review of thesis show on Shower of Kunst

http://showerofkunst.blogspot.com/2009/09/place-placeness-perception-chris.html

It's a long review, they seem to be fairly ambivalent about my work. The description of my use of shadows and light in order to evoke a sensation in the viewer is right on and I am glad that is what she got out of the show.

The Dutch Masters? Guild

We finally had our first guild meeting yesterday. It went surprisingly well. There were only a couple of times that we had to cite our only rule: it cannot become a pain in the ass. We have our first theme picked, a general time frame for our inaugural guild show, and are setting up regular-ish guild meetings.

I'm excited to get back to working, I've been so sick for weeks that I haven't had the energy to do anything. But now I'm good and am cranking out the art. Which is the way it should be.

Now I have to make our initial logo, find a place for our show, talk to some more potential members, get started on my main piece for the show (which I am super excited about), work on my own stuff: diagrams, drawings, contact writers, start building stuff, etc....

The Dutch Masters? Guild

Yesss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am a founding member of The Dutch Masters? Guild. And could not be happier. God I love artists.

The story of my life in paranormal experiences

Yes, I see ghosts. I always have. I finally counted-up all of my strange experiences (I'm including aliens etc...) and the number was about 25.

I started this a while ago in school because of a professor's obsession with this stuff, but she had had no personal experiences. I thought that was odd so while she lectured about her study of it I wrote and sketched my own real experiences.

I was working on my thesis show at the time so this sort of fell to the wayside. This seems like the perfect project to work on now while I am studioless and not ready to work on a serious project. I'll post images as they finish.

Influences and Inspirations - I got to think about something while waiting for a workspace

I am sort of stuck for a studio right now. I need to wait until the end of June to get one, and it's making me sort of crazy.

I make art because I have a need to express my ideas in a visual manner and also because I have a love of beautiful things and know I can make beautiful things (you are not supposed to say that -beauty is unpopular in art right now). But the main reason I make art is that it is the most effective means of keeping me sane.

I am starting to feel a bit unhinged now that it's been 2 months since I've had a studio in which to really work. I've been drawing a bit, but not as much as I need to be. Also jetlag tends to leave me with a death-like sort of inertia for a couple of weeks which makes it hard for me to force myself to do anything.

So I'm starting a list of the inspirations and influences that are lurking below the surface of the work. At least I'm thinking about working.


1. Depression and anxiety - it seems crazy that this would be the #1 influence on my art, but it is. My needing to make art to fight these off is a large part of it, and my experiences in low mental health are a huge part of the subjects I explore in my work.

2. Yoko Ono

3. Poetry & Music

4. Urban Industrial Areas

5. Adventure stories from when I was a kid - both fiction and real life stuff like Jacques Cousteau

6. Insomniac thoughts and nightmares

7. Leonardo Da Vinci - his inventions, not his painting.

8. Islamic Art

9. Birds

10. Car rides through desolate areas

11. Star Trek

12. Cages and traps

13. Eva Hesse

14. Louise Bourgeois

The Catalog of Things Lost

This is another call out for contributors for a project I am starting.

I haven't done any work in a month, I go home in 2 weeks to no job, no home, no shows, I'm wandering around foreign places by myself, and I am feeling that I have sort of lost myself.

But this has started me thinking about lost things and how as a lost thing right now it feels important to not be forgotten. So I have decided to start a catalog of lost things. If something is lost that means that someone misses it. I am not sure yet what form this catalog will take, but I would like to create a visual catalog of the missed and missing that acknowledges their/it's importance to the people who lost it.

It has become a part of my creative process to send out a call for help to the masses for contributions to the work, and I am doing it again.

I am asking people to send me photos, drawings, written descriptions, copies - anything that represents something lost. The things you miss can be anything that you feel the loss of: I miss people who are gone, my little red stationwagon, friends I have lost contact with, a piece of jewelry my grandmother gave me, our houseboat, ....

You can include an explanation if you want, but only if you want to.

