Future events!

I feel like my mind is bouncing between Hong Kong, Houston, Pittsburgh, San Jose, Providence, and Dublin, Ireland. It’s all good stuff: lots of work and exhibitions in the pipeline but it’s quite a job to keep it all together. Here’s what I can share right now (as some others are more tentative and not necessarily finalized into the pipeline):

—————————-
“The Politics of Craft & Design”
Friday, August 15th, 2008
Ft. Mason Center, the Golden Gate Room in the Conference Center, San Francisco
6-8:00 p.m. (6-7 wine/reception; 7-8:00 p.m. panel discussion)

Moderator: Andrew Wagner, Editor-in-Chief, American Craft Magazine
Rob Forbes, Director, Studio Forbes
Tina Barseghian, Editor-in-Chief, Craft Magazine
Garry Knox Bennett, Artist, American Craft Council Fellow
Robin Petravic, Co-owner, Heath Ceramics
Edie Kahuila Pereira, Artecnica
Stephanie Syjuco, Bay-area artist

————————-

I was interviewed by knitknit’s Sabrina Gschwandtner for an article titled “Let ‘em Eat Cake” in the upcoming August/September issue of American Craft magazine. If you haven’t perused this magazine because it sounds stuffy in any way, think again. It’s got an updated look and a new editorial focus, so check it out! Also included in the interview are friends Faythe Levine of Handmade Nation and Cat Mazza of microRevolt. The whole issue is devoted to the topic of craft and politics, wow!

—————————
I’m also in an upcoming exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art entitled “This End Up: the Art of Cardboard,” which will happily feature the new Craftsman chair I made out of recycled cardboard and moving blankets. If only it were happening next year, I would have put together an installation proposal to expand it. But alas, I have to be in Pittsburgh…

———————-
Which brings me to the fall semester teaching gig I have at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, running from August to December 2008. I’ll be relocating for four months and teaching an upper level undergraduate sculpture class. I’m tailoring it from a graduate seminar class I taught in Spring ‘06 at the California College of the Art but making it more hands-on and project-related as opposed to readings/syllabus related. Off the top of my head, we’ll be dealing with social and political issues of production, fabrication, the original vs. the copy, multiple production vs. singular production, craft and machine-made, etc. I’ll make it fun, I promise!

———————–

I’m also jurying an upcoming exhibition at The LAB in San Francisco called “Code-Switchers.” The deadline was today, so unfortunately we’re not taking more submissions after this, but I’m looking forward to reviewing the incoming applications with my co-curator, media and sound artist Steve Dye! The show opens in September, so watch for it…

———————
Yesterday I did a photoshoot for a feature in the September issue of 7×7 Magazine (a San Francisco city and lifestyle magazine). I’ll be included (or anti-factory will be included, I mean!) in the “Style Council” section along with about eight other folks ranging from SFMOMA board directors to other art-types. I’ve never had Chanel lipgloss applied to my lips before, so it was definitely a first. The photographer, art director, hair and makeup folks were fun to work with and I can’t wait to see what the outcome will be

Craftsman redux: making it!

I’ve been working on hand-making a classic William Morris Craftsman chair out of recycled cardboard used for shipping and transporting different goods. I based it off of actual building plans and the measurements came out so exact it’s almost scarily accurate. It’s held together with brown paper tape and comes apart into six sections that are doweled together. I must admit I totally surprised myself with how it worked out, since I was agonizing over how “finished” or “raw” the final product would look. In the end, the addition of the joinery details and the upholstery made of blue moving blankets really gave it the oomph i was looking for. I really do like how leaving the existing box markings (silkscreened labels and such) gave it a way to wear the material’s own history on its sleeve, so to speak.

This work along with several other “resuscitated” handmade classic furniture pieces of mine will be shown at the San Jose Museum of Art in October as part of a cardboard constructions exhibition.

Woffordlandia

I love it when good people get great recognition: friend and artist colleague Jenifer Wofford is getting tons of attention for her projects and hard work. Last year, almost to this very day, I took off to Manila, Philippines to be a part of the Galleon Trade Project, which Jen had produced and conceived. The cameraderie and connections that were formed during that trip are still resonating with me to this day. This little blurb came out yesterday in the San Francisco Bay Guardian…

Woff’s an amazing artist in her own right. View her awesome projects at: www.wofflehouse.com/

The Berlin Wall

(from a future page on my art website…)

“The Berlin Wall (February 18, 2008, San Francisco, CA),” rock, plexi case, and brass plaque

The Berlin Wall
2007 – ongoing

found objects, cases, and photo documentation

This ongoing project involves a constant search for “fragments” of the Berlin Wall wherever I go. I attempt to find what I believe to approximate the look and feel of pieces of this iconic structure. The collection is composed of facsimilies found in backyards, urban street corners, suburbs, and wilderness areas all over the world. Plaques are made to commemorate the day and place of finding.

The resulting collection of “proxy” chunks become a fictional collection that attempts to manifest the hopes and promises that the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall temporarily ushered in. As a pivotal moment in global history, its demolishing also brought on the hangover of economic globalization and the reality check of liberal capitalism. As a loaded symbol, The Wall divided the “before” and “after” of the Cold War and the promise of democracy, resulting in the oft-quoted “end of History.”

By transferring the “aura” of the original fragment onto the “found” version by plaques and labels, I see this project as a way to try to revisit and rethink the promise of that moment, and attempt to find it in the everyday objects that surround me.

below: “The Berlin Wall,” selections from the collection. Shown are portions found in New Smyrna Beach, Florida; Third Street and Yosemite Ave., San Francisco; and Daytona Beach, Florida.

below: “Looking for the Berlin Wall (New Smyrna Beach, Florida),” photo documentation, October 2007.

post-production: YBCA show is down!

Yep, The Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy) installation is officially down from the Yerba Buena show “The Way That We Rhyme.” I’ll be updating the counterfeitcrochet.org website with photos from the installation and it’s sad to see it go, but it was also quite a lot of work to keep going back five times to run counterfeiting workshops and just tend it in general. A small version of it will be in an exhibition in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as part of an exhibition that Faythe Levine (of Handmade Nation documentary film and book fame) is putting together in October this year, so it’s not entirely gone.

That said, the project still lives on! I’m still accepting and taking submissions from counterfeiters everywhere, so there’s no reason to stop

Some good news on the exhibition front: I’ll be having a solo exhibition this December at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston! My first solo museum show, no doubt, and super exciting. I’ll be meeting with the associate curator this weekend to try to wrangle which specific pieces will be included. My ambitions are overcoming me and I really want to knock out a mix of new and “revised” previous projects. Either way, it’s a super thing!