New Work

I am ready to talk to you again. I’m sorry I’ve neglected you. It won’t happen again.

The show was on Tuesday night and I have taken a few days to relax. It is a strange feeling to be through with it all– I wake up in the morning in a panic, What is it that I should be doing? What have I left unfinished? But, somewhat miraculously, and somewhat depressingly, there is nothing left to do. My studio is empty. All of my hard work is gathered in a cleaner, more organized space downstairs. I have not yet thrown out the newsprint on which I stored my glass paintings for months as they were being painted. The outlines of where they laid all those months, the spaces around them darkened by long days of sun through large windows, reminds me that it is all over. I must admit, it feels a little bit empty.

I drive around Spartanburg these days, more often now that I have time to wander, and I lament over the snapshots that I missed, that there was not time to paint. One scene in particular, an old mom and pop Mexican restaurant, in the shadow of a giant truck and a broken marquee (on New Cut Road in Una, for you Spartanburgers) was recently bulldozed. I have meant to photograph it for months now– I have seriously considered painting it even after the series went up– but now that it is gone, I feel the finality of this series, and with it, my experience in Spartanburg. In some ways, it makes me feel as though my exploration of the post-industrial South is not over, I still feel the tugging to document when I pass these sorts of places. But with or without this tugging, my time is up– life pushes me forward.

Without further ado, here is the work that I have been making this year. Stephen was kind enough to take these pictures during and the day after the show. The glass paintings are extremely hard to document without better equipment, so forgive the glare of other lights and the reflection of the camera. I am tempted to wait until I have them professionally photographed, but I am excited to give you out-of-towners a chance to see them. Hope you enjoy…

Here are the Apocalyptic Anagrams, which you may remember from the blog. Of course, the 28 pages that were reproduced by color photocopy and hung in a grid do not include some of the racier rearrangements of letters, but they are also available in the backlog of this blog.

This series is of four marquees around Spartanburg. (Please see my artist statement, in a previous post, for further information). The paintings are reverse glass paintings done on the front glass of shadow boxes, with the more translucent areas achieved by mixing medium in with the colored acrylic. There are lights installed inside the shadow boxes so that the marquees glow in their night scenes. (Cliff thinks I should point out that the messages on the marquees are my own and not found.)

“(I’d Like to Say) Yes.”

“Why Aren’t You Afraid?”

“Because You Don’t Love Me.” (plus detail)

“Here. This Is For You.”

The medium of these organs are sculpey, marker, acrylic paint, glass vial, vellum scroll and ribbon. This display was developed just for the Spartanburg showing, as these pieces will eventually be installed in New York, in the places they represent (again, see artist statement). For this show, I situated the organs on New York subway maps (thanks Charles!), above the area they refer to, along with an excerpt from each scroll.

From left: my liver, heart, pancreas, stomach, uterus, intestines, and lungs.

These are the 51 small reverse glass paintings that I have been referring to on this blog for quite awhile. Thankfully, the flaws that I had been agonizing over did not show up prominently (Brian went into each one individually and tried to fix them). The red dots indicate that they are sold! And they seem to just keep going, so thank you Spartanburg for your support! I hope to get some more detail shots when they are documented one by one– obviously not all of the 51 are viewable in detail here.

I had a slideshow playing in the tiny room off The Showroom for one night only. Due to my own stupidity (and several glasses of wine), I forgot to photograph it. The idea (refer to artist statement) is that I projected a series of 39 photographs into the small, open mouth of a beautiful, old hard-shelled suitcase, in an otherwise very dark room. All the photographs were taken on the way back from the Charlotte airport. You may remember some of the pictures that didn’t make the cut in an older post titled “The Losers” from quite a while ago. It will be hard to recreate the effect of seeing it in the dark, in the suitcase, but here are about a third of the pictures projected:

Thank you to everyone at the Bub who was responsible for this show going up, and for our presence here in the first place (you know who you are). And thanks to MY ENTIRE IMMEDIATE FAMILY for flying and driving in from Miami and Boston. I can’t remember the last time we were all together like that (it might have been my high-school graduation lunch, and what preceded that was both sides threatening that they were not going to come, so it was nice to have everyone together this time without the drama). Thank you to Howie, Cliff and Elinor for the well-wishes and thank you SOOOO MUCH to Alice who overnighted me homemade white chocolate macadamia nut cookies (my favorite) to congratulate me. Thank you most of all to Brian who, quite literally, had a hand in every single piece of anything I accomplished this year. Thank you to everyone who came out to the show, for real. There were much fewer people there than at our opening show, which was a little saddening for us to consider– that people were more interested in us then than they are after a year of our visibility in the community. I have resolved to blame Spartanburg for this, and the general tendency towards indifference to new and challenging arts, rather than take responsibility for it myself. It’s easier that way; it hurts less. And besides, the people who really mattered showed up (again, you know who you are).

I would have loved to take you through the whole show, virtually, through everyone’s work, because it was all impressive, but this blog post is too long as it is. Check out the Hub-Bub Flickr for more all-inclusive pictures from the show. As of now, pages 1-8 on the front page showcase our work.