Gun School, 2012

Here are two images of a recently finished sculpture that I've titled "Gun School," because I love how it reminds me of a group of fish swimming and I enjoy the play on words involved. What are squirt guns doing to those who play with them? Do they desensitize us to gun violence? Personally, I'm grew up playing with all kinds of toy guns and loved them...especially if it involved Nerf darts, and I've grown to enjoy firing all kinds of weaponry. But I'm also appalled at the number of gun violence incidents that have happened this year in my own city (one was just a few blocks away from my apartment). Are these toys that children grow up with and adore preparing them for something more menacing?

It just occurred to me that the items on my refrigerator make a fairly compelling still life. I'm posting this image as a challenge to myself to draw or paint it before the end of Summer. I've been considering a drafting challenge to get my chops up.

Cloud Jar

I found a little metal pipe in the large planter outside my apartment building. I picked it up, because I'm trying to develop the habit of picking up things that I think might have potential. It being a pipe I also thought it would be smart to clean it. I tend to just soak my found objects in bleach water, and look what this did! It's been growing for a little over a week. I'm afraid to touch it now.

Zeitgeist 2010

These are images from an installation at Zeitgeist Coffee in Pioneer Square. "Refuse Flock" arose from my investigations into the Pacific Gyre Garbage Patch, which is a massive accumulation of debris in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas and growing. I became interest in the idea of what it might look like if we had a similar issue, but floating in the sky.

current work

This is the piece I am currently working on. It's a suspended sculpture, which seemed like the natural progression from the work shown in "We Built This to Leave". One of the comments I received most from people was how drawn in they were by the shadows that most of the work projected on the wall. This led me to think about the secondary effects my forms were having and how to emphasize those effects. I'm trying to build a piece that will be viewed from below and will cast a shadow onto the floor. As of yet, it doesn't have a title, but I'm tossing around words like cloud (which might be too obvious) and the word flock. Flock strikes me as more active and descriptive--not to mention, less obvious.

Grand Opening!!

Well, as you can see here I have started a blog. I'm hoping that this will help me expand my audience as an artist, and expose more people to current and past projects of mine. Not to mention, now I can use a whole new vocabulary that relates to this facet of the internet world. First of all, the title of my blog is "Art Incidents". For those of you that don't know me, I am a security guard at an art museum, and whenever someone touches one of the pieces on display, the witnessing guard calls in "art incident" through his/her microphone so that the activity can be documented for the preservation of the work on display. This of course is a hilarious phrase, and shouldn't be limited to just describing damage to a work of art, but also just the presence of Art in general. I am an artist myself, and consider this a fitting description of any works I've made. They are all incidents. Some incidents are frozen as ceramic works, others are continually changing and moving--especially those that have yet to be finished. With this blog, I plan on displaying and commenting on my current "incidents" as well as past ones, and how they relate to my present work...or not. I invite comment and questions about everything I say and display on this site. It's hard to get shows--I'm hoping this will increase exposure.