Flashback Friday #5

[Couldn't locate the title]
watercolor, collage, coffee, 1989
45" x 25"

A pre-grad school work done while living in a loft on Halsted Sreet in the Pilsen Area of Chicago. It was a Pod place, meaning Podmajersky, the landlord czars of the Pilsen art community. I don't recognize the google map image. It's been rehabbed quite a bit in 20 years. I was having boy troubles at the time. I know this because the collage elements are torn bits of paper from a journal chronicling said boy problems in words and scrawly drawings.

Damn, I just looked at the prices of the lofts they're leasing. Damn Chicago for being so cold in the winter. dammit.

Flashback Friday Warm-up

I'm going to have to figure out an easy, cheap and quick way to scan slides in order to keep working the FBF thing. Stay tuned. Meanwhile I'd like to use this post to kick-off Flashback Friday with stuff from the Museum of Ephemera, also know as stuff I find when I go visit my mom and start opening drawers and stuff.

I laughed pretty hard when I found this.

1. My grandmother smoked occasionally and would preserve all sorts of ephemera in cellophane cigarette wrappers.
2. The fact that I, aka Pretty Baby #2, at the age of 3, would make a bookmark from a piece of crocheted yarn, a cellophane cigarette wrapper and a label denoting the above is hysterical to me. I could have just as easily made this yesterday.
3. The fact that it still exists.

My grandfather was a theologian of sorts and there is an entire bookcase in my parent's house that contains several varieties of holy books from a various cultures along with a passel of Bibles spanning a couple of centuries. I'm not very familiar with everything in there, but I like old books, so I felt like perusing last time. None of this is important to Flashback Friday except to explain that the bookmark was found in a chapter called Reception of The Holy Spirit and I didn't want to disrupt the ecosystem by removing it.

Next week, I'll resume posting real work.

Flashback Friday #4

Here are some stills from videos I did while in grad school. One day I will take time to compress the videos and post them to YouTube. They're short, except for the bed-making video, which is about 11 minutes.

The image on the bottom is from a video done after grad school from found footage I copped while working in the post-production industry. I had a sweet collection of industrial videos. I love industrial videos. Work work work. Machines at work.

I enjoyed doing video and was quite engaged with that medium at the time. The 90's was a good decade for video art. During that time though, I came across the following paragraph in an essay by Juan Downey called, The Smell of Turpentine. The essay is about his need to communicate through electronic media, but as soon as I read the paragraph, I knew what I needed to do.

"I do not recall whether I read or dreamt that Marcel Duchamp had said that some artists continue painting because they are addicted to the smell of turpentine. Their activity is therefore not aesthetic but instead a biological dependency of the chemistry of that medium."

Soon after, I went back to painting, but I dragged some of these ideas with me.

Flashback Friday #3

Tin Can with Asphalt. late 80's early 90's, oil, tin can, asphalt on canvas. Roughly 60" x 48" on canvas.

Yellow with Eye. Late 80's early 90's, oil, spray paint, industrial enamel on canvas. roughly 60" x 48"

Color Field. Opposing forces and structure. I'm not presenting the works in any sort of chronological order (other than it's all pre-grad school work from the early 90's) so just enjoy the non-linear ride.

Flashback Friday Deux

Bench on Casters, c. 1990. Found wood, metal, tar, casters, , approx dimensions 4 or 5 feet long.


Number 5 Cancelled, c. 1989-1991. Found materials, wood, tar, asphalt, paint on canvas.
Shield, c. 1990-1991, found wood, tar, asphalt, apron, paint on wood. Approx. dimensions, 33" x 42"


More work done while living in Chicago before the anti-painting grad school lock-down. Anselm Kiefer meets Arte Povera meets Feminism with a capital "F." Had I not been mesmerized by the narcissism of video art, I might have enjoyed the challenge of seeing where this work would have taken me in the hardcore conceptual anti-painting climate of that department in 90's. Oh the irony.

(PS. I didn't really consider the bench to be "art," even though it wasn't functional enough to sit on. I just like making benches form scrap wood every decade or so.)

Flashback Friday

Wentworth Avenue #1, 1991, roofing tar, paint, found materials on canvas, approx dimension 24" x 28"
Wentworth Avenue #2, 1991, roofing tar, asphalt, paint, found materials on canvas, approx dimension 36" x 36"

These paintings were done while living in Chicago in the late 80's to early 90's, after undergrad and BEFORE going to grad school. I scavenged old abandoned buildings for materials and made paintings based upon the junk I found. I matched the color and materials of the found objects and made a painting based on that site. These reference a torn-down warehouse once located on a deserted stretch of Wentworth avenue between Pilsen and Chinatown.

I was into Anselm Kiefer at the time. duh.

I'm joining in the fun of digging up old paintings and posting them on Friday until I get bored with the idea or get behind on scanning. Practically none still exist, but I have slides. woo-hoo.

(Due credit for Flashback Friday idea to Carla Knopp)