The Degenerate Craft Fair!
I know – I’ve been MIA for a while.
About a million things have happened, and I will happily bring you up-to-date on all that on some other day. But for right now, I’m reminded of a bumpersticker we used to see around New Haven (“My kid and my money go to Yale”). If I were wearing a sign right now, it would say “My brain and my heart belong to the Degenerate Craft Fair.”
I am way to flustered to blog correctly, but here are the basics:
The DCF is being put together by me and Shannon Broder. It involves 20+ artists and will run for five days spread out over three weekends, the first being this Friday night at a DIY place called Silent Barn. The weekend after, it moves to a storefront in Williamsburg, and then the weekend after that it’s in Chelsea at BravinLee. For allllll the details and info, see our website: http://www.degeneratecraftfair.com
A slight aside: Have you ever been to Shecky’s Girl’s Night Out? It’s this really terrible event in the Puck Building – you pay something like $20 to get in; there’s tons of goodie bags and freebies and free ultra-sweet alcoholic drinks, and lots of vendors selling stuff. You go, the whole evening is a blur, and you wake up the next morning with a pounding headache and a brand new purse next to you that I guess you bought (probably stuffed with other things you bought), but good luck if you remember actually doing so.
Ok, so the Degenerate Craft Fair is supposed to be the good version of all that. Vendors (aka artists) selling FUCKING AMAZING stuff at fantastic prices, giving you lots of things to give as ultra-cool Christmas presents or maybe keep for yourself. And yes, alcohol and music and a party-sort-of-atmosphere. And also free to get into. Fun!
So basically I’m scrambling to get all my own work done (tons of cheap editions I’m making – books, “records”, other fun stuff) and also help organize this thing. It’s a lot. But I really hope you’ll consider coming and maybe even re-blog this event if you keep your own blog.
I have a million things to do, so let me close with some of the work that you’ll see at the fair…
Lauren Fatzinger: Beard Scarf
Everest Hall: (color xerox edition)
MiYoung Sohn: One Dollar USA (inkjet print)
Yura Osborn (Imaginary Friends)
Shalimar Luis
(and dare I say, “and much, much more…”?????)
New Henry Darger book!
Hey, there’s a new Henry Darger book…. and it includes an image of one of my works!
I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear it’s really beautiful. I think there’s a free copy for me headed this way via book rate from Germany. Which means I should have it by 2050 or so. So I’m probably gonna go by Strand in a few days and at least visit it! Anyway, pretty cool.
Ask a simple question…
Ok, I’m putting this out there to see if any of you can help with this. I am trying to make an edition of chocolates that will essentially be a riff on Paul McCarthy’s chocolate santa edition.
I am looking to cast about 200 of them and I’m happy to do all the work myself. Actually, what I have in mind is quite simple, so it’s totally doable and shouldn’t be a problem at all – and then I will have this thing I can sell cheaply and give away as Christmas presents. I’m not trying to make a tremendous statement here, I’m just trying to make something for the holidays.
Sounds easy, right? One hitch: I want the chocolate to be vegan.
Lots of perfectly good chocolate is vegan. In fact, most really good chocolate is – it’s really, really easy to go to your corner store and pick out a bar of decent vegan chocolate and eat it on the way home from work (trust me on this). The trick is when it comes to buying chocolate in volume and inexpensively, so that I can cast a whole bunch of these things. But even that doesn’t seem so hard, right?
Well, for starters, all the major brands of chocolate that are manufactured specifically for this purpose (for casting) contain milk. So they’re out. Not to worry, I thought – there’s a whole world available to my via the web; let me hunt around and find another kind that’s suitable.
After spending a few hours coming up with nothing, I eventually wound up on the site of Barry Callebut, a chocolatier who touts the healthy side of chocolate along with its delicious taste. His chocolates are really expensive, but I had already sunk so much time into finding another provider only to come up with nothing that I figured it was worth it to at least investigate his product. Since he isn’t forthcoming about what exactly is in each kind of chocolate he manufactures, I just shot the company an email.
Hi,
Is your chocolate vegan?
