Fun-A-Day 2013: Opening this week!

If any of you are in the Chicago area you should come by the opening for the Fun-A-Day Exhibition! This Friday night @ the Threadless store!

Participants in Fun-A-Day do one thing everyday for the month of January. Lots of people make stuff but I've seen others do a specific action or go to a specific place: as long as you can document what it is you choose to do. At the end of the month, a show is organized and everyone who wants to show their work is invited to.

This year I'll be showing all of my sky swatch photos from the month of January. My awesome roommate made tiny wood sculptures every day and she'll be showing those, too.
The show will be up for an entire month... but who doesn't love an opening party! Come by and say hello if you can!

Employed! A 24 Hr Project

One week after moving to Chicago, I managed to land myself an art show! Thanks to my cousin's amazing girlfriend, and my new friend, Tory, I was invited to participate in a 24 hr project with opening to follow. Each participating artist was to bring all materials necessary to make work to a warehouse space near Chinatown and all work created during the night would be hung in the Nichole Villeneuve Gallery.

What I managed to miss by not reading the fine print of the waiver was that the artists were also responsible for providing tables and chairs. Oops.. good thing I found that chair lying around or it would have been a really long night. You know.. even longer than it was already.

The space was huge and beautiful. Apparently, this particular warehouse used to be owned by Al Capone. It was handily located right on the river... good for dumping bodies? Rumor has it that the basement and freight elevators are haunted! But we saw no evidence of it during our night there.

There were all sorts of artists: painters, sculptors, installation artists, and me: fibers

One of my goals for moving to Chicago was to get back into the studio in a really serious, conceptual way. For the past few years I feel like I've really only been touching upon projects- starting things without finishing them... not really taking the time to think things/concepts all the way through. I haven't, however, lost my crazy thirst for historical details: my most recent research topic has been FDR, the New Deal and the Great Depression. In keeping with that theme, here was the proposal I submitted to the curators of this show:

FDR’s New Deal programs and the American experiences during the Great Depression seem to me to be particularly enlightening in the context of the contemporary “Great Recession” and the global financial crisis. During the 24hr project, “Employed,” I plan on exploring the relationships between the Great Depression and the Great Recession through fibers techniques such as scrap quilting and embroidery: both techniques popularized by the necessary frugality of the hard times of the 1930’s. By utilizing text and images I hope to create a series of compositions that can act individually or as a series.

My research included everything from listening to FDR's fireside chats from the 1930's to reading Paul Krugman articles comparing the economics of the two time periods. But what I found most compelling were the hundreds of posters designed and printed by the Works Progress Administration between 1932 and 1943.

The WPA was the primary institution responsible for getting people back to work during the great depression. They did so by initiating thousands of community improvement projects across the US. Many of these were infostructure building: road construction, bridge construction, etc. But many of them were cultural. The WPA organized and provided funding for murals, musical concert, theater... anything you can think of. And their posters advertised them.

I especially loved the WPA posters that focused on the idea of the importance of work, itself.

I mean... first of all, way to glorify the working class. It just doesn't happen that often. But also, it's so true that being unemployed in a country that idolizes productivity is the difinitive road to depression. No wonder the Great Depression was so totally soul crushing, right?

Uhm, amazing poster much? Totes.

This next one was my favorite. It seemed to bring together all of my research with my personal situation of being an unemployed and unconfident artist with the title of the show, "Employed," with my research of both the past and the present.

What these posters really drove home to me was that the WPA wasn't only battling an economic depression... it was trying to assuage an emotional depression that was affecting the entire American population. Spirits had been hit so hard that fixing one was impossible without fixing the other. This was one of the main differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession that I chose to focus my work on: it seems like now, although times are tough, the American population has kept from sliding headfirst into an emotional pit. Consumerism (apparently the best way to guage people's spirits) is still fairly up. Apple is still releasing ridiculously priced sci-fi products and people are racing to get their hands on them. NPR is still featuring stories of individuals who, after being unceremoniously fired from their boring office jobs, took the "opportunity" to change careers- to become self employed or follow dreams they had never thought were possible.

See? Optimism! And Hence: a flourishing indy crafts movement. The contemporary independent crafts movement combines the comfort seeking nostalgia of handmade objects with the anti-establishment mentality of an unpopular war and the rampant excuse for capitalism that Americans feel is their constitutional right. (Okay, clearly my feelings about the crafts movement are many and varied. And I am admittedly a part of it... but for this project it serves as a complicated muse.)

For my work for the "Employed" show I decided to combine fabrics common to the indy craft movement with images and techniques from the Great Depression.

To me, the forthcoming pieces are a sort of hilarious paradox of domestic memorials (handmade objects that hang in the home) with the mass-produced popular fabric styles and the incongruous images from the WPA posters. Were these posters ever meant to hang in the home? Probably not. But now they can be remembered for the place they hold in America's heart. (I mean, everybody knows this history, right? Ha. Hence my point.)

I chose to leave the images empty for a few reasons: first, because I forgot how god-awful long it takes to embroider anything. I had planned to make maybe six of these compositions but I barely finished three. And second, because I really liked the visual competition of the fabric patterns and the images; like the past and the present were battling to be seen.

Ok, so it's clearly not a finished body of work. But I think there's potential here. I would love to continue the project and make a whole hell of a lot of these guys. I would LOVE any feedback that people have on these, too. Please? Criticism welcome? I need to get back into critique mode.. I've been a bit coddled lately. (Mostly by myself.) Bring it on.

