"remembering pleasure" GETS MENTIONED IN THE POST!!!!
excerpt from Art-O-Matic for the People
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 8, 2002
"Surprisingly -- or perhaps not, given Washington's artistic conservatism -- there is very little video art of note. Save for Renee Butler's flower-themed video installation (reminiscent of a poetic piece I saw last year by Cuban expatriate Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at Baltimore's Contemporary Museum), and an abstract musing by Alan Callander (part of a strong, three-person room that explores the theme of "Remembering Pleasure"), the examples of interesting multimedia are depressingly few."
yay! Wow, but how great it feels to get mentioned in the newspaper in such a well thought out article. The funny thing is it's not ME that is is mentioned, but the show and the & idea that takes the precedence. And while it was Ian & I that started tossing the ideas around months ago the show became collaborative, taking on other meanings from George and Alan as well. And sweetly, so sweetly-O'Sullivan understood this!
Friday, November 08, 2002
Monday, November 04, 2002
'gone like my innocence'-November '02 Artist Statement
At a community art gallery opening for a group show (the worst kind of hang-it-yourself kind of random fiasco), at the end of the summer in 2002 a friend of mine overheard and elementary school aged child say to her guardian "can we make that when we get home" in reference to a 3-D collage that I had done on a plastic easter egg. When my friend told me about it, I suddenly realized how long I had been looking for that kind of justification for making art. Instead of the proverbial age-old "my kid could do better than that", an actual child upon seeing this work of mine not only thought she could do it, but found it interesting enough to want to do it herself. I take this as a huge compliment. Children are interesting and incredibly observant. On the same note, in a painting class in the late 80's/early 90's, the artist Glenn Goldberg said to me "to be an artist you have to be at least as interesting as your plumber". Odd sounding, but his reasoning was that he had never met a plumber who did not like to chat-ad infinitum explaining what went wrong with your plumbing, genuinely wanting you to understand his craft. After 10 years of painting on my own, I am finally starting to understand this. The message in art DOES NOT have to be a simple, it DOES need to be honest.
My first large scale sculpture 'gone like my innocence' takes three simple elements. Dead brown leaves, disc-shaped lollipops wrapped in cellophane, and an almost full-size matress shape constructed out of clear vinyl. The leaves and lollipops are contained in the matress, can be clearly seen, and their shear volume serves as the support and foundation for the matresss.
The piece began as a simple meditation on Autumn, as the show I was intending to use it for would open on October 31st, Halloween. It was not suprising that these three elements began to suggest some of the contexts, symbols and juxtapositions that have been running through my work for years.
Autumn is an overtly visible time of death in nature and time of transition in the calender year for us people as well. Metamorphasis, journey, and growth often figured into my paintings in the past in the form of butterflies, boats, and plants. But like Autumn, these other symbols also signify time dedicated to transition and transformation rather than being something or somewhere.
Yet to meditate on the transitory nature of things brings with it the worldly confrontation of pleasure and pain. The form of the matress indicating sleep, a non participation in the world like a hibernation, it's own kind of death. Or the matress can be viewed as the place of procreation in the modern home, the boudoire, a sex den, not for making babies at all. Again, the proverbial 'come-hither', the prophylactic of the clear vinyl keeping you from the dirtyness of sexuality or just from the the buggy leaves and seathing naturalness (one of the prefered interpretations of George Panagi in the text for the show 'remembering pleasure') though you can see it plainly.
The asseptic lollipops, heat sealed in cellophone for your protection like the doctor,dentist or bank teller would give to a child for behaving themselves. A reward of sugary candy, addictive candy, that many as a children would horde and devour in an orgiastic frenzy, eating it until it sickened you. This addiction to pleasures, even when they bring pain in rarely fully outgrown.
Individuals have no problem believing exclusively in the microcosm of their individual experiences and sensations, and base their perception on this microcosm. The breath like condensation that forms inside of the clear pillows gives the piece actual life. It turns out that you can see the insect tracks going through this condensation on the interior of the sculpture. They are like the memories and and sensations in or minds that make us perceive our waking hours through this filter of the past, our own past. A bubble we can never break free of that forms the microcosm of our individual perception. Microcosmic perception that makes each of us both special, yet separate.
At a community art gallery opening for a group show (the worst kind of hang-it-yourself kind of random fiasco), at the end of the summer in 2002 a friend of mine overheard and elementary school aged child say to her guardian "can we make that when we get home" in reference to a 3-D collage that I had done on a plastic easter egg. When my friend told me about it, I suddenly realized how long I had been looking for that kind of justification for making art. Instead of the proverbial age-old "my kid could do better than that", an actual child upon seeing this work of mine not only thought she could do it, but found it interesting enough to want to do it herself. I take this as a huge compliment. Children are interesting and incredibly observant. On the same note, in a painting class in the late 80's/early 90's, the artist Glenn Goldberg said to me "to be an artist you have to be at least as interesting as your plumber". Odd sounding, but his reasoning was that he had never met a plumber who did not like to chat-ad infinitum explaining what went wrong with your plumbing, genuinely wanting you to understand his craft. After 10 years of painting on my own, I am finally starting to understand this. The message in art DOES NOT have to be a simple, it DOES need to be honest.
My first large scale sculpture 'gone like my innocence' takes three simple elements. Dead brown leaves, disc-shaped lollipops wrapped in cellophane, and an almost full-size matress shape constructed out of clear vinyl. The leaves and lollipops are contained in the matress, can be clearly seen, and their shear volume serves as the support and foundation for the matresss.
The piece began as a simple meditation on Autumn, as the show I was intending to use it for would open on October 31st, Halloween. It was not suprising that these three elements began to suggest some of the contexts, symbols and juxtapositions that have been running through my work for years.
Autumn is an overtly visible time of death in nature and time of transition in the calender year for us people as well. Metamorphasis, journey, and growth often figured into my paintings in the past in the form of butterflies, boats, and plants. But like Autumn, these other symbols also signify time dedicated to transition and transformation rather than being something or somewhere.
Yet to meditate on the transitory nature of things brings with it the worldly confrontation of pleasure and pain. The form of the matress indicating sleep, a non participation in the world like a hibernation, it's own kind of death. Or the matress can be viewed as the place of procreation in the modern home, the boudoire, a sex den, not for making babies at all. Again, the proverbial 'come-hither', the prophylactic of the clear vinyl keeping you from the dirtyness of sexuality or just from the the buggy leaves and seathing naturalness (one of the prefered interpretations of George Panagi in the text for the show 'remembering pleasure') though you can see it plainly.
The asseptic lollipops, heat sealed in cellophone for your protection like the doctor,dentist or bank teller would give to a child for behaving themselves. A reward of sugary candy, addictive candy, that many as a children would horde and devour in an orgiastic frenzy, eating it until it sickened you. This addiction to pleasures, even when they bring pain in rarely fully outgrown.
Individuals have no problem believing exclusively in the microcosm of their individual experiences and sensations, and base their perception on this microcosm. The breath like condensation that forms inside of the clear pillows gives the piece actual life. It turns out that you can see the insect tracks going through this condensation on the interior of the sculpture. They are like the memories and and sensations in or minds that make us perceive our waking hours through this filter of the past, our own past. A bubble we can never break free of that forms the microcosm of our individual perception. Microcosmic perception that makes each of us both special, yet separate.