Thanks,
Amy Wilson
I thought the response I got back was a little weird, but obviously I had no idea what I was in for.
Dear Ms. Wilson,
In order to help you, can you please provide me with the UPC code for the
product that you are looking for?
Waiting to read you.
Sincerely,
Marlene
Ok, “waiting to read you” aside, I guess this is an ok question. She must think I’m referring to a specific type of chocolate they make, whereas I’m really asking is any of their chocolate ok for vegans. So I wrote back to clarify:
Hi Marlene,
I just mean – is any of your chocolate vegan? I am trying to find chocolate that is vegan and I’m very flexible on type. So please let me know if any of it is.
Thanks, Amy
to which she responds:
Hello Amy,
As far as I know, our chocolate items that do not contain milk would be
suitable for vegans.
I am not sure if this will help but I hope so.
Sincerely,
Marlene
Ok… that’s great, but this company makes a gazillion kinds of chocolate and I’m still not sure which ones have milk and which ones don’t. So I write back:
Hi Marlene,
Right… specifically, which of your chocolate products don’t contain milk? That’s what I’m not sure about.
Amy
Here’s where things take a weird turn. She responds:
Hello!!!
Can you at least tell me where you expect to purchase our products? I will
try to find out what we are supplying to this store (or distributor) …
Waiting to read you.
BYE! BYE!
Marlene
Ok, is it me or did our communication just go totally off the rails all at once there?
At this point, Marlene sort of scares me, so I’m thinking that Barry Callebut is out. Anyone out there know about a vegan chocolate I can buy in volume and cast with? If worse comes to worse I’ll use vegan chocolate chips, but that seems like the most expensive route possible.
Outpost!
Quote:
“Outpost is a group exhibition sponsored by the Visual and Critical Studies Department. It is an inquiry into the value we place on artworks and on the spaces that house them by encouraging the public to trade works of art for goods and services. Organized by faculty member Amy Wilson.”
I’m not entirely sure that descriptive sentence (which I wrote) is actually grammatically correct but here’s the deal: A bunch of students in the VCS department have taken over an unused studio on the 6th floor and turned it into a crazy, alternative exhibition space. Not a white cube at all… it’s bright and colorful with mismatched wallpaper patterns bumping up against bright blue shelves. In it, the students will have their artwork and next to each piece a “mailbox” of sorts – a place where you can leave notes for them, in particular an offer of something you might want to trade for their work. Instead of having a set price list, Outpost is asking the public to speculate on the value of the artwork, but to do so in a way that doesn’t involve money. Maybe you want to offer to clean the apartment of the person who made that awesome painting painting you want, or maybe you want to bake them a cake. Or maybe they want to hold out to trade to someone who offers them a really amazing TV set. Whatever – it’s about the communication, the exchange, and the discussion of what the value is that’s important.
It runs from Oct 15 – Nov 9th and there is an opening (which I hope you will come to!!) on October 15th from 5-7pm. It’s in the 133/141 W21st Street building in the 6th floor studios. Cupcakes will be served!
New book: Middle, 2008-9
This is a book that I started at least a year ago (may have been longer, I’m not sure) and only completely finished just now. It’s strange for a project of mine to take that long, but this one went through so many different changes as I learned more about book-making and pop up books. There is a real ceiling when you’re making things where your abilities and your ideas sort of clash; for me, that ceiling of ability kept constantly changing (I’d learn something new and it would go soaring up or I’d totally screw up another project and it would scare me enough to basically have it clamp down). And I am really, really trying to find a way to combine this idea of the pop-up, which I absolutely love, with my work so that it’s not just gimmicky or cute but instead refers to this interior space which is infinite.
Anyway. At very long last, here is the book.
The cover:
Side view:
Here is a picture of my gimpy hand opening it (not sure why I always show my hand in these pics but I do so why stop?):
Inside the cover:
Then you turn the page and you reach this part you have to assemble:
So it’s not a pure “pop up” in that you have to do some of the work, but it is incredibly easy to assemble. The five-sided cobweb basically comes out at you and all you have to do is latch the side into a little perforated latch I created. When you do, and interior part naturally falls down and it looks like this from above:
…and like this from head-on:
You fold it up to read the rest of the story, but from there on it’s just symmetry in terms of the design part:
and the last spread:
I worked like crazy trying to get the hinges on the pages so that it could be opened and assembled over and over and over (100s of times) with no worries about damaging it… and in the end, I think it has to sort of remain a fragile work of art.
Ok, I’m excited! I think this is a big step!!
About-face.
It’s funny for me to think that there was a time several years ago when I absolutely swore I would never make artist’s books, because I really felt that the whole medium had become this ghetto that women artists for whatever reason gravitated to, only to have relatively few people/institutions collect them… and in that way it was a sort of self-perpetuating ghetto. Why would I ever choose to put myself in a category that is so routinely ignored and overlooked? Why would I basically go out of my way to make my life and my work so much harder than it is already? But I’ve done an about-face on that as I have with crafts and sewing – it’s not so much that I don’t care about that ghetto (I think it definitely exists and is very real) but more like I want to exploit it, to examine it in some sort of way, and maybe… I don’t know… report back? Do something interesting with it?
I’m not sure. But this is the conversation I’ve had in my head over and over today as I bound and re-bound a book, trying to get it just right. It took 12 hours… of course not continuous work, but setting it up, waiting for glue to dry, tweaking it, cutting this or that, waiting for more glue to dry, and so forth. Frustrating as hell. And yet I’m leaving the situation wanting to make more books and thinking that craft-based projects and books may be what I spend the rest of the year doing.
Pictures soon. I just have to get the binding just right…
p.s. sculptures out of paper, too. I was thinking about that all night after I wrote this.
The tunnel book that really doesn’t want to be photographed
That is the only way I can really explain it: The tunnel book I have labored over for the last few weeks is somehow sentient and has decided for itself that it doesn’t want to be photographed properly.
That is why these photos are so… lame.
I’m really frustrated. Few things make me feel quite as satisfied as working on a piece, getting it just right, and then posting a triumphant photo on my blog. It’s kind of a big downer when the photos suck.
Anyway. Bah. Here’s what we have for now.
No, really – it looks awesome in person. Trust me.
So bitter.
Leaf blanket
Ok, it’s hard for me to explain, but this just rocks my world:
I cannot overstate this: When it unrolls, it’s a leaf. That’s completely amazing. The idea of taking the shape of a utilitarian something (a blanket) that we just automatically assume we know and then switching it to something else entirely (something from nature no less)… I dunno. That just rocks my world. And yeah, I know it’s based on Thumbalina, but it’s still a really amazing idea.
I don’t have a baby, but if I did I would buy five of them – I am completely serious. The woman who made this blanket is a genius and I really hope she makes a bazillion dollars off of them. Click on the picture to get to her store or else click here. And give her money.
Tunnel book progress
It’s slow-going, but here is a shot of the tunnel book about halfway done:
I really wanted to make one that was tiny (actually, I wanted to make a series of them that were tiny – like maybe 2 x 4″ when laid flat), but it just wound up being way too difficult – I was so limited by the amount of text I could put on it, that it just didn’t feel right. This one is a little bigger (don’t have it in front of me, but maybe 5 x 6″?) and I’m still limited, but it’s much better. Anyway, once this one is done and bound and everything, I’m going to make a nice little box for it to live in, and I would really like to do a few more with in that format.
Meanwhile, the Tiny Fabric Houses are going amazingly well – I have such a backlog of orders, I’m not really sure when I’ll ever be caught up. And add to this that I’m trying to constantly keep coming up with new models to keep things interesting and… I have a lot of sewing to do!!
Pera Museum!
I’m completely confused… I posted this a few days ago and just noticed that it didn’t show up here…? How very strange.
***
I’m in a group show at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, and I heard today that they made huge reproductions of one of my drawings and are using them to cover their elevator doors. Ok, not sure I’ll ever get to see that given that I’m not going to Turkey any time soon, but I had a nice surprise when I went to their website to look…
The main page cycles through four images, two of which are mine! Very cool!! I love how my work is much better traveled than I am…
