Friday, August 29, 2014

ArtFULL Vermont at Compass Music and Arts Center in Brandon



This promises to be a wonderful exhibit!

Friday, August 15, 2014

Artwork at Downstreet Eats


I don't often install my work in restaurants, but I love what Elena Gustavson is doing at  Downstreet Eats in my hometown, Cabot, Vermont! So I put up some of my more colorful and lighthearted work -- my wine foils in the front room


and my Loose Grid pieces (from the Nagoya, ABC, and Numbers series) in the back room.


In her weekly newsletter Elena said, ""Wow". Really the only word that came out of my mouth when I looked around my restaurant last Saturday afternoon. Janet Van Fleet, a multimedia artist and one of the founders of Studio Place Arts in Barre, VT, had graciously agreed to hang a few of her pieces in DownStreet Eats. The place is transformed!

Using bits of materials that most of us do not think twice about throwing away, Janet transformed wine foil into whimsical figures and bits of wire, buttons and metal into aesthetic and social statement pieces."

If you can, go have a look, and enjoy this wonderful eatery!

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Gender in a Cabinet


I've been interested in gender from many different points of view. In my current work I have used the top drawer of the Cabinet of Curiosities that I've written about previously to look at women's historic concerns. I took some seat-of-the-pants photos today, just so I could get the images out there. There are three layers in the drawer, that you can see open in the image below:


Here are views of each of the layers, top to bottom. They stack on top of each other on 1.5" legs. The bottom layer is about courtship and being pretty; the middle layer is about housekeeping and women's traditional tasks; and the top layer is about childbearing :




Today I finished putting together a Men's Cabinet.


I still need to do some tweaking on the inside of this cabinet, but it's just about there. The text is cut into the wood on the inside of the cabinet's door, and the small installations in the box illustrate the assertions in the text. I think our cultural expectations and demands on men are unfair. What oppresses one damages all of us.


Tuesday, August 12, 2014

More Cabinets


I have completed two more cabinets that I worked on with my brother in New Jersey.


Here it is closed and (below) opened up.


And also one called TWO (below), that has two figures on top and eleven sliding trays, each with a digital reproduction of a found photograph and a number 2, printed on the press at SPA. I've been interested in pairs for a long time, and this is the latest iteration of that.


I'm now working on a Men's Cabinet, exploring some of the issues about being male in our culture.