4th of July!

State of the Union

Game time Game Face

Dear Monte Carlo,

This past weekend 75% of our little collective was fortunate enough to convene for several hours on a lovely Sunday afternoon. We ate shrimps, drank rose, and talked about art. Below is a re-cap of how we see the show coming together over our distances from one another:

1. Looking at the collages that Vanessa and Sio have been making, it is easy to see where their minds easily converge. I think that it would be a healthy exercise to begin passing around images to one another to make pairs or families of. Kind of make a game of it. As the images are filtered through each of us, a broader picture will come together of how we may curate these images in a way that the viewer can follow our odd logic. This idea gave me the idea to form some sort of loose narrative..

2. I'm not saying like a narrative from a movie, but I think it is helpful to think of the show as having a beginning middle and end. A place to build, a place to have a climax, and a place to end. However, not sure what the space looks like, or if we could have moveable walls, or whatever, so this might not be particularly feasible.

3. Back to #1. As I mentioned, since we are far apart, fabricating games that enable us to bounce ideas off of each other seems to be the agreed upon way to begin our collaboration. Since all of our work is so different, we think that every piece should be collaborative in some way. So in addition to playing picture association games, we can also play word games, because I would really love to have some beautiful vinyl text on the walls.
*At a local festival they had this amazing piece that was a vinyl lettered timeline in list form. It was made to look very weathered and old- and at first I thought it was- and next to every span of years was a beautiful statement. I will try to find a picture of this.

4. Collaboration ideas are as follows:
a. Credits, hallway of projected credits with insightful language in lieu of names
b. wall of collage/ picture associations
c. videos of people orating their wills
d. Unicorn roadkill

5. The unicorn roadkill was an idea that sio had while in school. We were thinking that when it comes time to travel to CO, we will drive out together with the fallen unicorn and document it as we journey across america, to eventually have it in the show.

So Park, since we haven't heard from ya, let us know if we are thinking along the same lines or if we are totally off base from you, or any ideas that you have cooped up in that little head of yours!

Love,

Kate

May 2011

HEY... WHERE'S PARK?

Name Ideas for Credits

1. Bunny and Anotinette
2. Recha Bullock
3. Randy Honeycutt
4. Chet Helck
5. Lydia Voles
6. Herb Gillette
7. Earl Virgin
8. Danny Almond
9. Dusty Rothrock
10. Mahogany hopkins
11. Ed Gloria

I was reading How to Wrap Five Eggs which inspired me to make some custom wrapping paper.

One is with illustrations of Houdini, the other is pieces of a jungle and the queen mum trying to stop her skirt from blowing up (a la Marilyn Monroe).

Springtime Mixes

March:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rclglj
April:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rqwmb5

http://jessemclean.com/biblio/heaven-and-earth-and-television-magic-the-cinema-of-jesse-mclean/

I like this and need to think about it..

http://pleaseenjoy.com/project.php?cat=1&subcat=&pid=75&navpoint=4

No,no,no. Not like a real dream...but a vision.

Dear Monte Carlo,

Today I sold my very first piece of art: the bats that are here on this very blog! I sold them! And I am so happy but also kind of sad because I love those bats. And I love you too. God Bless Monte Carlo.

preview

WAIT FOR IT... WHERE IS VANESSA

So I will be in the studio documenting my recent work for the month of April, so be ready.

Fiction-
INCENDIARY: a Steamboat Springs Arts Council Fundraiser Gala commemorating the historically rich exhibition, Monte Carlo, l'histoire (to include fireworks)

Where is Vanessa?
Vaya con dios

These are the eighth graders cut in half and collaged on top of each other to make about 35 two faces. The text is from Frederich Nietzsche "Birth of Tragedy." I don't know if you've ever read this book but its a very dense, straight forward text on differences between Apollonian and Dionysian ways of thought i.e. art and music. He also makes the argument that real tragedy- Greek tragedy has died.
I chose the text for these collages because of the proliferation of the "tragic teenager" in contemporary narratives. These petty tropes may be the few outlets for tragic, combustible characters. They also have that revealing quality, their unrelenting self doubt allows them to be perfect mediums for really fatal dialogues like the quote from Silenus.



These are the Seniors with masquerade faces. The Quote is from Prometheus of Aeschylus, taken from the same book. I liked this quote because the sense of self important aloofness might actually mimic the same naivete tragic teens portray, but it's actually about Prometheus.

I did this collage a while back, when I first moved to New Orleans, I just added the starry background recently. I think I was coming from a place that was trying to figure out this city, why it's fusion with the past stopped it from catching up with the future. I had all these cut outs from old books and tried to make a space ship with them, the idea made a Brazil like fantasy.
Of course you could never use ancient building parts for space exploration, but with the way people fester and use nostalgia like a noose, someday someone might try.

