The artist statement -- TMI?

Recently I caught an exhibit at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany IN (through April 5) that I liked a lot.  It featured two artists who make art out of found objects, aka junk.  Since I like to make this kind of art too, I figured I would enjoy it, and I did.  But my good art friend went to the show before I did and reported back that she was disappointed with one of the artists, R. Michael Wimmer, who makes large assemblages.

Not particularly in the art, if I'm properly representing her opinion, but in the fact that she thought you wouldn't know what the pieces were about without reading the artist statements on the wall.  Without the explanations, she thought, the arrays of different objects looked like so much random stuff.

And yes, the statements were quite detailed explanations of what each element meant to the artist.  I'll show you a couple of examples.

Part of me appreciated the detailed artist statements.  How many times have you looked at a work of art, fixed in on some detail and wondered what on earth that means?  In some ways it was nice to have the explanations, almost as if the artist were standing there answering your questions.

But part of me wished for a bit more mystery.  Maybe I would have enjoyed attaching my own memories and associations to these odd figures and artifacts.  The titles would have given me a clue, and perhaps that would have been enough to point me in the right direction without hitting me over the head.  Or at least the detailed explanations might have been put in a notebook on the other side of the room, so I could look first and be explained to later, if I wanted.

Now I'll show you some of Wimmer's other works, without the explanations.  You decide whether you like the art better with or without.

Audubon's Habitat

A Child's Dream, A Mother's Nightmare (details below)

Winter Springs No. 5

So what's your opinion?  Do you like artist statements that explain what everything means?  Or do you like the minimalist approach where it's the artist's job to make the art and your job to interpret it?

Junk can be valuable

I collect junk.  I pick it up from the street as I walk; I glean it from the workroom, the garage, the discarded mail, other people's trash pickup piles.  I make art with it (or plan to).

One of my favorite forms of junk is ephemera -- the fancy term for paper stuff.  In particular I love ephemera from foreign travel -- used Metro tickets, city maps, museum passes, hotel bills, menus, beer mats, newspapers, all the stuff that from home might not be very special but from away is très exotique.  I bring home packs of the stuff when we travel overseas, and I tell my relations to not buy me souvenirs, just bring home junk.

So my son, recently traveling in Europe, did as told, even though he travels light, just a backpack for a month's journey, and the pack of ephemera grew over the weeks.  Good boy.

As he went through security in Barcelona to finally come home, he was pulled aside for further questioning.

Where did you start your trip, señor?

Germany.

Where did you stay first?

Frankfurt.

Which hotel?

Ummmm.... some hotel near the train station.... ummmm.... can't remember the name....  Adler, maybe.... if you have wi-fi I could pull up my email and find where I booked it....

[ Then inspiration struck!  The pack of junk for Mom!  He pulled out the pack of ephemera, leafed through it, and found a bill from the hotel!  The security guy was good with that.  But wait.... ]

After Frankfort, where did you go next, señor?

The guard took him through the entire trip, city by city (seven or eight in all).  If there wasn't a hotel bill in the pile, there was a bus or train ticket with a time and date stamp, a museum pass, a restaurant flyer, an ATM receipt.  

The guard eventually said, semi-apologetically, "You understand why we did this -- you have been here so long with so little luggage!"  He didn't understand, but that's another discussion.

Different readers might take different morals from this story.  The one I take, of course, is that collecting junk can be good for you.

Collaboration 5

Yesterday I wrote about my middle-of-the-night realization that my collaborative piece was crap.  The next morning I went into my studio and took off the thread-drawing, which I liked a lot, parking it on my design wall for a future use.  I cut away some of the selvages.  I took the hand and relocated it to a much better place.

The rules for the project stated that "you should make additions and subtractions to the piece as you see appropriate," and I decided I had to subtract before I could add.

I cut the pegboard into a much smaller size.

I got more acrylic yarn and stitched over the top of the preexisting raccoon/pencil, to complete the cross-stitch pattern across the entire piece.

Then I painted over the stitching so all I had was texture and a bit of color peeking through, but neither pencil nor raccoon.

Finally I added some found objects and called it a day.

To respect my collaborator, who was revealed to be Lelia Rechtin, I decided to pretty much keep the original title, even though it still mystified me.  I shortened it a bit to "Everything In Its Hands."

I found this exercise frustrating, but a lot of fun.  It's very difficult to read somebody else's mind and try to figure out their intentions, so you can attempt to complete their work rather than just burn it down and build your own work on its ashes.  Not sure I achieved that, and not sure that either of us successfully interpreted the theme of "cosmopolitan localism."

But I did use a found object that had (most of) the name of our city in it.  It may not be cosmopolitan, but it is local.

