Mulch Thief

Website (finally) overhauled!

2012-01-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's a little disheartening to look back at old posts where I describe projects I'm working on that never end up materializing. This week, however, I can finally say I've finished one project I've wanted to tackle for the last three years: updating my portfolio site! The new site is live now, have a look here.

I built it using Indexhibit, which I highly recommend for a clean interface and refreshingly stripped-down layout. If you can get over some initial learning curves for those of us not well-versed in css coding (ex: me), there's a good online forum for custom plugins and general support.

Old Yeller's Dance

2012-01-05T21:00:00.000-08:00

I worked up a new video recently, an ominous treatment of the crucial scene in Disney's Old Yeller (1957) wherein Yeller battles the rabid wolf that's been terrorizing the Coates family.

(best w/ headphones)

Silverfish as Signature

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

I never sign my prints - or, at least, I hadn't in ages until we were asked to do so for our editions in the new Justseeds/Iraq Veterans Against the War portfolio (just completed, coming soon). After hand-signing 150 prints and scrawling messages on each of them, I really wanted a stamp or, better yet, an embosser to imprint future signatures. So, I had one made with an image of a silverfish (Lepisma saccharina), most commonly known for being the casual destroyers of paper 'round the world...

DIYDPW - a new blog series

2011-12-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

This morning I've posted the first installment of what I hope will be a regular, weekly blog post every Wednesday on Justseeds highlighting global examples of Do It Yourself Department of Public Works (DIYDPW) projects (I wish I had come up with that acronym, but I owe the idea idea to a friend). Basically, I would define these as any examples of municipal signage or infrastructure, generated by citizens outside of state-sanctioned means, that fulfill a perceived need in the situation within which they are installed. I'll be focusing specifically on street signage and way-finding graphics, and I'll be taking contributions from Justseeds blog readers. Do you have a photo of a great handmade (or otherwise DIY) sign that fixes a problem the local municipality had otherwise overlooked? Send it my way. Email (include a web-ready image and location found) to DIYDPW at gmail dot com

MFA dot biz...

2011-12-01T21:52:00.001-08:00

New "bandit sign" project with Jerstin Crosby. The URL is live...

New projects in motion...

2011-11-20T20:58:00.001-08:00

Back for a month now from a five-week stint around Europe, and working on getting some new projects underway:

- look out for a street sign project with collaborator Jerstin Crosby that I keep chuckling to myself about, photos (and a website) forthcoming.

- initiated a new collaboration with recent Portland-to-Pittsburgh transplant Tesar Freeman. Venue is 707 Penn gallery in downtown Pittsburgh this upcoming June 2012; theme is American history, loosely defined at the moment. Right now we're using Tumblr to banter about all sorts of ideas and imagery almost daily, and you're more than welcome to have a look (and follow us) here.

- right before leaving town, the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial opened it's second wave at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon and the Andy Warhol Museum. I took an organizational role in seeing the Justseeds installation through over at the Miller, with the help of Mary Tremonte and Bec Young (and quite a bit from the aforementioned Tesar Freeman in his capacity as exhibition coordinator at the Miller). Seventeen Justseeds folks participated in this project - we built an indoor landscape of fluorescent-lit billboards, and you can see some in-progress photos here and the finished work here. The Biennial at the Miller was curated by Astria Suparak.

- while in Europe, I worked with 13 Justseeds collaborators (and more friends and cohorts) on an installation for the 29th Graphics Biennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Justseeds won the Gran Prix in 2009, resulting in our 2011 invitation to do an installation at Alkatraz Gallery at Metelkova. There's a whole mess of images from the installation here. After Slovenia, I eventually ended up in Copenhagen, where Mary Tremonte and I (while graciously hosted by Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom) put on a Justseeds: Resourced Portfolio exhibit/presentation at YNKB, and also managed to slip out of town for presentations at schools in Odenske and Holbæk (thanks to Jakob Jakobson and Nis Rømer).

- other travel photos for the curious can be found here...

- and I'm back at editing video again, currently plugging away at a reworking of the scene in Old Yeller where Yeller and the Wolf battle to the death. Stay tuned.

Two New Prints on Justseeds

2011-09-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

I posted a couple of new prints on the Justseeds site this month. One of them a fairly silly but ultimately honest little letterpress number:

...and also my print for the upcoming Justseeds collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War this November. You can read about (and order) the first print here, and the IVAW print here. I also published a "how-to" on the IVAW print here.

"Macho B" billboard and "Tombs Letter" booklet finished

2011-08-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a little preview of the billboard I built/painted as part of the large Justseeds installation we're putting the final touches on for the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University (opens September 16). Participating Justseeds artists created billboards dealing with themes of immigration and borders, and Bec Young, Mary Tremonte and myself managed the project while out-of-town Justseeds folks came in to work on their contributions over the course of the summer. I took quite a few photos of the installation you can check out here, and I'll post the final photos when I've got them. In the downtime around organizing the installation I was able to work on my own billboard, a circus-poster-themed eulogy to Macho B, the last (and oldest) jaguar known to roam wild in the United States. Macho B was a male jaguar whose range extended North into Arizona - this drove him to cross the U.S.-Mexico border freely for about 13 years until he was captured and subsequently euthanized at the Phoenix Zoo under shady circumstances in 2009. (Clicking on either of these images will give you a larger version...)

Earlier in the Spring I wrote a short article called "Canonizing Emma" for a booklet recently published by the new, Philadelphia-based literary press Thread Makes Blanket. The booklet is a republishing of a letter Alexander Berkman wrote to Emma Goldman while he was imprisoned in the Tombs Prison in Manhattan in 1917, and includes some creative and contextual essays. We've got the booklet for sale over at Justseeds, more info here. Thanks to Marissa and Kane for including my essay in their burgeoning project!

Also, I just finished two new prints which I'll post here next week...

Some coyote prints still visible!

2011-07-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend I caught a couple of quick shots of one of the coyote prints that is still visible in the street, I put it in almost exactly three years ago!

Updates and Ideas in Progress this Summer...

2011-06-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

Some projects I neglected to post about when they happened, and some other work I'm concentrating on this summer:

- working heavily right now on the Justseeds installation (photo above) for the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial. Our work will occupy most of the second floor of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon, and involves an arsenal of indoor billboards, fabricated almost entirely from scrap and recycled materials and thematically working from the broadly-defined subject of immigration. The Biennial is spread across five venues this year, and the work at the Miller is curated by Astria Suparak and "feature(s) collectives and artists who work collaboratively in socially engaged ways."

- The Howling Mob Society will be featured in Creative Time's Living as Form online survey exhibition in September, more information on that as it comes to me. From the website: "Living as Form is an unprecedented project that explores over 20 years of cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, and emphasize participation, dialogue, community engagement, and activism around social issues. Living as Form provides a historical look at these socially engaged alternative practices, and the role artists have played in reshaping our world."

- The Howling Mob also participated in Rethinking Pittsburgh's Industrial Legacy, an exhibition and panel discussion (which included myself on the panel) at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh this past April, curated by Leslie Golomb.

- A couple of weeks back I participated in the 5-day March on Blair Mountain in West Virginia as part of the larger anti-mountaintop removal coal mining movement in Appalachia. It's been difficult to find the time and space to really grasp the whole event as it unfolded, and I hope to write something more substantial on the Justseeds blog in the next month or so. In the meantime, I posted a slideshow of a lot of the handmade signage we experienced along the way, most of it from folks who disagreed with our message - kind of a slogan v. slogan thing.

- I'm almost finished watching all of the movies on my massive list for finding and capturing a database of scenes involving violent human/animal interactions in Hollywood movies. I've been plugging away at this project as a slow background process since the Spring of 2007 (believe it or not). I've made a couple of short videos throughout, but I'm looking forward to finishing the acquisition work and diving into some actual "making" - most of these movies are downright crap, and it's really been weighing on me to slosh through them all. I have an idea that I'll host a gathering where I'll show some of the highlights, get some outside input, and then watch Cujo - by far my favorite of the hundreds I've seen! Stay tuned for more on that...

- I'm working on a signage project involving the neighborhood that rests along the Allegheny river on an old Lenne Lenape settlement known as Shannopinstown (~1731-1754) in what is now Lawrenceville in Pittsburgh...

- ...and might also start working with local artist Jerstin Crosby on some other public signage TBD.

- Finally started carving on a replica of the dagger Alexander Berkman used in his assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick in Pittsburgh (1892). I'll post some in-progress photos of that here pretty soon.

- I'm headed off to Slovenia this summer to work with Justseeds on our installation as part of the 29th Slovenia Graphics Biennial in the capital, Ljubljana. Potential travel after that includes hanging with my cousin in Berlin, working with Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom at Tryk Tryk Tryk in Copenhagen, and tabling with Justseeds at the London Anarchist Bookfair.

- And it looks like this summer I might finally get around to revamping the portfolio site, which is long overdue, with the help of longtime cohort Ally Reeves (who just revamped her own site here). Suggestions welcome!

video: presentation w/ Greg Sholette & Jim Costanzo, NYC 10.14.10

2011-05-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

Last October, I was invited to Brooklyn by Not an Alternative to present on behalf of the Howling Mob Society, alongside Greg Sholette (REPOhistory, PAD/D, recent author of Dark Matter) and Jim Costanzo (REPOhistory, Aaron Burr Society). It was an excellent time, and personally very exciting to be presenting with a couple of people whose work has had a great influence on my thinking. For those interested to see the talk, here it is in it's entirety (I start the yammering at 41:16).

Books scattered all over the place...

2011-03-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

Ever since I began to focus on a more research-based practice, I've realized how instrumental the books around me have become to the creative process - so much so that I might actually argue that when I'm reading, I'm working on an idea, or at least starting points for ideas which later formulate. Initially that probably seems a flimsy argument, especially if I'm caught reading any of these books in a coffeeshop at lunchtime re: Leisure (or spending time blogging about them), but I'm sticking to it - as an old mentor once told me "I'm Working even when I'm not working", and I think this is really true for a lot of folks I know.

Unfortunately, on that note, I've been wanting to build new bookshelves for a couple of years, yet refused to prioritize the project. In the meantime, all the books I've accumulated in the past year have began to spill off the existing shelves and all over the floor of my room. I've been trying to embrace this mess and look at it as a positive indicator of self-education, which tricks me into ignoring the mess only about half the time that I acknowledge that it's increasing. I'm going to build those shelves this year, and I'm not going to read all of the books cascading from the current ones, but I'll at least try. What follows is a full list of all the shelf-less books as of this week, each of which has either been read, will probably be read soon, or was at least partially browsed recently in reference to some idea or another (a few of which I actually went so far as to write small reviews for on Goodreads if I finished them) and all of which are in small piles on my floor surrounding my desk and bed.

