27th Annual Made in California

27th Annual Made in California opens this Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. at the City of Brea Art Gallery. The following two works are in the show.

Heterogeneous, Xerox transfer on acrylic, dissection pins, paper cast onto plasticel hive foundation, colored pencil, found frame

Phaeolus Schweinitzii, Wet and needle felted hand dyed wool, forged copper, resin

SGC International 2012: Navigating Currents

Printmakers traveling by land and air to reach the conference.

The 40th anniversary 2012 SGCi conference, Navigating Currents, recently finished up where the organization began, in the Big Easy, New Orleans. Based in the Canal Street Sheraton, a centralized location to city happenings, the conference ran this past Wednesday to Saturday. University hosts include Tulane and Loyola, near the city's Garden District.

River view from the Sheraton's 38th floor.

SGCi is an extended family of printmakers spanning across generations, with attendance this year at around 1300, comprised about half of students and half professionals. The theme reflected on the history of the organization, looking forward to future goals and potential. New to the conference this year were INKubator sessions, intimate groups gathering to discuss a specific topic in the tradition of the organizations founding, and mentoring sessions where established artists came together with new to discuss their work.

A small clamshell letterpress at the Firecracker Press table during Open Portfolio.

Click to check out this photo album for some of the conference highlights.

Table Top Pattern Printing at Friday's demonstration with Josh Minnie and Emily Minnie.

Let's talk about love baby

Opening for Valentines is the Detroit showing of Let's Talk About Love Baby, curated by Chido Johnson. The show is a collection of altered romance novels, with each artist taking inspiration from the love contained within their book.

Lavyrle Spencer's, The Fulfillment, provided the materials for my contribution.

The Sketchbook Project: Life Underground

The Brooklyn Art Library is home to more than 12,000 artists' sketchbooks made by artists for The Sketchbook Project, organized by Art House Co-Op. This year's 2012 world tour will take recent sketchbooks on the road to art venues in 14 cities before landing at the Brooklyn Art Library.

My sketchbook theme is Life Underground. Images of plant life washed up on the Santa Monica beach transition slowly into debris entangled among the weeds.

TRIANGULATION

Sublime Environment: Materials and Applications workshop led by Judy Chicago

 

Housed in a newly constructed shopping center, Judy Chicago's 1968 collaborative installation, Disappearing Environments, consisted of 9 dry ice ziggurats and red road flares. Chicago's goals were "anti-monumentality, anti-consumerism, to transform and soften the environment." Each ziggurat contained 91 blocks of dry ice, weighing roughly 60 pounds each. That is nearly 25 tons of dry ice. Sublime Environment will be a reinterpretation of Disappearing Environments.

Volunteers met last Saturday for a meet and greet at Santa Monica Airport's Barker Hanger. Judy Chicago and her husband, Donald Woodman, along with Materials and Applications' directors Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess, introduced us to the project. Ethereal projected images captivated our attention, but the real magic happened when Woodman pulled out a block of dry ice and began to experiment. 

Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide. Sublimation occurs when material transforms from a solid to gas, or vice versus, without becoming liquid. The process is sublime.

Clad in coats and gloves, we stepped out to the parking lot to play with blocks of dry ice, modifying their precise cube forms with tools, testing construction hypothesis and baring the weight of moving these forms. The foggy air caused thick gas to roll off the blocks, blurring the precise edges, transforming the light of the red road flares to a soft pink.

Each team will get 91 blocks of dry ice and 36 road flares. Concept, design and approach will be finalized during December's meeting.

 

Sublime Environment will take place on January 19, 2012, as part of Pacific Standard Time's Public Art and Performance Festival.

For more information please visit http://www.emanate.org/pst-disappearing-environments.htm or http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2011/10/judy_chicago_disappearing_envi.php

Wave Hill: Hive Culture

Check out Wave Hill's Hive Culture website to see the artists in the exhibition and read a little about their work. Artists include Jennifer Angus, Anonda Bell, Deborah Davidovits, Anda Dubinskis, Cara Enteles, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Sally Gall, Hope Ginsburg, Talia Greene, Judi Harvest, Rob Keller, Andrea Lilienthal, Holly Lynton, Lenore Malen, Julia Oldham, Michelle Rozic, Jeanne Silverthorne and Draga Šušanj. The website has links to artist pages as well as a download of the exhibition catalogue.

Image of the Hive Culture website.

http://www.wavehill.org/arts/hiveculturecaptivatedbythehoneybee.htm

Rogue Print: Works by Craig Stecyk

Flier courtesy CSUN Art Galleries

L.A. Printers Fair

The International Printing Museum will host the L.A. Printers Fair on Saturday, October 1, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Hope to see you there!

Think Small 6

Last year I experimented with casting paper frames, to make the frame a significant part of the work. The two pieces for Think Small 6 provided a great opportunity to use a couple of the frames.

Art Space Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, hosts Think Small 6, an annual invitational fundraising exhibit. Artists are asked to create works 3 in. x 3 in. x 3 in. or smaller. The exhibit opens October 28, 7-10 p.m., and runs through December 18.

Cast paper experiments.

Red Tide Above and Red Tide Below, each 2 3/4 in. x 3 1/4 in. x 1/2 in., Cast paper, graphite, color pencil

Hive Culture: Captivated by the Honeybee

The New York Daily News wrote an article about Hive Culture: Captivated by the Honeybee, an upcoming exhibit at Wave Hill in the Bronx. The exhibit features work about bees by 18 artists, including myself, with many focusing on Colony Collapse Disorder.

Hive Culture opens September 13 and runs through December 1. For more information checkout www.wavehill.org.

Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Please click to enlarge and read.