Collaboration 1

Recently I participated in a collaborative project in which members of a group of mostly middle-aged and older artists were paired with members of a group of younger, hipper artists.  We were asked to make art on the theme of "cosmopolitan localism," which I thought was a bit obscure, but I decided that the most cosmopolitan aspect of our city is the immigrants from many different countries who have settled here in the last decades.

Since I don't draw and didn't want to use photography in this project, I decided to portray the immigrants by going to my favorite ethnic grocery store and buying a lot of food products from different countries.  Then I mounted them on a board in mandala fashion, leaving one quadrant empty for my collaborator to work with.

For the backgrounds, I used a map of the parts of town where most of our immigrants live, and some handmade paper that seemed kind of exotic in feeling.  I decorated the edges of the composition with a knife, fork and spoon that I had found on the street (the fork and the spoon had been run over and flattened) and a pair of chopsticks.

Here are some of the details.

One of the things I learned is that shiny plastic see-through packaging has no affinity for adhesives.  After trying two different kinds of glue I finally got it to stick with huge quantities of matte medium, but even so it didn't want to cooperate.  The paper and cardboard packages were much easier to deal with.

Tomorrow I'll show you what happened next.  Meanwhile, I'll tell you that the collaborative works are on display at the Patio Gallery at the Jewish Community Center in Louisville, through July 14.  If you're in the vicinity, drop by and see our stuff!

Photo suite 72 -- fourth-graders' junk art faces

The most popular format for junk art among the fourth-graders in my workshop last week was a face.  Here are some of the kids' artworks.

Junk art -- the kids make some

Here are the fourth-graders working on their junk art.

We had sheets of mat board for them to use as supports; they could choose either the blue side or the white side.  We had two hot glue guns going with grownup assistance, but encouraged the kids to stick down as much as possible with Elmer's glue.  Unfortunately, on some of the pieces the glue became a major artistic element.  (It will probably be less so after the glue dries.)

Some of them used my suggestion to group objects by color.

Some made words.

Some made pictures.

Others made symmetrical compositions.

Some were possible candidates for psych evaluation.

More later -- stay tuned.

Junk art -- the tutorial 1

I had the pleasure yesterday of working with three fourth-grade classes to help them make art from found objects (aka junk), a gig that was arranged by my friend and fellow fiber artist Melinda Snyder, their art teacher.  A month ago Melinda shared some photos of my found-object art and instructed the kids to start finding their own stuff at home or on the street.

I told them that the most important thing in making art from miscellaneous stuff is to think of a way to make the disparate things play well together.  Six different methods came to mind, each one illustratable by some work from the show I had in spring.

First, make a picture.

My Valentine

Hot Lips

Second, find a "picture" in an intriguing object.

Gator on a Leash

Beyond the Blue Horizon

Third, use multiples.

Powerless

104 Counts of Assaulting a Battery, an AA Felony

Caravan

Hey, that's enough for one day.  Tomorrow I'll tell you about three more methods of organizing junk into art.

Found pennies -- success!!

A couple of weeks ago I was whining about how many times I had to try to get my found pennies to hang nicely in a grid.  I realize that I have never reported back on how that worked out.

Fortunately, it worked very well.  Here's the finished piece, casting beautiful shadows under the multiple gallery lights.  I think it's probably the best piece in the show, from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.

I'm also happy to report that somebody liked it well enough to buy it -- and best of all, it's somebody who had been reading about the difficult genesis of this piece on the blog.  So she'll always know how much I wanted it to come into being.

Update: I'm posting this to Nina Marie's weekly blog roundup -- check it out to see what other fiber artists have been doing this week.

Art from the street

I haven't gotten much fiber art done recently -- not that I haven't been busy in the studio, but I've been on a different plane.

Let me explain.  For many years I've been picking up interesting junk from the street as I walk.  I'm always amazed at the quantity and nature of stuff that people are willing to throw away as they walk or drive along.  Often I suspect, from the placement and size of the piles, that people occupy themselves while waiting at red lights by emptying their ashtrays, changing batteries in their flashlights, sweeping out their pickup beds or fieldstripping their weapons.

I am intrigued by the stuff that ends up on the street.  I've taken to carrying plastic bags with me in case I find some appealing junk.  I'm not a hoarder -- not much intrinsic value to dead batteries -- but I have always had a vision that this could become art.

Over the years I found a kindred spirit, my friend Debby Levine, who like me is primarily a fiber artist but who is also an avid walker and an avid picker-upper of junk.  We try to walk at least once a week, each armed with our bags and with a sharp eye out for interesting detritus.  And on one of our walks we  had a brilliant idea -- hey, kids, let's put on a show!