Trickle Down

This is another small illustration/collaged project I've been working on with antique photos. At first I wanted them to be a sort of family tree, but it became just a fun exercise because I found it so difficult to harm the last images of these complete strangers.

Commemoration of Wildlife

CABINETLANDIA - MORE ON WHY THIS IS RELEVANT SOON PLEASE READ!

The construction of the Cabinet National Library in 2004 was the formative project for Rebar, our San Francisco-based art and design studio. Then, as now, we were self-styled idealistic conceptualists—foolhardy speculators, installation tricksters, land art humorists, remixers and remakers of the everyday landscape. Our ongoing exploration of fragmented landscapes, ambiguously defined sites, liminal territories, niche spaces, loopholes in the code, and eddies in the flow of regulation—an exploration that forms Rebar’s principal conceptual program—began in the desolation of Cabinetlandia, a few miles outside Deming, New Mexico.

Yet—as is the case with many outlandish dreams made manifest—the years had not been altogether charitable to the Cabinet National Library. As periodically reported in the pages of this magazine, the desert itself intervened in our intervention. After five years of steady environmental critique from the wind and weather—not to mention visits from creatures hailing from several phyla, the occasional vandal, an intermittent thief, and a valiant (but failed) attempt at a coup d’état—the Library had been reduced to ruins. The bottom drawer of the cabinet (originally the snack bar) was partially caked in mud and stuck shut. The Library’s collection had dwindled to a single copy of Cabinet no. 22 (“Insecurity”), which had hardened into a sturdy adobe brick. That issue—with its cover image of soap opera actor Larry Hagman flashing a spectacular smile now slowly fading into nothingness—seemed an apt metaphor for the entire history of the Library project.

So it was that we decided to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Library—to the day—by returning with a grand plan not only to re-secure and renovate the Library, but to carry out a new capital improvement project: the Library Exhibition Annex (“LEA”), a 220-square-inch gallery that boasts more than 380 square inches of white-wall space and will be available for exhibitions, performances, lectures, and other cultural projects. During our four-day adventure (excluding the sixteen-hour drive each way from San Francisco to Cabinetlandia), we encountered many of the same forces that had decimated the Library. Savagely indifferent thunderstorms left us stranded in the mud on three separate occasions. Once, we were forced to abandon the van and all our equipment overnight and literally run for our lives. During the days working at Cabinetlandia, we slogged through rain, heat, mud, dust, more mud, and then lightning storms, though we were also treated to the occasional rainbow.

In the end, the adventure was successful. We rebuilt the Library and re-stocked it with the entire corpus of Cabinet. We elevated the Library structure two feet above the desert floor, rebuilt the structural wall with an additional two hundred pounds of mud and cement, added a swale to improve drainage, and cleaned and weatherproofed the cabinet. When we had finished, we celebrated by attending the Cabinetlandia Senior Prom (theme: “Into the Bush”). Everyone had a grand time, though the prom was interrupted by a pitched war for territory between two colonies of fire ants. It turns out that the bite of a fire ant is extremely painful—especially on prom night. And, as we were packing up and preparing to leave Cabinetlandia, we encountered in the desert the very thoughts of the Library itself, spectral images encoded in dust and wind. Loosed from its earthly bounds, it was as though the Library was contemplating its own future potentialities, expressing its internalized delusions of grandeur. We arrived back in civilization with a nagging question: will the dreams of the Library ever be realized, or will the structure succumb to the seemingly inexorable forces of ruin? Is the Cabinet National Library destined to become a durable monument to the fantasies of everyday office furniture, or a mound of defeated dust? Time alone will tell.

The Cabinet National Library 2009 team comprised Matthew Passmore, John Bela, Teresa Aguilera, Masha Slavnova, and Jed Olson. We are also endebted to Cordelia Rose and her crew for a mission-critical tow out of the mud.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/35/rebar.php

Also, I have been collecting good working advice and copying it for my studio.
I am sharing it with you all as inspiration for diligent discipline and rigorous understanding we will need for this amazing opportunity.
Above is Ingrid Burrington's advice for working better, here is the video Tom Sachs uses to instruct his studio assistants - always be knolling.

I have been collaging a year book from 1972, I've been halfing faces and adding the other half to another student so it'll be close to an entire grade of two faces. I want to do this to freshman, sophomores and seniors since the layout changes as you go up and possible use an entirely different yearbook from a completely different year. I'm thinking the names will be replaced by a text of some sort that describes how all systems become a hierarchy eventually.

Steamboat 2012

Hi guys,

Park contacted me last night to discuss the organization of a monte carlo art show in colorado next spring. This is the discussion blog where we can form the theme of our awesome super badassssss shit! Let's get crackin'!

Bats

I've been drawing presidential style pictures of bats. I have three so far. I think I should do the whole set (There are 11 total give or take). I want to get some nice looking frames for them but I am pretty broke right now. I will scan the images I have from my sketch book later tonight.