MixedMedia

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty of fodder. I took up the task and wanted to document the process and result to share.

Step One
Create the form. Since the sarcophagus was going to be used to store candy, I knew it needed two halves. I drew and cut one out of a large cardboard box, and essentially copied it for the second half. In the center, cut out a square somewhat larger than a shoebox size, leaving enough room on the edges to retain structural integrity.

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The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table – he’s as playful and anti-establishment as the range of media and styles suggests. The artist as subject, director  and actor in the social struggle to communicate. While the rest of us bicker about what’s a more relevant, authentic, salient, expedient or efficient mode of expression he tested them all, not binding expression to a fetish or a movement of the day. Perhaps that’s why “peter” – Martin’s term for all unnamed forms – is such an endearing and appropriate expression: compact, unadorned, slightly naughty (in the American context?) and affectionable. Holland Carter put it nicely in the New York Times: “If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.”

Andres Myers is a mixed media artist who’s work stands out from the usual. Its almost otherworldly. Familiar too. Layers of color like lacquer, applied carefully and used sculpturally – paper, cloth, plaster, tape, paint, wire – you name it, its there. Its also deliciously abstract – a lollipop that fell onto a sprinkles-covered ice cream cone melting in the summer sun in a little black box – vulnerable. Some of it, like the fissure works and those with clay, seem to have bubbled up from bizarre other worlds of color beneath tectonic plates – perhaps, “the space between the two- dimensional and three- dimensional, hybridizing painting, printmaking and sculpture” to nick her own words. Check out Andrea’s elegant site: Andrea Myers

Love this idea of the ICE – I just might have to enter for the fun of it:Artists each make 13 collages (more or less), size not bigger than A4 (about 8″ X 10″ or 20cm X 26cm), and send them to me in New Zealand, to arrive by 20th March, 2009. One from each artist will be offered for sale at an exhibition here in New Plymouth, New Zealand with the artist setting the price. 30% commission taken. That selling exhibition will also be on the Net on the Virtual TART site, at http://virtual.tart.co.nz allowing the world-wide audience the chance to buy these collages. If unsold, that collage will rejoin the exchange. One is part of a month-long exhibition on the Virtual TART site during April and is also exhibited at the PukeAriki Museum in New Plymouth for at least a month. It will then travel to Samoa, to the MADD Gallery school of found-art assemblage and collage. It will also permanently be on exhibition on the outofsight.co.nz Internet site. The other 11 (or 12 if you didn’t sell) are shared out into parcels which are sent back to each contributing artist.So you send 13 of yours, get back 12 others (or 11 and money from your sale), and you become part of a public collection. NOTE: if you can’t finish as many as 13, or you want to send more, that’s fine. You’ll just get fewer (or more) back in your parcel. Learn more at: International Collage Exchange

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit.  Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com