Tom Burtonwood

Recently it’s all infrastructure all the time. Working on getting studio spaces set up and ducks in a row. Not so much time for actual art making However i thought i’d share two images, that have for different reasons had a big impact on my practice. The first image, above, is a club flyer from the late mid 90′s probably 95 or thereabouts for a collective called Desert Storm. I went to a few of their nights in Nottingham at that time. I loved what they were doing politically as well as musically. In 1996 Desert Storm took their sound system on the road to war torn Sarajevo.

The Desert Storm flyer shows a turn table sporting a “Nort” insignia from the 2000AD story Rogue Trooper. Again this comic was a big influence i’m not sure how or if it gets expressed thru the work so much… but in terms of downtime i’ve spent a lot of it reading Rogue Trooper and of late tracking down collected trades at Wizard World and such….

Despite the “Southers” being portrayed as the “good” guys in Rogue Trooper i love that DS took the “Nort” logo…… as a Northern Englishman i could never quite relate to the idea of cheering the “Southers” on…. ok back to my infrastructure play.

Doom Bear Havoc, drawing, 2002

Between October 2001 and August 2002 i worked at Pearl Paint in Chicago along with many. many other fine, young, crazy, displaced, deranged, artists and art students too many to name…. each day was a constant fight whether the vampires (certain managers) who were trying to steal our souls, the lincoln park trixies casting their intricate wedding invitation faux vellum curses on the hapless paper dpeartment, or the general suck that is retail…. to all of you artists who suffered and suffer still in retail hell  i post this image, of Doom Bear Havoc remember him at 4pm on a rainy afternoon with 2 hours to go, no more breaks, no caffiene to be had, no sonic youth on the stereo and a line of zombies assaulting your counter…..

Isometric Interior, pastel on paper, 2009

Mobile Sculpture, sketchbook page, 2000

At some point it occurred to me that you could “park” / install / display / deploy a mobile sculpture at Walmart or some other retail store parking lot fairly easily. You have a captive, if likely bemused / uninterested, audience and some super absurd awesomeness. Never did follow thru on this 100%. the mobile lander/ sculpture “Action” documented here comes close but we didn’t really leave it in one place and wait for a reaction… hopefully I will get the chance to make amends on this fairly soon.

i captured the color image about 3 weeks ago as i worked to “calibrate” my camera set up for the upcoming animation photo shoot. later when i was talking to Barbara Kasten in her studio i saw this black and white image by El Lissitzky. For some reason it resonated with the images of my hand / grid / pyramid piece that i’m obsessing about these days. Today at the library i found an El Lissitzky monograph, so i thought i’d put up my own version of the photomontage… El Lissitzky and his Proun works in particular were a big influence for me when i first started making installation works so it’s nice to come full circle in this fashion and by chance move in a similar orbit.

Sketchbook, wheeled concertina sculpture, 2000

Sketchbook, wheeled concertina sculpture, 2000

Post it Note sketch, 2000

Posting has been slow of late as i prepare for the start of the school semester, i’m teaching courses at SAIC and UIC in the fall and with the new term only days away at UIC i’m putting the finishing touches to the syllabus and what not. It’s great to be teaching again, i’m looking forward to meeting my students and immersing myself in academic life. I’m hoping to take some classes myself either in Motion Graphics or Maya both of which would be a big help to the studio effort. Holly is also about to start school at SAIC for her MFA in sculpture so we’re about to become a very academic household again.

Post It Notes, 2000

In a search for the sewing machine Holly dug out some sketchbooks from a “hidden” closet last night, and found some real treasures. I’ll be trying to get back in the daily posting groove and share these with everyone. Looking at this current post and the last one i;m struck as usual by the similarities and connections between the work i was making in the period of 1995 – 1997 and 2000 – 2001. The synchronicity of seeing all this work, from Loughborough, Carbondale and now Chicago together for the first time combined with my “new” studio practice is very exciting and I hope that i can get some of these “unfinished ideas” out in the real world soon. As you can see from the drawings these images mostly revolve around the idea of unfolding sculpture, of an installation that is either MANPORT (man portable) or VEH PORT MOD (vehicle portable modules) …. At the time i was making this work, i was back in the UK i think for the summer before my final year in C’dale. Regular air travel meant that i had to carry whatever i took back and forth across the Atlantic. After transporting an aluminum relief across the water in the summer 0f 1999 i realized that i should quit making art out of solid metals like aluminum or iron and focus instead on more MAN PORT objects / items. This idea for making in a general sense has held true for me throughout my practice, working with Holly or by myself. Apart from a brief stint between 2004 – 2005 (ish) i’ve never owned a car or other form of motorized transport and frankly do not plan to. Holly and I factor our living plans around public transport. When we do a big install we rent a cargo van or similar. And so it goes for my art practice, these sketches illustrate ideas for either unfolding installations that expand from a compact module to fill an exhibition hall, to paraphrase Marshall Mcluhan, “the medium is the message”…. the work is about networks, structures—- and it speaks this with form — it is what it is — OR the sketches illustrate pieces that are still modular, but are wheeled and can be moved from place to place and exhibited not necessarily in an exhibition hall but rather taken out into the public sphere.

Post It Notes

Studio wise i’ve been building and calibrating a camera stand to record all the frames of the Permutations animation i drew while in France this summer. It’s taken a lot of effort and fine tuning, and in the long run maybe it would have been quicker just to scan these images in at a low ppi… but i have another experiment / idea to follow up on now…. which if it’s half way interesting will post asap….

Anyhow plenty good material here to work from…. ok now i’m off downstairs to draw.

3 unfinished compositions from 1996. i like the square / cube unit as u r aware if u have been following this blog over the last couple of months. again, i need to get back to this method of working, i enjoy looking at the top two pieces, the bottom one, the white one is ok, but in the interest of completeness i felt it had to be posted too.

pyramid / beacon / node

drawing for sculpture. pyramid / beacon / node. i’ll be remaking this piece which was originally made in 1997 – 1998, and lost. also had some wild ideas for animations. got to get “Permutations #1″ finished and made a camera stand, so hopefully soon i get it all plotted in, key out a couple more frames and move on to adding sound, color sequences and so forth. additionally i’m hoping to start some new animations using the pastel / paper, again should have something to show soon.

Ziploc bag containing remnants of happening / class project.

Recently whilst digging through old boxes in the studio i came across this Ziploc bag. At first i was going to throw it out, after all it wasn’t immediately apparent what it was inside. As it turns out it contains about 10 – 15 pieces of chewing gum, masticated by 10 – 15 different people and their drawings on post it notes. Still wondering why i didn’t pitch it?

These items are the remnants of a happening / project I produced while at SIUC. I was taking Susan Felleman’s class Freudian Cinema. The idea of my piece was to create a colelctive “physical manifestation of a dream.” Basically a web that suspended drawing produced by members of the class. Each drawing (segment of the dream) was stuck to the web using chewing gum. I thought the act of chewing gum and applying it to the web was in line (HA! pun!) with Freud’s oral fascinations.

Instructions given to the class for a larger version click here:

www-us.flickr.com/photos/burtoholmes/3791265802/sizes/l/