The Longest Nights

Winter Solstice at my grandmother's house in Houston.

My cousin Mira -- belly dancer, painter, costume designer and body painter. She has a new project called Sirens where she transforms women with fabric, feathers and paint into their particular type of goddess. I drove to visit her on Friday southwest of Austin in a small town called Driftwood. I passed Enchanting Oaks Drive and Crystal Hills Drive. After a wooden sign proclaiming "Wizard Academy," I took a right turn onto her dirt driveway. Her studio sprawled across the ranch-style house with headdresses and Indian garb adorning every surface. A cushioned construction in the living room was shaping up into a hookah lounge. Three feline sentinels took turns keeping watch and bossing around her large dog.

Let’s Talk About Sets, Baby

It’s a funny thing to build pretend worlds for the eye to trust and explore. Literally. There have been many funny moments -- stringing naked girls from impromptu crucifixes in my studio, burning model houses on private property, convincing your local YMCA lifeguard to let you into the pool with your clothes on and perform multiple costume changes. I would like to begin this post with a shout out to all my friends who have made my painting references possible. Procuring naked photos of oneself covered in broken glass isn’t something that a girl can get through all on her own. Here’s to you guys!

My flooded Baltimore bathroom.

So when I start a painting, the mental image almost always comes first. And if that happens to be something that I can handle translating from mind to matter without assistance, great, I’m off and running. But that is almost never the case. So I set up models or puppets in my studio to look at or people in a setting to photograph. Then I often suture these images together Frankenstein-style in my head. Every painting calls for a different method. (Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.) Nothing is “cheating” in my book. I’ve used tracing paper, printouts and projection. (However, during a critique with Julie Heffernan on a painting that drew from only one photo reference, her response was “Love the image. But wouldn’t it be horrible to make paintings like this all your life?” True story, Julie. Because although the process involved a much-reduced risk of an anxiety attack, it lacked the generative thrill that comes from birthing something new. And then, of course, if a photo adequately communicates an image, why make a painting?

Me in a skirt.

I end up using my own body a lot because I’m always around and am very supportive of my cause. I wish I could show you all of the bizarre imagery I have floating around in the ‘References’ folder on my computer – the pics are usually even more surreal than the paintings because the subject is often acting out something that clashes absurdly with its setting. But, unfortunately, many of the photos are un-postable because there are naked(!) people in them and we’ve all learned the hard way that once an image is out there, it’s almost impossible to reign back in. (For instance, the first image of me that pops up when you Google my name is a chubby-cheeked, Ms. Frizzle-esque catastrophe from my sophomore year in college. Dear Oberlin, I really appreciate the publicity. All press is good press, etc. etc. But, for the love of God, take that photo down.)

Each painting ends up gathering together a digital mood board of sorts, filled with images from all kinds of sources. I use this collection of internet detritus, mixed with video clips and primary sources, to figure out the composition, palette and desired feel of the piece.

Delta advertisement that informed "Honey I'm Home."

Especially since so much of my recent work stems from a specific place, my travel photos feed into my work directly. In Iceland, I kept a folder of images that I had collected as a color journal.

Sometimes all of the images are too much to combine in my head, so I physically cut them up and paste them together or do the equivalent on Photoshop.

I owe much of my thesis work, “Outpost,” to a plexi-glass house. May it rest in peace. I had its components cut at a plastic company in Baltimore. I decorated the inside as one might a Robinson Crusoe style dollhouse, using model materials, furniture from my childhood dollhouse and random debris. It had a different role to play in each of my paintings. I had hoped one of those rolls would be a working aquarium. So I followed every Youtube step for making it water-tight. But it flooded my studio almost immediately. Since you can pass notes down to the floor below you in the Balitmore warehouse where my grad program was posted, I quickly scrapped that idea.

The house’s final act was a daring night stunt. Accompanied by three lovely female assistants, it was put afloat on a winter-cold river and set on fire. Apart from the toxic odor, it was a beautiful send-off. Afterwards, I tried to throw away its remains, but they were rescued by some of my more materially-experimental MFA peers and reincarnated as yet more art.

The best actress award goes to poet and neuroscience guru Ryann. The woman in my “Fielding Terns” painting was born from a combination of her body strung up in my studio and a puppet I constructed from material scraps. The forms ended up having a surprising amount in common.

These are images that came together to become “Everything That Rises:”

Most of my photos of Laura Hudson are not for the public eye! But luckily for you, her paintings are. (Be patient. They rotate through.)

In which Chaney (an awesome painter and fellow adventure seeker) and I braved a tangled Baltimore underpass adjacent a sprawling homeless person’s shelter, shattered a sunroof that I had procured from a car graveyard and filled her hands with broken glass:

This is something that I am working from now. Kind of love this messy Photoshop collage so hopefully my painting will be at least as cool.

O, that I were a glove upon that hand

Looking in on a gallery opening at the Vermont Studio Center on a cold winter's night.

When I am feeling daunted by the uncertain road ahead to “artistdom,” I often look to artists I admire and am reassured by the stories of how they were able to make it work. Clare would question my logic in this. Clare, who is quoted in her sister Noreen Malone's Atlantic article, ‘The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright,’ has some IM insight that begs a closer look:

CLARE: ok, you know what i always think about when i think of our generation? i read the david brooks book, “the social animal” and while it was only mediocre, he had this one really great bit that really stuck with me—the Greek ideal of “thumos”, which is the lust not for money or success (in the conventional sense) but the lust for glory


we want glory through our ideas-we want to know we matter 


(10:33) the cold truth is that not all of us are brilliant


we are not all big thinkers. Not everyone’s TED talks will change the world


some of us will just dissipate into the ether


(10:34) but it is the digital connectivity, that proximity to these people, that makes us think that perhaps we will succeed as well

We might not be able to get our hands on everything we dream up, but we can get our eyes on it (Romeo-style). Our idols and their creations are more accessible than ever. So what I want to know is, with our all-access passes to stellar minds and their accomplishments, are we any closer to achieving personal greatness in our own fields or do the examples just serve to taunt and tease?

I do think that the insights that we are privy to via social media can be useful in giving us a leg up in terms of technical know-how and career advice. Its advantages are clear if you think about the opposite extreme. Imagine trying to become a painter in the renaissance if you weren’t accepted into a guild. You wouldn’t have access to training, travel, mentorship or materials. Apprentices of master painters would have all the resources and you would be out of luck. Whereas, in this day and age, you can teach yourself just about anything you can type into YouTube.

In this way, the playing field is somewhat leveled. But are more people going to do something inventive with the surplus of resources? Or is the internet chatter just going to cancel itself out -- a bunch of white noise -- with the usual small percentage of unique voices standing out above the rest?

Sometimes it’s painful to read firsthand accounts of startups and starlets and artists who have hit the big time. We don’t just know them from their rare public appearances anymore. We get to read their daily thoughts, become familiar with their shorthand and receive messages from them on our personal phones. The illusion is that this brings us closer. But the major-league baseball player that my friend follows on twitter is not invested in her. (Sorry girl! He’s just not that into you.) There’s no reciprocation.

Tantalus wanted in with the gods. His father was Zeus, so he was above your average mortal stock and got a dinner invitation to Mt. Olympus one day. In order to impress them, Tantalus sacrificed his son and served pieces of him as the main course. When the Gods found out what he’d done, they were repulsed and banished him to the special part of Hades reserved for really bad guys. He was forced to stand in a pool of water underneath a fruit tree and for all eternity be tantalized by their proximity. Whenever he reached for a fruit it would move just out of his grasp and when he bent down to drink, the water would drain.

I realize this is a downer metaphor for reaching for the stars, but I found it useful in fleshing out Clare’s observation. Personally, I am optimistic that our proximity to great things will wet our palates (and palettes), spark some healthy competition and connect us with other people thinking similarly. For instance, I have developed the (hopefully not too annoying) habit of writing people whose work inspires me and thanking them for making awesome things. It is pretty easy to find email addresses and many of them write me back and are supportive of my work. This doesn’t mean that they impart any special success potion, but I do find it affirming and energizing.

A failed video project in which an apple did not spectacularly explode. (Don Hershey and Erin Fitzpatrick at VSC)

Most of the people that I hang out with are involved in some form of art, music or writing. Even though they are from all over and have very different backgrounds, they do have a certain type of ambition in common. As Clare writes, they’re not after nice things or being famous for the sake of being famous. But I think it’s safe to say that they’d all like to make something kickass and have people know it and benefit from it. They want time to spend producing and time to spend enjoying the things that their friends produce.

My friend Erin Fitzpatrick from the Vermont Studio Center has been doing an interview project that might shed more light on the subject. It’s still in the beginning stages, but stay tuned on Fitzbomb.com to hear about how creative people have responded to her polarizing question, “Do you want to be famous?"

Teaser image of an upcoming video project about rituals.

Topping Out

Twice-bundled, pre-cut trees.

Ours is not a culture ruled by ritual, but it’s fun to play out the few tattered traditions that remain, those that have hung on despite our penchant for utility and speed. In my experience, they are usually ghosts from a childhood of church-going, nostalgic reconstructions of the past or simply old habits dying hard. My family embarked on one this morning -- hunting for this year’s Christmas tree.

When I was very little, this was a whole day affair involving tractor rides up and down hills of differently spiked firs and pines. In later years, it was a heated argument between my brother and me over the pre-cut trees down by the lodge. We were supposed to alternate each year as to who made the final decision. But, without fail, we could never quite recall the outcome of the previous year. The debate would involve bribes, blackmail, hand-to-hand combat and the parent pity card. It would usually end in tears and one or both of us running off into the endless rows of trees. Today, we made a pact before we left to agree on something as fast as possible, regardless of quality. (What? We're busy!) So we chose a rather ungainly looking mammoth of a tree, fed it through one of those shrink-wrappers, bungee-chorded it to the car and had erected an eleven foot fraser fir in the middle of our living room in less than an hour.

I’m happy to carry on a tradition with pagan, Germanic roots. But it has evolved so far from its pre-Christian beginnings, when the purpose was to show tribute to the tree spirits, that the communing with nature aspect has all but disappeared. When people first started decorating trees, they were not cut down, but ornamented where they stood, so as to preserve their divine inhabitants. Many Scandinavian and Germanic rituals involved trees because the forest was the dominant element in their landscape and they relied heavily upon it for shelter and heat.

Unrelated to the solstice, Saturnalia or any other winter festival, the ancients also had the tradition of mounting an evergreen tree on top of a completed wooden structure. As the last beam was put into place, a tree would be hoisted up so that the spirits of all the timber involved would still have a place to occupy. This ceremony, called “topping out,” is cause for celebration for the workers and has also migrated to the States. I like to think of the tree towering over our couches as topping out the year.

Pixies Prefer Pixels

As I was looking to Kalan for an image to represent Occupy, New York Magazine was busy casting him for a much bigger role – the poster child of a generation. The article -- “The Kids are Actually Sort of Alright” -- came out this month in NYMag with him on the cover and laid out the lot of American twenty-somethings. The forecast by Noreen Malone, herself of the Millennial generation she was analyzing, was cloudy with only the thinnest of silver linings. The pessimism was amplified by its proximity to the article “P.S. The world is ending this Friday.” More than the many statistics about joblessness (which fail to shock me every time) I was interested in the psychological diagnosis that was offered of us big kids.

We are: idealist, self-confident, floundering, hopeful. Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that says we will fall short in all of the ways that our society usually measures people, we believe that we will succeed in accomplishing our aspirations – abstract and sweeping as they may be. We are alienated from the things we use. We live in a country that doesn’t make many things anymore, so we channel our impulse to create into crafting useless objects like art, crocheted reindeer and blog posts. We may be unemployed but we are culturally wealthy. We have more free, communal resources for communication, entertainment, news and production than we can use. We need less physical paraphernalia because of this. Our valuables are as small and portable as 1s and 0s. They are as transient as we are and as intangible as our goals. Sure it sounds a little like a hokey astrological reading. “You are passionate and headstrong. An unexpected visitor leads to financial gain on the second of the month.” But some of it rings true.

Let’s give our collective character form for a minute. Let’s call him/her Peter Pan. Now perhaps it is easy to see why Kalan fits the bill. A street performance artist, a transient traveler with his band of (lost) puppets, often outfitted in a costume of tights and secondhand ornaments. More oriented toward adventure and stories than a “grown-up” career.

Our generation is playful with gender. Our ideals of masculine and feminine beauty are conflating and more of us are curating our own gender from a combination of traditionally male and female traits. We have all of the sexual freedoms in the world but we are not necessarily using them, perhaps out of narcissism or because we value documentation and analysis over the experiential, or because the old ways of fitting together don’t feel right anymore and it will take time to craft new choreography.

There is a refusal to grow up and settle down with one city, one job or one partner. The Occupy movement has also brought out our drive to fight the pirates. (Those that take more than their share.) Not because we want to take their places but because we want to see the end of pirates altogether. Our fashion has embraced an aesthetic of the cast-off and castaway. To top it off, we can traverse our world in seconds – carrying messages, surfing currents of information and gaining great perspectives from our height. It’s just that, instead of fairy dust, our pixies prefer pixels.

Some new works on mylar that may or may not have anything to do with the above:

Study for Sleeping Beauties, 12"x15"

The DJ, 12"x10"

Performance, 10"x15"

Spilt, 10"x12"

Your Place or Mine, 12"x15"

Melon Morning

I just finished up a month long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont. The light coming through my window this morning lit the curtain up like a ruby and splashed the walls with melon green and yellow. Sometimes, like writers record snippets of overheard conversation, I collect colors.

Sleeping Beauties

Laini and I emerged from the Fulton Street subway and turned in slow circles, not sure which way was south with the sun directly overhead. A mailman stopped his cart to ask us where we were headed. “Occupy,” we admitted. He gave us directions to the park and we were off. “If you get a chance,” he called after us, “tell my daughter to come home.”

It was smaller than I’d pictured. I’ve heard others say the same. It’s expanded in our minds through its replication in the media, the kaleidoscopic documentation of each event and the seeds it’s scattered across the globe.

The core group – the sleepers – was an even smaller bunch. You could easily see how much space each one occupied. Their footprints of concave bedding, nested with a small pile of belongings were clumped around the park. They set the example that people could live with little. This was mid-October and the sun was out boosting moral. Although, temperatures have certainly dropped since then and the nights must be brutal.

Tents are outlawed in Zuccotti Park, so I wandered through a blue-tarped terrain that was composed of any shelter or support that couldn’t be labeled as such. I was reminded of the time I spent volunteering in the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. Ours was a tent village in a parking lot with its own self-sufficient infrastructure including facilities in a gutted school building. Outside of these one-block worlds, the environment is entirely different – wasteland or bustling financial center. Inside Zuccotti, the mood was festive, like a music festival campground. Each of the protesters seemed to adopt a role to keep the community organism sustained. A women collected trash. Bins of books were up for borrow. Ben and Jerry themselves set up an ice-cream stand and dished out highly-photographed offerings. The occupiers spent their days working, but in a non-Capitalist sense. They would organize events, participate in protests around the city, repeat and amplify speeches, and even perform puppet shows on the subway. Just being present was productive.

Jerry.

The puppeteer was Kalan, a friend from Oberlin who had often ruffled the feathers of our school, which considered itself unable to be phased by liberal antics, with his performance art. He told me he had been sleeping at Occupy with a few breaks since September 10^th. When I asked him how he was doing, he lifted his head slowly and looked at me with big, glassy eyes. “I’m very tired,” he said.

Chilling with Kalan.

As I weaved in and out of bodies and boxes and bold-lettered signs, I was struck by the intimacy of the space. Without being able to cover themselves fully, the protesters were in a vulnerable position -- belly up in the middle of a city known for chewing up its pilgrims and spitting them out. There was no private space and the site was a magnet for public viewing. Nights they had to fight off cold and city noise for sleep, so many caught mid-day naps when they could. Curled up in the sun, they were the ultimate peaceful protesters. Powerful in the satyagraha (Ghandi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance) sense.

Walking around to read the slogans and pick up the pamphlets meant that you were also stepping gingerly over the arm of a sleeping teenage girl or brushing up against two boys curled up in each other’s arms. The sleeping beauties imbued the space with a seductive charm. Some slept underneath their posters, asking to be documented. Unfortunately, the intriguing layout lured media leeches as well as supporters. Kalan and his friend told me that they had recently been photographed by a British tabloid that claimed the closeness of their bodies was evidence of public sex and drug use on Wall Street. I managed to find the article and the photograph online. But reading the slanderous accusations didn’t sully the beauty of the image. Despite themselves, they had circulated a photo that radiated the pleasure of togetherness and the peace of simple living.

Headline reads: "Sex and drugs on tap, who says it's not a political partaaay?"

Persephone Down Under

My apartment in Berlin on one of my last afternoons.

The trees are shedding leaves -- cutting their losses -- as the temperature falls and winter storms roll in. These skeletal trunks have a better chance of standing ground against the pileup of heavy snows. With fewer attachments, the burden of the world is easier to bear. Animals, too, pare down their lifestyles. They take to a simpler, stationary mode, conserving resources. It’s hibernation time and what better place to burrow than a small town in northern Vermont, where the local food shop is well supplied with this season’s maple sugar haul, the woodpile is high and the whiskey is stocked.

I am sitting in my studio in Johnson, looking out over the red mill-turned art space and the river. The morning sun is bright as spring water is cold and bathes the town in cool silver, rather than golden, light.

In thinking about the turning of the seasons, the main changeling that comes to mind is Persephone. An over-sheltered child, her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, kept her separate from the riffraff of Mt. Olympus. She spent much of her childhood alone, using earth’s topography as her playground. One day, while picking flowers on a hillside, the ground opened up in front of her and she was pulled down to Hell by the king of the underworld. Hades forced her to stay by his side and rule the dominion of the dead. Much to her surprise, the role suited her and she grew into a strong and confident queen. Old friends that visited her there were taken aback by her severity and serenity. But her mother was hysterical with grief and caused a devastating draught. This forced the hand of Zeus, Persephone’s father. He brought Persephone back up to the light. But before she left, Hades fed her a handful of pomegranate seeds. The fates had long ago decreed that anyone who ate or drank in the underworld was doomed to spend eternity there. Therefore, although the lands flourished when Persephone rose to greet them, they retracted again in the winter months (one for each seed) when she returned to claim her thrown in Hell.

Many of our life patterns are cyclical. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the process of making art works in the round. For me, the yin-yang of experiencing and recording keeps my gears turning. First, there is a period of living fully -- gathering new experiences and perspectives and sensations. Then, there is a period of digestion, reflection and, hopefully, birth. (Or the other way around because this is a chicken/egg type of thing.) This Vermont season is a time for patience and production. A lot of looking for reflections in blank surfaces – the iced-over river, notebook paper, white canvas.

My studio at the Vermont Studio Center where Jeff and Don are gearing up for the Halloween festivities.

They're ready now. (Photo by Erin Fitzpatrick)

Let The Right One In

In order to be safe you have to be separate. Either enclosed or excluded from the turbulent, unpredictable outside world. That’s the price. To stay exposed under earth’s vaulted sky is to risk it cracking up and falling down on your head. And in 1942, no one in Germany could deny the sky was falling. So they built a place apart. A building so sturdy that after the firebombs of WWII and many decades of the city growing up and changing around it, it stands as impervious as ever. Only the faint moonscape on its concrete shell betrays the trouble it’s seen. Most of the other bunkers from this era have been torn down, but the amount of explosives needed to level this one would take its residential neighbors down with it. Destroying its world would cause a rift in ours.

The entrance i.e. what I could see before they made me put my camera away. Still cool.

The bunker has had many names. My personal favorite being ‘Bananabunker,’ but we’ll get to that. Layers of history haunt this mammoth, 5,000 square-meter structure. Each with its own set of colorful ghosts. The haunts don’t have a way out -- the walls are two-meters thick with a three-meter ceiling. After serving its original purpose as a war bunker, the building was later converted into a prison by the Red Army and then used as a storage space for Cuban fruit. It played host to one of the most extreme gay fetish clubs of all time and, since 2008, has been transformed into a private museum. The artwork that resides there now mediates the many voices of its past and is charged by them.

When Karl Bonatz designed the building originally, it was to be a cog in the Nazi’s master machinery of Germania, the future capitol of the world as envisioned by Albert Speer. It was almost windowless, with low ceilings at 2.3 meters and 180 almost identical concrete rooms. Built to house 1,500 people in the event of air strikes, it held up to 4,000 at the height of the war. Or at least that was the figure quoted to me by my sprightly German tour guide as we wandered the space with the eleven other international voyeurs. (Tours are always twelve people at a time, scheduled weeks in advance on their website.) Inside, the walls are still stenciled with spray-painted regulations and strung with glow-in-the-dark arrows and lines to direct refugees in case of a power outage.

There are many buildings in Germany that were constructed to defend against an enemy, but are later occupied by that very group of people. The Soviets used this bunker after 1945 to house German prisoners of war. In the 1950s, it became a storage space for dried fruit, oranges and bananas because of its perma-cool climate. From 1992-1996 it gained the nickname “hardest club on earth.” Fetish, fantasy, drugs and techno music came out to play in its shadowy caves. Some rooms were painted black for that which required an even greater cover of darkness. However, the ventilation system had broken and been stripped years before and oxygen was hard to come by amid the smoke, drugs and fog machine plumes. Besides the toxic air, there were many police raids that eventually led to its closing. But no need to mourn the S&M muse, it alighted on Berghain and this club has held the torch since.

In 2003, Christian Boros and his wife bought the bunker to display their art collection and began a massive makeover. Forty of the 120 rooms and 1,800 tons of concrete were removed. Now some ceilings stretch to 13 meters and the space resembles more of a 3-D labyrinth than a prison. (You know, like if you were a giant snake you could wind in and out of its cutout walls and open ceilings.) For their first exhibition that has been on view since 2008, the Boros’ installed 80 works. Many of the art pieces were made specifically for the bunker or adapted by the artists to fit the space. The artists were able to choose which rooms they worked in and curate the show themselves.

It is a phenomenal space in which to experience art. With all of the different melodies from its history ringing in your ears, the pieces pick up on one or another tonal phrase and resonate. For instance, Anselm Reyle’s cart uses the same neon paint that clings to the walls from the 40’s and Katja Strunz’s wooden paper airplane-like sculptures play in and around old spray-painted text. Though for some, it is more about what you can’t hear. Kris Martin’s bell that swings over the foyer is clapper-less and titled “For Whom.” We weren’t allowed to take photographs inside, but there are some beautiful ones here and it’s all about walking the walk anyway.

The icing on top of this layered cake is a colossal glass penthouse. Because the Boros’ were not allowed to make changes to the façade of the bunker itself, they built their home above it. The view must be spectacular – both of the city and of the hundreds of artworks that grace their private walls, including what my guide estimates to be 40 Elizabeth Payton paintings.

Odin, king of the Norse gods, has a grand fortress too. It is also both a military establishment and a palace of wonders with spear-shafts for rafters and a roof of golden shields like shingles. It holds hundreds of rooms and is topped with the tree Lærad just as the Berlin bunker is crowned in foliage. The Valkyries choose which men die in battle and take the bravest here. Once they are residents of the great hall, the warriors’ days consist of fighting each other until they lie in a hewn pile on the lawn, being resurrected just before dinner time, dining and drinking the night away and then, if they’re lucky, getting to know one of those maidens of death a little better. The boar that they feast on is also whole again and ready for the spit come morning.

A palace of ghosts. Crowned by German art world royalty. Who wouldn’t want in? Christian sends invitations to the boldest of artists to take up residence. To our culture’s risk takers. Those that lead reckless charges against the ramparts of society’s standards or venture daringly into the unknown.

Magpies Nest in Neon

Instead of going door-to-door in search of the ideal space to call home, the artists that started the Agora Collective decided to take matters into their own hands. This summer, they began to renovate an industrial building in Neukölln with a floor for exhibitions, one for co-working and a loft for visitors to stay. They then began filling it up with the people and projects and ideas they wanted to be surrounded by. “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Eight of my paintings on mylar shown at the Montenegro Musik Raum.

On Monday, the musical branch of their space opened in an explosion of creative activity. Dylan Aiello had been working on transforming his neighboring flat into Montenegro – a practice and performance venue. The opening, sponsored by Airbnb, was composed of performances ranging from burlesque to jazz, classical recitals to improvised jam sessions. Chattering crowds of attendees, warm lights and the sounds of foot-stomping blues spilled out onto the streets.

A defining feature was the mammoth bar Dylan had managed to materialize inside the space – though it dwarfs the studio doors. For the opening, he outfitted it as a Wunderkammer. My paintings nested in its old wood shelves for the evening. He filled the middle section with an odd assortment of found treasures and lit the piece with jerry-rigged bulbs and colored lamps in various stages of disrepair. I had also painted the glass panels on the bathroom doors and a video artist projected his colorful abstractions onto the ceiling.

Dylan winds up an old film.

The evening winds down.

It was the opposite of the white-cube gallery experience. There was no line between where my work ended and the hanging clock gears began. I am not sure what this means for showing my work in the future, but when all was said and hung, my paintings felt very much at home.

I painted a shower-boat on the bathroom doors.

One of my paintings on display: Round Table, Oil on Mylar, 12inx15in, 2011