The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh [review here]
The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger
Dark Matter, Gregory Sholette [review here]
Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy, Gabriel Kuhn [review here]
The Tiger, John Vaillant
The South is Still Rising: Contemporary Radical and Anarchist Activism in Richmond, Virginia from 1994-2004, Mo Karnage
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Kevin Kenny [review here]
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Villians of All Nations, Marcus Rediker [review here]
The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
Solomon's Builders: Freemasons, Founding Fathers, and the Secrets of Washington DC, Christopher Hodapp (currently reading)
Digger Tracts 1649-50, edited by Andrew Hapton (bootlegged zine-style)
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy
The Book of Genesis as illustrated by Robert Crumb
Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, Paul Stamets
Your Action World, David Byrne
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne
The Black Panthers Speak, Philip S. Foner
Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
Signal :01, Journal of International Political Culture and Graphics
1877: Year of Violence, Robert V. Bruce
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory v.12 #1 & #2
Filling the Void: Interviews about Quitting Drinking and Using, on Doris Press (zine)
Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics #2
King Leopold's Ghost: Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West, Eric Baratay & Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier
Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, Dara Greenwald & Josh MacPhee
Reader's Digest North American Wildlife
Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist
Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind, Henry Hobhouse
Undoing Gender, Judith Butler
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
Radical Street Performance, Jan Cohen-Cruz
The Ganzfeld, #3
Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell
The Voice of the Coyote, J. Frank Dobie
Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman
Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Joshia W. Cotter
Secret Pockets, Mary Tremonte (Encyclopedia Destructica)
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib

Rejuvenated!

2011-03-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

[studio before cleaning]

Cleaning out the studio space I use in our house's basement felt a lot like clearing out one thousand cobwebs from my brain - I recognize how cliché that sounds, but the whole thing amounted to a real mental overhaul. There were literal cobwebs and mutated dust bunnies all over the basement to shopvac, combined with the fractured remnants of unrealized ideas, scratched up CD's and unlabeled cassettes, and a ton of junk I never should have kept but figured I'd need, you know, some day. I probably hadn't done any real work down there on a project in 2+ years, and it took me a country minute to finish the whole studio cleaning/rearranging scheme, truly indicative of a larger process of rejuvenating myself and encouraging space in which to start tinkering again (tinkering which will hopefully lead to some things being made). I feel better already. Now to start making a productive mess of the place...

[studio after cleaning]
[tools all hyper-organized on zen-inducing pegboard]

[notes for long-overdue projects]

Reflections...

2011-01-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

On my first day in Mumbai last April, I managed to squeeze out an odd list of current influences on my practice in my notebook. I think being completely un-moored from anything familiar (besides my travel buddies) caused some inner searching. I'm told this happens. At any rate, this past year has seen a lot more reflection than production, and it's been nice to have the book out so that it looks like I've been busier than I really feel. I thought it would be interesting (and something of an exercise for myself) to post that list here.

A list of themes relevant to current ideas in my work:

- Euro-American frontier mythology
- coyotes, trickster characters in culture
- fear of the Wilderness
- fear of being eaten by animals
- apex predators as keystone species
- anarchist theory and influence on US culture (or lack thereof)
- punk aesthetic (co-opted and non)
- cowboy aesthetic in fashion (see "frontier mythology" above)
- American game-hunting culture
- subterfuge
- municipal signage, including "DIY" or citizens' signage
- historical markers and monuments
- interactive maps
- pickup trucks
- Calvin & Hobbes (see "subterfuge" above)
- animal sexuality in mythology and biology
- perceived authority of signage (see "municipal signage" above)
- MST3K/Science Fiction films
- propaganda/image-based power dynamics
- bicycles
- composting with worms

I also have a design in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory v.12 no.2, a regular publication of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Josh MacPhee designs the journal now, and interspersed selections from the Justseeds RESOURCED portfolio in this issue of writings on climate change. You can get a copy of Perspectives here.

Additionally, I did the illustration for the December page of the 2011 Justseeds/AK Press/Eberhardt Publishing "WORK" calender. Josh designed this calender too, and it sure is a handsome thing on a wall. Pick it up here.

Howling Mob/Greg Sholette/Jim Costanzo presentation in NYC

2010-10-10T19:08:00.001-07:00

If you're in New York City on Thursday, I'll be presenting on behalf of the Howling Mob Society as part of Not An Alternative's Open Sourcing the City: Invited and Uninvited Participation series. I'm excited to be joining Jim Costanzo (Aaron Burr Society) and Gregory Sholette, both of whom were involved in REPOhistory (which was highly influential to myself and the Mob project!). Read a more in-depth description of the themes we'll be discussing here.

Where: The Change You Want To See Gallery, 84 Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
When: Thursday, October 14 at 7:30pm

"The Roar" at video_dumbo, Dumbo Arts Festival

2010-09-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

If you're in Brooklyn this weekend, I have a piece ("The Roar", 2009) in the "Faunatica" program of video_dumbo, curated by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy as part of this year's Dumbo Arts Festival. Faunautica is a 68 min. program running on the opening night of the fest, Friday, September 24, at 122 Water Street between Washington and Adams.

posters at "Dig It!" one night pan-Appalachian exhibit/discussion

2010-09-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Last week I ran a quick-n'-dirty set of the posters from the Resourced portfolio for the "Dig It! (But Not Like That)" pan-Appalachian, resource-extraction-themed exhibition and discussion at Artist Image Resource. Working with available inks (brown is easy to make!) on newsprint, I layered these on the wall as soon as they were dry, leaving a pile on the floor for people to take (and encouraging them to pull them off the wall as well). Mary ran some more prints the night of the show, and the pile kept getting snatched up! Thanks to Jude Vachon and Angela Wiley for organizing!

8 Hour Projects - Collaboration with Mary Tremonte at Allegheny College

2010-09-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

This past weekend I traveled with collaborator Mary Tremonte up to Meadville, PA to take part in the annual 8 Hour Projects exhibition at Allegheny College, curated by Darren Miller. Rather than approach the opportunity with a full-blown thesis, Mary and I worked playfully and loosely with imagery from American game-hunting culture and themes of predator/prey relationships in North America.

Earlier in the week, I took several of Mary's drawings and rendered multiples of them in black and fluorescent adhesive vinyl. Mary made a pattern from an image of a leg-hold trap that I recently used for a design in an upcoming AK Press calender - the idea was to make a large tessellation of the image, wallpaper-style, by screenprinting directly on the wall. When we found out we had our own room in the Megahan Gallery, things got a bit sillier as we decided to switch out the flood bulbs in the track lighting for blacklight CFL's which would coordinate with fluorescent vinyl and printing inks!

14 artists participated in the event, a day-long session involving a wide range of artists and practices and a steady stream of visitors asking questions and, in some cases, participating in production of some of the work. The whole deal was a blast, many thanks to Darren and Allegheny College (and the Penny Bar) for hosting us!

New Stickers...

2010-07-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

I had a big run of these snotty little propaganda pieces done this month, a re-working of my print for the newly released Justseeds RESOURCED Portfolio project.

Howling Mob Society in Afterall Online

2010-07-05T14:34:00.000-07:00

I had a long phone conversation with writer Daniel Fuller this winter - he had driven to town from Philadelphia specifically to find the Howling Mob Society historical markers after hearing about them at the Creative Time Conference in NY last fall. It's a nice article, despite the Shepard Fairey references at the end (his posters are now pasted nearby, but I would argue that the motivation behind his "Obey" brand is of a very different nature than the HMS work). Daniel also wrote captions for all his photos which offer some further insight as to the placement and orientation of the markers. Feels like we did this ages ago, it's nice to read fresh opinions on it!

Read the article here...

Firebrands is out in the world!

2010-05-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

When I reached Portland for the last leg of my two month's journey, I was soon handed a copy of Firebrands, the book project that I and others labored over for the last year and a half. It was wonderful to see all of those emails, jpegs, conversations, and pdf's finally becoming what they were meant to be: a book, an object out in the world, to be read, shared, discussed, and used! I'm very proud of it now, and of all the effort that Bec and I and the folks at Justseeds put into it. It's hard for me to know what to say beyond that, but suffice to say I'm satisfied. You can get it from Microcosm Publishing, AK Press, or right from us at Justseeds. Give me a shout, tell me what you think.

Stay tuned for updates on the new Justseeds space we're working on in Pittsburgh, some much-needed revamping on my portfolio site, and some other projects I hope to get underway as summer unfolds. I've come home refreshed and confident but feeling like I'm not getting enough of my own ideas into workable projects, so here goes a new chapter...

For the voyeur in you, check out the scores of pictures I've posted from the travels in Australia, India, and the cross-country drive from Portland to Pittsburgh in a rental moving all the Justseeds operations to the new space.

UPDATE: Just found out yesterday that Stuart and I did not receive the grant we applied for through the Puffin Foundation over six months ago. We sought to fund production of a touring penny smasher that would feature depictions of labor and environmental struggles in the Appalachian coal mining industry throughout history (illustrated by Bill Yund), but their "Board of Directors was not able to respond favorably to (our) request for funding"...

Out of Office

2010-03-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm finally off to Australia: a country I've wanted to visit since I was a child. With evolutionary biologist and solid pal Ben Vernot, I'll be traveling from there to Mumbai, India in April to visit my old cohort, Ally Reeves, then up to Delhi and back over to Sydney for another spell. I'm back in the States in early May to pack up Justseeds Distro HQ in Portland and drive it (with Mary Tremonte) across the country to our new digs in Pittsburgh! I'll try to post while I'm away, but please forgive me in advance for any lulls in communication... Likely I'll be posting photos throughout the trip on my Flickr stream.

When I return, the "Firebrands" book should be fresh from the printer, I'll know the verdict on the Puffin grant for the penny smasher project, I'll be figuring the details on running Justseeds distro HQ from it's new home, and I'll be starting work on a new (and my first) film! I'm looking at overhauling my website too, whenever the time and inspiration conspire to motivate me in the coming months.

a post-Providence high...

2010-02-09T12:33:00.000-08:00

Getting on the train back to Pittsburgh in a few hours after an incredibly productive two weeks in Providence at AS220! I finished ten prints while here, eight of which will show up over time in the Justseeds store. Also got the opportunity to speak in Ian Russel's class at Brown University last week, and do a public presentation at the AS220 performance space last night. On top of that I pulled some dish-dog shifts at the Secret Cafe and met some really great people along the way!

Special thanks are due for the tremendous support and positivity I received in the printshop from from Jacques, Morgan, Jay, and Kat. Rick Ring at the downtown public library Special Collections room helped me source some amazing old imagery from a section on North American wildlife, and through it all Meredith Stern was the perfect host!

Slideshow/Discussion in Providence this Wednesday!

