Address Is Approximate

I hope you as enchanted as I was by this tender, lovely very short stop-motion animated film by director Tom Jenkins - Robots!  Cars!  Google maps!

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.



The video arrived in my inbox today from one of my favorite blogs - Freakoutville Xpress  - accompanied by  this most appropos quote -

FreakoutVille Xpress

'I think that the ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity,sorcery and mystery.'    - Luis Barragan, Architect

Thanksgiving - happy & grateful

I'm grateful that this is in the world and equally grateful that it's not directly in my world.  Enjoy life, kiddos.

Chinese Oldster Chorus covers Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'.   Maybe they'll be special guests on her Thanksgiving TV special tonight.

Those Girls Again

So the other day I was looking at the dolls I use in many of my assemblages, and thought I should photograph them and use the images as design elements in collage.  These 6-7" porcelain dolls just speak to me. The seem to carry some essence of  'beingness' that says something, but I really don't know what.  And I don't mind a bit that I don't really know.

Pieces involving the Girls pop up pretty regularly.  After stamping the dolls in the first piece with letters,  I continued that theme - trading off with numbers or letters - thus they became the Alpha & Numeral girls.  The dolls in the collage sport punctuation marks instead of letters & numbers.  There's always a rebel in the bunch.

The Alpha & Numeral Girls

Retro

Retro images just speak to me. I love old advertising and vintage commercial design.  Fashion backward. So maybe it's childhood or classic movies.  Maybe is brainwashing by the ad industry. Whatever it is - retro images capture something that I want to express.

Retro

We Are A We

Vintage dolls represent the many - and sometimes conflicting -  aspects that make up the collective we each are.

Art Dream

Art Dream is a collage that emerged from just what is says - a dream about art.

The evening of the dream I had watched two television programs about artists on Halogen tv - a quirky little network on cable and online http://halogentv.com.  They have programs with a contemporary flare and a line of shows about art and artists - Aperture, Art In Progress, Desination Art and more.

This particular night featured Tim Nobel and Sue Webster, 2 uber-contemporary artists. http://www.timnobleandsuewebster.com/  I was especially struck by Nobel & Webster's Dirty White Trash, an assemblage of trash arranged precisely to cast a shadow of the couple themselves.  

Dirty White Trash _ Tim Nobel & Sue Webster

The other program featured Laurie Simons http://www.lauriesimmons.net.  Laurie uses ventriloquist dummies, puppets, paper cut-outs, miniatures and more to create amazing photographs and films.

The Music of Regret stars Meryl Streep [!] with Laurie's creations and songs.

The dream began with a video scene of me saying that I was going to use everything in my studio to make an on-going assemblage.  The first thing I did was create a tower of shoes - using some completed shoe art and all the shoes I had on hand for future pieces.  I then spent a lot of time searching in second-hand stores for a large cabinet. Back in the studio I then began adding to it and gluing on it everything at hand.  The dream then moved on to some old fantasy projects I've enjoyed musing about for years - making an ongoing assemblage out of a wooden storage building, a vintage gas station and a retro diner.

The collage itself includes mini-collages of each of the design elements.  Details within the collages include some of my favorite retro images - a Nash Metropolitan, vintage toys, mannequins, a Kit Kat clock, as always, dolls & doll parts and so on.

I like to think of this collage as a sketch-book - holding the promise of future work.

Art Dream