Candy Construction Committee
We invited a few friends over the weekend to brainstorm at the studio and start making some really big candy for a Halloween installation. The idea is sort of big candy combined with road construction, with maybe a few zombies thrown in. And it may involve a back hoe if the weather’s nice.
Shopping the warehouse, as I call it, is walking around piles of old stuff that’s accumulated over the years and trying to think of something to do with it. We had some old vinyl banners that were so big they were rolled up and sort of forgotten. Laying them out on the floor inspired Stephanie, Carla, and Holly to start cutting and pruning.
They were pretty wrinkly from being stored, but Holly had experience drying leather and had me cut a hole in a box that would hold a hair dryer and focus the heat to make the vinyl wrinkles relax. The box method was also good because you don’t have to hold a hot hair dryer for a long time – actually I could sort of use my foot to move it around, leaving my hands free to take photos and text 
After a little sewing, we thought we had a big Chiclet-shaped piece of candy to stuff, but it so happens, it might also work as a costume and bears a little resemblance to this old 70′s ad for “Hey Koolaide!”
As Julie said in a previous comment on my blog post about hosting PechaKucha Night – it sounds a bit like speed-dating for artists. I love that description.
The format of 20 images with 20 seconds to talk about each one puts you in the range of 6 minutes 40 seconds to present your work. That’s a lot of time compared to the oft-promoted elevator talk — the 30 second spiel you can introduce and explain yourself to a stranger in the time between the elevator door closing and re-opening. At the his reception at the Art Museum last week, Roger Shimomura told us he often juries NEA grants where artists are permitted 10 images with 10 seconds per image. So PKN is looking like a good first date.
PeshuKucha Night vol. 4 at our studio was great fun. We had over a hundred people — maybe more with some people coming early, some late. Although the format of presenting sounds rigid and the presenters do have to do their share of prep, the actual event is pretty casual atmosphere. Our doors opened a half hour early, there was a half hour intermission, and we invited folks to hang around afterwards — so there was lots of informal time to network, ask questions, explore the studio or just try out the vintage submarine game.
We had the big screen for the presentations strapped to scaffolding in the middle part of the warehouse with a lot of mis-matched chairs from various sources.
Russ also added some creative ambient lighting using old slide projectors and slides of Mesopotamian and other historical art (courtesy of the MSU art department who last spring auctioned off all their Art History slides and projection equipment at a surplus auction for, uhm, $5)
He also did a special installation of neon that spelled out PechaKucha on our framing table that added atmosphere and a great place for group photos.
But getting back to talking about art. One of the most interesting things I learned was how my friend Stephanie Cramer talks about her vibrant and evocative paintings. She likes to say, “You go first, then I’ll share” which is a terrific idea that I never thought of, because then she has the opportunity to learn what people see her paintings before she gives them her ideas. Another thing she handles quite well is the issue of time. This is a often-discussed to death topic I see on artist email lists and forums. Some artists and some people who create incredibly complex hand-crafted items seem to hate being asked, “how long did it take?”
Stephanie just says, “this painting took me three years” and then moves on. Nevermind that she was also working on about 20-40 other paintings during that time. Art takes time to gestate, transform, evolve, to become what it is.
You can hear more of how artists talk about their work in these videos of Stephanie Cramer, Russ RuBert, and Kat Allie’s presentations on our studio PKN page.
The other thing that was great about the event was the opportunity to work with such a great team of creative people. Amanda Taylor organized all the volunteers and presenters, ran the projector, and still had time to take an awesome set of photos during the evening. It’s the first time that I’ve really been able to put together a good photo gallery of a studio event that included all the setup and weird stuff that seems to happen whenever we’re setting up for a big event.
At PKN-4, we got to see 9 presentations, including Brandon Dake, AIA, president of the Springfield chapter of The American Institute of Architects present on the efforts to rebuild Joplin after a devastating tornado, and raised $360 for the AIA efforts to help in re-masterplaning there. So it was a good evening of art speed-dating.
Related links:
I’ve often though about doing more abstract work or big simple shapes because I love to stitch with loopy patterns. It’s not that big, but here’s a simple shapes quilt that I delivered to a friend this week using this stitch in the background.
The simple shapes came from quick pen drawings that I later refined to use in the invitation to this show, then I enlarged them to make a food-inspired quilt. To make the background stitching show up, I used a course variegated blue thread, and then doodled around the kitchen objects. This is a lot of fun, so I hope to do some more of these.
The other day, I happened to run across an article about creating special touches for packaging your handmade items -it said there were a lot of Flickr photos tagged “handmade packaging.” So inspired, before I delivered the quilt to the collector, I hand-wrote a card thanking them for the purchase and wrapped it up with a fabric bow.
This is how a usually wrap my quilts for transport. I used to use white cloth to wrap them, but batiks with colors are just so much more fun.
Over the years we’ve hosted many events at our studio, but this is the first one that most people I meet have trouble pronouncing. I started saying it just like it looks and am slowly working up to Peh-Chuk-Cha.