2010-02-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

EDIT: The talk has been moved to Friday due to a snowstorm that never happened! See updated info below:

If you're in Providence, Rhode Island this week, come by AS220 on Wednesday the 10th and participate in the discussion and slideshow I'm putting on! It's free to the public and starts at 6pm at the AS220 performance space on Empire Street:

"I Brake For Historical Markers"
5-6:30pm, riday, February 12
Pittsburgh-based artist Shaun Slifer will present a slideshow and discussion of problematic and progressive historical monuments and plaques with an eye towards remembering the often-buried stories of struggles for social justice. Slifer will discuss the Howling Mob Society's 2007 guerilla historical marker series commemorating the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

[that photo credit goes to Jenny Baggs of Nashville]

In Providence at AS220

2010-02-02T18:42:00.000-08:00

From now until February 14th, I'm more than happy to be the Artist in Residence at Providence's multifaceted AS220. I'll be working exclusively in their letterpress print shop, taking a slight departure from my usual practice and focusing on getting some small prints out of my head and onto paper with the help of their Vandercook No.4 press. I hauled three bags, overladen with reams of new paper, through Amtrak trains and stations all day Monday with the generous help of Providence writer Walker Mettling, himself returning from a month-long residency at Pittsburgh's Cyberpunk Apocalypse. Besides printing and more printing, I'll be doing a presentation on Wednesday the 10th, at 6pm in the AS220 performance space. "I Brake for Historical Markers" will be a slideshow and discussion of progressive and alternative historical markers and plaques.

Bec Young will take over the residency for the second half of February when I return to Pittsburgh. Special thanks to Justseeds cohort Meredith Stern for making this happen for both of us!

Working in Winter

2010-01-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

Things have been somewhat slow lately and there's not much to post about, but I gathered a few points up so it doesn't look like I'm just hibernating:

- it's (almost) official: Justseeds is moving our distribution headquarters from Portland to Pittsburgh, so I'll be taking on some new roles in the cooperative, to be determined.

- a review I wrote for the Justseeds blog regarding the Shepard Fairey exhibition at the Warhol Museum this fall was just printed up in the Nor'easter, a publication of the Northeastern Anarchist Federation.

- fingers crossed on a recent grant application to get funds to make the penny smasher project come to life. I've applied with friend and collaborator Stuart Anderson and would be happily working with Pittsburgh illustrator Bill Yund.

- for the first two weeks of February, I will be in a residency program at AS220 in Providence. I'm going to focus on letterpress, every day and nothing but! I'll be doing a presentation about progressive and alternative historical markers at their performance space on Wednesday, February 10.

- I've entered in all of the Howling Mob Society markers into my favorite new website, the Historical Marker Database! This site makes me want to hunt down more of the good ones out there...

- finished almost all the copyediting for the book, which is going to be called Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas and should be published in the late spring (no exact date yet and we're still working on the cover design and layout).

- this April I plan to head off to Mumbai, India to visit longtime friend and cohort Ally Reeves, who's currently there working under a Fulbright scholarship. Then off to Sydney, Australia. Very excited about this...

Old image, new life...

2009-11-21T16:52:00.000-08:00

Last week, with the help of two good friends, I was able to finally do a screenprint run of an image I made as a two-part stencil years ago. The old prints were part of Josh MacPhee's traveling "Stencil Pirates" exhibit, which happened maybe a year or so before the book was published. The stencil has seen a lot of paint since then, and it's on it's last legs. This summer I sprayed large transparencies directly from the stencil so I would always have something to burn screens from. The screened version still looks a lot like a stencil with it's inconsistent lines and overspray. The original idea came when my stolen bike was returned to me after I put posters all over my Nashville neighborhood asking for it back - the stencil said "search..." at the top left, but that part didn't make it on to this print.

UPDATE: These just posted to the Justseeds store for those interested in picking one up...

"Signs of Me" pilot project underway

2009-10-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I helped six kids between the ages of 6 and 8 realize "street signs" that they dreamed up. I'd never helped kids that young, it was quite a trip! Part of a project by Pittsburgh artist Carley Parrish, "Signs of Me" is a Sprout funded "Spark" initiative where kids get to design signs that they'd like to see around the city about their favorite things (swimming, skateboarding, the night sky, etc). They rendered their ideas in Illustrator last week, and then I cut them out of vinyl using my plotting equipment. I brought everything in in stacks of stickers and we set to work assembling the signs - next week Carley installs them around the Polish Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh, more pics when they get up! Pictured are Gaia, Jasmine, and Genley.

Book Draft Finished!

2009-10-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

If all is going as planned, then as you are reading this I am en route to visit some old friends in North Carolina and then to hit the beaches of the Outer Banks for some straight up vacation time after finally turning in the first draft of the book I am writing/editing for Justseeds. This book saw me researching and writing for the better half of the summer, with little time for other projects (hence a lack in posts), and it's a real relief to get a workable draft to Microcosm and walk out the door to a whole lot of doing nothing in particular for a country minute. Looks like the book will be titled "Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas" - it is essentially an illustrated primer of radicals from the Americas for a "young adult" audience. Comes out some time next year, but at the moment I couldn't tell you exactly when (in time for Christmas 2010, I hope...) My accomplice in the book is fellow Justseeder Bec Young, recently transplanted to Pittsburgh by way of Detroit. The pic above is my work station at home - this is what my world has looked like for the last three months or so, and the garden has suffered some as a result. It's been an adventure, if you're into that sort of thing (I am). My head is filled with so many stories...

One addition I did manage to make to the blog is a nifty little badge on the right hand side from our friends at ilovemountains.org: you can enter in your zip code and see just how connected you are to mountaintop removal coal mining, in case you were somehow feeling comfortable about where you probably get your electricity. Give it a shot, visit their website, and spread the word. We just might stop the bastards yet.

Little Rock coyote track...

2009-08-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

Bill Daniel just sent me over this photo from our tour this past June. As I was installing coyote tracks in the roads of some of the towns we visited, Bill took some photo documentation. Most of it is on B&W film which I haven't seen yet, but he did send this great digital shot (which I must have taken on his camera) of him driving the van over a freshly installed track a couple of times for good measure. This shot was in Little Rock, Arkansas - I've been laying low on installing more tracks in Pittsburgh while they repave some streets...

Justseeds Retreat 2009 in Braddock

2009-08-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, the Pittsburgh contingent of Justseeds (Mary "Mack" Tremonte, Bec Young, and myself) hosted Justseeds' 2009 planning retreat at the convent in Braddock, PA with the generous help of the folks at Transformazium and Mayor John Fetterman. Much was accomplished, including the above obligatory silly group portrait - this one in front of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, which roared without pause across the street from where we met, ate, and slept. It was an invigorating experience, despite the mental toll of three days of meetings!

Pictured are (top R to L): Kevin Caplicki, Nicolas Lampert, Colin Matthes, Pete Yahnke, Bec Young, Roger Peet, Kristine Virsis, Alec "Icky" Dunn.
(middle L to R): Melanie Cervantes, Favianna Rodriguez, Erik Ruin, Molly Fair, Jesse Purcell.
(kneeling in front R to L): Hippopatumus Lampert, Josh MacPhee, Dara Greenwald, Mary Tremonte, Meredith Stern, and myself.
Not pictured were Chris Stain, Swoon, Jesus Barraza, and Fernando Marti.

"Crushed Totally" video party backdrop

2009-07-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

Although this video will probably never make it into my general portfolio (and now that I think of it will probably never even be seen publicly again!) I thought I ought to at least post it here. In June, I agreed to edit together this video for a one-time viewing at the "My So-Called Bike" fundraiser party that some close friends were organizing. The party was held at Pittsburgh's Free Ride Recycled Bike Cooperative, which I worked with for several years, on Saturday, June 20, 2009. Profits from the party went to the new Free Ride summer programs and to the Book 'Em! Books to Prisoners program. The party was themed after the short-lived teen television drama "My So-Called Life" (1994-95), and participants accordingly dressed more or less like they did in high school (not a far stretch for many).

The video, entitled "Crushed Totally: World Happiness Dance Total Bust Infinity Loop Or Like Whatever", consists entirely of re-edited and slowed down clips from original MSCL episodes, with attention paid to non-dialog scenes with excruciating teen drama, longing gazes, locker leans, and any scene I could find involving a bicycle. Meant to be a tongue-in-cheek backdrop for an already ridiculously themed party, "Crushed Totally" was projected large on a cinderblock wall behind the beer table and adjacent to the raging dance floor (the video has no sound). The party was a success, money was raised, and a whole lot of people stood and watched this absurd video while they waited in line for alcohol, or maybe hung out casually waiting to be dragged into the giant Trapper Keeper for a bit of "Seven Minutes in Trapper Keeper Heaven" (I'm not making that part up). Creation of this video resulted in a moderate emotional crisis in which the editor began to feel as though the original television show bore a terrifying resemblance to his actual life, somehow...

Stamp by bUZ bLURR

2009-06-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

While on tour with Bill Daniel earlier this month, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of (hot and humid) days in Little Rock, Arkansas at the Arkansas Community Arts Center (ACAC). Bill did a two-night show with bUZ bLURR (aka Colossus of Roads) - the walls at the ACAC were filled with Bill's Texas punk photos and bUZ's stencil portraits (see below). I had a chance to chat with bUZ a bit on the second day about why he started doing mail art, when he got involved in the railroad, and how he turned Tav Falco on to Jack Kerouac books in high school growing up in Gurdy, AR. bUZ takes close-up flash photos of people and turns them into intricate papercuts, and many of these eventually become postage stamps. Today I was excited to get a stamp in the mail from bUZ taken from a photo he took of me in Little Rock!

Tour Dates with Bill Daniel

2009-06-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

Here's the schedule for the tour I'm headed out on with Bill Daniel. We'll be showing Bill's film "Who is Bozo Texino?", as well as putting up a couple shows of Bill's work along the way. I'll be opening for the film with a short presentation about a couple of current projects of mine. Hopefully I won't take any photos like the one above... although that is the tour van.

June 5 -> St. Louis, MO - Cranky Yellow
June 6 -> St. Louis, MO - Black Bear Bakery
June 7-9 -> Dallas, then Austin, then back to Dallas... (that's in Texas, no gigs there)
June 10 -> Shreveport, LA - Danzell House (? house show ?)
June 11-12 -> Little Rock, AK - Chaulk Legends @ Arkansas Community Arts Cooperative (w/ Buz Blurr aka Colossus of Roads)
June 13 -> Nashville, TN - Little H amilton Collective / Firebrand Infoshop
June 14 -> Knoxville, TN ?

I'm also excited to bring along my newly revived 1970(?) Polaroid Land Camera 420 and a slew of Fuji compatible film I just ordered. It's been a country minute since I've been serious about (and able to take) Polaroids, and what better time than on a roadtrip... and what better way than with an out-of-date film format? Onward!

Howling Mob at "Class Matters" conference

2009-05-27T20:52:00.001-07:00

The Howling Mob Society will be presenting on Thursday, June 4 during the Working Class Studies Association's annual "Class Matters" conference. The conference will take place on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Details from the conference program:

Session C—2:30-3:45 p.m. - Thursday, June 4
Pitt Cathedral of Learning, 2nd Floor, room 252

C3. "Contested Markers: Two Views on Historical Commemoration"
Chair: Joel Woller, History, Carlow University
Howling Mob Society, Independent, “The Howling Mob Society Reclaims the Historical Marker”
Kenneth C. Wolensky, Penn State University and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,
“Preserving and Interpreting Industrial and Working Class History Sites”

Upcoming Book, Upcoming Tour!

