Installation Blues (and Pinks)

November 30, 2006

Today has been a crazy day! There’s a big snow and ice storm hovering over several states in the Midwest, and everything in our city has come to a standstill as ice rains from the sky, and people are high-tailing it home to hibernate from the weather. It’s put me in a bit of a tizzy, because it’s unclear if the university will have to cancel my opening tomorrow.

In the meantime, I just keep working — because what else can I do? The ironic thing is, a few years ago I opted to focus on gallery and indoor art because I had been burned out from working hard on big outdoor projects where attendance was subject to the whims nature. Oh well, we can’t argue with Mother Nature, but this means I may have to do a quilt about her!

Above is the installation part of my show. I still have some tinkering to do, but I’m really happy with how it’s shaping up. The blank space on the left wall above the desk is where my Infinite Drawing will go. This afternoon while my quilts were being hung on the other side of the gallery, I went back to my (now empty) studio to sew the drawing together.

From earlier experiments, I decided it was easier to sew the columns before the rows, because sewing paper isn’t like sewing fabric. You can’t fold or scrunch it. I didn’t even know if this would be possible since I had never done anything like this, but it’s something that does require assistance.

Here’s the final drawing — it’s 5′ by 11′. I designed it to run off the pages, so that you can imagine the drawing could go on forever — kind of like wall paper. I can’t wait to hang it tomorrow and see how it looks.

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Still Life with Mr. Bubble

November 29, 2006

Yesterday Santa came early and left two elves in my studio. These elves are named Merrilee and Lettie, and luckily these elves know how to sew! They also know how to do micro-surgery on frayed fabric edges.

They also know how to sew hanging sleeves on the back of quilts, and since five quilts for the show needed sleeves, I was running short on time. So thank you Merrilee and Lettie for helping me out with lots of final tasks yesterday.

This photo is also a great opportunity to show off the new table shirt that I made a couple of weeks ago for my big studio table. For several years I had been kicking around these amazing draperies that were in my grandmother’s house. The pattern on the fabric was so big and bold, I didn’t know what to do with them. Even though I was told I could sell the barkcloth for a high price, I could never bear to part with them. Then I had this idea to cover all the junk under my table, so I cut the drapes in half and faked pleates with a staple gun. Now my studio is so much more homey, and I have good vibes from my grandmother’s house in my studio.

Because I had excellent help of the elves yesterday, I had the whole day today to work on my studio installation in the gallery. Here’s a few closeups — I’ll post a full view when it’s done. In case you can’t read the printer block letters, this says “Time to Make Some Art!”

I call this “Still Life with Pepto-Bismol.” Or maybe I should call it “Still Life with Mr. Bubble.” I did it because I thought it was funny to put together all these pink things in a medicine cabinet, but the cosmetics and the brand names on the bottles also relate to the cosmetics theme in my Late Date quilt that is part of this installation environment.

The medicine cabinet also relates to the sink, which relates to the dyeing enviroment of the studio. Talk about free association! Anyway, here it is in a slightly bigger context. After studying this composition, I think I need to move the vintage clothes line to the left, hang the blue apron, and turn the orientation of the pink rubber gloves. Tomorrow I will finish the jars of dye fabric to complete this section of the studio installation.

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Gallery Dollhouse

November 25, 2006

This summer my mom found my old dollhouse in my grandmother’s attic and brought it to me. I had forgotten I ever had this dollhouse until I saw it again, but then a flood of memories came back. She got it on sale for $10 at a department store in St. Louis to surprise me for Christmas when I was a kid. My dad cut a piece of masonite to cover the front, and I painted it — so for the sake of history, this is probably my earliest surviving painting!

The inside looks a little sad, since a lot of the furniture got broken or lost. But I did clean it up for my niece to play with it when she visits. Someday I’d like to repair or replace the furniture, maybe even make some little art quilts to hang on the walls. I guess this what you call a fixer-upper.

The dollhouse has been in the back of my mind for several months, and so after several sleepless nights trying to visualize my quilts in my upcoming gallery show, I decided to make a gallery dollhouse.

The gallery director had given me a dimensional floorplan of the space, so I drew the walls to scale. Then I imported little jpeg images of my quilts and sized them appropriately in the drawing. I was able to play around with the arrangement of the quilts which helped me a great deal in planning my show.

Then I printed everything at 2% of the scale so that it would fit onto white cardstock in my laser printer, cut out the walls, and folded them into the three-dimensional form. I taped the model to the top of our conference table because it was a color similar to the gallery floor.

You can see how I can move around, looking at different viewpoints within the minature gallery. Originally I was going to put PaMdora’s studio simulation behind the partial wall, but after playing around with this model, I decided it would better for the Wall of Yoga. Now PaMdora’s studio is planned for the right wing of the gallery, and I’ve set up with director to start that installation first, on Wednesday.

This is a photo of the real gallery with the current show of mixed media paintings by Juan Torres-Zavala. I was a bit intimidated when I walked into to the gallery last week — as you can see he has filled the gallery with a beautiful show. You can also see how my little model relates to the real space.

This is the entrance to the gallery. I was planning on putting some of my installation in front of the windows or actually using them to hang something, then I found out that the windows slide open during the opening reception because there’s usually a big crowd. Torress-Zavala actually had so many paintings that there are several exhibited in the outside hall (which looks like gallery space too.)

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Premiere of PBS Quilt Documentary

November 24, 2006

Heads up Wisconsin! Last spring I did some interviews in my studio for a PBS documentary called the Art of Quilting. The program will premiere this weekend on Wisconsin Public Television on Sunday November 26 at 7:00 p.m. and Saturday December 9 at 9:00 a.m. I wish I could see it, but I don’t have time to drive up to Wisconsin, and if I did, I don’t have a TV in my car.

However, it will be available for other PBS stations nationally in March 2007. The last program A Century of Quilts that Laurie Gorman produced was shown on 85% of PBS stations, so maybe this new program will come to your neighborhood station in March 07. If not, at some point a DVD with extra footage will be available for purchase from the PBS Home Video website.

The program will also feature lots of other artists and art quilts and hopefully will be wonderful. It’s been produced as a pledge-drive program, so if you see it, call up your PBS station and throw some dollars their way. Those folks work hard and produce some great stuff!

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Anyone having Crab Dip for Thanksgiving?

November 22, 2006

To help organize my work for the upcoming show, I’ve made a little paper 3-D model of the gallery with my quilts hanging in it. I call it my Gallery Dollhouse because it even has little paper furniture that I play with as I plan PaMdora’s quilt studio that will be on display in the show.

The blessing and the problem with this technique of visualization is that I’ve decided I need ONE MORE QUILT for my Wall of Yoga 101 poses. Can I possibly squeak out one more quilt in time? Time will tell, and here I’ve started cutting the background fabric for Yoga 101: The Crab Dip Pose.

Can’t resist a closeup photo of those shelves of fabric. My nephew was here today and asked where I get all this fabric — actually everyone asks me that. At my local quilt stores, in shops at every city that I’ve visited in the last four years, late night internet orders, and a few vintage scores. I used to buy half or one-yard sections of fabric when I could visualize it cut out as a coffee table or a pair of pants. Then I realized I needed more big background fabrics, so now I’m buying two and three yards of dots, checks, and plaids.

Right now, it’s my yellow section that’s lagging. It’s hard to find good yellows. I have lots of reds, but many of them are boring. Greens are definately my biggest section, I guess because of the popularity of lime green last year.

These big patterns are slippery and sometimes hard to hand, so I weigh them down on the cutting table with these old irons. I like using vintage equipment in the studio and plan on taking some of it to set up in PaMdora’s Quilt Studio — except all her stuff will be mostly pink and blue. More on that later…

With all this work on the yoga series, I’m all fingers and toes these days.

And luckily I found a basket-weave fabric that looks like a Triscuit when it’s cut in a little square. I’ll have to get back to the studio after these holidays are over and cut out the crab. We went to Red Lobster for lunch today, so I was able to do a little crab research.

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Late Date Men

November 16, 2006

I got my hair done today. No, really I did get it cut (I have to every four weeks because it’s so short), but I don’t really put my hair up in curlers nowadays, although I have been known to do so a long, long time ago. This is actually part of one of the quilts I’m working on right now….

and PaMdora is evolving out of the primordial soup of quilt fabric. Remember last month when I told you we were building new pin boards for my studio? Well, here’s the result. It is so great to have all this extra design space.

I’ve set up a quilt assembly line, working on four quilts at once, and put four of my headless friends in charge. Only problem is they also don’t have any arms, so nothing gets done when I’m not here (okay, actually they are vintage dress forms so they’re not really going to do any work, but they keep me company).

Here’s some guys I was drawing last night. The above new quilt-in-progress is called “Late Date” and it’s about how I’m never ready in time for a night on the town while my date, or rather my husband, is already ready and waiting.

So in the quilt there’s going to be a little guy that you see through the window, outside waiting by the car. I’m not sure I’ve captured the right character….Which guy would you pick to wait for you? (Little tip, each one comes with a Porsche, so don’t let that part sway you.)

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Sewing Drawings

November 15, 2006


When I go to contemporary art museums, I’m always delighted to see exhibits that push my view of art, but it seems harder to with my own work. I think there are things in my studio that I would not ordinarily consider a piece of art… but in terms of contemporary art, as explorations of media and concepts these could be interesting to share.

Something I’ve been trying to figure out how to present are what I call Infinite Drawings. Everyone has a pretty clear expectation of what a drawing should be. And yet on my computer I have drawings within drawings. I usually work from the center out, with the “final product” which is usually a color mock-up or a line pattern in the center. This is surrounded my other things I plop down anywhere on the virtual desktop — scans of sketches, photos of animals, people or things that I’ve scanned or lifted off the internet, doodles that didn’t work out but are too funny to delete. The image above is a very small and relatively simple version of one of these drawings.

