Red Clay Survey Reception Trip

The Red Clay Survey is an eleven state southeastern survey of contemporary art held periodically at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, Alabama. My piece, Domination Extinction, was one of the eighty pieces from a group of sixty-one artists that were selected for the exhibit by artists Janet Monafo and Paul Rahilly from the Massachusetts College of Art.

Domination Extinction: charcoal and pastel pencil on plywood. 7'H x 6'W x 2'D

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While waiting for the opening reception to begin, we explored Huntsville, which is a gorgeous old city that NASA redefined. Part of its past, updated for today, is Lowe Mill, an old factory mill turned into three floors of studio spaces for artists, designers, and photographers. They also have a restaurant, the Happy Tummy, which serves the hottest Jamaican Jerk Tofu wraps in existence.

You can eat inside or out

checking a screen print in a printmaking studio

"My skirt's made out of a Damien Hirst Dot painting"

Ruth Ann Muirhead-Stephen's studio

Jim Jobe's studio. He had work in the Survey, and was one of  the primo artists located in Lowe Mill.

Yes! There were Number 71 issues all over town, and we don't even cover Alabama. I need to find out how they got there. I hope people read my East Tennessee Update. I focused on OK Mountain's exhibit at UTC's Cress Gallery. That was one exceptionally witty exhibit.

Stained glass and glass painting I guess? Impressive.

As with any large multiple studio space, you will see work that ranges from don't look, to wow, to WTF? What is micro-girl doing down there on the left?

Oh, I want this....but it costs almost as much as I spent on my van new. Maybe I can do a copy with some stuff I can rig up from Michaels and Party City. Crap. Not a chance. It is a Susan Knecht  http://www.susanknecht.com/ Drool.

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This is the second time we had been to Huntsville, and for the second time half of their downtown streets were closed off. The first.time it was a St. Patrick's day parade. This time it was multiple bike races-kids bike race, and these guys going in Nascar circles. They had hay bales leaning against any sharp stuff they hoped they wouldn't collide with.

Indian Creek Canal  is a man made canal that dates back to 1831 that is totally landscaped all through downtown, and is stocked with every imaginable fish in every color possible.

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Reception Time!! You can see all the artists and their info on the flip catalogue located on the Museum's index page: www.hsvmuseum.org 
Only one work per artist is there, however. I didn't see anything about camera policy, so I took some photos as I walked around. The reception was great- jazz band, good food, wine.

John Douglas Power's "Field of Reeds", a kinetic sculpture with video. In the background is a huge Gary Chapman painting-they both won awards which made me happy because they were two of my favorites there.

My multi-person piece from an angle on the left against the wall, David Marquez on the right-the same piece he had in Dogwood Regional three years ago. Leslie Nichols, who also has shown at the Regional was in this exhibit,which was great. They both came to the reception from Bowling Green, KY.

Maryville Collge professor Carl Gombert and his wife Anita with their youngest daughter-Carl won one of the three purchase awards! Those awards were made possible by the museum's most generous docents. The third artist representing the Knoxville area was Margaret Scanlan

A very cool plastic hanger sculpture from Miami, now Atlanta, artist Jose Gallo

Alexandra Sutton's self-portrait made of dirt from her ancestrial graveyard and glue. The artist is from Birmingham.

Andy Behrle's piece made from red clay and rust on metal. Behrle is also from Birmingham. Another award winner.

This is another very smart purchase piece, by Dori DeCamillis: "Thy Self, Thy Foe". It addresses the negative self esteem she had as a child, convinced she was the ugliest child in school. It is of course a gorgeous and amazing painting, and my absolute favorite painting in the exhibit, and is especially cool because the artist lost her negative self image long ago.

articles and reviews from the Huntsville Times:

http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/05/huntsville_museum_of_art_colle.html 

http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/05/huntsville_museum_of_art_award.html

http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/05/red_clay_survey_opens_at_hunts.html

Alison Oakes and I Head West for Exhibit Talks

The Customs House Museum in Clarksville, Tennessee, had two exhibits sharing the same reception on May 12, 2012: Quantum Confusion, my solo exhibit, and their National Exhibit, juried by Alison Oakes; painter, and professor of drawing at Pellissippi State Technical College in Knoxville. Another shared road trip! I like road trips with Alison. I would be talking about the ideas behind my installation, and Alison would talk about her jurying process, and handing out the awards she would give after seeing the work in person for the first time.

