A schedule of sorts, a vague plan as usual, and trying to find my sea legs as always.

Sometimes I forget to put everything in writing, in one place. There was a time that I used my blog as that place to tie together loose thoughts, ideas and notions related to my life and studio practice, but that time has passed. Facebook, twitter, flickr and other ways of broadcasting, which in the end all cross post to facebook, supplanted the blog as my main spouting off point.  I feel most compelled to share on my blog when I have news related to my work or am actively installing on site. I guess this would be one of those moments. I blog best in response to images so here goes a set of images and accompanying texts that should bring my blog up to the current moment.

I am really grateful to be chosen as this years South Carolina Visual Arts Fellow.

This award is a real honor since an outside jury selects the fellows in a blind jurying process, and then makes suggestions to the Arts Commission. I had applied the last time it was offered to visual artists, but was selected as an alternate in 2009, this year though the honor is all mine.

I am also doing a few themed group shows for friends and colleagues whose work or influence means a lot to me.  I was more than willing to clear time and space in my life to provide new work for their themed shows:

First is Julia Bradshaw’s Air travel themed group show. Julia is an artist I met in Grad school who has a deep hatred  of air travel. She has made work in the past about her time on planes and it only seems natural that she would curate a show around the theme of air travel. Since I found myself bouncing around on planes a bit, I do take those times in the fuselage to make drawings, sketches and doodles that reflect my time in flight. For Bradshaw’s exhibition I scanned several pages from various sketch books over the years and printed and framed a selection of these drawings for her.

Next up is Heart Attack. This show is co-curated by Erin Glaze and her fiance Justin Nathanson. Erin is the gallery director at the City Gallery in Charleston South Carolina, and provided me one of my first bigger, challenging, stick installations in 2009. It was her confidence and that opportunity that helped set the tone, pace, and ground work for the way in which I conducted the “have sticks will travel: World Tour” series of work. They had asked all the artists to make work dealing with the heart, love, or anything heart like. For some reason the only image that readily came to mind was the “kalima” heart ripped from the chest scene in Indiana Jones and the temple of Doom. So i set about capturing that moment in an image I am calling “Take Heart”

The image is a composite of 20 different high res scans of the scene as seen on my old, slightly broken, television set that was just donated to goodwill. It is as much a tribute to that scene, as it is a tribute to my flatbed scanner, and my television set.

Finally, this month a themed group show just fell in my lap. The fine folks at the robert lange studios were so interested in the Field of Good Fortune installation from earlier this summer, that they set about designing a group show around the work. through a series of emails a simple formula was devised, they would ask their stable of artists to produce  works in response to fortunes, and I would retrofit one of the large fortunes to install in the gallery. and so a show was born. the show will open in November.

Last but certainly not least are two big projects coming up right now.

1) Next week I am zipping off to Grand Rapids Michigan to create a new site-specific work in the “Have Sticks Will Travel” series, for the Kendall College of Art and design. I will be on site building this one from Sept 7- Sept 21. This piece will be part of the citywide Artprize festival.

2) When I return from Grand Rapids I will begin prepping for my biggest most exhaustive show to date. Curated by Caroline Cobb-Wright, “Stick, Stack, Show” will open at the Visual arts center of Richmond on Nov 4(just five days shy of my 35th birthday). This three room, 2000sq ft show will contain, prints, castings, wall installations, a new woven stick work, a new sleeve piece, and some special treats. This will all be centered around my time as their Artist in residence, from October18-November 4, creating and leading workshops. At the moment the show layout and game plan looks like this:

When I get back from Artprize I will hunker down and prepare for this challenge, until then  I will see you on the road.