Stairs

I started noticing that many of the 20th century black and white snapshots I was collecting showed the fronts of buildings, often the front stairs of houses, with and without people. I suppose it was a convenient place to have people arrayed in a more-or-less orderly fashion, and, perhaps more importantly (in the days before flashbulbs on home cameras) there was plenty of natural light to allow a decent exposure.

There's something really wonderful about front stairs, an ascending transition from the outside to the inside, a lift in time and space.

Here is the new piece, Stairs, which I have taken for exhibition to The Front gallery in Montpelier (appropriate, eh?), where it will be available until the end of January. Here it is sitting on top of a stool at the gallery:

One can zoom in on the three "stairs" in the piece:

I'll be taking my camera with me to New Orleans, where we will be staying during most of January and February, and I plan to take some of my own photos of stairs in the city (and maybe some other stuff too... we'll see).

More Dialogue

I have three human/animal pairs that I originally made for the Parade series

and now I'm in the process of incorporating each of the pairs into a larger sculpture so that I'll have a series of three larger pieces. My last post was the first, called Dialogue, and here is the second, Dialogue 2.

The piece is 18 x 23.5 x 9.5" in size. The front of the sculpture uses the paired figures (I shortened the legs on the human figure ) and a house motif, with collaged images of animals and humans.

On the back, hidden in a sense, are statements in which I've tried to represent perspectives of animals and humans as they make an attempt, in some cases, to understand the perspective of the other. Sometimes they just rant.

Since you have to peek around the corners to read the texts/utterances, it's hard to show in a photograph...

A Re-Do of "Two"

The piece called Two, seen in this post, has bothered me. The two figures on the top are an animal and a human having a dialogue (one of three such pairs from the Parade series), but the shelves had prints that featured pairs of people. I decided to re-do the eleven trays and make it more explicitly about the relationship of people and animals and their lifestyles (similarities and differences) on the planet. Here is how it looks now. I call it Dialogue.

Here is what is on each of the eleven shelves. If you have trouble reading the text, click on the image to get a larger view:

A Look at the Studio

There's lots that's new in the studio. I'm getting ready to go to New Orleans in January and February. Georgia Landau will be using some of my space for a painting studio, and she'll also be taking care of my houseplants that I have been bringing in on days when it's above freezing.

I've brought out six old pieces from the late 90's that I wanted to look at again, hanging below next to a new version of the 5x5 grid in which I've written the appropriated text with a cool, very opaque white pen.

Here's a closeup of the grid. You can see that I've labeled the rows and columns, which I didn't do on the typewritten version. I also write a narrative about the process (here, in the lines between rows, I'm describing how I sampled the text):

Next is a look at some of the new pieces, which I'll talk more about in a subsequent post:

More Gifs - Kevin Weir

More here

Gifs by Henning M. Lederer

I just discovered these fabulous gifs of book covers by Henning M. Lederer. This is a taste of one -- you can see 54 more here!

Another Wine Foil

I've been playing with my stash of wine foils, and finally got one I'm willing to commit to a frame. I like the weirdness of a flower picking flowers. The image size is 12" x 9".