spyr

This year I’m doing an installation piece! Above is a sneak peak of what you might find. And probably press photography as well. Here’s a link to my AO bio.

The lush forests of New Jersey, the ruins of Bannerman’s Island castle, Maker Faire 2011, Museum of Natural History, NYC Resistor Hackerspace, The Cloisters, Central Park and Belvedere Castle, and miscellany.

Holidays with the family were great! And we got snow in Georgia – which never happens, so my sister and I took full advantage. After snowmen, snow angels, snowball fights, and trying to sled in an inch of snow, we decided to make a snow-pony! We got the body up on four legs, and it was soooo ugly our only course of action was to make a dinosaur instead.

Behold our SNOWASAURUS! It actually supported our weight, even our combined weight! Hooray snow!

My housemate Mendy Holliday and I are part of a group photography show at the Austin Visual Arts Association this Saturday, December 4th. This year we’re shaking things up a bit and collaborating on a collage installation consisting of photos we, and another housemate Aaron Bir, took of Mendy’s assemblage / installation art piece in our old house. The concept is a bit meta. It may even be a performance piece during the show (probably depending on whether we get a satisfactory result before the show opens).

The show starts at 7PM, I recommend coming around 8, and it’s one night only, so you only get ONE chance to see it! Also there’s usually wine. Here’s the official blurb:

You are invited to the one night, Saturday, December 4th Photography Show at Austin Visual Arts Association gallery located at 38th Street and Home Lane. 7-9PM. Participating photographers incude: George Anderson, Elizabeth Dunn, Rick Fink, LaTreace Giles, Laura Grimes, Mendy Holliday, David Kucko, James McKinnis, Leslie Pierce, Michael Shires and Anne Schultz. As in previous shows, there will be a wide variety of work presented in digital and traditional media. Light refreshments will be served.

Here’s a map; there is a parking lot for the studio around back (access from W 35th Street):

View Larger Map

I just finished two weekends of East Austin Studio Tour insanity. Out of the 150ish studios and galleries open for the tour, I probably got out to about 60 or so. Austin is full of some incredibly talented people, and I wanted to share my favorite artists from this year’s tour!

Katy Horan was one of my favorites last year as well; she makes incredible, magical, paintings of fairy-tale-like creatures with lacy accents and a muted, darker pallet. Her website wasn’t working at the time of this post, but maybe it will work for you: katyart.com.

Jamie Johnson was another of my favorites from last year, but I didn’t make the connection until after falling in love with her new work this year. She is a ceramic artist, and her work really strikes a chord with me. Last year it was amazing squid-pots, and this year it was tiny little figures of people and animals. Her style is just the right blend of function, fantasy, and realism. She currently has two sites: vesselsforthesoul.webs.com, and vesselsforthesoul.com (which looks like it’s still under construction).

Clarke Curtis is a new favorite. While I do remember his work from last year, it was only this year after seeing some of his quirky story telling and actually getting to talk with him about his characters that I felt a real affinity for his art, and the context it inhabits. He makes strange and compelling collage creatures that look like they should be cavorting through the pages of a children’s book (or a nightmare), and this year I got to see his idiosyncratic drawings in a few story books he’d made. The stories were spare, and reminiscent of flow-of-consciousness prose poetry. We talked about the possibility of animating his creatures – so I’ll look forward to next year’s EAST!  Check out his blog: clarkecurtis.com.

Fisterra Studios and its friends are always a favorite of mine. Jennifer Chenoweth is a metalsmith and sculpture artist of incredible vision and scope. Her pieces are usually simple, yet powerful – I just can’t quit staring at them!   And though they are all generally abstract and often brightly colored, they’re evocative of natural forms, and have the same tranquil-yet-invigorating feel as a brisk morning walk in autum.  Monique Capanelli is a botanical artist, and I absolutely love everything she does, especially her little glass balls of growing goodness. fisterrastudio.com, articulturedesigns.com

My favorite single piece from the whole tour was an installation at the Pump Project Satellite Studio: a huge bookshelf filled with an eclectica of natural objects and observations: stones with holes, antlers, old bottles with made-up perfume labels, polaroids of the sky every day for a year, a wind-up bird that sang with a music-box voice, crumbling books on botany, butterflies and bugs under glass, desert wood…(basically the kind of stuff in my own bedroom installation piece, so no wonder I was thusly swayed). Unfortunately I took, and can find, no pictures of the installation, nor do I know exactly who is responsible. I do know that the woodworker James Whitmire was part of the collaboration, and possibly Carrie Lawrence & Lynne Maphies who were also showing work in that space.  Whoever all was involved – congratulations!

Sara Hasslinger is not only an amazing artist, but an amazing person as well.  She does the MonsterLove paper mache heads (if you’ve been around the cool events in Austin and surrounds you’ve seen her work), among many, many other things.  I don’t even know how exactly to describe her work except for AWESOME.  See for yourself: sara-hasslinger.com

Domy Books isn’t an artist, it’s a bookstore.  But man, is it a bookstore!  Ok, so it’s also a gallery.  Basically Domy Books is packed full of mind-melting, art-sense-tingling, expectation-creaming art.  It’s got books of art that you’ll wet yourself over, and a changing gallery, that if the EAST installation is an indication of, will be the place to see art that will explode your eyeballs.  domystore.com/austin/