Dangling Participles

Having been suspended from the ceiling of the Armory Northwest in Pasadena for seven weeks, I finally got around to snapping some shots of my Limp Chandelier just before the deinstall. Them's Deb Diehl's video silhouette cameos in the background.

Poupee in the Mist

Reyna, pursuing her investigations this morning at the top of Elysian Park.

Prolegomena to Any Future Chick Art

My testy review of Connie Butler's WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution has been online for a week, but the print version hits the streets tomorrow. The picture shows a little-known portion of Judy Chicago's oeuvre, which is described therein.

Both Sides Now

Here's the back side of one of the five sculptural components of my piece "Out/In," created for Jan Tumlir's 'White Album' show at Shoshona Wayne in 2000, and resurrected for this show opening this Thursday March 15th at West LA College:

A Warning Shouldn't Be Pleasant
March 15 - May 11, 2007

WEST LA COLLEGE GALLERY
9000 Overland Ave., Culver City, CA 90230

Opening Celebration: Thursday, March 15, 2007, 6-9pm
with a musical performance by Wreck of the Zephyr

HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS is proud to present its second off-site project, A Warning Shouldn't Be Pleasant – a group exhibition of 23 California-based artists' responsiveness to the end of the world. The exhibition takes its title from an essay by the poet Alice Notley. Like Notely's subtly brash warning, the selected artists playfully and irreverently examine notions of apocalypse with hope and abandonment. Offering conceptually and metaphorically uncanny responses to a somewhat melancholic world-view-notion through a various range of media and visual languages, A Warning Shouldn't Be Pleasant aims at evoking a series of mercurial and illuminating narratives amongst artworks, which address, embody, and explore this very current and somewhat timelessly elusive and incalculable theme. Revealing connections to belief, doubt, and politics, the artworks here hope to contribute to a larger more realistic conversation that seems to not be happening loudly nor clearly enough, concerning and/or in response to current global obsessions with cultural stasis and battle.

Featured artists include: Jimmy Chertkow, Marcus Civin, Christian Cummings and Michael Decker, Todd Davis, Julie Dermansky, Nicholas Grider, Mark Hagen, Kent Hammond, Jeremiah Harrison, Doug Harvey, Marc Herbst, Gregory Michael Hernandez, Peter Herrmann, August Highland, Candice Lin, Jay Lizo, Katrin Jurati, Caroline Rankin, Greg Santos, Michael Smoler, David E. Stone, and Megan Whitmarsh.

March 15 – May 11, 2007
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday, 10am-4pm

WEST LA COLLEGE GALLERY
9000 Overland Ave., Culver City, CA 90230
Official Map & Directions
Unofficial directions:
get yrself to Culver City off the 10 west or something...exit at Overland...
the campus is on Overland just past Jefferson...
once you turn into the campus, take yr second right (Albert Vera Street) and follow it up to parking lot B...take a right into parking lot B and across the way is the FAC...
the gallery is in the Fine Arts Complex...


for more information email: info@highenergyconstructs.com or call 323.227.7920

Through a glass, Dorkily

AKA Retroactive Breed Parity II. Here is Al Gordon, C.D. as seen through a Pellegrino bottle.

Danceability in the Crosshairs

The other opening I made was Brad Eberhard's & Allan Ludwig's thesis shows out at Claremont Graduate University. Brad, in addition to being a talented painter, is the leader of Wounded Lion. For this evening's musical portion, however, Brad subcontracted to a remarkable act: The Incredible 2-headed DJ Scottie Vera, who regaled the hundred + revellers with such classic dance numbers as "Psycho" and "Hello Lucille, Are You a Lesbian?" These conjoined fellows are on the right track and will almost certainly go all the way!! Photo by Jun.

For Organ Security Please Wear a Vest

I actually made it out to a couple of openings. The unveiling of the Getty version of Tim Hawkinson's Uberorgan (and concurrent 'Zoopsia' exhibit) was embiggened by the gourmet hot dogs and presence of Gordon Haines. My recent LA WEEKLY studio visit with Tim is detailed here. This clipping -- from the Uberorgan's original installation at Mass MoCA in 2001 -- is reminiscent of Cecil Beaton's Jackson Pollock fashion spread in Vogue executed almost exactly 50 years previously. I'll see if I can't dig up the pictures I took of "der Ub" in Manhattan during the Whitney retrospective in 2005.

Retroactive Breed Parity

We have received complaints that Nigel the whippet has been accorded considerable exposure on this blog at the expense of his older greyhound comrades, Albert and Reyna. To begin to address this issue, we offer the above recent snap of Reyna in full regal splendor. Mess of other posts coming soon. Thankyou for your patience. The MGT.
Addendum: In response to a number of misguided comments on the 'cuteness' of this image, it behooves us to point out that it was not posed and that the crown-shaped cushion did in fact find its way into this position entirely by chance. Thankyou. The MGT.