If this was a chapter in my autobiographical how-to book (working title: Fired Up), it would be much longer and charmingly anecdotal, starting with one premise but taking off on profound and oh-so-meaningful tangents before returning to a heart-rending culmination. But, instead, it’s a journal entry and it needs to get in and out in 800-1000 words. I think I can do it – particularly the heart-rending part – and I will tell you the word count at the end.
Each December I take a moment to reflect on the past year and try to peer into the next. It’s an agenda-less non-ritual with a few symbolic visuals, good smells, candles, flowers, and cowbells. This year I carried objects of continuing fascination to my (slab-roller) altar. I also brought my lists: 2016’s Successes and Suckages and 2017’s Future Games. This writing is intended to be my last post for this year, so I will dwell on 2016’s Gumbo of the Sublime and see you back here bright and early in 2017 to discuss what else I can see on the creative horizon and how you and I can meet there.
The HOME Exhibit at the Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery has closed. After almost seven weeks away, my “Homefire 1957” incinerator piece is coming home.
When it’s in transit, I have learned to handle my work myself whenever possible. (Here’s one sad, sad example of why.) I figure if I break it, I am pre-forgiven. Others, they feel terrible all by themselves and I can’t assuage it! Consequently, I am glad for any nearby opportunities to show my stuff because I can deliver and pick up in person. If I have a driver, I hold pieces on my lap, but when I drive, I need to either fully pad and pack pieces in a lidded container or buckle them in thusly.
The HOME Exhibit at the Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery just closed. Everybody’s pieces are going home – some to new ones. I have written about this exhibit for the past six weeks: the drop-off, its reception, three of the most compelling pieces in it, and my artwork in depth. (All the links you need are below.) We will close this Summer Blog-a-thon too, with a tiny glimpse of striking the set and beginning the new production. Over is OVER, as the deconstructed title wall serendipitously demonstrated when I showed up to get my piece.
After one gets over the news that it smells bad, it looks like the odor of Outer Space is hard to pin down. It’s reportedly a bit like burnt metal, welding fumes and seared steak. Acrid but slightly sweet; sulphurous and undeniable. The astronauts’ suits and gear, upon returning from space walks, stunk like they’d been camping at a celestial tire fire. It was such an unlikely surprise.
But at one time so was the discovery that smoke from earthly tire fires, oil refineries, automobiles and backyard incinerators probably was to blame for the continually bad air.
Let’s take a walk together, just down the block and back. We can marvel at the sky moving behind the trees. Feel the songs sung by skywires.
In this third-of-three looks at individual works of art in the Pajaro Valley Arts HOME Exhibit, (links to all the others below) we have the pleasure of spending time with Maren Sinclair Hurn’s small porcelain wallpiece titled “Central Coast Summer.” It’s as brief and brilliant as a haiku. Evocative. A sassy statement about HOME without mentioning the house.
If you ask over 80 artists to create art around the theme of “HOME,” especially if you incite them to go long by suggesting “HOME can be a source of identity, a state of being, a repose of security, a place to belong, a war zone, an inalienable right,” you’re bound to see an intimately idiosyncratic array of responses. And that is most certainly true at the current home-themed exhibit at the Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery.