PAC in black

Hey beautiful people! I've been furiously finishing up my piece for the big fundraiser at the Portland Art Center. The pressure has been on this week, with my two major winter events of the season also culminating this very same week: Tannenbaum Madness and the Kenton Firehouse Sale.

This piece has been a challenge. The panel is so big for my scale and I don't do as well in the ready-to-hang format as with site-specific works. But I really wanted to support the Portland Art Center. The latest news is that a donor has come through with up to $20,000 in matching funds for what they can raise in this upcoming fundraiser where up to 300 artists,(depending on how many actually return their panels!) have poured their hearts and souls into works to support this fantastic institution. Need I remind you that by supporting PAC, you also support me because it's where my next major solo show is slated for next year. There are a lot of great artists who are participating, including Katherine Ace, Carl Annala, Josh Arseneau, Hayley Barker, Bennett Battaile, Chris Bennett, Ryan Birkland, Chuck E. Bloom, Brian Borrello, John Brodie, Sharon Bronzan, Mazana Bruggeman, Melia Donovan, Robert R. Dozono, Eleanor Erskine, Karen Esler, Ellen George, Pam Gibson, Chris Haberman, Cecilia Hallinan, Stephen Hayes, Harvest Henderson, Helen Hiebert, Scott Wayne Indiana, Diane Jacobs, Daniel Kaven, Yoshihiro Kitai, Randall Koch, Rhoda London, Bonnie Laing-Malcomson, Victor Maldonado, Mack McFarland, Seth Nehil, Jim Neidhardt, TJ Norris, Eugenia Pardue, Ben Rosenberg, Laura Ross-Paul, Mark Smith, Kentree Speirs, Abi Spring, Jeremy Tucker. They're also having a special silent auction with works by Sam Adams, Rae Mahaffey, Trude Parkinson, Robert T. Baribeau, Sherrie Wolf, Tom Prochaska, and Morgan Walker.

Preview Reception: Wednesday, December 5, 6-9pm

First Thursday Reception: Thursday, December 6, 6-10pm

click here to go to the Portland Art Center's website for directions and more details.

I have been working with what I call the "bouquet format" for many years, and, well, I guess this is my latest. I still like them better when they just sprout straight out of the wall, but what can you do? Some of the sugarplums that danced through my head this week as I worked on this were:

Russian Folk Art


Dutch Still Life Paintings from the 1600's


And of course this spectacular Expulsion painting by Fred Tomaselli.

If you're low on the dough right now, there's another way you can give to the Portland Art Center. The Willamette Week has a great package of goodies for a donation of $25 to this and many other fine local institutions. Click here to go to there right now and make a small, but enormously important gift. Thanks!

man oh man!

My friend Deb sent me this great video journal from the New York Times about how the New York City manhole covers are made in India. Click here to see a short presentation of photographs and a commentary by NYT photojournalist J. Adam Huggins. I've taken many a casting class in my day, and it's interesting to see these men performing feats of molten metal wearing skimpy outfits.

While you're in the India mode, make sure you go see Wes Anderson's latest flick The Darjeeling Limited. And make sure you see it on the big screen to get the full effect of India's technicolor glory.

bunny in space

I just saw this article that I had to share with y'all--apparently they made a balloon version of Jeff Koons' famous rabbit sculpture for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Wish I could have seen that! Read about it in the New York Times. Andy would have been so proud.

200!

Hey Beautiful People! My excuse for not blogging for so long is that I've been saving up for my 200th entry, which you have here before you. No...not really.....I've been super busy. In fact, I have decided to keep it brief and write some haiku to accompany the images of the arty things I've done in the past few weeks. Enjoy!


Towel elephants
that I made with Alex C.
thanks to Wiki-How!



Retrospective of
lovely Nevelson altars
I knelt to pray there.


I never turn down
free S.F. opera tix
bonus: hula hoops




Icelandic artist
Olafur Eliasson.
I can smell yellow.



Hula hoops? again?
March Fourth at the Schnitz
inspired Deb Stoner.



Harold Lloyd had us
laughing as he climbed way up
the wall, froggy style.

vote blue!

Hey beautiful readers! Here at Bunny with an Artblog headquarters, we have temporarily suspended all art reporting in our fervent promotion of our favorite benevolent entity-- my brother Mathias Craig's blueEnergy, who brings sustainable energy to needy communities in rural Nicaragua via windpower. There's one week left to make me and this particular nonprofit organization very very happy. Vote for them in the CNN Heroes poll as often as earthly possible, and maybe we'll get Anderson Cooper to wear this outfit during the live televised interview, which is the grand prize, along with $25,000!

Click here to learn more about blueEnergy

Click here to vote now!!!

