Art + Soul Celebrating Lake Champlain

I'm participating in the Art + Soul Celebration in Burlington,  with an opening tonight (June 6, 2013) at Dunkiel Saunders from 5:30 to 9:00pm. Dunkiel Saunders is located at 91 College Street, just as the hill starts to go down towards the lake, it's set back from the road. There is a parking garage across the street and parking downtown. I will be there for the opening reception.

The exhibit will also be open for First Friday Art Walk from 5 - 8pm the following evening (Friday, June 7).

My piece shows  lifeforms above the water, on the land, and under the water. Sales will be split 50/50 between the artist and the ECHO center.

Upcoming: I'll be exhibiting selections of my circular pieces at the Supreme Court in July and August, and will let you know details as soon as I get them.

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350.org Vermont Exhibit

I’m excited to have the first exhibition of work from my Parade in

UNRAVELING & TURNING: A Climate Change Art Exhibit
Goddard Gallery
54 Main Street Montpelier
May 24 - June 30, 2013

An opening reception will be held Thursday, May 30 from 5 - 7:00 pm.

Artists from across Vermont and beyond share their work relating to climate change in this exhibit presented as part of 350 Vermont's Climate Change Arts Festival.

As the planet has been mired in fire and drought with Arctic ice rapidly shrinking and high temperature records on all continents, it’s time for a creative conversation about the challenges, fears, and opportunities of climate change. The discussion of climate change must be more than a fruitless exchange between scientists, lobbyists, corporations, and politicians. Artists have a critical role to play in shifting the dialogue about climate change to one that is understood on an emotional and spiritual level. Through art, we can identify and strengthen the emotional resilience of each community.

Included in this exhibit are artists Blair Rayfield Borax, Galen Cheney, Kevyn Cundiff, Cami Davis, Joshua DeMello, David Hurwitz, Arthur Hynes, Sally Linder, Riki Moss, Mia Rubow, Anne Sarka, Nancy Taplin, Janet van Fleet, Ruth Wallen, and Shelley Warren. The show includes paintings, sculpture, and installations and has been curated by Peter Nielsen and Alison Goodwin.

Gallery hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays, 12-5pm;  and Fridays and Saturdays 12-7pm.
You can see a few more images at this Facebook link.

Corporate Commission

I created a piece for GNI in Montpelier, based on a chart of their workflow and process.

I was asked to produce a piece that showed the form, but without the text. The piece below has the same basic structure, but with different colors.

For quite a while I've wanted to do a wall installation that affixed directly to the wall, without an underlying grid. This was a great opportunity to start exploring these possibilities.

New Collectors

Such a nice thing happened: a couple at the SPA Bash last Friday loved my work and came back on the weekend to buy two pieces. It's so wonderful when people are in real synch with your aesthetic. The work I make with found objects is not easy for everyone to like, as it uses very funky materials that perhaps some people might think of as Garbage, but for me has a kind of sacredness. I think all my work is essentially about transience and the ephemeral, which is what makes the things scavenged from the Planetary Dumpster and given a rebirth in art so numinous for me.

They bought a piece I call Standing Disarmed (one of the few pieces I made in the Disarmed series that doesn't hang), and even suggested that it "bears a compelling resemblance to Donatello's Magdalene." I have to say that I see and agree, even though I am humbled by the comparison.

Here are images they sent of the pieces in situ in their home.

School Residency

I did an Artist Residency at the Waterford Elementary School the week of March 18. What a great school -- enthusiastic teachers and students, and a wonderful school climate.

Food was the theme I was asked to plan for, so I created a group of experiences that used a diversity of materials and media (here's a look at the display in the hallway that I put up on the last day):

Kindergarteners drew on bananas with toothpicks, writing their names and drawing. Later in the week they made letters using vegetables and then made designs on bread rolls that were consumed at our culminating activity.

First Graders made and painted big paper mache fruit.

Second Graders designed their own seed packets and decorated bread rolls.

Third Graders made veggie creatures and then made scenes and stories with them.

Fourth Graders made collages based on the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Fifth Graders made Additive Monsters by imagining what some chemical additives might look like.

On Friday we had a culminating activity with Stone Soup (partially made with stock from the remains of the two large sacks of vegetables we used to make Veggie ABC's and Veggie Creatures), cooked by the school's Fabulous Food Services person, Wendy Fearon (who also made and cooked the bread dough we used to form rolls). Each class brought blankets, and we all sat on the floor in the gym and had a picnic.

I met with each class three times during the week (we had a snow day on Tuesday, so that scrunched the schedule a bit; I will go back to the school sometime this year to spend the day showing students what I make in the studio and talking about what it's like to be a studio artist), but I always wish there were time to do things more slowly and spend more thinking and talking time with the projects. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly!

Overview of The Parade Thus Far

I created a Slideshare Presentation about The Parade, to try to sum up where I've been up to this point.

I've been working with Riki Moss, (who is working on her own parade) to create a collaborative installation that will begin with a website exploring the issues we're treating in our artwork and in our thoughts about how we humans interact with the world around us.

The Parade from Janet Van Fleet

Animals!

I've been thinking about animals a great deal of late, which is interesting because I am not an "animal person" -- I don't have pets and am not drawn to nature photography or trying to catch sight of wildlife when I'm out kayaking or walking in the woods. It is that I think other animals, like humans, have their own space, their own lives, their own rights -- one of which should be to be free of human oppression and the assumption that we have a right to their territories, their resources, and their bodies.

So animals are appearing with greater frequency in the Parade. Although other previous pieces in the Parade have been animals, the newer ones are (mostly) four-legged, instead of 2-legged.

 

The Dancing Bear is an exception, but really bears DO stand up on their hind legs on occasion... And I love the Inuit carvings of dancing bears, and this is an homage to them.

This creature was made from a piece of a rotted baseball bat, and came with this intriguing fragment of text.

On another note, I have FINALLY updated my website with a link to this blog and my current Resume, Paintings (with all the Priests I could find images for), Installations, and Exhibitions. It had been over ten years on some pages...