Standard Incomparable

Helen Mirra has an installation at the Armory Arts Center in Pasadena called Standard Incomparable.  In it she asked weavers to weave 7 stripes of alternating local natural undyed fiber.  Each stripe should be a hand width wide and and arm’s length long.  Each weaving becomes a description of the locale and of the weaver.  

Photo by Jeff Mclane

My contribution was woven on our Mixtape Light Neutrals warp.  Since I live in a city and local can be defined many ways, I unraveled 2 vintage sweaters I bought here- brown Peruvian alpaca and the other Irish fisherman’s knit natural white wool.

Photo by Kiera Coffee

Photo by Kiera Coffee

Each weaver made 2 pieces.  The second became part of an exchange with the other weavers.  I received Liz Gipson’s beautiful work.

Thanks to Eric for the heads up on this project.

The show got a lovely write up in the LA Times.

 

 

 

Landed!

We are so happy to announce our presence in the Savel Showroom on the top floor of the D&D building.  We are in great company- come on in and check us and them out.

Re-cording

In the USSR music was strictly censored.  As a kid I had a chance to visit the USSR as a ‘student ambassador.’  A fella named Sasha made friends with me and was so happy to receive my copied cassettes.  One was Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave.  The was particularly exciting as he’d read about her but hadn’t yet heard her.  He promised to share the music widely and without cost.

Maybe some went out on X-ray films etched with sound grooves and using a cigarette to burn the center hole like these I saw in New Scientist:

Here in the studio we have been weaving cassette tape into 5 colors of Mixtape: Light Neutrals, Greens, Blues, Reds, and Greys and Browns.  

Our perfect soundtrack for that weaving is from Bow Wow Wow.

 

It's Science! Plastic Eating Bacteria.

The PBS Newshour has an article on a newly discovered bacteria that digests PET!  There is a lot to learn, but maybe we have a tool to not just degrade but digest the most common plastic.  Maybe even the microplastic floating in the ocean.

Scanning electron microscopy image of the degraded surface of a piece of PET after 60 hours with Ideonella sakaiensis. The inset shows the original smooth surface of the PET plastic. Scale bar, 1 μm. Photo courtesy of Yoshida et al., Science, (2016).

Don't worry- it won't eat all the rubber seals in our underground facility:


I Shop Therefore I Am: Mr Heartbreak

When I was in high school my sister blew my little mind by giving me a cassette copy of Laurie Anderson's Mr Heartbreak.  I've really internalized this music.  Now at Wright in Chicago an edition of the cover image!

Laurie's film Home Of The Brave made just after the album is available for us all to watch!


Family Portrait

Roy McMakin made a dining room table and chairs for a family of four in Austin.  He sent many painted wood blocks to the family and had each member choose two without seeing what the others had chosen.  The resultant palette is weird, actually really weird.  Somehow, just like a family, it works together.  
Adding to the already very handcrafted work of Roy’s team in Seattle, we got to oversee the hand dying and hand weaving of the merino wool upholstery fabric.  Different dye colors had very different characters- some are almost purely solid color, others have tonal variations, and the dark blue has some white dashes- where I maybe tied the skeins a bit too tight.  The red with its rich rich variation is one of the most beautiful fabrics I have ever seen.
I’m very thrilled to have been part of this family portrait in 8 colors.
In Austin Roy’s work can be seen at the Lora Reynolds Gallery.

photo by Mark Woods

photo by Mark Woods

photo by Mark Woods

photo by Mark Woods

Recombinant!

On a recent visit I got to see new work in process by my dear pal Leslie Baum.  She has been exploring and stretching in her painting practice for a while now.  It is in a great place. 

Inspired by this image of Helen Frankethaler:

Helen Frankenthaler in Life Magazine

Leslie is making two environments of painted tarps.  The cloths I saw in progress are the kind of environment that one can really enter into.  Boldly she will be showing Mountain and Sea as a two-venue solo-painting exhibition in two locations:

4th Ward shows MOUNTAIN and sea starting 6 March to 15 April

St Xavier College will host mountain and SEA 17 February to 22 March

As if this wasn’t enough, she brought my hubby and I to the Art Institute where there is this show of Buddhist Monk's robes.

Kesa, Buddhist monk's robe at the Art Institute of Chicago

So much cutting and recombining lushly!

Kesa, Buddhist monk's robe at the Art Institute of Chicago

Inspired Living: Fonthill Castle

My sister Becky took me to a remarkable house .   Henry Chapman Mercer was a lover of handmade things who thought the industrial revolution would mean their end.  He feared fire and loved idiosyncratic building techniques, so built his house of cast concrete to be the ultimate handmade architecture to house his personal collection of objects.  It is a warm and welcoming structure with columns and stairs everywhere.  Tiles from his Moravian Tile Works were cast into the vaulted ceilings and cover the walls.  The ceilings and walls were cast over boxes stacked up and covered with dirt and finally sand to make the forms of the rooms.  His team then poured the concrete and later dug out the cavity of the rooms.
Walls are covered with a mix of his tiles and also historic surveys of different cultures and their tile making techniques.  Windows in his study, for example, have more than 100 years of delft tiles imbedded in the walls around the windows ordered by age.
Every surface has things to discover.  Book prints right next to Cuniform Tablets next to Moravian Tile mosaics.

Mercer is also the man behind the nearby Mercer Museum- my favorite museum in the world.

Fonthill does not allow pictures- so the first ones here are culled from the internet. Bergdorf Goodman did a stunning photoshoot there.

photo: mserfass

 

Photo: mserfass

 

photo: mserfass

photo: mserfass

 

Photo: Scott's phone

photo: Scott's phone