2009-05-09T08:13:00.001-07:00

I've finally begun the next stage of work on a book that Microcosm Publishing asked Justseeds to produce this year. I'll be co-editing and wrangling the book with Detroit-based artist and puppeteer Bec Young: I'm handling the text editing and research, while Bec is pulling together all of the graphics and layout. The book (which we are currently seeking a catchy title for) will be something of a primer on radical social justice activists from the Americas, a quick and dirty run through some 80 people you likely didn't learn about in high school. Aimed at "young adults", the book will feature illustrations (which are already looking amazing) by Justseeds artists alongside short summaries of who these people were/are, what they did, and suggestions for further reading. I'm very excited about this project coming together - a couple months back Joe Biel (Microcosm co-founder and organizer) and I had an invigorating conversation about the small, cheap books and zines that had a hand in radicalizing us in our teens, and I'm looking forward to creating a similar "tool" of inspiration for future generations! It's looking like the book will be out this fall, currently I can be found fact-checking research for it at the library.

Speaking of Justseeds, Milwaukee-based artist (and new dad) Brandon Bauer has just started an interview blog. If you have time, check out an online interview with a few folks from Justseeds that he just posted last week. Right out of the gate you can find a healthy smattering of some of the rampant sarcasm we traffic in when we're not being super-serious about political graphics...

Also, in June I will be headed South for a week on the road with filmmaker, creative multi-tasker and all-around charmer Bill Daniel. Besides some general errand running and taking of photos of strange things in Texas, Bill will be screening his beautiful quest of a documentary "Who is Bozo Texino?" at several venues, and I will be looking to stick more coyote tracks into the ground in cities I've never spent much time in (perhaps doing brief presentations on the subject before each screening?). More on that scheme as the tour solidifies...

Signs in Milwaukee

2009-04-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Some of the signs I created as collaborations with Justseeds folks finally made it up in the streets of Milwaukee...

Video of Justseeds Collaboration in Milwaukee in March

2009-04-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Ross Nugent, who I originally met as part of Pittsburgh Filmmakers (when they were generous enough to let us at Free Ride host the "Bike Bike!" community bicycle recycling project conference in 2007) and who now resides in Milwaukee, made this sweet video documentary of the Justseeds installation "Which Side Are You On?" that we worked on this past March... thanks Ross!

...in Chicago at Columbia College

2009-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'm spending this week at Columbia College in Chicago as part of the school's Critical Encounters program. The theme this year is "Human|Nature", and I'm going to have my hands full. Monday I had planned on working with Joan Giroux's "Artist/Activist" class doing a version of the coyote tracks project and hopefully getting some of them installed in spots around Chicago (which has a burgeoning coyote population). Unfortunately it was rainy yesterday and the crack filler used in the process doesn't set on wet streets, so I'm looking at trying again later in the week. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll be performing a day of back-to-back presentations in Fereshteh Toosi's class, where I'll be wrangling my ideas regarding the ongoing animal-attack videos I've been plugging away at for the last two years. And, later in the week I'm doing a public lecture about some of my recent individual and collective projects, including Justseeds. The public lecture will be this Thursday, April 16 at 6:30 pm in the Hokin Lecture Hall at Columbia (623 S. Wabash, 1st floor). Come by if you're in town!

"Loaded" Opens in Chicago

2009-03-19T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Loaded: Hunting Culture in America", curated by Audrey Michelle Mast and Ann Wiens, opened this week at the Glass Curtain Gallery, 1104 S. Wabash in Chicago. I have two videos in the exhibition, "The Roar" and "Hylophobia". From the press release:

In contemporary America, where people no longer need to hunt for survival, hunting culture – with its roots in notions of American independence, the frontier spirit, dominance over nature, and rugged individualism – has evolved to become an aesthetic and a lifestyle choice, a sport steeped in regional and family traditions. Many contemporary artists and designers have gravitated toward either the aesthetics or the cultural/social phenomena of hunting as the subject of their work, giving us objects, images, and spaces that range from kitsch to realism and hard-edged social commentary. This group exhibition, "Loaded: Hunting Culture in America," timed to coincide with the college-wide Critical Encounters initiative "Human|Nature," will take a deliberately ambivalent view toward the morality of hunting and address the subject as social, cultural, and artistic phenomenon, ideally nudging viewers to question their own preconceptions regarding hunting.

I'm excited to check out the show next month, when I'll be spending a week at Columbia University as part of the aforementioned Critical Encounters initiative. In April I'll be working with a class on a version of the coyote tracks project, doing a day of back-to-back presentations in Fereshteh Toosi's class about the Wilderness videos that are forever in-process, and doing a public lecture on some of my other work in the last year.

"Loaded" runs until April 29.

"Which Side Are We On?" Justseeds collaboration in Milwaukee!

2009-03-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

I just returned from spending the last week in Milwaukee, collaborating with 13 other members of the Justseeds cooperative on an exhibit at the Union Gallery at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM). We spent six straight days working 15-17 hours per day to bring together a massive installation from scratch, using largely recycled materials and cheap lumber and paint. Besides being an intense exercise in collaboration and compromise, it was also probably one of the best-supported shows I've been involved in. UWM staff and students were extremely helpful throughout the week as we all cobbled together something of a massive sculptural theater of impending doom and expressions of hope for a more just future. For my part, I made a pack of carbon-copy coyotes out of old boxes, put a life-sized cut-out of a kodiak grizzly up on the edge of a collapsed model highway overpass, and lit the exhibit with all kinds of random colored gels from a rather sketchy hydraulic lift.

The whole installation process was really an intense ride. Having just returned, I'm having a little trouble parsing out all of the elements of the past week into something articulate, so for now I'll post a couple of pics and direct towards some in-process images folks were posting on the Justseeds blog. Other photographers were on hand documenting the whole process - these images should be on the Justseeds Flickr in the next couple of weeks as they are sorted through for inclusion in the exhibition catalog.

You can track the transformation of the space over the week in these photos from Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and the opening, plus some other detail shots here and here.

From the press release: "Which Side Are You On?" examines the use of walls as physical and mental barriers that create de-facto segregation, whether it is the walls that divide nation states, the streets that separate one side of town from the other, or the barriers that separate humans from the environment. Which Side Are You On? challenges these barriers while envisioning a more just and sustainable future.

More Exposed Coyote Tracks

2009-02-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

This week I went to take a photo of one of the bronze coyote tracks I installed last fall, as it had recently become fully exposed in the winter traffic. Unfortunately it bordered on a sizeable pothole, and when I walked up to snap a photo I found it had become dislodged and was laying face-down in said pothole. I stuck it in my pocket and took it home to look at closer - I'll probably reinstall it in the spring. I suppose one risk to positioning these in already-distressed areas of the street is that they may be engulfed by the destruction that comes with winter weather's impact on asphalt.

In April, I will be heading out to Columbia College Chicago to work with students alongside educators Fereshteh Toosi and Joan Giroux. We'll be working with these bronze tracks, and doing some research about predator animals habituating to urban settings, particularly the growing instances of coyotes in Chicago. I'm hoping to get the students interested in some sort of online mapping project which could combine recent urban coyote sightings with placement of these bronze chunks, as well as some combination of whatever new ideas these kids will likely bring to the project. I'm excited to see what directions we'll take...

Jon Brodsky's "Make Your Own Truth" Book Released with Encyclopedia Destructica

2009-02-01T07:57:00.000-08:00

Last winter I participated in the second installment of Jonathan Brodsky's collaborative performance series with the folks at Encyclopedia Destructica, which they call BYOPPT - Bring Your Own Power Point. The night consists of over a dozen lightning-fast presentations on a myriad of random subjects, the only restrictions being 1.) 20 slides, with no more than 20 seconds of talking per slide, and 2.) you cannot present on the content of your day job. My presentation was about Alexander Berkman's attempted assasination of Henry Clay Frick during the Battle of Homestead in 1892, and his friends' subsequent and daring attempt to tunnel him o ut of prison in 1900.

Starting in 2007, the folks at Encyclopedia Destructica have picked a guest artist to do a book at the culmination of their publishing year, their honorary "Flying Destructicate". Jon is the 2008 Destructicate (Josh Tonies was 2007), and in this capacity surprised me by asking me to transcribe my PowerPoint from the BYOPPT event for inclusion into his Flying Destructicate book for 2008, entitled "Make Your Own Truth". I wasn't feeling like my actual presentation was nearly as articulate enough to warrant transcription, and also felt like an analysis of the Berkman situation as a whole would require a much fuller account than I was going to have time to hash out in the sudden - and tight - deadline space. So instead I generated a rather ridiculous multiple choice quiz for readers, one question per slide. Hopefully my contribution does as much to educate as it does to pull a laugh or two, without ridiculing the story itself.

True to form, the folks at ED just keep getting better and better at the books they put out. "Make Your Own Truth is a really well crafted affair, complete with a bound book, inserts with Powerpoint presentations transcribed (or otherwise), and a DVD of video and animations by Alberto Almaraz, Rick Gribenas, and Brodsky. Other participating artists include Juliacks, Paus Akid, Josh Atlas, M. Callen, T. Foley, Curt Gettman, Brett Kashmere, Laura Miller, Greg Siegle, and Jim Storch.

"The Roar"

2009-01-29T10:47:00.001-08:00

I created this newest video for the Fugitive Projects' 60 Second Video Project (2009), which I was just invited to participate in. The footage is edited down from a pivotal scene in Jean-Jacques Annaud's "The Bear" (1988), which I first saw as a child. Other influences include Sonic Youth, Jimi Hendrix, camping, and a bit of that old fear and anxiety regarding wilderness that's been the fuel for all my videos lately...

(Note: I re-posted a newer version of this video on 3/3/09 which reflects a richer, more layered soundtrack that I'm a lot happier with.)

"Materialisms" at Allegheny College

2009-01-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

Today I drove up to Meadville, PA to install work for "Materialisms" in the gallery at Allegheny College. Last fall, former curator Robert Raczka invited me to create a gallery-ready document of my ongoing coyote-tracks-in-asphalt project (that's actually the working title, I suppose, or at least the one I kick around in my head) for this exhibit. I brought in one of the bronze track casts, which sits on a small platform in the middle of the floor, and three photos I took back in November of some of the tracks in-situ. The presentation is pretty minimal given the generous amount of space I was alloted, but I'm pleased with it all the same. Carin Mincemoyer and I were invited to speak about each of our projects at the opening reception on Tuesday, January 20.

Other artists in the show: Liana Dragoman, Ryder Henry, Matt Kenyon, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Keny Marshall, Carin Mincemoyer, James Nestor, Ed Parrish, Jr., Adam Welch, and Tessa Windt. The exhibit will be up through March 4.

"Hylophobia"

2008-12-25T21:06:00.000-08:00

This week I cleaned up the editing on another off-shoot of the Wilderness/animal attacks ongoing video project. This one focuses on Grizzly bears, and is an experiment in trying a different approach to the same sort of Hollywood material I've been working with on the other projects. With the shark video I finished this summer, I felt like I ended up with something very forceful, violent, and absurd. I don't know if it could have come out any different, in all honesty, and I think the absurdity worked well in that case. However there are some other considerations I'm looking to spark in people when they watch any of these projects.

