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Ginger Haydon's Chameleons

June 8, 2008

Zagnut

Maria

Ginger Haydon is an old friend and mentor of mine and a wonderfully inventive and whimsical artist. She has taught at MICA and the Art League School and is currently teaching at NOVA. Ginger has an eleven year old daughter, Olivia, and they make art together a lot. I think "Chameleons", her latest series of silkscreens embellished in oils, reflects the mutual influences of mother and child. With just slight tweaks on the basic silkscreen image, the creatures assume a variety of expressions and moods, from childish to full-on lascivious.

Camp Rehoboth donation

June 6, 2008

I donated this piece to the annual fundraising gala and auction last week for Camp Rehoboth, a great cause in Rehoboth, Del that has been patronized for years by my two friends, Sondra Arkin and Mary Beth Ramsey. It was in the live auction, pretty much guaranteeing that I couldn't go to the event, since it is agonizing beyond words to watch your own stuff being auctioned. But it did well, so that's good for them (and me.)

Salon D'Estrogene

June 4, 2008

Invisible Children

These are some of the members of the salon assembled by my friend, the artists Kathy Keler. I(f anyone can think of a name less pretentious than "salon", I would love to hear it.) Anyway, we include poets, playwrights, a novelist, a musician and several visual artists. We meet one Tuesday a month, eat a fine dinner, catch up on each other's work and some of us usually present a project, often one in progress. Our aim is to engage each other in collaborative projects. Last night Elizabeth read a scene from the play she is working on. She managed to transform herself into an African freedom fighter - ah, the magic of theater! The other picture, Invisible Children, is a drawing I did a few months back inspired by a chapter from Sarah's novel. It (the novel) is in the hands of an agent in London - stay tuned. Perhaps this will be the cover?

Something New

June 2, 2008

My head is already on Cape Cod and my body is not far behind - we will pack up the car next Wednesday, June 11, and go to New York for the preview reception for the Affordable Art Fair. It's at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 135 West 18th Street from the 12th through the 15th. Then we'll leave straight from there to Truro. We used to make this trip from DC to the Cape leaving in the middle of the night all the time (so as to avoid traffic in NY) but in the past few years we have taken it a lot easier, so it will be intereting ro see if the bods are still capable. There are always motels, although they are against Mr. Weiss's religion. Anyway, I think this is probably the last piece I'll manage to finish in my studio here. It's an encaustic, 24" square and incorporates a sheet of rice paper that's been melted into the wax and gives it an interesting texture and a matte finish.

Some Good Drawing at Artomatic

May 25, 2008

Rita Elsner, Beautiful Thing, part 2

This year there seems to be a fair amount of interesting drawing at Artomatic, much of which is woven into a narrative either explicit or suggested. I love Rita Elsner's graphite drawings of a dirigible floating ominously over a city and her other drawings involving birds, x-rays, parachuting figures (that's all in one piece). I don't claim to have found the key to the iconography, but it makes some wierd visual sense. Maybe Rita will tell me.

Carucci (?)

I also like Matthew Carucci's cityscapes with buildings in the process of either construction or demolition. And there's more, but I sometimes can't tell whose work it is because, as in past Artomatics, some folks don't leave anything identifying themselves. What's up, folks? Are you being coy? Are you hiding a secret life from your colleagues at Homeland Security?

Mudomatic: Clay at Artomatic

May 24, 2008

Yeonhee Ji

Leila Holtsman

For sheer craftsmanship, professionalism and artistic quality, there is little at Artomatic to challenge the group of ceramic sculptors presenting "Coincide" on the 10th floor. Organized by Novie Trump and Laurel Lukasewski of Flux Studio in Mt. Ranier (hip hip hooray for old Mt. R.), it features work by 17 of our area's most accompished ceramic artists. I work in a complex that houses the studios of a number of these ferociously talented sculptors, so I was happy to discover several artists whose work I had not previously seen. These include Yeonhee Ji, whose metal and ceramic installation is like an otherworldly prayer altar and Leila Holtsman, whose constellation of white biomorphic forms scattered over a rusted backdrop combines the industrial and biological in a new and beguiling way.

This One Stopped Me, Too

May 24, 2008

Veronica Szalus's Russian snowflakes

Secret Agent Man

Another piece that stopped me in my march through Artomatic was Veronica Szalus's installation on the 11th floor. The title is the Russian word for snowflakes, which I would not know except for the serendipitous fact that I was touring through at the time with my friend, artist Richard Dana, who has a secret past involving the knowledge of Russian. There, now you all know. Just don't tell where you heard it. But I digress. The snowflakes are spheroids fashioned from what I think is that hardening bandage material that casts are made from. They are light, fragile, delicate - like snowflakes, in fact. Veronica placed some out on the balcony of the building where they have just begun to be dissolved by the rain - a process that I hope she documents.

This One Stopped Me: Artomatic Part Two

May 24,2008

Artomatic is so big - this one is spread out over 8 floors and has over 700 visual artists - that after the first half hour I found myself pretty much sprinting through because, let's face it, life has only so many hours that one can commit to this and I already knew it would be a multi-day affair. So it takes something special to slow me down, much less to get me to stop for more than a few minutes. Tracy Lee's installation, "Refused:Return to Sender" did it. I'm not usually a big fan of conceptual work and the installation is not particularly compelling visually, but something about the collection of snapshots stuck on the wall as if on a teenager's bulletin board, the slides in plastic sleeves and the old-fashioned baby photo book pulled me in and I read the narrative. It tells the story in clipped, bleak prose of alcoholic parents who utterly and completely excised their two adult children from their lives, going so far as to return all family snapshots and refusing to accept the mailed announcement of the birth of their first grandchild. Then I looked more closely at the photos on the wall that seem at first to be typical family snapshots of Mom and Dad with kids at play, having a picnic, etc.and saw that each time a parent is pictured - in the park, by the pool, in the backyard - they are holding or are in close proximity to a beer. I don't know if this is Tracy's true story or if it is a fiction, but in either case, she has made a heartbreaking, deeply moving piece of work.

Artomatic: Part the First

May 23, 2008

Ara Laughlin's big fly

Over the past few days, I have visited the latest incarnation of Artomatic a couple of times and am ready to say some words, with more to come. Disclosure: I was one of the founders of Artomatic almost ten years ago when local developer Douglas Jemal loaned DC artists a shabby-ass building redolent with history called the Manhattan Laundry and allowed us to do with it as we wished for a few months. It was a wonderful creative free-for-all that began with just a couple of fundamental rules/principles:1) no juries, 2) all the work to prepare and run the show would be done by the artists.

nightmare fridge

A. Zealand's coffee filters

Exhibition space was allocated in the 100,000 square foot building in a kind of semi-organized gold rush, where groups of 50 artists at a time ran through the three oddly-connected buildings in 15 minute increments, staking claims by post-it on segments of floor and wall space. Then, over a period of less than a month, over 300 artists colonized the space and transformed a dingy, mostly unlit warren of rooms, hallways and basements into a vibrant and living tapestry of the creative impulse in virtually all of its forms and all of its shades of quality.

Chuck Baxter (I want this)

Mr. Robot

Artomatic 2008 is Number Six in the series and it must be said that the insanity/spontaneity of the original event has been tempered by the probably inevitable institutionalization of the enterprise; Artomatic is now a registered non-profit corporation with a Board (on which I served until 6 months ago), corporate sponsors, a bank balance, and a bunch of rules, most of which are no-doubt necessary but nonetheless to be regretted, at least by me. Us old originals can't help sniffing a bit at the upscale nature of the venue for 2008, a brand new office building with gorgeous views of the Capital and bathrooms that Donald Trump would be proud of. ("Shoes? You had shoes?!?"). Having done my old-timer's grumbling, then, let me assure you that the 2008 version may be cleaned up but it is still brimming with energy and surprises.

Juice Guy

Mary Frank's boxes

Sonra Arkin and her Checkpoint

Let's get this part out of the way: if you can't stand the dreck, stay out of the kitchen. As is inevitable with Artomatic, there is plenty of mediocre-at-best photography and lame painting and some stuff that is so dreadful it makes you wonder whether irony was the intention - and that makes you stop and think, which is a good thing. But, Blake Gopnik to the contrary notwithstanding, there is also a lot of stuff to love and a whole lot of stuff that puts a smile on your face and to my mind, that's what Artomatic is all about. I'm going to write separately about just a few individual artists among the many whose work interested me, but here I've just included some quintessentially Artomatic artwork.

Bob Weiss on Juice Guy's crazed exercise bike

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