empty studio : time to start over

my studio feels very empty [and clean. i swept and even mopped the floors today ! yay !] empty walls are inspiring and also kind of scary.



everything - except for one piece that i'm still crocheting doilies for - got packed up and dropped off at fed ex this morning.

i feel both a huge sense of relief - and a huge sense of trepidation.

i still don't feel like i'm going to be there. there are still too many other things to do. grade, work on a proposal, TAXES [ugh]



packing is like a giant puzzle. and i'm a bit worried about the glass ball sculptures. they are wrapped - floating in boxes that are lined w/ foam - but you just never know. i mean it just takes one brute fed-ex guy to toss your box aside or put something really heavy on top to ruin it for everyone. everything passed the shake test [i shake things to make sure you don't hear anything rattling around]. oh art gods please protect my goods as they make passage to milan... pretty pretty please ! i do think, though, that my mom - the MASTER of all packers - would be proud of how i fit everything together.



i was peeling and prepping vinyl wall stickers till the very last minute this morning.... i'm going to do a GIANT version of the above - it's phenyldichloroarsine - a chemical nerve agent developed by the german's in world war I. there are a lot of chemical warfare agents in this show. yup. and the deforestation work is going to be shown too.

title of the show? Fleeting Beauty.... from the curatorial statement {Marinella Paderni is the curator} :
What has become of the image of beauty in contemporary artistic expression? Once the prerogative of art, today beauty is no longer a sublime ideal but has become a social constraint or need. With the cult of the image, its symbolic value has shifted to the fields of marketing, economy and fashion, leaving a new task to art: the denial of beauty, turning it into an aesthetic and spectacular phenomenon that we have to seek in places where we do not usually look — in the inner recesses of the human mind, in memory or in the reality that apparently removes, distorts or corrupts it. Under the ashes of the romantic ideal and utopia, beauty — formerly lost — has only changed its future... the American artist intervenes in our perception of reality by deconstructing it thanks to the invention of ‘beautiful’ images of elements that are, however, threatening (viruses, toxins, arms, disappearing trees) and are represented with childlike forms and settings...

hopefully i can live up to that !

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have you seen Sally Shim's [of SHIM + SONS ] new venture ?

my friend : artist + curator : Timothy Buckwalter is about to open part two of a series of shows. [i'm going to be in part 3] here comes the darkness . it's a great concept and a cool show [with work by my pal kate bingam burt amongst others.

ok. off to start to tackle other things on my to-do list [more like to-do pile]