When you draw on computer, there is a relative scale (meaning that I draw the size of the quilt - so my “final product = the pattern” is usually about 7′ x 5′). But there is no absolute scale, because I can enlarge or reduce the drawing at will to see the whole thing, or focus in on some teeny-tiny detail. That’s why I call them Infinite Drawings. They could go on and on. Not only could I keep adding to the sides of the drawing or zooming in indefinitely, I could also keep layering on things forever…

To show these drawings so that everyone could see all the details, I’d like them to be really big. In one area of the gallery I’m thinking about hanging a twelve-foot long drawing. I could print this out on our big Epson 10000 printer, but I’m thinking about tile printing it on a laserjet on 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheets of paper for several reasons. 1) that’s how I used to print patterns before I got the big printer 2) I like the idea of the texture of that many assembled sheets of paper 3) assembling many little pieces reinforces the idea that this is only a makeshift representation of the drawing that really only exists in the virtual space of the computer environment and 4) the structure echoes a patchwork quilt.

Here’s a test of a small portion of this drawing. It’s 16 sheets of paper that I have sewn together. At first I didn’t think I could sew papers together into a large drawing, but at our Uncommon Threads meeting this morning, Arleta was talking about sewing block quilts together. She said that it’s easier to sew the columns first, then the rows. I had been trying to do the opposite with the paper, sewing across first and then down (maybe out of habit because that’s how I read). But Arleta’s idea worked better for the paper too.

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Legs like Bananas

November 8, 2006

Hey, look at the legs on that quilt!! And now that I’ve got your atttention, I’d like to make an announcement. Denise kindly pointed out that I have done a poor job of informing people about the dates and location of my upcoming show…..

The Perils of PaMdora
Art Quilts by Pam RuBert
Dec. 1, 2006 through Jan. 30, 2007
M-F 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Pool Art Center Gallery
940 North Clay, Springfield, Missouri
on the eastern edge of the Drury University campus.
Opening Reception — Friday evening, Dec. 1, 7-9 p.m.
Artist’s Talk — December 1, 6-7 p.m.

Now I guess I need to get busy and update my website, right?

p.s. this is another quilt I’m working on in the Yoga 101 Series….The Banana Split pose, but I haven’t gotten the banana split cut out yet.

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Houston IQA Show and Museums

November 5, 2006

Just got back from the International Quilt Festival in Houston where I saw a lot of great stuff. Maybe in December when I get my show installed, I’ll have time to post a gallery of photos like I did last year. When you walk around a show like this, you notice the award-winners, but you also notice some great pieces that didn’t get ribbons. This is “Gerbera” by Mandi Ballard.

This is a photo of the George R. Brown convention center from the twenty-fourth floor of the Hilton. What part of this huge building that isn’t filled with quilts during the festival is filled with thousands of booths of people selling stuff like fabric, buttons, thread and sewing machines to quilt-makers. Ask me how I know :)

Here’s me at the awards ceremony doing my impression of a two-headed alien. Well, it was on Halloween after all…

Here’s the Best of Show “Mother Earth and Her Children” by Sieglinde Schoen Smith. I’m glad she won best of show, because she entered this quilt in my catergory, Whimsical Quilts. So that means that all the rest of us got bumped up one notch, and I won second place :) I also had another quilt “The Vintage Purse” in the “Best of SAQA exhibit - The Creative Force.”

Another reason that I went to Houston this year was to visit the wonderful museums that are only a few minutes away from the IQA show and accessible by the Metro train. The Museum of Contemporary Art had fantastic installations by Pipilotti Rist, a Danish video artist who explores themes of being feminine, love and the struggle for independence.

The Houston Museum of Fine Arts has two huge buildings full of art and there were also a couple of fun exhibits — Best of Show (the dog portrayed in art from the Renaissance to today) and the Cats Meow was a similar exploration. Saw a Damien Hirst installation and another wonderful exhibit…The Past Made Present (how different artists show memories in their work). And the Houston Museum of Contemporary Craft had a great show also. Finding Balance: Reconciling the Masculine and the Feminine.

I think it’s interesting that many art quilters say they want to be accepted by the art world, and yet few of them show much interest in any other art form or in other contemporary artists. On the Quilt Art list today there has been lots of discussion related to how art shows are juried and judged, so I posted a comment about visiting these museum exhibits. I was curious if anyone would email me and say, Hey, I went to those museums also! But so far haven’t heard a peep from anyone.

Since I travel to a lot of places to see art, I’m really impressed that I could go to the IQA show and visit three top-notch museums within a few blocks of each other. Too bad more people don’t realize this. It’s good to encourage people to take design classes, but to really be serious about making art, you need to look at a lot of other art (and not just at other people who are also trying to learn to make art) just as to be a good writer, you not only need to take writing classes, but you need to read great literature and poetry.

I enjoyed the IQA show very much, but I really don’t get much inspiration from other quilters because I don’t want to imitate what others are doing better. I got a lot of interesting ideas from seeing these other exhibits.

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