The Great Wall of Vagina

via The Guardian

Yup. The Great Wall of Vagina by Jaimie McCarthy is looking for a permanent home.  According to The Guardian:

McCartney’s wall featured in the opening exhibition of Mona in Australia, the largest private gallery in the Southern Hemisphere, and was last exhibited in 2013 at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. The artwork is currently sitting in crates in his studio, gathering dust. After the Italian show, McCartney got interested in other projects and hadn’t begun searching for a permanent location to house it until recently. “I don’t want to exhibit in a sex museum,” he said. “It’s not about sex; it’s just anatomy. For me, it’s a serious artwork and it should be in a serious museum.”

 Fascinating concept. Real conversation starter. And McCarthy is doing it again (and again. and again),with The Sum of Our Parts and Mondcivitano – The Women of the World.

The Hardest Thing

This art project is genius, really, devised by the Dutch artists and directors Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug . The concept is a short film of an artist attempting to explain his/her work to their parents. Below is #1 in the series; artist Arno Coenen trying to explain to his father how his brewing a beer is art. You know, as they murder a bottle of said beer.



How to explain it to my parents - Arno Coenen from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.

Fall Images

Printed three blocks last weekend (03 October 2010). Two more of the West Coast series and another of my figure study series.


Figure Study 2

 Figure Study 2 was printed in an edition of four on 60# 200mm x 250mm paper.

 Island 1 is part of the West coast series and was printed in an edition of 20 at 215mm x 125mm.

And Terminal 1 is also part of the West Coast series and was printed in an edition of 20 at 215mm x 125mm.

I'm printing the West Coast series in editions of 20 in this odd size in order to eventually bind them into a limited edition book of 20 prints. Getting to 20 is taking a lot longer than I had originally anticipated, but they are slowly coming along.
It's also becoming clear that I'm going to have to build a press, rather than continuing to pull prints by hand. This should be an interesting project--or two.

Two New Prints

Space, and reasonably clean space, is at a premium. So I have to grab printing opportunities where and when I can. Last night was one such opportunity.
And not everything works; I pulled one test print and discovered that the image communicated nothing, and was forced to discard all plans for printing it. Not a good feeling. But the other two worked better, although I'm still having ink issues (ignorance is not bliss in this case. I need more information!).

First is the local just up the street from where we live in Cadboro Bay. Difficult to figure out what to concentrate on and what to ignore when carving the block.
The second image, well, I have to work on how to reinforce sections of the medium when pursuing fine detail. But the image itself is, I think, simple and communicative.

The original source is a found photograph from the mid-1950s. It is the first in a new series of figure studies.

The Building Series

I've started printing the Building Series. Mostly because I needed a contribution for the uni 102 journal. I block printed a single copy on rice paper (thanks Kathy P for that idea). As you will see below, I had to append an artist's statement to the image. So, from the Building Series--UVic:

Architects talk of buildings as planes, space, and mass. In the Building Series, my prints simplify their subjects back into these elements, and discuss them in terms of their impositional space; the way in which the built environment imposes itself in the natural and conceptual world.
Building Series—Uvic: Building #1 is a representation of the Clearihue Building. When we first begin attending classes in the building, we find the building itself generates an emotional response in us, becoming a concrete representation of our fears and trepidations. But as the term continues and we begin to come to grips with these worries, the building itself begins to become less fearsome and more neutral—indeed, it can even become welcoming. Yet even as our relationship with the built environment changes, the building itself never changes. It remains a collection of planes and masses in space.

L'Homme qui marche

Alberto Giacometti's sculpture L'Homme qui marche, it is reported in the Guardian, has sold for north of $103M US. It really is an extraordinary work of amazing potency. I remember the impact it had the first time I saw a photo of it--even mediated through a picture, it bowled me over. Some years later, for a show called "Seat Specific"  here in Victoria, I paid hommage to Giacometti with a piece called "Hungry Ghosts Walk the World, and it's Time They Had a Chance to Sit Down: A Chair for Alberto Giacometti." It was a spindly-legged Douglas fir chair, 3 metres tall, which I had textured with pigmented plaster to simulate the effect of the tortured bronze used by Giacometti. I was gratified by the response--even though it didn't sell and was eventually trashed. I've since managed to see some of his work, and he remians, for me, one of the great artists of the last century.

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Wooden Robot Arm

So many centuries and we still haven't explored all the uses of wood. Of course this model was built of wood--why would you use anything else?

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