feather2pixels

Character Profile, the July 2013 text and language based group show I curated at Root Division in San Francisco, is over.

Just a rapidly fading collection of electrochemical brain markers and digital residue on the internet, the exhibition now exists only to the extent that we accept the highly contested notion of the past as a tangible component of reality. Character Profile does not think, therefore it may not be and may never have been.

To combat existential dread, I recorded this ten minute walkthrough of the show in 1080p.  We did it off the cuff in one long continuous take, so sorry if I misrepresented anything you might find important.   Thanks to EB , Trevor, and Lonwell for help with this.  And thanks to everyone who participated in the viewing and creation of this show.

[iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/UXwZGbFcN6o” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

One of my big summer projects was An Interview With the Author Monica Zarazua.

It’s a screenprinted motion picture on thirty-eight wood tiles made for a group show at Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oak-land.  That show explored intersections between the literary and visual arts and my intent for the piece was to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, creating an imaginary space for the non-imaginary author of the show’s short stories to inhabit. Here is a pdf of the show catalog beautifully put together by Xiomara Castro.

The images used in the project, which proceeds left, right, up, and down the gallery wall, were collected from photos and video recordings produced for this work.  Here’s a shitty video about one day in that process!

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/70608039?byline=0&amp;color=ff0179″ width=”500″ height=”367″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/70608039″>Underwater photoshoot for a screenprint project.</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user16153940″>Jon Fischer</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p> <p>A four minute video filmed during the making of the visual art piece &quot;Interview with the Writer Monica Zarazua&quot; by Jon Fischer. On this day of production, Fischer enlisted several adventurous friends to improvise dozens of simple movements and sequences filmed using HD video underwater in a 59&deg;F pool. <br /> <br /> To develop the final art piece, individual images selected from single frames in the source footage were collected and reassembled to form intertwined fantastical stories that draw on motifs such as color, text, space, and movement. The result resembles something in between a period silent movie, a comic strip, and the pre-cinema locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.<br /> <br /> The piece creates a story for the storyteller to inhabit. Presenting a complex structure of overlapping narratives that is generated from simple recordings of people in motion, the project explores a fluid relationship between fiction and non-fiction, in which each creates the other. <br /> <br /> Filmed by Jon Fischer and Nowell Valeri in 2013.</p>,/imframe]

“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.

I am starting a project that involves making and projecting 35mm slides from scratch.

I figured my first step should be to test my found projector with some found slides. To my delight, it worked great.

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/62141608″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen]

Soundtrack thanks: Ben, Joe, Nowell, Shal

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>]

Special guest blogger Andrew J. Shal.

Guess who stopped by the screen printing studio the other night?  None other than nvSurly/Lonwell Alvier/Sir Lee himself.  The ever-dutiful Trent Reznor scholar since birth, Lonwell had just completed his new master Nine Inch Nails mix and the only thing standing in the way of shipping them off to the far corners of the California–Philly–New York City Corridor was packaging.

Enter the Slushmonger.

I would like to think that I helped motivate our hero towards completion of this much anticipated project, but just as the tides need not the assistance of man in washing up the ocean’s secrets so Lonwell needs no help from any one in making his voice heard.  I might say, though, that he did make this as difficult as possible, designing a multi-color square pattern that required the most precise of registrations–one false move and the spacing between red and black would read as monumentally screwed.

Alas, once again we discovered success together and everything turned out great.  Also, I must say that Mr. Reznor’s work on “The Social Network” soundtrack is exactly what I would expect from him in the year 2010, and I say that not to suggest that it sounds predictable but rather to offer it as the satisfying answer to the question of what would Nine Inch Nails sound like when Trent Reznor was fifty-one years old.  I have been enjoying it. (From what I could tell, the most important answer the film provides is that the social networking website is the most monumental thing to be invented by mankind since the the Polio vaccine).

I ask you this: what is better than a good ol’ fashioned German restaurant?  Answer: A good ol’ fashioned East German Restaurant!  After my favorite schnitzel place shut its doors a few months ago with a truly sad and unexpected farewell,  a void was left in the city’s breaded-meat and 2 liter beer dining options.   Luckily, Walzwerk on South Van Ness not only stepped in quickly to fill the vacuum, but it also happened to be on my 2010 restaurant Bucket List.  So me, CW, and Nowell checked it out on the Thursday night of my very first group show at my very first gallery.

