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February 24, 2007
Back to NYC
I'm back in New York for a whirlwind weekend of art and catching up with old friends. Highlights thus far:
The art highlight of the trip so far was a visit to the place where my friend Brian works. Brian somehow got a job as a personal assistant for an uber-rich art collector. So Brian works in a large, unassuming three-story building in Brooklyn that houses an insane art collection. It's like walking around a museum except that the work is much more crowded in the space. Brian's boss has a thing for Russian artists, especially Ilya Kabakov, whom I really like. Here's some other stuff I likeed:
This is Brian in his office. There's a painting by the same artist on each wall. I don't remember the artist's name.
A bench by Jenny Holzer. Brian pointed out that she made it several years before September 11. Seems prophetic now.
A Kabakov installation. I felt a little left out because I don't read Russian.
James Rosenquist and Gene Davis. Reeeeally nice.
This half-eaten burger is from an amazing restaurant called Brgr. Seemed at first like a typical burger and fries joint, then I spotted the chalk board on the wall that explained where all the locally raised turkey and grass-fed beef and dairy came from. And to top it all off, they served a great local brew, Brooklyn Lager.
Tonight was also a reception for a small show of my work, which is the main reason I'm here. It was cool, but a little weird. More on that later, I don't have a way to upload the pictures at the moment. So I'll write about that soon along with tomorrow's main event: The Armory Show.
Posted by kevinb at 12:01 AM | Comments (3)
February 2, 2007
WORDCOLLAGE: FANTASY/BIOLOGY
Lately I've been interested in the juxtaposition of words within lists, particularly in texts that catalog a wide variety of information, like dictionaries and encyclopedias. It started like this, I removed several pages from an old set of encyclopedias in order to use images from those pages in collages. But then I started looking at the words on the top of each page, the names of two entries, listed in bold so that the reader knows where they are in the alphabetical list of entries. Some of these stuck out as nice little two-word poems:
TAPPAN BAY / TARANTULA KILLER
FREE WILL / FREEZING POINT
STINKING CAMOMILE / STIRLINGSHIRE
EMPEROR BOA / EMPIRICISM
SYMBIOSIS / SYMBOLISM
ELEVATION OF THE HOST / ELEVATOR
GERONIMO / GERRYMANDER
Some of those word combinations have shown up in drawings I've done. More recently I've been making lists where the entries alternate between two different types of items. Here's one I made that consists of the names of North American Wildflowers and spells that can be cast in Dungeons & Dragons:
FÆRIE FIRE
HURON TANSY
PHANTASMAL KILLER
GRASS-OF-PARNASSUS
PRISMATIC SPRAY
FALSE PENNYROYAL
FORCECAGE
ARETHUSA
GEAS/QUEST
This one contains the names of insects and Dungeons & Dragons monsters:
REGAL FRITILLARY
PSEUDONATURAL TROLL
GLADIOLUS THRIPS
DIGESTER
PROMETHEA MOTH
TARRASQUE
EYED ELATER
ETHEREAL FILCHER
SPIREA APHID
Posted by kevinb at 3:57 PM | Comments (0)