Our show opens today at the Firehouse Gallery in Louisville, and for the last month we've both been busy getting that junk looking spiffy for the occasion.  For me it has been exhilarating, challenging, satisfying and most of all, a lot of fun.

Unsealed (Combine with Eagle)

Although one of my pieces is mounted on fabric, the others are presented against wood panels in a sort of bas-relief sculptural effect.  That has required me to take up woodworking, a skill that I have possessed in a crude way for many years but not practiced much since we got old and rich enough to hire people to fix the things that go wrong in our house.  This show has forced me to get my saw, drill, wirecutters and glue gun out of retirement.

Fortunately my son is a whiz with wood and power tools, so he has made me the platform/supports for all my junk work. And in keeping with the spirit of the show, he is also a lover of picking up junk from the streets, except that where I pick up a half dozen rusty washers, he picks up whole pallets.  So the supports are genuine street junk, just like the stuff displayed on them.

Street Person with Dueling Scars


















What has been fascinating to me is how working in 3-D, and with a whole new array of tools and techniques, has given me a huge shot in the arm.  I still think of this as a frivolous sideline while my fiber stuff is my "serious art."  But I'm dreaming about junk art, and it's been a long time since I dreamed about quilts.

After the show is hung I know I'll need to get back to the fiber art sometime soon, but for now I'm on a wonderful vacation with my junk.

If you find yourself in the vicinity of Louisville between now and April 8, please drop in and see the show.  If you'd like to visit at an unconventional hour, send me an email  
[      artwithaneedle@gmail.com     ]          and I'll come let you in.

Plan D progress report

I am happy to report that Plan D worked and I have finally finished sewing my found pennies into a grid.  As so frequently happens, by the time you just about finish a project with lots of repetitive fiddly process, you have figured out how to do it right.  At which point you wish you could go back and re-do everything you did in the first two-thirds of the project.

The front of my pennies look pretty simple and classy.  But the back is a lot more complicated, holding those spokes of thread in place so they don't slide apart and allow the penny to escape.  It took me about ten hours to stitch the grid, which I ordinarily wouldn't feel bad about but this week I am on deadline and I begrudged every minute of it.

The hot glue did hold the pennies in place while I stitched, and to make sure the thread stayed where it was supposed to, I gave each penny an additional shot of glue after I was finished stitching.

Now all I have to do is attach the grid to its armature and the piece will be finished.  Thank heavens for heavy-duty staple guns, a useful addition to my weapons collection.

Plan D...

I've been trying for several weeks to make a piece of art consisting of pennies I have found on the street while I walk.  My vision is clear -- the pennies are suspended from a grid of thread that hangs from a wood piece.  But executing that vision has turned out to be a flaming pain in the butt.

Plan A was to stitch the grid by hand onto a foundation of Solvy.  I put dots on the Solvy to show where the pennies should go, then I sewed around the pennies with blanket stitch.

After I did a dozen or so I became disillusioned.  The stitching seemed messy and I wasn't sure it would actually hold the pennies in place after the Solvy was washed away.

I cut the pennies away and moved to Plan B.  This time I would switch to the sewing machine and make a base grid on the Solvy, then stitch around each penny.  That seemed to work just fine, until I dissolved the Solvy and realized that several of the pennies had slipped out of their cages.  Besides, I didn't like the way the Solvy was behaving -- it didn't want to totally dissolve, and the pennies and the thread were decidedly slimy no matter how many times I rinsed.

Plan C.  I decided to stitch the grid out of a sturdier cord, without Solvy.  At each intersection I would sew a little square of tulle, just barely smaller than the pennies.  Then I would hand-stitch a cage around each penny, stitching into the tulle behind it to hold the shape and prevent the cage from slipping around and the pennies escaping.

I didn't even get one penny stitched on before I realized this wasn't working.  Despite the tulle, which was supposed to serve as a foundation, the cage wouldn't hold its shape as I stitched.

Plan A was looking pretty good by this time.  Why had I abandoned it anyway?  But I had a lovely base grid finished, and it seemed way too late to go back.  I need the piece finished in the next couple of days for a show that opens on Friday.

Plan D.  The DIY slacker's friend: the hot glue gun.  Last night I glued the pennies to the grid.  I guess a true slacker would just declare victory and attach the grid to its armature.  But I'm not sure the glue will hold, and besides, I have always wanted the look of the pennies "tied up" to the grid with some kind of stitched cage.  

Today I will return to the general concept of Plan A and attempt to hand-stitch them more securely.  If that doesn't work, I guess I'll think about Plan E.