Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: The Work of Tara Donovan

I have always loved Tara Donovan's artwork, they way she makes such breathtaking work with such simple materials. She received the 2008 MacArthur “Genius” grant, and an exhibition just opened in Boston to spanning a decade of her work.
This is an abridged version of an interview between Lawrence Weschler and Tara Donavan that appears in the monograph, Tara Donovan. (Via Design Observer)

Lawrence Weschler:
So you graduated from the Corcoran. Then what happened?
Tara Donovan:
I waited tables for six years.
Then I started making this sculpture where I was filling balloons with sand. And, God, it’s really funny actually. They were these natural-color balloons. I realized that if you exposed them to sunlight, they would kind of turn these pinkish hues and you could get all this subtle variation in color. And I would sit at night watching TV with a funnel and a bucket of sand and I would fill these balloons with sand, knot them, and pin them to my wall. So I covered this entire wall in these sand-filled balloons. It was kind of the first big thing I’d ever made.
To conitnue reading the interview click here.

Amy Sacksteder

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with Amy Sacksteder for coffee. We have a few mutual friends and I have heard of her many times. I am thrilled to have finally met her and to continue our friendship. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University and was recently featured in New American Paintings. We share many similar ideas and aesthetics in our work and it is great that she only lives a few miles away!

No more shopping for me.....

Because I just bought this amazing painting, Veil, by my dear friend Kathryn. I have been pining for this painting since I saw it over a year ago. I am happy she put it on her etsy shop and soon it will be on my wall! Yippee!

Blood Bath City, 2nd Annual Art Execution

Two of my new drawings will be included in the second annual Halloween event, Blood Bath City at the Anton Art Center. This juried exhibition will be on display from Friday, October 10- Nov. 2nd. Opening Reception and costume party with live music will be on Oct. 24, 9PM-2AM.

It should be a blood curling good party and exhibition!

Drawing goes where it wants to...

This drawing I began last night for one of my donors for Drawing for ARDS. I started out with the intentions of drawing something that matched the words that she had sent me. However, the drawing just kept going in an alternate direction. I don't like to stop myself when a project is going someplace unexpected, so I just continued. Perhaps she will like the drawing, or maybe she won't. It didn't turn out how I expected, but I like it.
Materials used: watercolor pencils, graphite on rag paper.

New Drawings

Here are a few new drawings I have been working on.
They are all 8X10" and are done with watercolor and graphite on rag paper.

Abbie Miller at the Teton Art Lab

Abbie Miller is exhibiting this week at the Teton Art Lab, In Proximity Tender: Render.

I have been to her studio and her work is amazing! This piece was done with fabric, zippers, and a wooden frame. You can see more of her work from a review of Centrifugal Force, a show at Russell Industrial in Detroit.

"Miller’s sewed sheets of vinyl together with an evolving repetition. While building the sculpture, she sewed into it two-hundred-foot-long zippers that, when zipped up, spiral the fabric into cylinder-like forms that rest – or loosely teeter - on two built wooden frames. Each piece has two forms that counterbalance each other with a strand that reaches across the room like pulled taffy.The texture is ribbed with folds of vinyl that sometimes bubble or pock with a vigor that has a mind of its own. The human-scaled forms help viewers relate to the “controlled chaos” or “organized erratics” they exhibit.From the excesses of fashion to the repetition of cancerous growths (like berle wood), references can be drawn from the sculpture. But the artist refused to share her intention, other than to say she was exploring the interactions between materials and focusing on the “ambiguity” of the forms." ...continue reading the review of her current show.

Abbie recently began working with the Teton Art Lab as head of exhibitions. Congratulations on a great show and the future growth of the contemporary art scene in Jackson Hole.