OPENING
Fountain 604 Grand Ave (between St. marks and Bergen) Brooklyn
Jan. 16th 7 to 10
Dan Blake
Yoni Niv
Matthew Abbott
Tom Burtonwood
Stephanie Costello
Michael Zachary
fountainstudiosny.com
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.
Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97
2 images, which i think are photographs of slides projected in the studio. At this time i was doing a lot of studio scale installations, building the total environment pieces, photographing them as slides, and projecting them back onto the installation in question or some other construction in the studio. So the effect was to break up the space several times and fragment it in interesting ways. these two images are i think projected onto a blank wall however. but u get the general idea. sections of the studio were painted deep strong colors and pieces of wood and other material were used to break up and section the space. sort of painting in space, this was for the me the apex of my “structural work” and from this point i veered off into making earth works.with these installations i encouraged the viewer to physically interact with the work, in order to experience the entire room it was necessary to clamber over pallets and other obstacles stacked up in the space. These items were also painted and arranged according to my taste. i think inm the end i got tired of the profound difficulty at knowing what to take from this and how to see it beyond my studio environment. i think in many ways it was more an incubatory for me to find a way of working more so than an end result. that said, this is exactly the type of large scale installation i’d like to find a way to produce. later on in carbondale the unfolding sculptures were an attempt to create an easily deployable module that unfolded could produce a level of spatial fragmentation like these pieces. i think that one recurring theme in all my work, and with holly too, has been portability. from time to time i make works that are patently impossible to move easily and these pieces are the flip side of the drive towards mobility. but i keep coming back to this MANPORT / MANPAD production. …. hmmm. (p.s. sorry about all the dust, i need ot clean the scanner).
Studio Installation, mixed media, 1996 / 97