15 May, 2010
28 February, 2010
Untitled (Last Chance To Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled)
I’m making a group of 39 drawings about the Heaven’s Gate suicides. They’re going to be 6×9″ oil pictures of their keyhole logo, done in a pastel rainbow spectrum on black.
The piece is going to include a picture of the Hale-Bopp comet made out of fusible beads. For the upcoming faculty show at least, I think the drawings are going to be shown in a pile on the floor, and the bead-picture will be framed on the wall.
24 September, 2009
Materialist Cinema: Workers Leaving the Factory
I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to read the published version of my review last night, but I did just now: with the exception of a bizarre superfluous comma or two that made it through to publication, I’m not mad at it. In case anyone living outside of Fuse’s distribution range (that is, most of the States) wants to have a look, I’ve uploaded a PDF version below. For Canadians, it’s volume 32 number 4 (September).
23 September, 2009
Well look what’s hit newstands
I had no idea (1) the issue of Fuse that I wrote a piece for this summer had come out; (2) that my review (which would ordinarily have gone in the back of the issue with the other reviews) was going to immediately follow Lee’s cover story on Detroit. Um, I guess this (3) makes me a—and you’ll have to imagine me saying this while suppressing a laugh—published… art critic? Weird!
14 July, 2009
Naturalized area
This is the “naturalized area” in front of the University athletic facilities. The McDonald’s is right at the place where cars and (mostly) trucks exit the US customs station. The intersection apparently has the worst air quality in the entire country (I live out of the frame, about three blocks to the left).
This is one of the signs we had printed. Somewhat astonishingly, we had them in hand less than 24 hours after submitting the file (credit where credit is due: FastSigns does indeed make signs quickly). They’re printed vinyl fused to aluminum, and they look pretty sharp, even if they are a bit a bit delicate—the vinyl scratches pretty easily; if one were looking to a permanent application, one would do well to go another route, but in all likelihood the signs will be taken down before they have a chance to weather too badly. Or maybe they won’t, who knows?
Finding these posts at the Home Depot was a pretty lucky stroke (I think they’re meant for temporary fencing and/or for propping up newly transplanted small trees). They’re a bit on the flimsy side, but they met our needs perfectly. This one is installed in one of the accidental meadows created by the three-month city workers strike.
And now for some gratuitous macro shots of the overgrowth on the Huron-Church pedestrian bridge. I’ll be sad to see it all go once the strike is over.
[That's one of the "ARBITRATION MAKES THIS GO AWAY" signs, at left.]
13 July, 2009
3 July, 2009
Chintziest. Diploma. Ever.
I was almost a bit conflicted about not walking, graduation day (convocation? Is that what people call it in this country?), since I didn’t walk for my Bachelor’s, either (though I did at least attend the ceremony, unlike this time). But then I finally got around to picking my diploma up from the registrar’s office, and let me tell you: I am so relieved that I didn’t spend half a day sitting in the middle of the cross country field (or wherever they held the thing) in a damn dress just to shake hands with a dude who barely knows where my department is located is on campus and pick up this abortion of a certificate. My high school diploma was fancier than this. Shit looks like those free samples they used to send out with the Paper Direct catalog in the early nineties. I take that back, the Paper Direct samples would at least have had a damn border.
2 July, 2009
21 June, 2009
Brief: Somehow I don’t think this paragraph will make the final cut
To encounter Windsor is, in many respects, to be confronted with the logic of the dreamscape. Both its chosen narratives and particular cast of characters tend, at an instant, to be both naggingly familiar and only partly resolved. Any new development to the plot refers insistently, if obliquely, to a past that shimmers on the horizon between genuine recollection and mythic fabrication. This situation is perhaps one common to all industry towns faced with the threat of obsolescence; lacking a received frame of reference for reinvention, such places turn recursively and inflexibly to their own familiar tropes in acts of stubborn defiance and frantic self-preservation. For Windsor, the available palette of stock metaphors is rooted in the cycles of industrial manufacture and labor conflict, in the stereotypic patterns of shifts beginning and ending, of work stoppages and arbitrations, rhythms of drudgery, righteousness, and resentment.
