THEM, US & YOU Video!

The Times-Argus interviewed me for a video about the current show at SPA that Sue Higby and I co-curated. Have a look!

"Salvage" at the Chandler Gallery in Randolph

I was away in New Orleans pretty much during the whole run of Salvage, an exhibit curated by the irrepressible Josh Turk. The last day of the exhibit is next Saturday, March 19, when the gallery is open from noon until 3:00. I'm showing two large pieces, Men's Cabinet and Medicine Cabinet, as well as three smaller boxes with figures.

Meg Brazill wrote an extensive review of the show for Seven Days, in which she said:

No salvage-based exhibit in Vermont would be complete without work by Cabot artist Janet Van Fleet. This one includes five of her mixed-media works. During this writer's visit, the 21.5-inch high "Men's Cabinet" attracted many gallerygoers, perhaps in part because Van Fleet invites viewers to open it. Inside, the cabinet resembles both a tiny curio shop and a dollhouse, with its invisible fourth wall and three levels. It holds some miniatures, including a piece of dollhouse furniture, along with human-scale objects such as full-size photographs. The piece suggests a glimpse into an unknown family's history. 

Them, Us, & You

I've co-curated an exhibit at Studio Place Arts called Them, Us, & You that I've been installing this week.

Here's a link to the interview I did on Vermont Public Radio about the exhibit.

I hope that, if you can, you will come to the opening reception on Saturday, March 12, 4-6 PM.

We are also having day-long activities on Saturday, March 26:

Special Event:  Sat., March 26th
Join us for all or part of the following:
10 – 11:30AM  –  Art project led by SPA artists (all ages)
1:30-2:30PM  –  “Walk & Talk” with the exhibit curators, Janet Van Fleet
& Sue Higby
4PM  –  Talk by anthropologist, artist & writer, Dana Walrath, Ph.D., MFA
“From Slavery to Syria:  Art and Social Justice”

NOLA Stairs

Here are a few of the pieces I made in New Orleans with photographs I took there. There's something too bare about a photograph, as though additional life needs to be injected into it. That happens here with found materials.

Nesting

We're back from New Orleans, where in addition to making a garden in our daughter's backyard (in the second week of January! -- the snap peas were starting to climb by the time we left on February 19...), I installed a studio for myself in a kitchen cabinet. I didn't realize how hard it would be to be without my tools and studio (even though my daughter has great tools, they weren't always the ones I am used to working with).

I made, as planned, some photographs of stairs, which I will be using in the coming months, but my major piece was one called Nesting. I scavenged some cypress wood from a dumpster a few blocks over (work is still ongoing to try to repair damage caused by Hurricane Katrina) and, after trying to remove the nails and metal with a hammer and rip and cut it using a circular saw, I gave up and found a young man named Roland to cut and join the wood to make a skeletal house, to which I added the small houses on each side, cut from the same wood.

The house is 24"H x 16"W x 16"D, and it sits up on 4 foot pipe legs. I have proposed it for an exhibit called Anarchitecture at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans and, if accepted, I will make a 20 x 20" steel base for it to sit on.

I said in my statement:  
The work in my current series uses an iconic "house" motif to explore issues of displacement, appropriation of resources, and impermanence. All humans build and occupy structures, and this necessarily involves the displacement of other living things (whether plants, animals, or other humans). However, each individual person has a limited lifetime, so there is succession, as these structures pass to a next generation of ownership, to new occupiers, or are destroyed deliberately or  by misadventure. The pieces in this grouping are all made with materials from that process of destruction or disaggregation, each part bringing with it a former life....Nesting, was created in New Orleans in January and February of 2016. I salvaged cypress boards from a dumpster in Mid-City to create a skeletal house, with streetscapes on four sides. Nestled in the attic are white houses, suggesting eggs or ghosts (precursors or successors).

I took some photos at a neighbor's house, where I used their digital projector to create light from a white screen, but it clearly had other colors in the projected pixels, and this cool image was the result!

New Orleans!

I'm here in the Big Easy, while it's snowstorming in Vermont. It's amazing to me how much diversity there is on our planet -- different plants, different climate, different people. But there are still cats, pooping in the vegetable garden I planted here.

We're staying with our daughter Berrian, who's one of the leads/creators of the Krewe of Janes, that will be rolling with the Krewe of Chewbacchus on January 30 at 7 PM (after one of my favorites, Tit Rex. Here's a look at the sign we made for carrying in the parade. The letters are cut into a big, shallow cardboard box we modified, backed with stiff translucent plastic, with cool led strings of lights bought by the other lead, Kristy.

Berrian has made fabulous costumes for the members of the krewe out of gold crushed velvet, as well as modifying a shopping cart with bicycle tires. Exciting. I'll post more as more happens!

Dialogue 3

Here's the final piece in the three-part Dialogue series. It's 22.5 x 15 x 15", and, like the previous two dialogues, features two players (an animal on the left and a human on the right) talking about what's going down.

The piece is built on a circular base, where a number of wooden houses are built. In the center is a copper bowl filled with wish bones, one of which the figure on the left has either fished out, or perhaps is in the process of depositing...

From the back, the figures almost look like they're one with the structures at their feet. Humans and other animals have much in common, and we are also built of atoms and molecules like everything in the physical universe.