The name PechaKucha comes from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat.” PechaKucha Night started in Tokyo as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public and now has similar events happening in cities around the world. Presenters are allowed to show 20 images, with 20 seconds per image. This totals 6 minutes and 40 seconds per person, which makes for an upbeat tempo and allows the audience the chance to see wide variety of creative presentations in one evening.
PechaKucha Springfield was organized in Spring 2011 by Amanda Taylor of Dake Wells Architecture, meets quarterly, and previous events have been hosted at Lindbergs, Lemondrop, and Historic Firehouse #2.
The one I attended at Lemondrop was a lot of fun and touched on topics of art, history, architecture, film-making, the irony of yearbook signing, with an occasional cow thrown in.
Friday, September 23 from 7-9 p.m. at RuBert Studios
PechaKucha #4 we are hosting is open to art and design fans, and we have several artists scheduled including Stephanie Cramer, Kat Allie, Carla Stine, Brandon Dake, and some surprise guests. Doors will open at 6:30 if you’d like to walk around the studio, or have a glass of wine at the Tiki bar. If you’d be interested in presenting, Amanda may have a couple of slots left.
The event is a fund-raiser for the AIA Springfield to help with master-planning to rebuild Joplin, MO after a terrible tornado destroyed its center city last June, so we are asking for a minimum $5 to help with Joplin’s rebuilding process.
Some Past studio events
Although our studio is not normally open to the public, usually about once or twice a year we host events for non-profits with an art or art education emphasis. One of the more intensive but fun projects was a series that I call the Monster Foam workshops for Drury University art foundation students with art professors Todd Lowery and Tom Parker, using mountains of foam collected by Russ RuBert.
Another was a series of First Thursday artist discussion forums with featured speakers. But most have been one-night receptions for the Mid-America Art Alliance or group tours for Kansas City Art Institute students or the Missouri Art Education Association. Here’s some photos from past events. It was especially fun to dig out the old Monster Foam photo album.
Maybe they’re not mad, maybe they’re just having fun.
I’d forgotten how fun this is — dyeing!
All summer long I’ve been fighting the heat, coming up with different strategies for working in my non-air-conditioned studio very very early in the morning and developing satellite work locations and making smaller projects on the go.
Then I finally remembered that turning up the heat is good thing for dyes. I had a lot of old supplies – dye powders, soda ash, etc. in the back of my studio from some previous dye adventures. It was merely a matter of cleaning up the shelves, re-organizing, and I also started finding lots of little stashes of un-dyed fabric, or fabric that totally needed a color makeover. And those little stashes added up to to a lot of yardage. Yay, I didn’t even need to order any supplies, and since I’m in the recycle as much as possible mode right now, last weekend’s project fit right into that philosophy.
Mixing up the dyes reminded me a little of being a kid and making blue animal pancakes with my brothers, or the times when I was just playing Humbug Witch in the kitchen and not trying to come up with anything edible, merely something explosive. So this train of thought led me to realize that Mad Scientists are not really Mad in the bad temper sort of way, but in a crazy off-the wall way. Kind of like the blue guy in Megamind – what a great animated movie.
What’s different about now as opposed to a couple of years ago, I realized that I needed more darks, lights, and odd ones. I have a great stash of brights, but most of my recent work has been done by using patterned fabrics that from a distance, create complex colors. Currently I’m working a series of non-figurative pieces and need more depth in my solid color options.
Following Ann Johnston’s Color by Accident book in my first batch, the darks weren’t dark enough. So the next day, I re-read Lisa Call’s methods, threw in a little salt, left the fabric in the sun out on the back parking lot for a few hours (not the cart though, because salvage bandits will take anything metal in a heartbeat), and then didn’t wash out the dyes until later the next day. The second day batches were much better, and although it was hard to wait, it was worth it.
It’s the time of year that I sometimes work on art for the Japanese Fall Festival. I don’t do it every year, but over the past decade have designed many posters and t-shirts, so looking back through my files, you can see sort of a snapshot progression.
I often return to Japanese wood-block prints from around the 1800′s for inspiration. There I often find originality of compositions and stylization of forms of nature that I need to reinvigorate my work. I love the way flat shapes are filled with complex patterns, and depth inside the picture frame is created not through shading, but by scale, color and composition. I also like the way images seem frozen in a moment of time, and yet at the same time tell a story by selective use of people, objects, and landscapes.
Another interesting aspect of this annual festival is that making outdoor banners for the event is kind of how I got started making fiber art and art quilts. I was trying to come up a with a way to make big outdoor banners — not signs – but vertical banners that would hang from posts — so I started experimenting with kite materials that could survive outdoor weather.
This was about 15 years ago, and they are still used every year at the festival. In the photo above that Russ took last year, you can only see the backs. The fronts are more colorful because they are appliqued color layers edged with black satin stitching. The black kanji above the figures was painted by a famous Japanese calligrapher who was visiting Springfield, and so I left room for him to paint in whatever characters he wanted, then we heat-set the paint with an iron.