Specifically, I want people to think about the way in which these movies have helped to craft a fear of the unknown, an alienation many of us already feel from the "natural world", propped up and encouraged by inflated fiction. The idea of these predators lurking a short distance away - plotting, hunting us, considering our movements and our deaths - these movies prey on those very primal ideas, and I'm fascinated by how those ideas are rooted within us.

Me, I like to camp, but I didn't grow up an outdoorsman. I'd love to tell you I could walk for miles in the woods and feel at home, but the first time I saw a bear cross our trail in the wild a couple summers back, I froze. I feel I should point that out, so that these videos might come across as having a necessary element of personal reflection within them - and maybe also the necessary dose of admission of vulnerability. I also think a lot about sharks when I wade into the ocean - but I grew up in Nebraska, so maybe that's my landlocked, Jaws-educated childhood sneaking through...

Anyway, with "Hylophobia" ("fear of forests" - it's a working title that's maybe a tad pretentious), I eliminated all of the human elements, and focused on footage of bears stalking, being stalked, watching, approaching for the kill, and moving through their dominion unseen and unchallenged. The idea was to create an entirely different type of tension - albiet a lot more low-key than the shark montage - while still using all footage from Hollywood movies.

To be a little more specific on the actual bears in this video: although all of these movies refer to them as Grizzlies, these bears were almost exclusively Alaskan Kodiak bears. In fact, in most of the movies I used, the star was a Kodiak named Bart, who shined in almost every "bear" movie from 1980-2000, including "The Bear" and "The Great Outdoors". His mother preceded him in "Grizzly" - part of the post-Jaws "rogue predator" horror genre that blew up in the late 1970's.

I'm also finishing up my total re-edit of the 1967 live-action Disney romp "Charlie the Lonesome Cougar." Hopefully I'll have that one up in the next month, I've been on-and-off editing this one since September and I'm excited about how it's shaping up.

(After posting this I realized that there was a lot of confusion about the lack of sound on this video. I should have pointed out the fact that there isn't currently sound for this piece - sorry if you thought your speakers were screwed.)

Hot Off the Press...

2008-12-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

My first letterpress print - the background layer is a quick dust of matte spraypaint. Inspired in part by a recent article in the New York Times about the overpopulation of white-tailed deer.

I guess that, technically, this isn't really my first letterpress image. I did do the covers for the latest Directory Action resource guide last year, but that was using a polymer plate made from a drawing I did, and we had to rig the chase with a hefty amount of duct tape. It was a tad ridiculous. This time around, I'm trying to learn the whole process, including setting the type - although learning with Artnoose, I've found that there is quite a bit of packing tape involved in lining up the paper itself...

New Student of an Old Technique

2008-12-10T12:12:00.000-08:00

This winter I've started learning the nearly-lost art of typesetting and letterpress printing with friend and cohort Artnoose. I have a lot of ideas relative to my current video work that I'm hoping to flesh out on paper in the coming months, and these old printing techniques are really exciting me. I like the idea of trying to work in similar themes, but using very different media. Hopefully I'll also start getting these prints onto the Justseeds store by Spring, but in the meantime I'll post images as they come together.

Installing with the Yes Men...

2008-11-16T14:18:00.001-08:00

Astria Suparak, director of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, captured this touching moment as I helped hang one of two Haliburton SurvivaBalls in preparation for the Yes Men exhibit this past week. The show, "Keep it Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with the Yes Men", is their first exhibition of props and ephemera from their projects and was curated by Astria. It runs through February 15.

... Returned from the Justseeds Planning Retreat!

2008-11-13T17:23:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was spent in Milwaukee at our annual planning retreat for the Justseeds radical artists' cooperative. I left more inspired than ever about the projects I'm working on with these folks in 2009! I will be co-editing a book with Bec Young on Microcosm Publishing this coming year, sort of a primer on radical historical personalities with illustrations by folks from the collective. More on that soon...

Pictured: (top, L to R) Molly Fair, Erik Ruin, Nicolas Lampert, Roger Peet, Pete Yahnke, Kristine Virsis, Bec Young, Kevin Caplicki
(bottom, L to R) Icky A, Mary Mack Tremonte, Colin Matthes, Dylan Miner, Josh Macphee, and myself

Not Pictured: Meredith Stern, Chris Stain, and Swoon

"Street With A View" Goes Live - Finally!

2008-11-09T09:00:00.001-08:00

View Larger Map

After a lot of anticipation, Google has finally gone live with Ben Kingsley and Robin Hewlett's collaborative "intervention" in the Google Maps Streetview map of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh's North Side (I wrote about the experience of being a part of the reshoot back in early May). Entitled "Street With A View", the project can either be seen through their dedicated website, or by anyone happening through the area using Google's normal interface. It's worth sitting down for a few minutes and "strolling" down the street...

Collections at the Children's Museum

2008-11-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

Ally Reeves has the unique privilege of curating "collections" for a set of display cases over at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. I'm really into this idea - so many people collect interesting or obscure things that even their friends rarely get to see. In September, Ally invited me to display a collection for a few months. I handed over an assortment of (mostly) natural odds and ends I had picked up while on a cross-country roadtrip back in August of 2006. Chunks of petrified wood, redwood bark and pinecones, odd stones and rocks, sand-worn wood - and my train ticket stubs from the ride home. I finally got to go in and see the collection today and it looked really important in its inset case, guarded by plexiglass.

Other collections on display: Thiago Hersan's Uno card collection (which I was next to), tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's movie and movie prop/costume collection, the Children's Museum's lost and found collection, Kyra Bingham's seashell and mineral collection, and Turadg Aleahmad's mask collection.

Coyote Tracks Beginning to Weather

2008-10-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

I went around this weekend to snap some photos of the coyote tracks I've installed so far. You can see that car tires are wearing the tar paper off quite a bit in some spots, although it's filling up the paw-print areas still. I needed to document the work in it's current state for an exhibit I'll be participating in this coming January entitled "Materialisms" at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. The show is curated by Robert Raczka, who invited me to make a gallery component to illustrate this project.

New Uses, Old Places...

2008-10-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2006, I made a piece I called "We", which was laregly an experiment to see if I could run a tin can telephone over the Hollow separating my Pittsburgh neighborhood, Bloomfield, from Polish Hill. The "phones" were installed as securely as I could get them in there, and I did manage (with help) to get the line across that urban canyon and connect the two sides. It didn't "work" exactly, but to me the whole thing was more about the impossible gesture than whether or not I could solve an engineering problem and have a cross-Hollow conversation.

Anyhow, I never expected the piece to last forever. The 950 feet of monofilament I used to string the cans together was only up for about two months, and eventually the phones started to blend in with the rest of their surroundings.

Last night I was tipped off that someone had re-purposed the old concrete bridge stanchion I had secured the phone to on the Polish Hill side. Excited, I dropped in with a camera today to find a new sculpture: a rusty skeleton man with a hat, perched on the edge overlooking the Hollow and Bloomfield - one hand pointing out over the gully, and the other open just enough to cradle a beer. There only remains one chunk of the original metal stand I bolted into the concrete two and a half years previous.

You never know what's going to happen when you put your work out into the world. I enjoy that surrender, not knowing whether something will ride for years, be removed the next morning, or just be plain destroyed by someone who hates it. So far as this skeleton guy goes, I welcome the change. Seeing him sitting there with a sort of constant vigil over the place reminded me of what that spot meant to me when I first came to Pittsburgh (I lived three doors away), and how far I've come since I decided to stay for awhile. The Hollow (maps label it The Bloomfield Ravine, old-timers knew it as Skunk Hollow from the trash incinerator that used to run there) is a quiet muse for a lot of folks around here. I hope it stays that way for decades to come - and I'm pretty sure they'll never land a Walgreens down there or build any Hollowview Lofts...

HMS presenting at Visible Memories Conference

2008-10-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Howling Mob Society will be presenting at the Public Memories Project/Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University in New York this weekend. The conference promises to "explore the intersections between visual culture and memory studies with particular focus on the ways in which memories are manifested and experienced in visible, material, or spatial form."

HMS will be presenting on the panel "Interventions in Public Amnesia", alongside Fereshteh Toosi (New Millennium Studies, Columbia College Chicago: “Locative Sound: listening for environmental justice in Syracuse”), Dara Greenwald (Electronic Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: “Beyond Uncle Sam: Making Visible Resistant Histories”), and Olivia Robinson (Fiber and Material Studies, Syracuse University: “Spectres of the Non-monumental”) Joanna Spitzner (Department of Foundation, Syracuse University) will chair the panel on Saturday.

In Halifax, Nova Scotia...

2008-09-24T14:15:00.001-07:00

...with a giant moose antler, upstairs at the Anchor Archive.

Some Older Videos, Now Online...

2008-09-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

A friend recently asked why I didn't have most of my videos up on the site, and the only reason I could think of was that the ones I haven't posted are "old", and will potentially get cycled out as I continue to upload new work. After all, I'm pretty focused on this animal attack theme right now (and have a couple of new spin-offs from that in the works), and the stuff from a few years back starts to look distant quick. But it seemed silly not to make them available anyhow, as they are still influential on the work I'm doing currently.

I've compressed and uploaded two of them. "Approaching", which I did with Ally Reeves in 2003, has been edited down to a couple of the more intriguing scenes. Considering the original is just over 32 minutes long, I figured a quick highlight was in order. In retrospect it's a really drawn out video, but it was never meant to be watched beginning to end in the first place.

I've also uploaded the slug self-portrait, something which I shot on the fly in 2003 when I found a slug hauling itself across the floor of my living room while working on my roommate's computer. It is, in many ways, a piece which I think other people enjoy more than I do, although perhaps that's because I'm not so comfortable with self-portraiture these days - or maybe because slugs just don't really gross me out all that much.

In one of my more shining moments in print, Pittsburgh City Paper's former art critic Greggory Knepp took a hot minute to bring his trademark sophistication to the table in a review of a show the slug video appeared in at SPACE gallery in 2006:

"It's more "eww" than "ah," and more a Jackass audition than an aesthetic gesture."

Having made a name for himself as a writer who took pot shots at young contemporary artists from behind the walls of a generally liberal corporate weekly paper, Knepp's name curiously stopped appearing in the "Art" section after he blew a little too much ink belittling artists whose work made him uncomfortable. I was certainly not the only one to draw his ire during his time at City Paper... but hey, no hard feelings Greg! Water under the bridge...

Free Ride and Howling Mob Society Receive Awards from the Pittsburgh Creativity Project!

2008-09-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

Both the Howling Mob Society and the Free Ride recycled bicycle cooperative received $1000 awards from the Pittsburgh Creativity Project this month! The awards were not part of the typical application process by which most individuals and organizations receive grants - rather, projects were awarded based on accomplishments and work which they are already doing on their own. From the acknowledgment letter:

"This award is not tied to a competitive application process. The Pittsburgh Creativity Project views its constituency as agents who contribute vibrant cultural works, venues, programs, and services to our region, and recognizes your ability to make thoughtful and effective decisions regarding the use of monetary and other resources. The Pittsburgh Creativity Project intends to tell this story.

