my heroes died of syphilis

ovaries on vellum

When I was nine I stood by as the neighborhood vet strapped my Australian Blue Heeler's paws to the operating table, inverted her, and began fishing around in her belly for the reproductive organs. (I remember watching, with bated breath, ribbons of intestine and other miscellany emerge on the tip of his metal instruments before he finally located the relatively miniscule uterus.) He let me keep the extracted bits and I photographed them extensively when I got home. For some reason it came to mind recently, and this is a sketch from memory of that organ.

Troy Gua & The Collaborati : Meet Greet Rinse Repeat

glyph in progress

Yesterday I handed my glyph over to Troy Gua to be photographed and resined and eventually hung at Monarch Contemporary for the show he's orchestrated and curated, "Troy Gua & The Collaborati : Meet Greet Rinse Repeat". You can sneak a peak at some of the pieces that have already been documented . . . it's a host of fascinating and sometimes surprising conceptualizations by an impressive group local artists. My glyph came with a hole in the center that called to mind a #/pound sign. The pound of flesh association couldn't have been more fortuitous (the fact that I have a grandmother named after the heroine of The Merchant of Venice might have something to do with the association).

The show opens on Thursday, April 1 at 6:00 pm at Monarch Contemporary in the Tashiro Kaplan Building and runs through the end of the month. Considering the number of artists involved in the collaboration, I expect the opening to be quite a fete, let alone a location of pleasurable visual overload.

with camera

Scenes from another studio group meeting, this time at Margie Livingston's studio, which was brimming with all kinds of ensorcelling grids and dripping, marbling plastic and complicated, organic geometry. Her ability to patiently amass incredibly dense objects out of acrylics is impressive. Also snapshots from Joey Veltkamp's studio, Kiki Smith's recent lecture, and Daniel Carrillo's exhibit of ambrotypes at Gage Academy (hey, there I am, happily hanging between Troy Gua and Gala Bent!).

Elle a chaud au cul.

ça sent de l'hystérie

Three ink sketches based on 19th century erotic photographs.

the genitalia of a female syphilitic

on the CAB

As Ms. Huberman wrote, brace yourself, vegetarians. I was invited to write a little blurb about what I'm doing in the studio at the moment, and I thought this would be just the thing to photograph and document on the City Arts Blog. Here it is:

What R U Working On?

Hysterical tongues, of course. I should mention that I was a vegetarian for six years myself, for what it's worth!