feather2pixels

“Character Profile: New Works in Language, Text, and Wordplay”
Curated by Jon Fischer
Opening Reception Saturday July 13 7-10PM (one block from tacos!)
Exhibition Dates: July 10-27
Root Division
3175 17th Street at South Van Ness, San Francisco
free

About eighteen months ago in Golden Gate Park, I had a sudden flash of inspiration in the form of a succession of twenty-eight free associative phrases that I quite immediately knew I wanted to develop into a substantial art piece.

I was associated with Root Division through some teaching work, and decided to go even further and pitch them an entire language based show through their curatorial submission program. Over the course of four of five months of back and forth I refined the concept, got three or four trusted collaborators involved, and the proposal was accepted as the July 2013 show at Root Division! This group show is going to feature the language-based visual artwork of 27 artists including my beloved Ben Hill, Nowell Valeri, and Erin Bregman. I think it’s going to be a really fun, multifaceted show featuring but not limited to:

• A wall of Toasted Puns.
• An interactive sound installation in which visitors can manipulate Presidential speeches with obscene gangta rap with old TV commercials, to create their own postmodern soundtrack the way God intended.
• Flip Books.
• A New York Times vs USA Today death match.
• eBooks (a humongous “e” made out of books).
• And lots of other engaging, interactive work dedicated to a spirit of play.

Bring your kids!

My project, “American Fistfight” evokes the early era of cinema with rudimentary moving image sequences produced entirely with screen printed 35mm slides. Several vintage projectors connected with a fabricated control panel will allow visitors to maneuver image sequences for themselves while the results are displayed on the gallery wall.

From the curatorial desk:
Character Profile is a visual arts exhibition featuring projects that explore intersections between the forms, mechanisms and meanings of language. Drawing from a cross disciplinary group of twenty-six collaborators from across the country including writers, visual artists, and craftspeople, Character Profile investigates novel functions of language through a broad range of materials, media and approaches. Many of these works are dedicated to a spirit of engagement and play. The exhibition highlights art designed for direct interaction with visitors and work that provokes expanded meanings and alternative associations. These artists present language as both a medium and a subject, and deftly maneuver words to both convey and critique meaning.

A few recent gifts (that I have pictures of):

Game

Watercolor

Needlepoint

Rap Video

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/53496463?badge=0″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/53496463″>Fischer and Erin Wedding Card (Rap Video) Version 2.0</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user4805707″>Nowell Valeri</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>]

The screen printing workshop for kids was not a complete disaster.  I’ll be damned if every kid in that whole school didn’t get to make a print.  Some of them didn’t even hate it.
Here is a somewhat painful excerpt from the into to one of the last sessions.  I think I make five assumptions before the first three seconds are up.  Teacher of the year right here.
[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/screen_demo.flv 320 240]

Some days I feel like screen printing is less of an art form and more of a series of things that can go wrong.  Having worked out my emulsion issues for the time being, I agreed to run a daylong printing workshop with fellow Explainer alum Kristin at the elementary school where my friend Raymond works.  Seven session, seven grade levels, forty minutes a pop, and Kristin will be dressed as The Cherry Ghost.  But as the day of the workshop approaches, I find myself questioning how screen printing—which only works on the days that everything goes right—will happen amidst the near-infinite entropy of two hundred kids.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics practically guarantees that there is now way in hell this is going to work.

To make matters worse, my game plan is probably overly ambitious.  Ridiculous, now that I think about it.  The idea is that each student would make a print of their teacher.  Example design of Ms. Baum:

The little kids would print one layer, two for the the older kids.  We spent yesterday prepping the screens, and today the gravity of the task at hand is apparent.  I am just not lucky enough to make this work.

Instead of explaining the last few weeks, I will just post some pictures:

On Thursday, Kristin treated me to a belated birthday dinner of my choice.  I chose to dress fancy and eat French Food.  So we went to Cafe Claude near Union Sqaure and both ordered Onion Soup, Hangar Steak, and wine.  Kristin accidentally ordered extra potatoes but then wouldn’t touch them, only saying “life is troublesome.”  I would have thought that extra potatoes would help.

Screen printing is so good, it’s hard to contain myself. Tonight, Kristin joined me at Cellspace after a hard day working the dreaded Exploratorium summer camp. While an impossibly loud break dancing group practiced downstairs, we made a series of three postcards up in the silk screening loft. They came out really good. The gifs don’t do it justice. The images and words are (unmistakably) hers; I helped with the design.

One of my favorite friends is Kristin. The following are seven items I admire about her.

1. She gave me a typewriter. Weighed in pure inspiration, it’s the best gift I have ever received.
2. She sends mail.
3. Her aesthetics are paramount to her meanings.
4. She always picks up the phone, even after midnight.
5. She grew up in Astoria.
6. She owns every Bob Dylan album except one on vinyl.
7. She saw Rocky Balboa in the theater five times.

My wide-eyed cousin visited last weekend.  More on that later.

God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

New York City: