IDEA: Lygia Pape's "Livro do Tempo"

Highly relevant to my current brainstorming. Highly inspiring.

100 words – Katie Murken: Continua

When a system constantly replicates even a simple set of variables, the result quickly becomes organic, seemingly uncontained. By rolling dice to move around the color wheel using mathematical probabilities, Murken dissolves the familiar spectrum into variegated columns of haphazard hues. Towering chroma without regard to art-school theory nonetheless impose beauty on the gallery-white walls. There are the beginnings of excess, of sheer visceral reaction to brilliant abstraction. Phonebooks as the medium could add extra layers to themes of extreme systemization and the disruption of order, but instead are almost ignored, used as a meaningless ground to inexpensively house so much color.

("Continua" at Gallery 2J, 319 N. 11th Street, September 2-October 7, 2011)

RSVP 2011

I'm pleased to have work included in the New Wilmington Art Association's upcoming exhibition RSVP. The show runs September 9 through October 20, with an opening reception on Friday, September 9th from 6:00-9:00pm. More details here.

Come see Three Thousand Daughters in person!

Now on Twitter!

Taking the Twitter plunge. Follow @MelindaSteffy for regular updates and art-related tidbits.

Work in Progress, August 2011

As I mentioned before, I'm in the beginning stages of a new series of work connecting handicraft with language, particularly using visual constructions as an actual language or code in themselves.

One piece in the works is a series of one-page, map-fold copper books. Each book is tarnished with a different quilt block pattern and will have a used sandpaper cover. Industrial material meets book arts meets textiles.

Taping the first few blocks to prepare them for tarnishing

Tarnishing the copper

So far I have 40-some tarnished. Since the fold pattern naturally divides each page into quarters, I'm only using 4x4 quilt patterns, and I would like the final result, if I were to display them in a grid, to also be divisible by 4. Which means I'm either making 64 of these suckers (8x8 grid) or 144 (12x12). 144 would fit nicely with my numerological inclinations, so that's what I'm leaning toward, but it will take a while to get there. Fortunately, "5500 Quilt Block Designs," which I am using as a reference, has ample patterns to choose from.

The pages. The surface will be antiqued and then each page will be folded into a small book form.

The language possibilities still seem wide open, but I'm leaning toward using the names of the blocks (since each one is different) to construct a story or poem that would accompany the artwork as an over-sized caption of sorts. Working title: "Impossible Narrative"

100 words - Sheila Hicks: May I Have this Dance?

While containing all of the gentle tactility and delicate detail you might expect from a textile-work, Sheila Hicks’s two-story cascade blows the whole definition apart. Monumental, visceral – you feel the tangled coils twine through your own gut. It dwarfs you, shrinks you to the size of a pin head next to a spool of thread. You have no chance to passively observe, but must conquer the simultaneous desire to dive in and to run away screaming. Like standing at the base of a thousand-year-old tree, you feel the looming presence of time and the constant but unpredictable workings of nature itself.

 ("50 Years" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, March 24-August 7, 2011)

IDEA: khipus and three-dimensional writing

A recent Slate.com article about khipus, the Incan method of recording information using knotted cords, has me thinking about the relationship between handicraft and language. My current work-in-process involves a series of one-page books of quilt-block patterns made from tarnished copper, so I've already been contemplating abstract methods of communicating via materials and patterns, but haven't really been sure about how to direct a larger body of work. This sort of  material-based, non-alphabetic code might be just the connection. Interestingly, it also ties in to a new-found fascination with Chladni patterns and how they might be converted to musical scores (thanks to another Slate.com article). Several new pieces are now rolling around in my mind.

Gotta love sparks of inspiration.

100 words - Bohyun Yoon: Embody

Bohyun Yoon: Embody
Yoon's "Structure of Shadow" suggests that our material bodies are so familiar, so universal, as to be intangible – a mob of mixed-up races and genders with indistinguishable limbs and torsos. The substance, then, is in the shadows, in the way a focused light condenses us each into a specific person with personality and proclivity, movement and meaning. We march together in haphazard rhythms as our passing bodies and tenuous identities shape into societies that shift and jumble as the light changes. What is our collective purpose, the focal light that directs our course? How do we structure the world when everything around us is shadow?

(At the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, April 4-May 6, 2011)

Installation shots at the Crane Arts Building

Views of my artwork installed in The Hall at the Crane Arts Building during January & February 2011, presented by InLiquid. This time, I installed "Aubade" as one large sheet of the nine panels, so that the scale and color can dominate the space. "Ode" also got a modified installation, with the rows spaced according to the Fibonacci numbers. The "Introductions" are facing each other across the hall in their most formal posturing.

"Aubade: Mnemosyne Sings," with "Introductions I: Mars Enters" in the background

"Ode: Hestia Travels," with "Introductions II: Venus Receives" in the background

"Introductions II: Venus Receives"

IDEA: shadows and intangible imagery

I'm in the preliminary stages of a new piece that is going to cast significant shadows if installed on a wall. I've been contemplating how best to make use of the shadows, and ran across some images of Kumi Yamashita's work. Now I'm fascinated by the idea of incorporating an intangible image, dependent entirely on the correct angle of light or viewer perspective.

This Yamashita piece particularly caught my attention because it looks similar in scale and installation to mine. Brainstorming...