A Time of Other Focus Points

Working on building out a new home (that's the backyard garage/soon-to-be-studio pictured above), after living in the same house for over eight years, has been consuming my time and creative energy throughout the winter. This won't wane soon, and posting about flooring installation doesn't really segue with the other work I update about here. It's been a country minute since I wrote an update - mostly I've just been uploading tangential imagery to Tumblr, which I'm still having fun with despite my sneaking suspicion that most people are only on Tumblr looking for porn. Anyhow, here's an update, some goings-on since January:

• The Howling Mob Society was featured in the  U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia, Italy last autumn. I don't have much information about the exhibit, or how it went down, but I do know that the focus was on creative infrastructure projects like signage, community gardens, and whatnot. The show is being exhibited in short-form in Chicago this spring, but I don't know if our project will be highlighted or not.
• Meantime, I'm in the idea stages of working on an exhibition design about the same Howling Mob project for an upcoming exhibition for the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Colombia College of Art in Chicago in June: Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage.
• This March, I spent a week in Milwaukee working with fourteen Justseeds members and allies on a collaborative project at UMW's Union Gallery during the Southern Graphics Conference. Uprisings: Images of Labor was mostly an amazing experience, as we turned the gallery into a production facility for screenprinting large posters and did a parallel-to-the-SGCI series of our own free presentations and workshops. This whole project was geared to highlight our strengths, much different than the more experimental collaborations we've done in the past. Slideshow of images from that week is below...
• I released a couple of new prints on Justseeds - one a slight re-working of an older letterpress print, and one a digital print version of the Macho B billboard I painted for a Justseeds exhibit during the Pittsburgh Biennial (and re-worked for the Justseeds Migration Now! portfolio with Culture Str/ke).  I also just released the print I worked on from the Uprisings exhibition. I'm in the beginning stages of hashing out a Celebrate People's History poster about the Luddite uprisings in England (1811-13), more on that as it develops.
• Firebrands, the book I worked on with Bec Young and the rest of Justseeds, is still available in print, but we're looking to release an e-book version soon.
• I've begun outlining/researching a pamphlet/zine on the history of Indigenous peoples in the area surrounding what is now Pittsburgh. My basic intention is to create something of a primer for understanding the history of European colonization of this area, as any institutional presentation of Indigenous history here is typically relegated to whatever relationship there was between original peoples and either the French or British colonists during the Seven Year's War.
• I've been brainstorming how to restart the penny-smasher project, a perennial back-burner idea that I would love to bring to fruition sooner than later... meantime, one morning when I really should have been doing something productive, I instead made a running list of my own smashed penny collection. No photos of each yet, but coming soon. Funding ideas for realizing this project are always welcome!
• Mary Tremonte and I worked locally with the Shadbush Environmental Justice Collective on some anti-hydrofracking graphics for their newest newspaper project. Mary did a two-page centerfold splash, and I did a large full-page poster for the back of the paper. Both are meant to be hung in street-level windows, wheatpasted, waved around by angry people on the sidewalk... whatever works in the moment. You can read more about the project and get copies or bundles of the new paper from Shadbush here.

Guns vs. Butter exhibition

For the month of December, 2012, I presented an exhibition at Future Tenant in Pittsburgh that I put together along with Josh MacPhee. "Guns vs. Butter" was the first collaboration between Justseeds and the Interference Archive, and it's also the first time that Interference has lent a body of work out for an exhibit. Josh pooled together a range of historical anti-war prints and posters from the collection at Interference, and I interspersed them with newer anti-war print work from Justseeds, including the Justseeds collaborative portfolio with Iraq Veterans Against the War and Booklyn, "War is Trauma". The show "contextual(ized) current socially-motivated print graphics alongside a history of posters as an integral element of popular grassroots movements against war, colonialism, and military occupation." Check out the slideshow above for a tour (of sorts). Special thanks to Bec Young for help pulling the show together on the gallery walls!

New Scrimshaw project...

This summer I started teaching myself a form of the traditional craft of scrimshaw, which by basic definition is any sort of carving of bone or horn. Usually the term refers to the practice of sailors on whaling ships whittling designs into whale teeth or baleen in their idle time (then rubbing ink or lamp black into the carvings to highlight them), but the practice spans regions and cultures globally. I'm particularly interested in the incarnations of scrimshaw on powderhorns in the Northeastern U.S. during the Seven Year's War - primarily a product of downtime during the colonial exploits of French and British troops that generated a unique folk art and aesthetic particular to a time and region.

The first horn I worked on is a sketchbook of sorts, and includes the original German iteration of my last name as it was brought to Eastern Pennsylvania by the Mennonite Heinrich Schlieffer in 1743. I also worked in some Pennsylvania German design, flowers and hens, from a spice cabinet that I've had since my childhood.

Raise Your Fist!

One of my favorite consequences of posting video work on the internet is the possibility that someone might take the time to tweak your project in a new direction. Over at submedia, they've already got a remix up of the All Power To The People! video I posted just a month ago - and they've reworked the image flow a bit and added a hardcore techno score: "Raise Your Fist" by Angerfist. Nicely done! Now I'm holding out for a remix to the tune of Loretta Lynn's "Fist City"...

All Power to the People!

I've finished up the "fist video" that I was doing documentation work for at the Interference Archive during the end of August. Most of my time was spent color correcting the individual photos, actually, and after digging around in the flatfiles at the Justseeds office I ended up with 360+ images! This online version is three rotations of that sequence, the whole thing is meant to be seen as a constant loop.

Don't miss Lincoln Cushing's great article on the history of the clenched fist in resistance graphics here.

The Drift: Floating Projections along the Allegheny

View Drift River Screenings in a larger map

This Saturday, Sept.29, the folks organizing The Drift will be screening videos from their river-borne project platform at various locations down the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh (map above). Beginning at Herr's Island at 8:30pm, they will be drifting down the Allegheny River toward PNC Park, projecting at several sites along the way and terminating at the Warhol Bridge. I love this concept, and I'm hoping to make the trip via canoe, weather permitting. I've got two videos screening - other participants include Rafael Abreu-Canedo, Scott Andrew, Craig Fahner, Steve Gurysh, Kathy Lee, Ali Momeni, Lucia Nhamo, James R Southard, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, Rachael Wagner, and Erin Womack.

mulch thief: Tumblr

I've got a new Tumblr rolling. I really enjoyed using this format when Tesar Freeman and I were brainstorming and eventually working through the "Commission" show this summer, particularly the posting of tangential graphics and little bits and pieces of research. It felt a bit like putting together a puzzle, or perhaps generating one as we went. Even if many of those thoughts didn't go anywhere concrete, the underlying themes did, and I thought it would be useful to keep up the practice more broadly with my own projects: a graphic collection of tangents, beginnings, ephemera, in-process images, and research. Please check it out, and follow if you're inclined to that sort of thing.