And don't worry--we'll be back to art blogging soon. I'm off to San Francisco this weekend to see Ms. Nevelson's work, and you'll definitely get my lowdown on that action. In the meantime, keep on voting! Maybe this image will inspire you.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bunny has left the Building

vote-a-palooza

Hey beautiful people! It's time to dust off those voting fingers again--my brother Mathias Craig won his round of the CNN Everyday Heroes, and now he's up for the big prize--$25,000 and an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN! Mathias, as you faithful readers may remember, runs a nonprofit organization called blueEnergy that builds wind turbines in eastern Nicaragua. These turbines not only bring electricity to the people, but also offers revenue from surplus energy sales for this region. If they were to win this competition, it would go a long long way for a lot of people in need.

The polls are now open. Between now and November 26, you can vote up to once a minute for Mathias Craig and the Community Crusader category. What I'd like really to ask of you is to go above and beyond, as I have, and set your web browser's homepage to the CNN Everyday Heroes voting site for the next two weeks, until November 26. Every time you open it, please give Mathias Craig a vote before you use the web for your previously intended purpose.

Click here to go the CNN voting site.

Thanks everyone! We pulled together to win him the first round, and with your help, we'll do it again. To learn more about blueEnergy, click here. Here's a video of a turbine installation they did in Punta de Aguila so you can see them in action.

what's in a name?

Hey Beautiful People! Are you ready to finally see my work after all my teasers? I dropped off this batch at the Museum of Contemporary Craft today. I have been making these little palm sized wall pieces since my thesis way back in 1999, but it's only been recently that I decided to name each one. They are busy setting up for their big holiday show Handmade for the Holidays, which opens this Friday night for members, and Saturday for the general public.

I decided to name this batch after some of the folks who work for the Museum. I wonder how long it will take them to figure that out??? That's Wendy above, and here's a selection from the rest of the MCC posse:

David

Duncan

Dylan


Emily

Lisa

Katherine

Kristin

Eric

Maggie

Namita

PAC-a-go-go

Some great shows at the Portland Art Center this month--starting with a motion activated chorus of CPR mouths playing harmonicas. You have to see it to believe it--there are a dozen or so of these pieces situated in the large gallery space on the bottom level of PAC. As you enter, you activate the harmonicas to move towards the mouths and the effect of all the single notes playing around the room is hauntingly beautiful. The artist is Joseph Kohnke and he has a sweet little artist's statement that reads as folows:

"I am interested in conversions, the expressive shift that can occur when an inanimate object is given the characteristics of life. Potato chip bags that can breathe, wigs that are baptized, a measuring tape that can actively chirp like a hundred birds, or a single operatic note emanating from a combination of water, crystal and rubber. I try to get the properties of everyday objects to ascend to the role of being a vehicle fro a type of spiritual communication. I want to create conditions where these objects can voice issues of afterlife.”

Upstairs in the Light and Sound Gallery is an interesting piece by New Yorker Andy Graydon. It's two pieces, actually, but they work together. The first points out the architectural nuances of the room by tracing them with a line of projected light. The curious soundtrack is a four channel recording of the “room tone” of the empty space prior to the exhibition. It's very minimalist in its overall effect, which leaves room for big thoughts to enter the brain.

The other show I especially liked was also upstairs--a series of wall pieces created with paper and thread. Hiebert starts way back with the pulp, and the variations on the embedded threads cause the papers to distort in different, but beautiful ways as they dried.

What makes this show exciting is the time lapse films of her process that play in the other portion of the gallery. What was originally a laboriously slow process becomes animated into a life of its own. The title of this show is "The Life of Paper," which reminds me of a BBC series that Christian turned me on to called "The Secret Life of Plants." Watching the video of the paper moving is a lot like those great time lapse films that I've adored ever since I was a kid where you get to see a plant sprout, flower, and die within the course of a minute. Or a month's worth of weather patterns move through the sky in a flash. This is a great connection for Hiebert to make because papermaking, like many craft or art processes, is a technique that often invites a suspension of time and introspection. Seeing this slowness of a 24 hour (I'm guessing) period sped up into 24 seconds gives a traditional process both and elemental and a contemporary feel.

Before I left, I made sure to sign up to be an official member of Portland Art Center. Have you done it yet? Time's a wasting!Click here to join for only $35 and help preserve this mecca for local and national installation art.

I've also been in the studio. Took some pictures for you, yes I did. But I'm not gonna show 'em to you yet. No....I've got some other things on my agenda today. Here's a little sneak preview, dear readers, of the whole lot of 'em. Later on, I'll let you look at them one at a time. Okay? Okay.

Happy Breauxday!