The Pittsburgh Creativity Project is an artist-led pilot initiative serving local creative professionals and is housed within the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. It is funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation and Heinz Endowments."

Starting On the Coyote Tracks!

2008-08-11T13:11:00.000-07:00

In February I spent a week in Sewanee, Tennessee casting bronze with my friend/mentor Greg Pond. I've been sitting on the casts for awhile now - I have intended to install them in small potholes and cracks in city streets, but a combination of other life priorities has kept me from working on them. I've got to get cracking if I'm going to take advantage of any more of this summer weather...

Today I started cleaning them up, rather minimally, and picked up a few other supplies I've never actually worked with: asphalt crack filler and tar paper. What I'm trying to do is mimic the installation of the "Toynbee Tiles" - these are basically linoleum tile mosaics installed into asphalt roads by using crack filler, tar paper, and asphalt's unique knack for assimilating solid objects as cars drive over them. For a serious rundown of the Toynbee mystery, check out friends-of-friends' website Resurrect Dead (a film is in the works), which is a real treasure trove of research - they're in Philly, after all, where most of these tiles have been discovered. In their "external links" they have also graciously posted a very detailed how-to for making and installing the tiles, which originally appeared in Crimethinc's Recipes For Disaster handbook.

These photos show the bronze being cleaned up a bit - they're basically small bronze puddles with coyote tracks embedded in them. I've glued them to small pieces of tar paper which are sized a little larger, then coated the bottoms with crack filler and left to cure. At this point I'm thinking that when I go and install them, I'll try bringing along more of the crack filler and coating the nook I'm installing them into. This whole thing is an experiment, so no telling quite how it will work out.

Whatever the outcome, I'll post pictures, but I've got to wait first for the tires to wear down the top layer of tar paper. That could take days or weeks - the product label doesn't address tar paper's durability when you glue it to the middle of the road.

Finally Showing My Work in Nigeria!

2008-07-31T10:41:00.000-07:00

I'm no stranger to those silly investment scam emails from Bank of Nigeria (or wherever), but I haven't personally been sent one in ages. I guess it's been awhile since someone shared the tip that I'm the go-to guy for international investing and money managment. This morning, however, I got a special treat - Mr. Paul Simon, from Oceanic Artworks in Abuja, got in touch with me about purchasing some of my "lovely artworks". I normally wouldn't have thought to respond to this, but imagine my surprise when I realized that they actually typed in the titles for two of my projects that they found on the internet... and then asked what condition they were in, were they in frames? The works, Welcome Home, Pioneer and Predator vs. Prey, aren't in frames, primarily because they are large (and in one case moving) sculptures. Clearly whoever wrote me really wants to pay top dollar for my work - whatever it actually is! With minimal egging on from my roommate, I sent Mr. Simon a response. Below is the original letter followed by mine... hopefully this will be fruitful.

Dear Artist,

Oceanic Artwork Is located in Abuja, Nigeria with is various stores across Africa. We have been in business since 1992. We buy and sell different views of artworks including Sculptures, fabrics artworks, Metal and Wooden artworks, Poetry with pots, canvas and Captivating carpets, Herbs & Natural Foods, Textiles etc….

Over the years, and through our commitment, experience, and expertise Oceanic Artwork has established a business relationship with our customers that will last a lifetime! We hope we can count on you to be one of our faithful customers. We challenge you to give us a try. We will do our best to beat the competition.

We came across your web page while searching for good artworks And I will like to buy some of these creative artworks out of your Stock. I am pleased to let you know that we am interested in the Purchase of some of your lovely artworks, please let us know the present Condition of the artworks. Are they in frames?

Welcome Home, Pioneer
Predator vs. Prey

We appreciate and value your business and look forward to provide you with the best possible service.

Regards,
Mr. Paul Simon
FOR: Oceanic Artwork
E-mail: oceanic.artwork@yahoo.com
Or writing us at:
Address: Suite 031,
Wuse phase 2,
Behind New Market central
Area FCT
Abuja.
Calling us at: 09-7821850,
+234-802-525-8946

Hello Mr. Simon!

I am very excited to have been contacted by you regarding my art work and your organization, Oceanic Artworks! As an artist in the United States, I am unaccustomed to people purchasing my work no matter how hard I try, but since it is my passion you will understand that I must pursue art even though it keeps me from becoming a rich man (for now)! I am especially pleased that you would be happy to include my work in your galleries, and I'm sure you will find that works such as "Welcome Home, Pioneer" will fit in nicely next to some of your captivating carpets and poetry with pots.

You have asked about the condition of these works and I assure you that they are both in fine condition, as neither of them have left my house for some time. "Predator vs. Prey" has occupied a special place in my living room for the last two years - I must only brush off some dust and then it will be ready for purchase in one of your fine galleries. This situation with my work is very similar to my great paintings which I also possess. I have dozens of fine paintings in oil paint on board - they are currently kept safely in my parent's attic and I am sure they will be very happy to be rid of them, as they are for some reason unpopular at the garage sales in their neighborhood.

You have also asked if these art works are framed and I can assure you that they are. "Welcome Home, Pioneer" is indeed a superb frame, and you will find that it will grace any room with it's beauty and form. I like to think of it as one of the best sculptures I currently have in my stock - and in fact I have been told by many important people that this sculpture rivals a good Rodin or Kincaid or anything by Hirst, but I must of course digress! I'm sure you will agree though! Especially when you see it! This work is especially good for people who enjoy landscapes!

We must of course discuss the important shipment of these works immediately. You will understand that these works are both very large and I will need to take the utmost care to pack them so as to insure that they do not incure any damage during the dangerous shipment across the ocean. Both of these arts are also very delicate, and they will require very careful packing in order to get them to you. As I do not have much money from my art, I will require a small advance payment to procure the necessary materials to pack the art and to hire top professional men to make sure this is done correctly and the best way possible. I can not take a chance that this work will not make it to you in the best condition!

I'm sure you are also aware how difficult it is to get good works of art past our Customs police here in the United States. As we are of course careful not to let terrorism in or out of our borders now, the Officials inspect every package and are particularly suspicious of anything that is art as they think it may be something else. We must be very careful here in America now as everyone seems to want to kill us all the time! I will need to pay these police a small sum to make sure that I can get the work to you in Nigeria promptly. This is only a standard procedure that any artist must fulfill and you will understand. I wish it was not this way but with the terrorism we must be careful always!

You will be so happy when you have this art in your hands! My work is about beauty and truth in the human form and I'm sure you will agree! I hope we will both be able to profit excitingly from this venture!!! I look forward to hearing back from you very soon!

- Shaun Slifer
New York City, NY
USA

"We're gonna need a bigger boat..."

2008-07-28T19:51:00.000-07:00

“Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”
- David Quammen, Monster of God

Next week opens the first annual Alumni show at Watkins College of Art & Design in Nashville, where I received a BFA in 2003. I am represented in the exhibition by a new video that I finished up last week, "Testing the Waters" - the first spur video from my tending-towards-sprawling "Wilderness" project. "Testing" is my attempt to get a grip on what, exactly, I'm trying to do with "Wilderness" - and indeed whether I can actually do what I think I can with this idea. My videos are typically simple and performative, evidence of an action. This project represents something new for me, and as it is with any new creative thrust I'm not entirely comfortable with it. Maybe a big reason for this is also the most obvious: all of my source material for this project is other people's work. Add to that the general violence of the footage (animals attacking people and/or people attacking animals) and things start to get complicated. I'm enjoying the process, though, and I'm operating with the outlook that if these projects don't quite live up to the thesis they will at least make interesting YouTube fodder.

I post the first version of this video (in low-res, compressed form) in the hopes of getting some feedback as I continue with the project as a whole. Please share your thoughts! Comment on this blog, or email me personally.

Unfortunately I won't be able to make it down to Watkins to see the exhibit - I mailed in the DVD yesterday. It's the first alumni show they've put on and I'm sure it'll look great.

And speaking of annual surveys, coincidentally enough this week happens to be Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The video montage of sharks leaping out of the water to the tune of "Flight of the Valkyries" on their homepage may already have my video beat...

"While some informed people may have decided that sharks are really not so bad, they yet may find reasons for not swimming in the ocean. Traditional island peoples widely regard the shark as a spiritual being whose analogous aspect in the human self is an embryo. That sharks rip open the body of their victims has a double horror of an unborn monster ravaging the self. Sharks are neither intrinsically terrible nor sacred, but they are utterly fascinating and therefore a perfect candidate for encoding extreme feelings and concepts."
- Paul Shepard, The Others

Luddites at the Robot Show?

2008-07-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

Friday was the debut of "Meet the Made", the latest in the Mattress Factory's "Gestures" series. Curated by Ian Ingram and Carl DiSalvo, "Meet the Made" addresses "the relationship between robotics and all aspects of human culture." Stuart Anderson and I were invited to work with this idea for an exhibit, and combined forces to create a work about the Luddite uprisings in England during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It seemed appropriate to address a popular uprising against the mechanized workplace in the context of a show which celebrates the mechanized. Not that we wanted to cause a stink, but we were, at least, inspired.

We created a replica of a sledgehammer head, specifically the type commonly referred to as an Enoch Hammer (after its manufacturer Enoch & James Taylor). Sitting in a classic, museum-style vitrine display, the hammer head is alone and centered in a room kept dark except for one spot light on the case. Rendered impotent by its treatment as a relic of another time, the case is guarded by a security camera on each wall and a proximity-triggered alarm on the case. You can get close, but not too close. After all, this history should be important to remember, but it shouldn't be empowering enough that people get the idea that the same lessons should apply today... right? This is, as a friend pointed out, a piece about fear - the fear of a people rising up violently (or at all), the fear that tools like this sledgehammer will be used again. By rendering it safe in a plexiglass box in a quiet room, it's story can be manipulated as it is taught. I feel this way about most museum treatments of popular struggles for social justice - in fact this work is the first in a series of "relics" from past struggles I have been working on for awhile - I'll post pics of the other pieces as they are created.

The text on the informational plaque next to the vitrine reads "Iron head from long-handle sledgehammer, of the type used to sabotage knitting machinery in newly mechanized factories during the Luddite uprisings in England (1811-1813). From the collection of Joseph Radcliffe (1764-1819)." Radcliffe was one of the most vehemently anti-Luddite officials of the time, and presided over the trials and deaths of many of the accused rebels.

I also installed a vinyl graphic on the outside of the gallery space - an illustration of an old sledgehammer with the caption "down with all kings but King Ludd" (a line from a Lord Byron poem depicting the Luddite mindset, written to a friend in 1816). King Ludd, or Ned Ludd, was the mythical head of the Luddite rebellions, and many of the threats and public notices issued by various Luddite groups were either signed "Ludd" or referred to Ludd specifically as an arbiter of justice.

