Swimsuit Mini Crisis

The straps on my current lap suit, purchased in the Pacific Northwest and worn throughout its entire life in Indiana, have grown crunchy and it has stretched as a result. I am suffering through a small crisis because it is the first swimsuit that I will throw away rather than save to represent the time lived in Portland, Oregon (see image from Echo of the Object below).

I question why this is a problem but it likely relates to not wanting to toss anything that pertains to my life lived in the Northwest (but then I could not keep it because I would be saving an object past the time where I lived in this location). The dilemma!

Art Department: Confetti in the Desk Drawer

I am slowly working on the section of the Art Department series that features a letter outlining outrageous activities that occurred in one department in the 1970-1990s. This circumstance featured a stolen master key and confetti dumped into the drawers of all the faculty members' desks after hours. I purchased $25 of confetti and fortunately, my friend David let me use his office for the photo shoot. I didn't want to buy pink confetti (which symbolically represented the person who originally did this in the 1970s) and opted for bags that described me. I was thrilled to find saguaros (Viva Cinco de Mayo!) and also purchased anything that was predominantly blue.

I spent time separating a few of the cacti from the chili peppers before I tossed all of the confetti into one ziplock to mix them, thoroughly convinced that it was sealed properly before I turned it upside down to shake.

Wrong.

There went an hour on a Sunday afternoon picking confetti out of the kitchen sink with tweezers.

At least it was good practice for the real event three days later.

Here is the image that I am contemplating using in the series.

I left David a few surprises in his tack box after spending an hour cleaning up the confetti.

David's lunch bags or my audience during this 2.5 hour affair.

Toilet Paper Magazine

Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari for The New York Times Magazine, 22 February 2015

About eight months ago, I became infatuated by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari's Toilet Paper Magazine. I may even have purchased a couple Christmas presents that featured this image...

... and a 2015 calendar...

 ... in which I am currently responding to each month on Instagram...

(with taxidermy coyote eyes)

(and a package of organic rainbow carrots).


From the New Yorker:

In Toilet Paper, the images might appear to have been appropriated from world’s most surreal stock-photograph service, but they’re all made from scratch. “Every issue starts with a theme, always something basic and general, like love or greed,” Cattelan explained. “Then, as we start, we move like a painter on a canvas, layering and building up the issue. We always find ourselves in a place we didn’t expect to be. The best images are the result of improvisation.” Many images are rejected, he said, because they’re “not Toilet Paper enough.” What makes a Toilet Paper photo? “We keep homing in on what a Toilet Paper image is. Like distilling a perfume. It’s not about one particular style or time frame; what makes them Toilet Paper is a special twist. An uncanny ambiguity.”

I wish I had seen Cattelan and Ferrari's mural on the High Line billboard in June 2012:

I am fascinated with any artist/trickster whose work that I have respected who announced his retirement from the art world yet continues to produce provocative imagery (and who may not have truly retired - hello Marcel Duchamp).

Ann Hamilton's "The Common Sense" at Henry Art Gallery Illustrated in Photographs

As visited in December 2014.

An Anonymous Inventory of Items Stolen From Art Departments - Mock-up

Round 2: I am still collecting with the idea that all will be shown together in a singular installation.

[From the faculty show in October-November 2014.]

I am fairly sure I could outfit a dining room with the amount of chairs I hear people have taken from Art Departments. That said, I need to photograph one and print it full scale.  Next up: beeswax and stage lighting.

Winter 2015 Postcard Collective Submission

Photograph by Hannah Barnes (once received in the mail)

Three firsts: attempted shorthand (the scrawl says "I am at a loss"), did not print the back (purchased index cards with grids and glued them = no Avery labels!), and I wrote everything 44 times (over and over again).

The term "mulligan" has many definitions but had I not created this card, I may have produced something that fit with "a man who has a mullet and wears a large cardigan" (thanks Laurie and the Urban Dictionary).

Julian Charrière's "We Are All Astronauts On a Little Space Ship Called Earth"

Even though I have a folder on my desktop with fourteen images for a sixth post on globes, Julian Charrière's We are All Astronauts... deserves its own entry. Sage Lewis posted an installation image on Instagram from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and I haven't stopped thinking about his representation of hanging spheres since.

From Charrière's website:

Medium: 13 found globes made of plastic, paper and wood, steel base with MDF board; dust from globes surface and international mineral sandpaper

"We Are All Astronauts On a Little Spaceship Called Earth, whose title is inspired by the writing of Buckminster Fuller, is composed of 13 abraded world globes, which seem to be floating over a table. The globes date from 1890 to 2011, and the artist has sanded their successive and shifting geopolitical contours until their carefully drawn territories disappeared from their surfaces.To do so, he created a special, 'international sandpaper' with mineral samples from all UN recognized countries, a remnant from one of his previous works, Monument - Sedimentation of Floating Worlds (2013). The dust carried by the abrasion gently settled on the table beneath the globes, creating new, yet to be defined cartographies."

More images of his studio (with pristine globes) can be found here and while this is a link to a sanded globe displayed as a solitary sculpture.

Adios California

Funniest little hot tub in Palm Desert

View from the Palm Springs aerial tram at twilight (scary)

Vik Muniz's Pictures of Cars (after Ed Ruscha) at the Imago Gallery, Palm Desert

The Cabazon Dinosaurs through the front window of the Corolla (remembering Pee Wee's Big Adventure)

 Adam's birds stored on top of the refrigerator

View from Griffith Observatory at sunset (amazing!)

Jim Hodges' The Dark Gate at the Hammer Museum

From Jeff Koons' Banality series or custom made gingerbread houses at Gelson's in Pacific Palisades