and experimental music courtesy of Nonpop.com.

The stencils were all done by tracing projections on craft paper... either from jpg files or from acetate overhead projections. then cut in class with a terrible collection of box cutters and rusty exacto knives.

Ghost Story

http://tmblr.co/ZJ3izuhP1QB2

I spent part of the time that I was doing my previous post listening to a video from a psychologist named Bruce Hood about how we construct our image of self. It's reposted from a newer blog by the authoress of a blog I've followed for years, Triffid.org. I have adored an anime called Ghost in the Shell for a couple decades because it calls into question this very concept...a "ghost," or the quantification of one's consciousness, being separate from the raw data that makes up memories and genetic info and sensation...