Recommended reading on the Luddites: Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Justseeds 1026 Opening a Hit

2008-07-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Justseeds opening at the impressive artist-run Space 1026 in downtown Philadelphia went well last Friday - despite the fact that it was July 4th, it was raining, and the bathroom at the place was out of commission. We didn't even have free beer and we still packed the place (although we did have a crazy beautiful and satisfying food spread by local artist/puppeteer Morgan Andrews)!

The installation of the show was the largest group collaboration of Justseeds yet - ten of us worked on this show, and it was a trail in group dynamics and a learning experience for all of us. The results, I believe, came off really well. Besides the opening, Erik Ruin (our "sole Philly proxy", as dubbed by the local weekly there) has schedule a bunch of events to bring more traffic into the space.

I didn't take many shots of the show since everyone else had a camera - some great in-progress photos are posted on the Justseeds blog here and here, and Colin Matthes has posted some other pics here.

More Sign Collaborations...

2008-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working on some more sign collaborations with other artists as part of the Justseeds "Out of the Shell of the Old" exhibit this week in Philadelphia at Space 1026. I asked friends to suggest slogans to work into street signs which I would design and fabricate. The signs will be part of the 1026 exhibit, then likely get installed in a more permanent spot once the show comes down. Three are pictured here: Make Time (Pete Yahnke), Grow Despite (Ally Reeves), and Capitalism (Nicolas Lampert).

Maxo Vanka Murals @ St. Nicolas in Millvale, PA

2008-06-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

I booked a tour this week to take some of the kids I'm working with over the summer to see the murals of Maxo Vanka at St. Nicolas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, PA (just north of Pittsburgh). Vanka, a Croation immigrant to the States, painted the murals in two stages - in 1937 and again in 1941 - commissioned by Father Albert Zagar. They are filled with fierce and vivid anti-war and anti-fascist imagery, and seasoned with some illustrations of the reality of the immigrant experience in industrial America. I've never seen work like this inside a church of any sort, and each time I go back to see them I'm still amazed.

I first read about the murals at St. Nicolas four years ago in Icky A's zine Nosedive (#13), and went to see them with friend and Justseeds artist Erik Ruin while he was in Pittsburgh for a visit. Mary Petrich, who remembers Vanka painting the murals when she was a child, gave the tour today - by far the best oral illustration I've experienced with these paintings. The church building is in need of financial help since the fallout from hurricane Ivan in 2004 flooded much of Millvale and damaged the walls and roof of St. Nicolas. The church is accepting donations towards this work, which will include efforts to preserve the murals before the water damage gets worse.

If you're in Pittsburgh, do not miss these murals! Mary Petrich can be reached for her amazing tours at 412-681-0905. Also, visit the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka website to see much better photos than I posted here!

New People's History Poster Collaboration Finished

2008-06-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

Sara Meister and I have finally finished work on a collaborative poster we started this spring. It will be part of the Celebrate People's History poster project, an influential poster series started by Josh MacPhee 11 years ago. On a visit to Sara's hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan last summer, we saw a great exhibit at the local history museum about the intriguing strike at the Kalamazoo Corset Company in 1912. As there was never much written on the subject, Sara embarked on a research project with the goal of producing a zine later this year. I'd been itching to do another People's history poster for some time, and we got to work.

We've printed a limited edition silkscreen run of the posters which will be available soon from Justseeds. The design will then go to Stumptown Printers, the Portland, Oregon-based shop that has been printing the People's History project for years. Within the next month or two, the poster will be available in mass-produced form, distributed to individuals, schools, community spaces, libraries and the like. One of my favorite things about the People's History posters is how often I see them around.

You can click on the picture above to get a larger, readable version.

I designed another poster for this project several years back (2003?) - that one was about the French environmental writer and anarchist Eliseé Reclus.

Seen in Downtown...

2008-06-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

I caught this humorous alteration to a sidewalk advertisement while downtown today. I don't know what it used to say under the word "war", but I do recognize the ad as part of a series of sidewalk murals aimed at the upper crust that developers hope will continue moving into many of the new loft developments in downtown Pittsburgh. This piece strikes me as especially relevant given some of the recent news regarding the local Food Not Bombs chapter and the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership butting heads over sharing food in Market Square.

Howling Mob Society presents at the Allied Media Conference

2008-06-19T07:31:00.000-07:00

The Howling Mob Society will be presenting alongside the Pocho Research Society at the 10th annual Allied Media Conference in Detroit this weekend. The panel, "History, Memory and Public Space: Taking Back the Plaque", is organized by Nicolas Lampert. Pocho Research Society does some really invigorating work out in Los Angeles, posting corrections to officially sanctioned historical markers (pictured below is one of my favorites, you can read the text on the plaque here).

From the AMC's website: The Allied Media Conference cultivates media strategies for a more just and creative world. Held every June in Detroit, MI, it is the primary point of intersection in the U.S. for alternative media makers and committed social justice activists from around the country. We come together to share tools and tactics for transforming our communites through media-based organizing. The panel discussions and workshops of the AMC are hands-on and practical, intergenerational while youth-centered. They showcase the solutions emerging from places where creativity is a matter of survival. Out of the AMC, we evolve new skills and strategies to bring back to our local contexts. We deepen our relationships and expand our networks in ways that support ongoing collaboration throughout the year.

New (Old) Ross Winn Writings on Wikimedia Commons

2008-06-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

Unearthing the almost completely buried history of Ross Winn, the turn-of-the-last-century anarchist publisher from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, was the project that catapulted me into what will probably be a life-long obsession with stories of obscure radicals (and the struggle for social justice in the US in general). Back in 2002, when Ally Reeves and I were still trying to find this guy's gravestone, there was almost no information on him in print or on the internet. Now a simple Google search will tell the whole story - at least, the story we've been able to piece together over the last six years!

Friend and fellow researcher Ryan Kaldari has just obtained digital copies of all of the Ross Winn publications available through the Labadie Collection in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He's in the process of formatting and uploading every page into Wikimedia Commons - where they will be digitally archived for, I guess, a really long time. You can check them out as they accumulate here.

According to the Commons "Welcome" page, the site "is a media repository that is created and maintained not by paid-for artists, but by volunteers. Its name "Wikimedia Commons" is derived from that of the umbrella project "Wikimedia"... it provides a central repository for freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media of all sorts that are useful for any Wikimedia project." Sounds like as good a place as any to file these images away - and Ryan is a Wikipedia fiend, having most recently bottom-lined Wikipedia Takes Nashville, the first spin-off of Wikipedia Takes Manhattan. It's great to know he's making this project happen.

The bulk of the writings Ryan is working on are from "The Advance", Winn's last publication before his death in 1912 and, so far as we know, the only remaining copies are these that were scanned at the Labadie. Winn was setting type on the sixth issue when he died of tuberculosis in his wife Gussie's family home in rural Tennessee. He also worked on a slightly more mysterious small-format paper called "Red Phalanx" in his final year, although the only mention of it is in the obituary Emma Goldman penned for several anarchist papers when he died. Ryan and I found a couple printing proofs of "Phalanx" in a box held by one of his last surviving relatives, but most of the text was gibberish - either meant to be filler or the typesetting of a dying writer going crazy. Ryan and I are also still in the process of trying to obtain, or at least take photos/scan some of those other rare printing proofs, scrapbooks, etc that Winn's relative has in her garage, but she's not answering our letters these days...

Directory Action goes online!

2008-05-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

Last year I designed and hand printed a letterpress-and-rubberstamp cover for the newest incarnation of Directory Action, a Pittsburgh grassroots resource guide. This month the guide went online!

Directory Action is particularly close to my heart. When I first came to Pittsburgh, it seemed like everyone I knew had copies of this amazing organizing and informational tool sitting by their phones... kind of a social justice Yellow Pages in a zine format. It meant a lot to me when friends asked me to do the new covers last fall. Jude Vachon set up DA's online presence - she's also responsible for organizing the similarly indispensable Be Well! guide to health care for the uninsured - another amazing resource zine with an online presence, and another reason I've handed my heart over to this city...

Happy Mothers' Day

2008-05-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

One-Off Makes a Better Trowel Than Money Can Buy...

2008-05-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the opening of "Other Options", an exhibit at Goods & Services (aka Tent Show) devoted to explorations of alternative economic exchanges. Milling around the small storefront, I struck up a conversation with Kellen Fenaughty, who was sitting at a curious table with a set of metal alphabet dies, waiting for someone to ask him what he was doing.

"I am a maker of things" was the friendly introduction, after which Fenaughty described his project "One-Off". In his words (from a later email): "I make handmade, useful objects with sensual construction techniques that are rare at this scale. Each week I choose to make one object from the week's proposals, which is then given to the proposer the next weekend. The objects I choose are rarely made outside mass production, and are more personalized than something you could find in a store. Everything I make is meant to be well used, because the things we use everyday are more influential than something just for display."

Earlier in the day I had answered an email from a friend who, coming back to town from a long sojourn in North Carolina, was looking to round up some gardening supplies for the season. I had some spare seeds for her, a shovel and a maddock she could borrow, and (so I thought) a spare trowel she could keep. Unfortunately a quick hunt through my house determined that I didn't have that spare trowel after all...

That evening, pondering a potential One-Off project in the hotseat across from Kellen's notebook, I asked if he minded making a trowel that I would then give to my friend. He smiled and opened his notebook - and we then launched, believe it or not, into a detailed conversation on the pros and cons of various garden trowels the two of us have put a hand to throughout our lives. Why did certain trowels let us down, and others proved a worth which set them above the fray of pathetic, disposable tools? Turns out mass-produced tools are often crap!
Yesterday (a little past the one-week wait) I met up with Kellen, got the trowel, and passed it off to my ecstatic friend that evening. Truly the Excalibur of trowels (yes, I really typed that), this masterpiece features stainless steel blade, mahogany handle, and hand-hammered bronze rivets. Lifetime guarantee? Well, not in writing, but I will say this is one damn fine trowel - and yes, I still gave it up even though both of mine are bent and aging.

Kellen can be contacted at kellen@gmail.com

Google Street View "Intervention"!

2008-05-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I spent some time in the slightly drizzling rain with artists Ben Kinsley, Robin Hewlett, and about a hundred other "actors" as we set the stage for Google technicians to reshoot Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh's North Side for Google Maps' slightly troubling Street View feature.

Street View allows Map users to navigate a 360 degree vista of the address they've looked up, and "walk" up and down streets, alleyways, and sometimes even private roads. Besides the general eerieness of being able to move through a digital version of your neighborhood or wherever, Street View has managed to capture some rather unsettling pictures of frozen people walking around (and even crashing on their bikes).

Characteristically recognizing the potential to retool Street View as a vehicle for something unexpected (and really fun), Kinsley and Hewlett (they're the ones with the clipboards - also in the photo is friend and legend tENTATIVELY, a cONVIENIENCE in his bird suit) somehow convinced Google to work with them to reshoot several blocks of a Pittsburgh street. The catch is that the re-shoot would capture a whole myriad of absurd scenes dreamt up by the artists. Map users entering Sampsonia Way (which runs behind the Mattress Factory, and is also home to the Tom Museum and exhiled Chinese poet Huang Xiang) will now be confronted with the Langley High School marching band, a running marathon, and a massive skinned chicken (courtesy of Milwaukee artist and friend Nicolas Lampert, who delivered the sculpture from Wisconsin special for this shoot), among other ridiculous vignettes.

