Happenings in the press

BOOOOOOOM just put up a little interview with me on their site and they managed to make my book look very attractive. I think I might start requiring people to gather a nice rock, some tea and a bit of crochet before reading my work. Also there has to be a bit of sun coming in the window. How good does that look? Damn. They are also giving away a couple of copies of the book to people who leave a favorite poem in the comments section. I managed to shout out some favorite people in Chicago and elsewhere, and work in a little thing about how Benjamin Franklin supposedly had to be naked to get any writing done.

Project: Astoria

I'm going to be in Chicago in a couple of weeks to help high five Todd Baxter and open his new show at Lula. This is one of the pictures:

Todd has been a friend for twenty years – since we were painting students together at the University of New Mexico. Back then he was doing exquisitely painted scenes with little collage elements cut from books and magazines inserted so seamlessly that you sometimes couldn't tell what was real and what was invented. Sometime after that he got hold of something called Photoshop and now he does the same thing with his own photographs, culled from shoots in Guam, Morocco, the Pacific Northwest, rural Kentucky and the space museum in Washington D.C., among other places, as well as in studio shoots with hired models. I've posted about his work now and then on this blog, occasionally I've been lucky enough to collaborate with him, and we've shown his work several times at Lula. He's one mega-talented s.o.b. (with a similarly talented collaborator in Aubrey Videtto) and we're beyond delighted to show this new body of weird loveliness as it develops over the next few years – this is the first of what are projected to be several semi-annual showcases at Lula. So come get in on the ground floor. More about the Astoria backstory here. And a facebook event page for the opening is here.

Wow, that was kind of amazing.

The thing at Lula was really wonderful. More so than I could have even hoped. I don't think I got to talk to half the people I wanted to, because it was packed like sardines. There was already a line outside before the doors opened. Huge all encompassing thanks to the folks that made it possible: Jason and Lea and Susannah at Lula (and the servers and cooks who all made it seamless), John and Zak for making fun of each other in public, The Kyles (O and B) for their lovely meditations on fatherhood and that pesky generational gap, Liz from Quimby's who had the job of writing out everyone's credit card information and fending off angry fans when the book was gone. Amy Honchell who let me take half her work down for a night. Aleks for hooking up the sound system. Who else...? It's hard to say because it almost felt like everyone I know in this damn town was there. Kind of choked me up for a second. Y'all rule. For real. THANK YOU.

New Show at Lula

We just put up a new show at Lula this week. Gorgeous photographs by Debbie Carlos. Click here for more about the show. The two last images are part of a triptych printed very large on translucent vellum and pinned loosely to the wall so they kind of float a little bit in the moving air. Really nice. There will be an opening reception with the artist October 26th from 6-9 at Lula.

Benefit Engine Manual

We made a little catalog for the Car Engine show, featuring images of each of the artist's work. Full color. Proceeds from sales of the catalog will go to benefit Tommi Musturi and Marijpol, whose work was damaged in the flood at Lula a couple of weeks ago (see right to order--$10 plus postage). Below is the first spread.

Laura Park

I'm not sure exactly how I came across Laura Park's amazing and beautiful sketchbooks on Flickr. As a Chicago cartoonist type I knew her, vaguely, as friends of friends, and had seen and admired her mini-comics. But they didn't prepare me for the breathtaking color comics and drawings in her sketchbooks. It was like peering down a rabbit hole in the woods and realizing it's filled with gold. Several of these will be on display in the bar cases at Lula through December, installed in time to be featured along with the Car Engine Show for Lula's first proper art opening (Tuesday, August 24th, 6-9). In the months that follow, pages will be turned now and then as the mood strikes us.

The Car Engine Invitational Drawing Show (and a flood)

I just posted some info about the new show at Lula at the Lula's Walls blog and thought I'd put some of the images and the story of THE FLOOD here as well (see below). Following are installation shots of the show and then some of the individual pieces. I suggest clicking on Chi-hoi's drawing below (the textured cube) the text is good.













Shown above are pieces by Marc Bell, Dan Zettwoch, Jeffrey Brown, Chi-Hoi Lee, Jay Ryan, Gabrielle Bell, Esther Pearl Watson and Andrea Bruno. Also in the show are Marijpol, Tommi Musturi, Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, Mark Todd, Anders Nilsen, Peter Thompson, Luke Ramsey, Doublenaut, Michelangelo Setola, Sonnenzimmer, Nick Petersen, Doug Shaeffer and Ron Rege.

THE FLOOD


So, it's been a rainy summer in Chicago. Two trees on my street have been blown down over the last month or so, and the strange colors of the sky and the lightning shows have been frequent topics of conversation this year. Last weekend it rained and stormed for a solid eight or nine hours, all night long, very unusual for Chicago, who's storms generally come and go fairly quickly. And the basement of Lula flooded. Like, 3 1/2 feet, with freezers picked up and dumped out, computers and files and wine bottles floating around in an apocalyptic mess. Among the casualties were a number of pieces of art--from past shows and a few pieces waiting to be hung for the opening reception. Of these, most have proved more or less salvageable, a number have spent several days pressed between layers of newsprint and under stacks of heavy art books in my living room, and early indications are that they might make it. But two pieces in particular, by Marijpol and Tommi Musturi (shown above) having been stored in rolls which collapsed, were torn in places in addition to being swamped. Prints by Jay Ryan and Jordan Crane were also affected. My intention is to hold a silent auction at the opening, or perhaps online to benefit Marijpol and Tommi, possibly for a private commissioned drawing from them or something. More on that as details are ironed out in the next few days.

There is also a concurrent exhibition of small pencil drawings at Lula right now, by Amanda Vahamaki and Michelangelo Setola. More on that show, including images, soon...

This is Not the World and How to See it: A Short Idiosyncratic History of Visual Culture in 10,000 Small Round Shiny Fragments

Readers who've been following this blog since the beginning (both of you) might remember a post I made in October of 2007 about a "button installation" I was commissioned to do in a boy's bedroom here in Logan Square in Chicago. His mother had seen two similar pieces I'd done at Lula a few years before. Recently I was asked to do another one. This time on a slightly different scale. The video below is a time lapse of the installation process, made by the folks at Ogilvy & Mather who commissioned the piece for their newly renovated lobby.


The wall is about 40 feet long by 10 or 12 feet high. I used close to 10,000 buttons, pressed by (the wonderful people at) Busy Beaver Buttons. what you see was filmed over the course of five days–roughly 45 hours–for the actual installation. Seen in the video, other than me, are Kelsey Zigmund, Dan McKee, Lillian Martinez, and Dorian Byrd, all of whom helped me IMMENSELY. Thanks also to Tereasa Suratt









About 20% of the content was provided by Ogilvy, from current/recent campaigns. The rest was chosen by me and consists of everything.

Including but not limited to:

Some Chinese propaganda posters
A diagram of the Sun
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus
The cover of Weirdo #4
a couple of different images of Krishna
"Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild"
randomly punched images from current issues of Newsweek, Rolling Stone and People
two paintings of Birds by John J. Audobon
some illuminated manuscripts
some Native American Petroglyphs
an 1884 ad for tobacco
Li'l Nemo
Rubens' The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
a photograph of Minor Threat sitting on their front steps
a photograph of Public Enemy
The cover of Fantastic Four #248
some Byzantine mosaics
some Soviet typography
a shopping circular from my front stoop
the Mars Rover
a photograph of a tree


The idea is that it's a kind of (necessarily incomplete) catalog of visual culture from the beginning of time. I plan to use the occasion of the piece's completion to do a few posts in the next week or two about where this work came from and how it might or might not connect with what I do as someone who mostly spends his time drawing pictures with word balloons.

Stephen Eichhorn at Lula

My co-curator Marianne and I put up a new show by Stephen Eichhorn at Lula last night. Below are a couple of pictures, there's lots more about the show at lula's walls.

Lula's Walls

Marianne and I recently started a blog for the art at Lula. I'll probably continue to post an image or two from new shows here, but actual info can be found at Lula's Walls. Current show features photographer Jeremy Bolen (above) and printer and book artist Kim Jae Young (below).

I'm out of Ideas. I'm going to Spain to get more

We hung the new show at Lula last night. Kyle Obriot's double exposed poloroids and Todd Baxter's alien world with tapirs. Here are some photos. But you have to go there to get the full impact. Go. Awesome.