Hey Beautiful People~ I thought I'd share a recent creation. One of my dearest friends, Nancy Breaux celebrated a milestone birthday this year. Around that time, which was way way back in May, Nancy and I were having a conversation about her refrigerator and how she was tired of all the clutter. My response was about my refrigerator, and how I had transformed it from a cluttered photo gallery and random refrigerator magnet collection to Art Project to commemorate my own milestone birthday earlier this year. Remember, faithful readers, how I made a list of 40 things I wanted to do in my 40's and make all those cards that I posted on the blog? Well, those cards were the main attraction on my fridge during my self-administered birthday party, and have remained there ever since. Unfortunately, I haven't done any of those 40 things yet, although Christian has been encouraging it, since I'm soon approaching birthday #41. We are getting ready to make a nice pear infused vodka, since it's that time of year.

But I digress.....

I wanted to do something special for Nancy's milestone, so I offered to do an installation for her refrigerator. For various reasons, it took this long to get around to actually doing it. The recent event that pushed us over the edge was their lovely new bamboo flooring and subsequent repainting of that room with a nice mustard/tomato soup combo. It was time.

I found a bunch of vinyl last summer at SCRAP, one of my very favorite local haunts for art supplies. They sell all kinds of great used, semi-used, and new-but-never-used materials and random objects for art making--perfect for someone like me who uses a lot of found objects. Their inventory is constantly changing--they rely largely on donations from individuals and area businesses. When I finally make a legal will, I am going to give all of my art supplies to them. That should bring in the big bucks because I'm a serious hoarder when it comes to art materials! But I'm not planning on making that event happen anytime soon, so no worries, dear reader. I picked out a lot of black and a little maroon when I was there, thinking they would fit in with whatever color theme was going on in the kitchen.

So when Nancy and I started talking about imagery recently, one of the things that came to mind with those two colors was my lovebug project. I did a lot of sketching for that project, but this is often something that stays in the private sector of my art career (e.g. my sketchbook.) Nancy and her sweetheart Leah have two of my lovebugs already, having bought them at my show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft last winter. Nancy loved the idea, so I made a new little swarm.

I worked the way I usually do in my studio, making a bunch of little shapes to play with. Then when I had enough to start with, I just pieced them together one at a time, each reflecting on the last one, until my loopy swarm was complete. The vinyl was fantastic to work with, and I want to get some more before the Costa Rica residency. I need to work in 2-d more--and I guess I will when we go there next month to continue some of the flat exploration I started in Finland. The whole project took me two hours, and my entertainment altered between a great interview on Fresh Air with Katha Pollitt, which was followed by a philosophical discourse about the aesthetics of basketball. I love public radio. And of course Nancy, who was writing a quiz in the next room, but couldn't resist the urge to check on the progress of her long awaited gift, which of course evolved into a conversation I'd been meaning to have with her about The West Wing, a tv series I missed in its initial airing, but have been making my way through on dvds from the library this summer, on her recommendation.

I tried to get Nancy to pose with her birthday present, but she declined, as she was dressed in her "country comes to town" attire. Love those Louisiana descriptions--doesn't that just sound a whole lot better than "I don't want to appear in your freakin' blog in this outfit, girlfriend!!!" Yeah, much better. Happy birthday Nance!

moving in circles.....

My favorite piece of jewelry is the ring I wear on the middle finger of my left hand. It was made by my friend Todd Reed, a fantastic metalsmith I met years ago at the ACC show in Baltimore. We have traded artwork, mostly to my mother's benefit, but the one piece I got for myself is among one of my most coveted possessions. It's a circular setting of uncut diamonds in a chunky 24k bezel. It has consistently made me happy for the past five years, and in some ways, has really become part of my visual identity as oft worn adornments do.

I spent the day in the studio making circles myself. Whether this was affected by my ring, I do not know, but it seemed like the perfect shape to use in my latest batch of little wall pieces. I kept returning to that motif again and again, varying the size or type of circle, in relation to the piece it would ultimately rest upon.

I mention these stories because it was the recent discovery of this image that made me realize there was a theme going on today. I'll be in the Bay Area for a few days near the end of this month, and so I spent some time this evening looking to see what my favorite museums had in store for me. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, the de Young is having the retrospective I've been waiting for all my life: Louise Nevelson. Whooppeeeeee! She's been a big influence for me as an artist, and I am thrilled to see a large grouping of her work all in one convenient location. I was very interested to see this particular piece that I was not familiar with--and doesn't seem like your typical Nevelson piece to go "out of the box" with that huge ring. Maybe someone out there is trying to tell me something........

morning light

Hey Beautiful People! We set our clocks back an hour last weekend for that time-honored tradition they call Daylight "Savings." I don't really see how we are saving any daylight, since I am up after the sun on most days. It's hard to deal with the sudden shock of near complete darkness at 5pm, but let me tell you, I definitely noticed that free bonus hour last weekend. I had enough time to sleep in, go out to breakfast at my new favorite joint Kenny & Zuke's (an authentic Kosher deli that's got the best bagels and lox in town, and supposedly a pastrami sandwich to die for) .....and work a decent day in the studio, AND dinner with friends. That's a good day in my book.