Pit Stop at Uncle Pete's Truck Stop somewhere west of Cookeville. I enjoy restroom door announcements.

This restroom had way more patina then you can see in the photo. We decided we didn't want to buy any snacks there. We have very high snotty standards. It would have to at least be a Pilot station.

The Customs House Museum is housed in an 1898 building originally designed for use as a Federal Post Office and Custom House to handle the large volume of foreign mail created by the city’s international tobacco business. It is built on the site of a former boarding house. The structure was designed by Federal Treasury Supervising Architect William Martin Aiken, and is attached to larger, modern additions. It is the second largest general use museum in the state. We love their outside exhibit banners.

My banner came with an entire sidewalk cleaning crew to keep things nice.

Alison's awards go to Alessandra Sulpy of Erie, PA (1st), Leslie Sheils of Cincinnati, OH (2nd),Greg Sands of Clarksville, TN (3rd), and two Honorable Mentions to both Matthew Deric Gore of Nashville, and Elizabeth Porter of Knoxville. Museum curator Terri Jordan waits for the results so the programs can be printed out.

We now have the rest of the day until the reception to Do Stuff. There is a lot of outdoor sculpture in Clarksville, and this is the one that the art community gets annoyed with. It is some kind of pre-fabricated fountain with add-your-own-children. The kids are supposed to be playing, but at the right angle they appear to be engaged in some kind of epic battle.

Downtown Clarksville is a beautifully restored small city with gorgeous turn of the century homes and public buildings. Mostly. I'm not sure how this got here.

Nothing is better than finding small, independent clothing stores where the buyers like really cool stuff. We hunted successfully.

I tried to make Alison buy this one because it says, "I'm a hard core gym trainer", because that is her other job when she isn't teaching drawing.

And we found a gym! Kind of. Your basic hotel tread mill, bike and multi-station deal, and nothing was busted so they got an A for that. We left when the couple came in to work out wearing slide on slippers. Alison set the tread mill up for her, then we got out before her slippers flew off and she landed face first on it, or maybe she was going so slow she survived?

Reception time. I love the size of the gallery my installation is in-it allows it to be isolated in a pool of spots. The reception food was gorgeous.

The gallery space the National is in is killer. They have done amazing things in here, everything from hanging Adrienne Outlaw's mummified body installation from the ceiling to mounting animal heads high on the walls. The last exhibit had woman writers painting their narrative texts directly to the walls-floor to ceiling.

Awards time for Terri Jordan, the museum curator, and Alison.

We headed straight to Nashville after for a series of events in the May Hosiery Mill on Chestnut Street. It contains a bunch of artist studios, Seed Space cube gallery in Adrienne Outlaw's studio, and the release party for the latest issue of Number, an independent art journal I've been writing for quite awhile now. Based in Memphis, it covers Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. I finally meet recent interim editor Jennifer Gonzales from Memphis College of Art (in red), and her art collaboration partner, Nathaniel Hein of Mississippi's Delta State University. They are know as go.hein, and produce conceptual constructions addressing societal issues.

New editor Chuck Beard doing The Hug in the plaid shirt. It was a happy night. This was issue NO 71, and the 25th year the journal has been around. The issue looks fantastic. http://www.numberinc.org/

We run into artist Sher Fick in Adrienne Outlaw's studio. We have all exhibited together at one point or the other. The Southeast is a large geographic area, but the arts community here connects with a sense of familiarity that I love.

