Thinking about touch, gesture, and mark-making in relationship to growth and transitions. The “X” is a to-scale reproduction of my brother’s “signature” from his emergency room intake form on the day of his departure in 2018. I erased everything except his final mark. Looks a lot like the gestural language of my office plant touching the window.
News — Events — Works-in-Progress
flowering rhizome perennial, city water, humid heat wave, Canadian wildfire smoke, sun, notes
3D printer failures, archival pigment prints, acrylic picture stand, plexiglass.
A local rental center has chairs to fit the perceived quality of your event.
A behind-the-scenes view of my DIY set up for filming books. I’m using this quarantine time to finally shoot some of my books. Blending low-tech and high-tech to make it happen.
Souvenirs (2006) is currently on view at the Tucson Museum of Art in the exhibition Travelogue: Grand Destinations and Personal Journeys. I collected dust bunnies from three sites along the south rim of the Grand Canyon and made cyanotype photograms of the clumps which look a lot like clouds in the sky. This piece spiraled out from a larger project titled Brief Notes on Existence. I hadn’t seen it in over a decade before this month - it’s holding up so well!
A passage from Godfre Leung’s essay in AA4 is featured on The Third Rail.
3.5 years in the making - AA4 launches in late April!
Centered around an experimental artist publication, AA4 is an art project that utilizes a chance encounter with the sound of a typewriter to produce new music. Artists Peter Happel Christian and Phillip Andrew Lewis, along with curator and critic, Godfre Leung, will launch the publication with a reading and present live musical performances at Spectrum Business Systems, a typewriter repair shop located at 957 Front Ave. in St. Paul, MN on Saturday, April 27 from 3:00-5:00pm.
AA4, designed by Elana Schlenker, includes an experimental text by Godfre Leung, a 12” vinyl record of music by eight musicians, a drawing by Lenka Clayton, and sheet music of the original score. The launch event will feature an introduction to the project by Peter Happel Christian and Phillip Andrew Lewis, a reading by Godfre Leung, performances by Minnesota-based artists Michael Masaru Flora and Jonathan Kaiser with Zosha Warpeha, and a small exhibition of typewriter models owned by Ansel Adams. A special performance by carrillonist, Tiffany Ng, whose music is included on the record, will occur at House of Hope Presbyterian Church at 797 Summit Ave. in St. Paul, MN on Sunday, April 28, beginning at 11:15am. Interpretations by Flora, Kaiser, and Ng are all included in the AA4 record. Additional contributors on the record include Chris Duncan, Barbara Held, Steve Roden, Greg Pond & Cesar Léal.
The soul of AA4 is a found audio recording of a letter typed by Ansel Adams, the contents of which are unknown. Working with a sheet music transcription of the typewriter sounds as an original musical score, Happel Christian and Lewis, who have collaborated on art projects since 2007, and Leung commissioned artists and musicians to execute interpretations of the score to create new sounds works. Included with each copy of AA4 is sheet music of the original typewriter sound which can be performed on any instrument by any person. The project embodies the spirit of Fluxus and proposes that chance is a primary element in the making of art. AA4 is the fourth volume in what will be an eleven volume set of artist publications by Happel Christian and Lewis. The multidisciplinary project was produced with generous support from the Ansel Adams Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography, a Visual Arts Fund from Midway Contemporary Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jerome Foundation, The Loft Literary Center, The University of the South, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, The Third Rail, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.
PRE-ORDER AA4 right here. Orders will ship June 2019. A limited number of advance copies will be available on April 27.
Full documentation of the exhibition in the Cyrus Running Gallery at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN, Oct 9 - Nov 1, 2018. Titles and details coming soonish. Give me a shout out if you want details on something specific!
A lot of new works along with some choice older works will make up Good Jokes Bad Magic in the Running Gallery at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN from Oct 9 - Nov 1. The title is drawn from the serious playfulness that is a large part of my studio practice. The exhibitions mixes pictures, objects, shelves, step stools, and a new table piece. Pictures of the install will be up in the near future. Big thanks to Chris Mortenson for all the work behind the scenes.
Installation views of Sword of the Sun in the Perspectives Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design this past spring. Huge thanks to Jon Horvath for the invitation and installation. I asked Jon to arrange the circular table of objects in the spirit of collaboration. Many thanks to MIAD recent graduate, Danny McCullough, for taking pictures of the show (I'm pretty sure that is his hand their in the second image). I love how this work evolves and shifts with each new gallery space. New works mingle with older pieces, table arrangements are always in flux from one show to the next. The first version of this work came together in 2014 at the Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College in St. Paul. I made a book version of this work as well. The book was an experiment in translating the spirit of the work into book form rather than simply making a catalog of the work from the St. Paul installation.
Lifted from my studio wall - a constant haunting of a certain kind of landscape stewardship, natural disaster clean up, errant collecting, and/or how car tires work through the simple capture of pressured air inside rubber rings. Do you ever think about this driving on the freeway? This is a 4"x 6" machine print from a 35mm negative. Photographed on Bever Avenue at 16th Street SE in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2010 or so, probably in the spring.