This will become a part of my art, so with that in mind let me know if you do not want this seen by eyes other than mine. Those private ones will be kept secreted away in a special place.

Please send this on to anyone you know who may want to have something they lost added to the catalog.

Please send the lost things to: catalogoflost@gmail.com


thanks, Angel

No more school, ever! -Thesis show and opening

Getting set for the show aka everything is going wrong (but can be fixed)!

We're 2 weeks from the show, and 5 days from vacating the studios. The catalog and postcards are here and turned out fabulous. Unfortunately, that's the only thing that's working for me right now. - And yes, we do have a made-up word in our title and unfortunately I transposed the i and o in a word but nobody so far has noticed despite how blatantly misspelled it is.

Because of the remoteness of our school we rely on mail-order for most of our supplies, and nothing that I have ordered has shown up. And so that means that I won't get the stuff until Monday afternoon, which gives me 1.5 days to do what I had given myself 5 days to do. So I am panicking and wasting time while trying to think how to work this all out.

So in the meantime here's the state of the show:

The interiors of my rooms for Everything I Love - I am waiting on more paint so I can't start creating the web out of brass wire for it yet. The mesh ceiling is almost done, but again I can't start installing it until the paint is here. The roof is made of 4 stretchers (that's Chris and Sean's shack by my ceiling panels), but can't be installed until the paint gets here. Boxes of photos that go in the room, I have 4,000 photos of things I love so far - I think I will spend this weekend uploading the other 4,000. So I will do that, build the tables for the photos and make the grill behind which the audio elements are hidden this weekend.

So far I have 5 of the Nets for Shadows finished, I want 7 but the wire didn't show up this week (so much for express mailing in Ireland). I'm fine with 5 but 7 will be better. Those are what I really needed to be working on this weekend. It takes an entire studio wall to make one and about 9 hours per net. I need to be out of my studio with the walls spackled and painted by Wed. morning, so provided the wire shows on Monday I will be pulling a couple of all-nighters to get these done and the studio cleared in time.

My House is done, and just needs to be moved to a different studio. But I can't fix it's wall until the studio is all cleared. So that adds to the insanity for Tuesday.

And then there is the installation for The Cage I Put Myself In - which can't even begin until next Friday. That gives me 5 days to finish a major piece - there is no part of it that can be done until I have access to the studio.

I'm starting to freak-out a bit, but I guess it's to be expected. And my poor poor hands - I scraped off most of my knuckles pulling those canvases and have smashed my fingers so many times with a hammer making my nets that I have massive blisters. It's probably good I can't work on the nets this weekend 'cause my hands are so sore they shake constantly and I can't do the detailed work.

That's my sad story. Hopefully the next post will be about how it all worked out great for the show.

catalog images

The materials I choose for my art all carry associative meanings with memory and emotion. The wire, wood, ink and paint relate to places and periods of my life, I construct objects with them which help me to come to an understanding and resolution of past experience.

I use my art as a way to explore the conflicting psychological states which I associate with the places in which I exist. I show how my perception changes based upon the context in which I am considering it.

I am most interested in the extremes of meaning generated about place as experienced from contrasting emotional situations. I often turn to literature and to creative exchanges with writers as a means to find a different viewpoint in which to observe and evaluate my personal surroundings.

Nets, cages, home and thresholds are the symbolic language I use to express conflicting reactions to the experiences of my life. I hope that these images and structures allow others to recognize something in them that resonates with their own lives.

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound –the tumultuous motion of the heart, and in my ears the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch, a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought – a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavour to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival of soul and successful effort to move.

- The Pit and the Pendulum (fragment) Edgar Allan Poe

My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart...

"Yes," I said to the little prince. "The house, the stars, the desert-- what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!"

-The Little Prince (fragment) Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

- Invisible Cities (fragment) Italo Calvino (1972)

About 1/2 of these are faked because of the nature of what I am making. I will not have access to my installation sites until just before my thesis show. So for now the corners and floor and walls of my studio are turned into detail shots to approximate the finished work.