The exhibit in Seed Space is SUPER LONG PLAY! by Benton C-Bainbridge and collaborators. SUPER LONG PLAY! is an interactive ‘old media’ installation that uses abandoned tech to move minds, bodies and souls. Obsolete VHS and CRT equipment creates an electronic cinema ‘time machine’ back through the creation of a dance and media art work made by Benton-C Bainbridge with his collaborators,Ezra Bainbridge-Powers, Perrin Ireland, Erin Law, Tony Youngblood, Ryan Hogan, and Johnny Invective.

We head upstairs to Victor Schmidt and Anise Doak's studio. Between the both of them-he is a metal sculptor, she works in wood, there is every tool I could ever hope to play with. Victor recently had an exhibit in Knoxville that I helped with as far as some installation was concerned, and he also had a piece in the Dogwood Regional Fine Art Exhibit, which I have been chairing for the last four years, so it was cool to see where he works.

We head back to the hotel in Clarksville, and wake up to an exciting event before heading back to Knoxville:

Snake causes power outage in Clarksville 

Associated Press Posted May 13, 2012 at 4:05 p.m. x

 CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Power has been restored to about 12,000 people after a snake slithered into a Clarksville Department of Electricity substation and caused the outage. The Leaf-Chronicle (http://leafne.ws/JIflek) reports electric crews found that the snake made contact with electrical equipment inside the primary substation, which caused a system protection device to trip and disconnect power to around 5:30 a.m. Service was restored to all customers by 8 a.m. 

 Information from: The Leaf-Chronicle, http://www.theleafchronicle.com © 2012, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

The Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s 2012 Contemporary Realism Biennial

I've got work headed up for the second time to this really nice Biennial. I was part of it for the first time in 2008 when I was totally psyched to be exhibiting with Vincent Valdez, Don Jacot, Richard Maury, Maria Tomasula, John Tuccillo, and a whole bunch of other amazing artists from across the country. Oh-and when we went up to the reception last time, Ice T was staying at the same hotel. 

( I just kind of ignored him while trying to paparazzi some sneaky photos)

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2012 Contemporary Realism Biennial: The Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s Contemporary Realism Biennial is a national invitational and juried exhibition which highlights the strength and innovation of America’s current trends in realism. 

 August 11-Oct.28 

The exhibit is a cooperative project of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery/NY 

and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art 

 http://www.bernarduccimeisel.com/index.php

New Exhibits opening this May

My four person, charcoal and pastel pencil on plywood installation, Domination Extinction will be in the Huntsville Museum of Art's Red Clay Survey, opening May 20th-Sept. 19th in Huntsville, Alabama.

The Red Clay Survey is a major recurring regional competition sponsored by the Huntsville Museum of Art. The exhibition “takes the pulse” of contemporary Southern art every three years through a selection of work in all styles and media determined by jurors with strong national credentials. The exhibition recognizes and encourages excellence, and provides a permanent record of the development of regional art through the publication of a comprehensive, award winning catalogue.

http://www.hsvmuseum.org/about-2/

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I will have two paintings in the Clarksville, Tennessee Customs House Museum National Exhibit, which opens May 10th and runs through August 5th.

 Confrontation         oil on linen

Impaled Strawberries      oil on canvas

Inclusion in new book

The International Drawing Annual publication was conceived as an extension of Manifest's Drawing Center mission to promote, feature, and explore drawing as a rich and culturally significant art form.
The goal of the International Drawing Annual is to support the recognition, documentation, and publication of excellent, current, and relevant works of drawing from around the world.

www.manifestgallery.com 

This press makes great contemporary art survey books, plus wonderful exhibit catalogs of every exhibit in their gallery space. I've got a couple pages in this book, which gets released mid-March. There are a couple of other Tennessee artists in it, plus Christine Wuenschel, an Indiana based artist that I'll be having a 2 person exhibit with at Yeiser Art Center in Padukah, KY this fall.

"War ot the Lawn Ornaments"

"War of the Lawn Ornaments"

March, 2012, at The Balcony in the Emporium Center for the Arts, 100 Gay Street, Knoxville, TN

Wildly underwritten by: The Society for the Preservation of Lawn Art, with help from the Knoxville Arts and Culture Alliance.

There is a remote place in East Tennessee where concrete garden statuary has been manufactured for 50 years, with some of the molds even older than that. This place is like some strange kind of archeology site of the distant past, already unearthed. Within just moments of being in this place, the concrete characters, both human and animal, seem to assume a life force that begs you to come see them, and listen to their stories. The concrete beings were amassed on pallets in the craziest juxtapositions and "conversational groupings", and there seemed to be no end to the narratives contained there. There was pain, evil, and absurdity. Disturbingly, some of the figures still produced there were reminders of a South that should already have been extinct, but they were still there in all their racially offensive horror.
The second location was a business in North Tallahassee, Florida. Totally different souls trapped in concrete were found there.
My favorite sculptures were the religious one-only love and devotion could be motivators for them. I grew up in Massachusetts where the Virgin Mary is in so many yards, so I never tire of spotting her. I had a total of around 28 photos from both sites in the exhibit, and am posting just a few.

Tallahassee: Our Lady of the Giant Chicken #1/ iPad photo

Tallahassee: Heads in the Weeds/ iPad photo

Tennessee: Leda and the Swan/ lomography

Tallahassee: Our Lady of the Giant Chicken #2/ lomography

Tallahassee: The Decapitation of Pocahontas/ lomograpy- red scale film

Tennessee: Baby Gets His Cow/ lomography- red scale film

Tallahassee: Bad Manners/ lomography

Tallahassee: Bad Recess/ lomography

Tennessee: The Miracle of the Light Leak/ lomography pigment transfer on panels

I made three clay figure dioramas for the exhibit. Artist statement for "The War of the Lawn Ornaments: Payback":
Quite a while ago there was a KKK Rally up in Cocke Count on the courthouse steps. It was raining, and the police and their service dogs were everywhere. I wanted to see these fools I had only seen in news broadcasts in person. I had family members harassed and targeted by them in the early 20th century New England town I also grew up in. My newspaper photographer grandfather had even been sent on assignment to take photos of a rally during that time, but my grandmother, horrified at the sight of them, destroyed the negatives she later found in the house. I went up to Newport with my cameras to the counter rally, standing by Earth Firsters pounding on dry wall buckets, church people with banners proclaiming Love They Neighbor, and the press. There was one bearded Klan member wearing the requisite dunce cap that looked just like a demented garden gnome. I wanted to do something with the idea of deranged KKK garden gnomes ever since, and I finally got an excuse!

Detail: All the jockeys got a special weapon. The one depicting my great-grandfather LeBeau (3rd from right on top pic) got  big machete.

"Her Lust Lay Heavily Upon Them" polymer clay, wood, fake grass, dirt. This is a recreation of an exact tableau found on site.

"One Epoch in the Life of a Lawn Goddess"/polymer clay, hand built 1954 trailer, and lots of random found materials, resin, and glue

detail

"Midnight in the Garden of Concrete and Shadows" cut paper photographs, wood, transparency film.

We had an interactive board for visitors to tell us their stories of lawn art, and we got great ones!

March Exhibits

"Quantum Confusion"
Custom House Museum in their Orgain Gallery Clarksville, TN
March 15 – May 20
This is the latest location of this traveling installation, which has been shown at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville's Ewing Gallery, The Appalachian Center for Craft/Tennessee Tech in Smithville, TN, Open Concept Gallery during ArtPrize 2011 in Grand Rapids, MI, and will be seen this Sept. 29 - Nov. 3, 2012 at the Yeiser Art Center in Padukah, Kentucky, along with work by Christine Wuenschel.
This work is charcoal on plywood with plexiglass.