Saturday, May 17, 2008

Far Below, post reception

Far Below installation view
The show which I have referred to often, in hopes that someone will praise me for the massive amount of work it required, as the show which was produced in one month. Thus far, no one has been terribly impressed, which leads me to believe that I over-estimate my own endeavours. Anyhow, the show looked lovely, a fact which was largely ignored by most of the gallery attendees.

You see, Pravus Gallery is divided into three spaces, and my show "Far Below" occupied the middle of the three spaces. The first space had a group show of custom vinyl toys (Moodys, actually), and was a great testament to horror vacui*, all tiny details and bright colors. The third space is occupied by Synthetic Compound, a vinyl toy shop and a similar description as above can be accurately applied to it. And there was my show inbetween, with big pools of space between the pieces and bereft of any colors besides the black and white of monochromatic relief printing.

Perhaps if my work cannot visually compete, then I should re-think my approach to art. I should do this, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to assign the smaller crowd that my show attracted as the inevitable sifting that intellectually superior art must do. See what I did there? I took a situation which illustrated my artistic shortcomings and made it into the opposite. Because I'm deluded like that.

Because of the short notice of this show, I was unable to do much in the way of publicity for it. But my friend at the local weekly wrote a short piece on it, mostly about how I was shortly to leave Phoenix. And now everyone asks when we're going to move, and we respond with the reply, disappointingly lacking in urgency, that we leave in a month and a half. It's like putting on the turn signal blocks in advance of the actual turn.
Far Below installation view

That's me with the backpack. I have to wear gloves nearly all of the time for reasons that I won't go into. Suffice it to say, they are not fashion inspired reasons. So I'm up against the inability to dress reasonably well with gloves and not looking very gothy, or not looking like a pretensious nance, wearing gloves in a Phoenix summer. Do you have any glove wearing recommendations? They must be full gloves, no thug-ish looking fingerless nonsense.

Far Below Installation View

Far Below installation view
The Fish. I'm most proud of the fish. It's the first piece I've made that skipped the intermediary step of making a blank of the pattern to test it, and then to draw the image on. For the fish, I drew the original pattern and the drawing directly onto the material before cutting, and didn't know if the whole thing would work until after printing it and sewing it together.

Far Below installation view

By the by, we're now accepting submissions for Super Fun Activity Challenge 2, Activity Quest.
activity quest call for entries