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Getting started, making plans, and the last leg of the “Have Sticks Will Travel Tour”
This blog fits into the category of studio ramblings; as I have fallen into slightly less production and a more relaxed studio routine.
The images above include some lids with larger Solo writing and some of the digital images I used in a recent printmaking experiment.
Below is an image showing the taxonomy of coffee cup lids. This and the stuff above are some of the things I keep around the studio for inspiration and such.
I think when I tell people what sort of planning I do for an installation they are always surprised, but not for the same reasons. People tend to be surprised either at how little or what they perceive as how much planning took place. I started many years ago treating the gallery floor plans I get as an integral part of my working process. For me each piece or show begins with the gallery layout. Even when I am installing objects I like to treat the whole gallery space as one cohesive drawing. For me the gallery is literally like the piece of paper the map is printed on and the gesture drawings I make are how the pieces begin. Above and below are the drawings and ideas for what will be the last installation in the Have Sticks Will Travel cycle of installations. This last show, coming up in September at The McColl Center, will hopefully encompass all the lessons I have learned so far in the work, and ones I will be learning shortly.
With the McColl Center show I will be creating a new woven piece, a new lid piece for the walls, a revised sleeve piece, installing prints and ephemera from the whole of the tour, and there is a dedicated wall in the space for videos where I will be able to make tour video journal. I suppose I am putting the cart before my horse since I still have a couple more installations to undertake before The McColl Center.
Above are printouts of the emailed images I got from the gallery in mexico, which is the next woven stir stick installation. It was actually the request of this gallery that prompted me to print the new shirts in green. The space I am being given is an unused retail space in san jose del cabo. I am pretty excited from what I can tell of the space as it has a column for me to interact with and plenty of natural light. I just got confirmation that the sticks are en route to this site and I shipped some works on paper, prints and other things for the gallery to frame before the opening on May 28. I will get there May 19 and at that point will be making work the closest to the equator I think I have ever been.
This printout above is the layout of the room I will be working in for the Bumbershoot festival in seattle in August. In planning for this one not only will I need to have a sense of the gestalt of the finished piece that i want, I will need to work faster and smarter than before. Because this is a festival I have a very tight install time on the ground. To work around this I will be using some of my bumbershoot budget to crate and ship several woven panels ahead of time, as i did with the norman, memphis, city gallery, and ft lauderdale pieces respectively. Although with each of those i only made between 7-10 panels, for bumbershoots I am hoping to get 20 panels woven and crated and shipped out by the end of July.
Speaking of crates, here is how every crate will now leave the studio. Thanks to the 18Rabbit gallery who stencil all of their wall texts for shows I now have a complete set of stencils of my own.
So the whole point of this is that when I titled this cycle of installations “The Have Sticks Will Travel Tour” last year I did not really know what form or where it would take me. I always knew that the McColl Center would be the culminating show in the cycle(or the end goal if you will. once I had been awarded the McColl Center gig and had the dates confirmed I always just figured I would work backwards and fill in my schedule up until then). Since I did my site visit to the McColl center last week I really got excited to use that opportunity to create a culminating installation for the sticks tour. The best part is that after the show opens I will then spend three months as an artist in residence working on new work and developing components for upcoming installations in the 2011 exhibition year. Speaking of which I just finished scheduling January, February, April, and June of 2011 for new installations(come on people who wants me in December 10, March 11, and beyond). It will be really exciting to take what I am learning with this cycle of work process it during my time at the McColl Center this fall, and then present the results all through out 2011. For better or for worse I know my strength and interest as an artist lies in the residency model of art making. By this I mean I prefer to intersperse periods of standard studio ramblings and production with more compressed intensive time working in new settings. In many ways knowing I will be making work every month in new locations frees up the anxiety that once drove my time in the studio, so I can now be driven by good old fashioned curiosity.