My friend Morgan and I played the part of "official" traffic directing road crew types - the "official" part stemming only from the fact that we were both wearing "caution yellow" vests and serious brows. Our job was to usher Google's camera car into Sampsonia Way as though it were part of a parade, and to keep any other vehicles from accidentally turning down the same street and getting caught in the mayhem during the brief shoot. It worked remarkably well - it's actually kind of amazing how much authority a cheap vest with reflective patches can give you.

These photos don't accurately capture how many people attended the event, nor how much fun it was to be there. The whole idea was superb and executed without a hitch, and it was great how many different folks showed up to be a part of it - they even had the local fire department in full garb with their truck, using a ladder to get a plush cat out of a tree for a little girl. This was one of the best ways to spend a Saturday morning I could dream up...
Google hasn't guaranteed yet that the footage they shot this weekend will in fact go online - they still need to review it. If it does go up, I'll know this summer and will post a link.

First Morel Hunt = Success!

2008-05-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's a stretch that this relates in any way to what I consider my artistic practice, and maybe I'm just bragging a little bit... but last weekend I went on my first morel-specific hunt and turned up all of these little guys under one slippery elm. Beginner's luck? The foray takes place once a year in Mingo Creek State Park in Washington County, organized by the Western PA Mushroom Club - of which I am a proud, albeit green member.

Clip Art for the Rev!

2008-04-25T13:03:00.001-07:00

Reproduce and Revolt (Soft Skull Press), a book collaboration between Josh MacPhee and Favianna Rodriguez, is finally available!

I have a handful of images reproduced in here, and I'm really excited by how this project finally came together. The premise of this bilingual book is that many social justice groups tend to lack interesting graphics for their posters, outreach materials, etc. Operating from this experience, Josh and Favianna have been working for the last three years to compile royalty-free, copyright free images from artists all over the world, to be bound into what amounts to an amazing collection of resistance clip-art. (I hope the term "clip art" doesn't downplay how well-done, and directly useful, this book really is...) From the introduction:

"What you hold in your hands is a toolbox: a massive collection of contemporary political graphics for you to use. Every single image compiled here is intended to be reprinted and reused by activists, organizers, artists and designers committed to social justice and a radical restructuring of our society. So, don't just flip through these pages; throw them on the photocopier or scanner, crack the spine. If there's one book in your collection where the pages should be falling out, this is it!"

Hat Band!

2008-04-25T12:41:00.001-07:00

This week saw the first in what will hopefully be a regular happening in Pittsburgh - a Hat Band performance! Three weeks ago, interested participants emailed their names to the Hat Band Organizer - this person put all the names into a Hat, and drew names in random groups of four. Each foursome became a Band as soon as they were notified, and then had three weeks to meet up, learn new instruments (regulations required that those who exhibit proficiency with one instrument must chose another instrument with which they have no experience), and be ready to perform two or three (hopefully original) songs by April 24.

I was thrust into a Hat Band with Lisa Landslide, Christopher St. Pierre, and trusted collaborator Robin Hewlett. Somehow or another we made a performance happen in front of maybe thirty-five people, despite our incredible inability to be, all four of us, in the same place at the same time to practice together. Being adverse to the idea of learning new instruments due to time constraints with other projects (and crippling stage fright in more than half of our ranks), we succeeded in constructing a galleon-on-the-ocean puppet stage for our four sock-puppet stage persona. If we couldn't raise the roof, we were at least going to make a bit of a mess...Beginning tamely enough with an the old hymnal "All For Me Grog", our innocent voyage was suddenly parlayed by a giant Rum Arm, which, after having dumped most of the contents of a bottle of Black Seal down our eager puppet throats, set our sails upon a course of ruin. I was thankfully able to make my puppet vomit veggie medley (canned peas, carrots, and corn) only slightly off cue during the second tune, through a secret tube that I had not had time to practice with. Apparently it turned the stomachs of more than a few land-lubbers, and was a hit with the kids - although we wouldn't have known, being hidden behind our plywood stage. (Note: from all I can remember, this may be the first puppet show I've ever done!)

Cinematography on Tom Weinrich's "SeaKing"

2008-04-18T17:37:00.000-07:00

Last summer, Drew Pavelchak and I helped Tom Weinrich shoot a video over the course of a weekend in rural Western Pennsylvania. He's just posted a low-res version of his final edit this spring, and I think it came out great... and, in case you can't tell, I'm the guy in the Confederate soldier reenactment costume who gets slain.

Post No What?

2008-04-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

Other styles of collaboration...

2008-04-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

One of the ways in which I try to keep the bills paid around here is by freelancing design work, specifically in vinyl, for galleries, museums, artists, and independent businesses. Lately, this has allowed me some interesting opportunities to work directly with artists who want to do intriguing work with the tools I have. In a couple of recent cases, I was able to help actually manufacture signs as part of realizing projects.

Above is an image of two signs I just completed for artist and friend Josh MacPhee (the other design is the STRIKE sign to the right). The signs are part of a collaborative installation, "The Threat of Chance", with Chris Stain, Billy Mode, and The Polaroid Kidd at Ad Hoc Art in New York. When I get some shots of the signs in the context of the overall work, I'll post them. The show opens May 2.

Also this winter, I fabricated a series of twenty small metal signs (pictured below) along with Chicago-based ex-Pittsburgher Adam Grossi, who developed a compelling collaboration , "Provisions", with several mothers and workers at the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry. The signs are on display at the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Center for the exhibit "Making Hope Happen". I've been having an interesting dialog over email with Adam about the nature of this sort of work, much of which I hope to post here very soon...

Team F.R,Y! Takes Second Place at 3rd Art Olympic Theater!

2008-04-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

It was a near victory this weekend for Team F.R,Y! (Frying Rocketship, Yes!) at the 3rd Art Olympic Theater. The "Olympics" are a two-hour competition which pits three teams of four artists against each other in a race to create "Art" out of a pile of random junk in two whirlwind hours. The event is the brainchild of Pittsburgh artist Tom Sarver, who was kind enough to ask me to spearhead a team this April. Teams are encouraged to be ridiculous, and with this in mind I recruited local art-slingers and trusted cohorts Ally Reeves, Greg Witt, and Joey Hays.

Our plan was simple: in two hours, we would 1.) build a Rocketship, and 2.) deep fry some food. Teams were allowed to bring one suitcase full of tools and props, so we brought a (massive) suitcase filled with potatoes, a jug of vegetable oil, my roommate's Fry Daddy, a fresh bottle of Heinz ketchup, and around 1000 feet of mylar (the basis of any serious Rocketship).

The competition was fierce - somehow I managed to hold down the Fry Station for the full two hours while the rest of the team furiously rendered a spaceship from who-knows-what (and mylar). I took orders, gave people tickets, and fried everything from yam slices to Oreos while the cacophony of the night boiled all around us. It felt like the whole competition went by in ten minutes, and I can honestly say this is one of the most overwhelming things I've done in awhile. I don't even remember how we decided on frying food for people as part of our performance, but it was a hit. Frannie (the young girl kneeling next to me in the picture above) decided we were the best show going, and sat next to the Fry Station for almost the whole evening even though she didn't want to order anything (I gave her a few cookies).

We had a secret weapon buried inside the Rocketship - a sort of potato gun rigged with confetti and packing peanuts. During the final countdown, Joey emerged from the crowd in a chariot made from a Tupperware storage bin and, using a foam lance, charged and toppled the Rocket with Greg inside... who managed to pull the switch and blow most of the peanuts before keeling over in front of the audience. I then called out Bill Daniel's order for fried pickles on our megaphone - the last order of the evening - and we were history. I actually thought that destroying the ship was going to cost us the trophy, but the judges were apparently blinded by the sheer volume of mylar and the incredibly overpowering smell of frying food. I hope they were able to open some windows the next day and air the place out a bit...

Team "Air on the Square" (or was it "Mayor on the Square"?) traveled all the way over from Philadelphia and somehow managed to place last, probably due to some heavy-handed anti-Philly bias from the homegrown judges. They were Anton Lieberman , Shaun Baer, Joseph DiGiuseppe and Christopher Golas. The winning team, "Ed", was Kerri LaCharite Andrea Shockling, Louis P. Taylor and Dave Schewe.

You can watch a nice time lapse video of the night from filmmaker Keith Tassick, who was on hand filming the evening for a future documentary. Our square is on the far left, the team from Philly is in the middle (and about everywhere else), and "Ed" is on the far right. The whole event took place at the Union Project, an incredible old church that has been renovated into a community space. The photos I've posted here were generously taken by Ashley Brickman, who showed up in a sequined onesy with F.R,Y! emblazoned in felt on the back. You can't ask for more team spirit than that.

Damaged little cylinders of liquid...

2008-03-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

I'm still collecting batteries off the street as I find them, although last week I opened up my collecting container only to be greeted by an overpowering, acrid smell. Dumping them out on a table in the studio revealed that several of the batteries in the bottom of the can have started leaking. Up to this point I hadn't thought much about what I would do if these things started to deteriorate before I got a solid project off the ground - now I'm forced to rethink storage (I moved them to a box in the basement) and consider the possibility that these things might not be so easy to work with in the long run. I haven't been finding many batteries over the winter, partially because of snow, but probably also because people aren't spending as much time outdoors where they are content to throw them on the ground when they no longer perform up to speed. Working under the assumption that maybe I won't ever build anything substantial that will run off of these batteries, I've realized that I will probably not be able to stop picking them up off the street as I find them - so maybe I've just developed a life-long habit in the process?

I'm still thinking about making joule thieves as a possible solution - if not for a full-on project, at least maybe converting the blinkies on my bikes. Besides the batteries I find outdoors, I also have cans of them that my roommates and I have used that it would be nice to re-use, if I can, before recycling them. I bought a rechargeable set over the winter but I'm not sure how well they will work over time. The guy at the store where I bought them was trying to convince me to buy lithium AA's instead - he said that's what he used on his GPS, and all I could think about while he was talking to me was how a GPS unit in an SUV was about the most ridiculous way to waste batteries I could imagine.

Earth 911 has a nice battery recycling directory that will give you locations based on your zip code, as well as other general battery recyling information.

Heading to Tennessee...

2008-03-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

This past month I received an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. The grant was to fund a period of study with a significant mentor, and I headed down to Sewanee University of the South in Tennessee to brush up on bronze casting with Greg Pond. I'm the guy in the middle in this picture.

Also, as part of my involvement with the newly restructured Justseeds radical art cooperative, I will be posting often on the Justseeds blog. This news stream is our attempt at keeping tabs on all of the socially and politically engaged artwork going on around the world that inspires us. Check in and check often, there's a lot of great projects being posted on there every week!