We missed the show.

Our absence was on account of a terrible accident which required the paramedics and ambulance, but the food was damn good.  In sum we sat at a long table with two San Francisco old timers who seemed tickled by us, all ingesting unhealthy quantities of food and drink.  Enough so that I found myself waiting in agony outside the lone bathroom,  crying “Mr Gorbachev tear down this stall!”

Sorry, that was stupid.  (And why would I want the stall torn down if I needed to use it so badly?)

Anyway, Walzwerk was just as great as Schnizelhaus and later that week I went to new-to-me Chinese and Japanese places that were touted as the Sunset and Inner Richmond’s Dumpling King and Sushi Zone, respectively.  They were fine.

The anatomy poster is done!  All you have to do to see it is move your mouse over the the all-knowing more link and click.  Wait, did I say mouse?  Of course you wouldn’t ever move your mouse over a computer screen.  That would be ridiculous.  I meant move the pointer that is controlled by your mouse.  Or maybe you don’t even have a mouse.  Maybe it is a track pad.  Or a stylus, like my friend Nowell uses.  Could even be one of those useless red nubs.  Oo, any trackballs in the house?  I am sorry for making so many assumptions. I was just trying to suggest that there is a small possibility that the act of activating the more link could be worth your time.  In the future I promise to be a scrupulous Californian and do my part to promote a non-specific, assumptionless society.  (more…)

People sometimes tell me that Nowell and I are looking more alike these days.

Is that what happens to friends in older age?  And if so, what does it mean that Ben and Joe sent me the exact same package last week?

Since the beginning of the fall I’ve been bringing food to work.  I have never been able to do this before and I have no explanation as to why the O.C.D. is taking hold so late in life.  But five days a week this has been my lunch:

So it was that last week was a special treat.  I am not gonna gloat, but I’m coming off an unbelievable five days of eating with my friends. The undeniable highlight was Brothers restaurant, in the Korean BBQ district of San Francisco.  We got the meal for four, which yielded 38 plates, 3 pounds of meat and 1 hot-coal grill and the recommended Korean daily serving of approximately twenty thousand grams of sodium.

On Wednesday night, Nowell and I discussed Postcard #28 with a reporter from the Haight Ashbury Beat, which is a newish SF neighborhood paper. The paper took notice of Nowell’s Cole Valley address and was attacking the local boy makes good angle in what turned out to be a slightly surreal interview, if only because it lasted four times longer than the film in question. For a night, we got to feel like local heros.

Joe’s gone. Before he left, Nowell, him, and I enjoyed a fancy civic center dude evening with the Kronos Quartet at the never comfortable Herbst Theater (has it always been hot as hell in there?). After checking in with the wives, we headed down to the bars south of Cesar Chavez, which are slowly becoming my favorite places to drink in the Mission: the courtyard at El Rio is downright charming, the photo booth at The Knockout is second to none, and for good measure there’s even a Taqueria Can-cun in the area. Even the Argus lounge makes up for an overall lack of inspiration with free shots of vodka gimlet and projected Kubrick films.

It was good to have a night out drinking. The moon was high and brilliant. Mission Street felt like a loving old relative with questionable hygiene. The city glowed. Joe is a believer in the well-timed sentiment and so we spilled lots of beer over locked-eye toasts as we made our way through the rounds. Each new drink comes with a small slug of intensity and that’s how drinking with Nowell and Joe is. Later, Joe learned that on this side of the Cascades, ordering a “carne asada” gets you a plate, not a buritto. Nowell successfully ordered a chorizo burrito (every time Nowell gets chorizo, it seems to generate a new inside joke) and I got my secret weapon: cheese quesadilla.

A few days later, I found myself south of Cesar Chavez again, with Adrienne to watch her boyfriend’s band play the Knockout on a Monday night. Spontaneity! Plus a chance to revisit the photo booth! Adrienne remind me of me. Since starting graduate school, she’s been constantly embattled, yet she’s full of plans for displaying our crafts to the world. Thank goodness somebody is.

Has there ever been a fifther wheel than me?