So, a final word on the show experience:

Now, I've done 24 hr projects before... and not with the best success or enjoyment. But the difference between the show I did when I first moved to Philly and this one was that in this case we weren't trying to create collaborative work. When you're relying on other people- people you may not even know- to create a piece that will have your name on it... tensions tend to run very high in the middle of the night. Nichole's show allowed the artists to only feel responsible for their own work... which meant that the rest of the artists involved could be respite and community. I feel like I got to know a bunch of people in the area and see into their creative processes a little bit. It was really awesome.

I thinking Chicago's gonna work out, and I'm really excited to get involved with the art scene here. Too bad i'm leaving for a month in.. like 45 min. I guess I'll try to pick up with this project when I get back in July! In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog for Snow Farm 2010! A week with my amazing nephews! And trying to drive fast enough to escape my personal demons! (Wish me luck. Also safety.)

First Story: Paula Wilson at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

It turns out I took a lot of photos during my 2+ month stint at the Fabric Workshop and Museum... but going through those photos now, almost a month after finishing the project, it's amazing to watch the transformations: basic, monotone, industrial felt was magically transformed into architecture... canvas and tempura paint became a cityscape. Here are (kind of a lot of) photos from the studio:

Industrial felt...

Jenna Eagan and I sewed this cornice the very first week we were here. It was only a taste of the giant-ass sewing to come.

Canvas and burlap.

We sent the drop to Paula in New Mexico so she could paint it. Here it is installed on an ingenious contraption made of plumbers pipe with snaps! SNAPS! On PIPES! These are the big leagues, my friends.

Sample #1, sample #2, photo, sketch...

Et Voila! Pretty grate...

Craft felt with a wire frame stuffed with polyfill and sewn on the industrial very carefully...

I like to think of this pillar as the Logan's Run Pillar... doesn't it just look like some overgrown stone garden? Somehow it's a vaguely sci-fi simulacra...

...love...

Fruit! We patterned a ton of fruit: pineapple, lemons, apples, grapes, pears, star-fruit...

Tiernan made these gorgeous braids for the cornices..

That's right: Butt cornices. (In process..)

Elisabeth is a Butt Cornice mastermind...

Fruity Butt Cornice? There was no end of the fun we had with this.

Installed by Elisabeth Roskos.

Pigeons!!
Monoprinted on silk, canvas and industrial felt.

(Attack of the giant pigeon!)

If you get a chance to go to the show (which clearly you should) see how many pigeons you can count throughout the gallery! So many pigeons...

Since light plays such a huge role in Paula's work another fantastic element to the FWM show was this sign- originally a real estate sign- collaged with scraps of silk organza. I love the relationship between the light coming in the real window and the light- also the shapes: the circle of the window and the circle of the moon. Even though I had never made this connection before, the architecture itself ends up being a reference to nature.

And when you turned around to view the other side of the sign, you make another visual connection between the moon in the sign and the sun-like circle in the stained-glass window. Beauty!

Each leaf and flower was made out of craft felt, industrial felt and stuffing...

and made into a decorative cornice- then combined with the stained glass window panels made of layers of silk organza.

Paula silk-screened her drawings onto lots of different shades of organza, then trimmed, layered and stitched together on a regular house-hold sewing machine.

The base is made out of quarter inch industrial felt and then painted gray to mimic cement or marble.

The windows were then sewn in by master seamtress and studio head Andrea Landau (assisted by myself and Jenna Eagan-shown here- and Tiernan- shown below.)

Serious seamstress street cred, man. For realz.

The window was then installed in the gallery on a plumbers pipe and connected to an amazingly beautiful hand sewn brick wall. I wish I had a close-up of the pipe tube which I engineered and constructed out of felt! It was kind of awesome.

Installed with another wall- monoprinted on canvas- with a black fabric grate. Wheat-pasted directly onto the wall is a collection of posters and drawings. The space itself was part of the inspiration that determined the work so I love how the posters connected the fabric walls we made in the studio and the brick wall of the gallery.

Mono and silk screened burlap curtains- painted and embellished- hung between collaged pillars. (Did you catch the hidden pigeons on the floor there? Yay!)

The show blends together installation and prints, tiny hand-stitched detail and overwhelming proportions. Paula Wilson's vision is an experience that deserves to be seen by everyone. Go See It! (It's up now and will be viewable at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philly until the fall.) And feel free to let me know what you think!

Fun-a-Day 2010! This Weekend!

It's that time of year again!


And unlike last year... I actually finished my project AND got it turned in on time! Which, let me tell you, was no small feat. The drop off day was last Saturday and as those of you from the Philly area can attest... we had a bit of snow that day.

So I bundled up my knots and trudged them the three blocks to the drop off site. Snow up to my knees! It was beautiful!

And the project itself came out pretty well too:


Raph let me use her cursive typewriter to type the labels for all the knots (date, fig #, historical name.) And after only a few embarrassing incidents with a can of gold spray paint...


Come on out on Friday or Saturday to see all the amazing projects! There are always SOO many creative collections: the show is always worth coming to West Philly for.



*** in other news!! Because the snow blanketed the city last weekend, the opening event for the Text/Textile Show has been POSTPONED until this Sunday, Feb 14th! Be my Valentine and come see my work! 1-5 pm, 704 Catherine st at the DaVinci Art Alliance.