This morning, Christian and I both woke up early, still being on our old internal clocks. We decided to take advantage of it by starting our day with an early morning viewing of the Portland Building installation space which is sponsored by RACC. Why don't all galleries open at 7am, I ask? I wanted to check out the piece by Noah Nakell before it came down at the end of this week. I can't remember if I mentioned it here before, but I am on the selection committee for this installation space, so it's fun to see how the projects we selected come out. It's kind of a pain parking around there, being in the midst of the construction-ridden city center, not to mention the fact that at least of half the potential street parking spaces were taken up by city vehicles. I made a joke that our city motto "The City that Works" should be amended to include "......if you work for the city, that is."

No...I don't want to start this entry with a complaint. It's worth it to make the journey to this installation space. I had a show there three years ago and it was a great experience to make a piece that more of the general public experienced than the typical Portland art crowd.

Nakell is a relative newcomer to the local installation scene, but I hope this piece is an indication of more imaginative projects to come. I first saw his work in a show I blogged about many months ago with Madoka Ito.

Anyone who doesn't frequent the Portland Building on a regular basis might not notice that this is an art project because the entire installation area has been filled in with a wall that has a single window in the center. A window shade that is drawn down to a few inches above the sill. It's a strange sight for the inside of a public building, but it could easily be passed by as people carry on with their busy lives. Anyone curious enough to peek through this gap below is rewarded.

There's a little scene happening as if it's outside the window. It reminds me of a Michel Gondry fabrication--Nakell has made a diorama of a little house that's being swept away to sea. Except that it's a little more fantastical--the house floats on the waves and is lit from within. You can see inside the house to an empty chair at a table. The waves are interpreted by a series of rolling cylinders with heavily textured paper to make the choppy waters come alive.

The whole piece is lyrical, and made me feel a little melancholy. But in a good way. Nakell's idea from his proposal was that "in western society, we insulate ourselves from the natural world, as well as from social interactions in the human world around us. Increasingly, we find ourselves trading in real world experiences and interactions for a world made up of laptop and cellphone screens. Not long ago, a local cafe would be a meeting place, filled with conversation. Often times these days, cafes are as quiet as libraries. Every seat is filled with someone staring at a laptop, headphones on--out in the world but isolated."

As you know, faithful readers, I am interested when viewers have to use their bodies to experience a piece of art. This is a great piece for that. It really added to my experience to be asked to bend down so low to watch this magical world, especially as people bustled behind me through the turnstiles to take their places and start their relative days in this building where many important things in this city begin.

Here's a little movie he made of the test run in his studio. You'll get the idea:

Lightship initial test run from Nonverbal on Vimeo.

Noah Nakell is one of the artists on the roster at the Portland Art Center next year, if they can pull through their present financial dilemma. Hey, speaking of which, I encourage you, dear reader, to become a member of PAC for a mere $35--they need it now more than ever. Click here to join now, and you'll be supporting me and Noah Nakell as well! Of course, if you're in the position to donate more, you will be making a lot of people very very happy.

taste the bliss!

Hey beautiful people! I haven't felt super wordy lately--have seen some great shows around town that bear some sort of bloggerly mention--Greg Carrigan and Mary Tapogna at Guardino Gallery (image here of Mary's work), Tabor Porter curated a fabulous Day of the Dead window display there too--go at dusk for the best viewing, and then pop across the street to a great new restaurant Lolo with luscious tapas and wicked cocktails. (I hear the chef used to work at French Laundry in Napa, which I also recommend!) I also saw a ton of great work at First Thursday, including Beth Campbell at PNCA, Kristin Miller (inside) and Susan Klein (window project) at PDX, Bill Will and LeBrie Rich at Nine Gallery, Oliver Boberg at Quality Pictures, and some truly lovely work by Yoshihiro Kitai at Pulliam Deffenbaugh. My art buddy that night was TJ Norris, and he wrote an inspired blog entry about many of those shows, so I'll direct your mouse over to that part of the web.

I have been a busy beaver, making lots of things in the studio with the holiday $ea$on fast approaching. I had a request from two places to make ornaments, so I decided to let my hair down and play a little last weekend with some of the materials I've been hoarding for the past few days....years...decades.....you artists probably know how that goes. Anyhow, I'll share some of my very favorites with you.






and then here's the one that I made especially for my pal Fred, who came over to fix my leaky faucet last week. Thanks Fred!