Kohl's intervention and atom smashing, proper

Yesterday I went to Kohl's with Allie. She looked for business/cute cloths for a job interview and I got to play! (these are all camera phone pictures)





Also, yesterday was the first successful experiment at CERN!!! Congrats CERN! I can't wait for the black hole to open up and swallow Europe. I'll be there for it.

health care bill

democratic party - seats in senate: 57 seats in the house: 255
republican party - seats in senate: 41 seats in the house: 187
I keep hearing that we don't want this. I think, by election, the American people have spoken.

Leap

A. E. Stallings
Fear of Happiness
--
Looking back, it's something I've always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I'd slip through,
Though someone always said I'd be all right -
Just don't look down or See, it's not so bad
(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later
The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn't the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It's that the ledge itself invents the leap.

Yves Klein - Leap into the Void (photograph) 1960
[I've also seen this piece titled as, Jump into the Void: The Painter of Space Launches Himself as seen in the newspaper below]

Yves Klein - Single Day Newspaper, November 27, 1960

The following three photographs were taken by Harry Shunk for the above photo-montage and newspaper insert.

---------------

Sean Landers - Sean Leaps into the Void via Harry Shunk's Famous Photograph of Yves Klein, it is a Conceptual Art Act and Not for Sale so Please Don't Sue Me (collage) 2008

Ciprian Mureşan - Leap Into the Void, After 3 Seconds, 2004

cameraphone

In the world of cameras I own a Canon EOS T1i, a small pocket Canon, 2 Polaroid Land cameras (plus 4 frozen packs of film), and a regular Canon (film) Rebel. And I still can't deny that I like the photos from my phone the most. They seem to capture the best of what I want to say about notions of 'at hand' and economy of means. I just need to find the right subjects. Here are some that I've pulled off my phone.

Cowboy Hat (above Judy and Tony's House, Oak Park, IL)

Fermilab

Hungry Turtles

Boyfriend and Girlfriend

Cobbler Slip

Snail

two new blue

2 new pieces. The first, Blue Spill, is a re-working of an older piece: Coleman 82 Quart Ultimate Xtreme Cooler. I felt that I had no good justification for the use of cardboard in the earlier piece - at the time I thought of the cardboard in terms of poor materials and thereby as a comment on class. The comment on class didn't come from the material, rather it came from the subject - a cooler (a very vernacular and utilitarian object). This piece is also a nod to a Bill Conger piece from some time ago. The second piece is my toast to the creation of stars. I chose this object because of it's similarity to some gas clouds that birth stars, and because it reflects light. Its a miniature stellar gas cloud and a salute to the creation stars.

Blue Spill (Coleman cooler, lights, extension cord) 2010

Blue Spill (detail)

Celestial Ether (cocktail toothpick and tape) 2010

And the Lord said...

Yesterday I went to the Art Institute in search of the light. Camera in hand, I searched the whole museum. Here is what I found.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Untitled (Strange Music) (42 lightbulbs, extension cord, and porcelain light sockets) 1993

This Gonzales-Torres piece is definitely a father to a few pieces of mine (such as 2700°K and My Universe and Yours). I admire the simplicity of his work - in his work very small gestures have grand and poetic connotations. In this piece the poetry is musical; as referenced by the title. The light bulbs act as and are transformed into vertical and piled musical notes on the measure of the extension cord.

Robert Ryman - from The Elliott Room (Charter Series) (oil and acrylic paint, fiberglass, aluminum, and steel) 1985-87

Robert Ryman - from The Elliott Room (Charter Series) (oil and acrylic paint, fiberglass, aluminum, and steel) 1985-87

These two pieces by Ryman do not have light in them, but anyone who has visited this room is at first struck by the lighting; one wall of the room is windows from the floor to the ceiling. These pieces seem to be vehicles for light and light play. I had the fortunate experience of seeing the blinds open once while viewing these pieces. The colors changed and it was like a dawning or enlightenment - both of which were a consistent theme in my search for the light in the Institute's galleries.

Max Ernst - Forest and Sun (oil on canvas) 1927

This one has an obvious connection, sundog - as a phenomenological and mysterious event. But surrealists were all about the magic.

Joseph Cornell - Untitled (Lighted Owl), c. 1949 [from the AIC website - I couldn't photograph this because of a really bad glare on the display case]

Cornell was the reason I decided to dedicate my interests to art. I couldn't talk about light without referencing one of his lighted boxes. The new installation of these are at once problematic and magical. This box and the other lighted piece (Untitled (Lighted Dancer)) are in very tall (too tall to see the things at the top) display cases in the cave area of the surrealist galleries. The darkness in this area is beneficial though. These two boxes are completely dark, to the extent that you can not make out any parts of the image until you manage to make the sensor turn the lights on. So here light is the momentary giver of image.

Georgia O'Keeffe - The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (oil on canvas) 1926

Georgia O'Keeffe - Ballet Skirt or Electric Light (oil on canvas) 1927

I have to say that I've never really like O'Keeffe too much, but there has always been something that has drawn me to some of here paintings. Here these two pieces find their home in this group of 'light' works by their solid (in paint on canvas) representation of ephemeral light effects.

Edvard Munch - Girl Looking out the Window (oil on canvas) c.1892

Soooo awesomely sincere. A person at a window always conjures up notions of longing for me, so here the light is nostalgic, emotional, and hopeful. This piece rings nicely with my piece, Downtown Chicago Nightlight. As note, it is odd that the top two panes of the window do not project onto the floor. The girl looking out the window also seems to be praying, a nice segue into the next image.

John Martin - Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still, from Illustrations of the Bible (mezzotint, on ivory wove paper) 1835

Here it is, light as God. Joshua is commanding the sun to stand still as a display of divine power - but the rays of sun is also a symbol of 'the light of God.' The light rays blast in through treacherous and stormy clouds to illuminate the people below.

Sanford Robinson Gifford - Hunter Mountain, Twilight (oil on canvas) 1866

I ended my search on a type of painting that I was looking for the whole time - romantic landscape. Romantic era paintings were about the splendor and awe of nature and God's creations - light almost always is a major player in these works for that reason. This painting by Gifford shows a beautiful sunset in the Catskill Mountains in New York. The sun bathes the landscape in glowing oranges while the crescent moon and Polaris usher in the night and guide the viewer though the darkness that will in no doubt be just as beautiful - I imagine the night time landscape bathed in blues and silvers.

Sanford Robinson Gifford - Hunter Mountain, Twilight (detail) (oil on canvas) 1866

Polaris and the moon here are the guiding light for what will come. I left the museum and headed home.

Polychromatic Cloud

I found a new use for my opalescent tissue paper: Cloud. The previous piece using this material was The Mystery of Sprites and Jets. I don't think of this as a bettering of this idea - it is more like a piece in conversation with my other atmospheric pieces (a new 'body of work' or group is developing along this). The photos do not really do it justice, there is a lot more amazing color play in the reflections and projections (onto the wall behind the paper) that are hard to document) - it also is really light and airy, so it moves when you walk past it.
This came from my interest in an image of a polychromatic cloud and my want to make a piece with this material for the upcoming exhibition with Erica Moore called Polaris.

Cloud (tissue paper, rare earth magnets, and screws) 2010

(detail)

Kay Ryan
Cloud
-

A blue stain
creeps across
the deep pile
of the evergreens.
From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees, a color
passed from one
to another, a
requirement
to which they
submit unflinchingly
like soldiers or
brave people
getting older.
Then the sun
comes back and
it's totally over.