Oh Geode!

Eliza Fernand's show billow/ripple opened last weekend in Oakland's Fort gallery among sizable crowds and music. I happened to stumble in, having heard little about its substance beforehand, and immediately noted their similarity to Carrie's costumes and gallery pieces. In a good way. Both ladies' creations could happily live in a village together and subscribe to the same set of neighborhood association's member guidelines. What I mean is, their art shares the same wild palette and fantastical tactility. Eliza makes crocheted neon stalactites to Carrie's french fry bouquet.


A little crazy, sure. But fun! The gallery blurb describes Eliza's work: "craft infused abstractions...These installations are crafted with familiar materials and familiar forms, but the scenes are fantasy...each room in the gallery sets a mottled scene of contradictions—composed and organic, material and immaterial, intimate and encompassing."



I love sewn gallery pieces: no matter how sterile the vacuum environment, the art begs to be touched. Mostly, I enjoyed Eliza's large scale, landscaped objects that reference a family quilt, puppetry, geodes and caves at the same time. And I was impressed with the many different mediums incorporated into her pieces; any one person who can equally sew, crochet, knit AND use a hammer is a talented lady in my book.

**more pictures (and arguably BETTER pictures) of eliza's show here.

I'm all for handmade but...

You know when somebody seems so ironical that you're like, "hold the phone.." because they seem to be making fun of something but you are having quite the time putting your finger on it?

Well Friday evening I ran across something like that. These two boys, hip as could be, were showing their wares in a tiny, teeny space moonlighting as a gallery at the monthly art murmur here in Oaktown. One of them bent over a big four harness loom and the other over an industrial Singer, they were displaying blue jeans they'd made from start to finish. And the price? In the neighborhood of several thousand dollars as I recall. They claimed the process took nearly 4 months to complete.



My first thought was, "are you-all crazy? it wouldn't take anybody four months to do that!" Not that I'm some kind of raging capitalist, but that just doesn't make any sense to me, someone with a basic knowledge of how things work and what things are reasonable. (And someone with a working knowledge of handmade time frames.) Hand weaving, sure. Hand stitching, sure. But these boys had tools and seem to be skilled. But four months! Jesus.


So as these boys cooed, "see, we're wearing them," and "of course it's profitable!" and "would you like some sake?" I just sat there trying to figure out who exactly was having who in that little room. Were they poking fun at handmade? At luxury items? At money itself? Or at the people who don't know how much work goes into a pair of blue jeans? I still can't figure it out.

Bless me Roy and Travis, for I am confused. I suppose that as such a provocative exercise, it may have succeeded in that vaccuum of the gallery space, but as for any larger, broader context, I'm afraid not.

Heads Up

You're probably pooped out from celebrating, but our pals at Magick Outlaw have a show of their incredible and I'll say it, zany, screen prints going up at the Art In The Age space in Old City tonight. This is the very same Magick Outlaw that's behind those fancy 59ers you've been drooling over. The show will probably be brighter, crazier and better than any other opening you've ever been to, so it would be worth crawling out of your post-holiday cave for. Mr. Pete Whitney writes, "Me and Joel and possibly even Don Vincent Ortega are gonna stop by there this Friday night the 2nd if you, like, want an autograph or something." So, there you have it.



Other exciting things out of Outlaw this holiday season include some sweet cycle relevant prints by print assistant Don Vincent Ortega, dear Philadelphia collectibles and a new shirt design that may remind you of someone you know.

Just Food

A week ago, Friday night was the usual Art Murmur Festivities in Oakland and I attended. The opening for the group show "Food Justice" at Rock Paper Scissors was a particular draw, for me anyway, and judging from the usual horde-sized turnout I'd say the topic seems to crowd some other people's minds too.



Maybe it's just California, but the whole foodsystems-MichaelPollan-Urban-local-slowfood thing has started to infiltrate pretty much...everything. It seems that nothing is safe from the consideration of where and how your food is grown. Especially in the design world, people whose job it is to produce and promote aesthetics are now pulling on the ideas of locality and seasonality for the substance of their work. See also: Slow Food Nation. The boundaries between design and action are more blurred today than ever before, as innovation has become the battleground for the shaping of our society's future. Call me postmodern, but I see design, economics and science so intertwined at this historic juncture that it is sometimes difficult to tell the three apart. And I'm all aboard this smushsmash of issues. Of course the exhibit at RPS seemed only too timely and so I headed over for a closer look.
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The show touched on all facets of our local East Bay alternative food production rockstars: People's Grocery, ForageOakland, the Secret Cafe and CitySlicker Farms Backyard Garden Project. Rock Paper Scissors contributes more regularly to this movement by providing a pickup point for the people's grocery Grub Box program.

ForageOakland contributed maps of the North Oakland Neighborhood documenting the location of found fruits and edibles. And SecretCafe, a house turned sometimes restaurant, displayed an archived collection of menus: each illustrated carefully and beautifully and hung about for all to see.





The real centerpiece of the show, however, belonged to the Backyard Gardeners, who as part of RPS's Community Collaboration Project used Holga cameras to document each other, their surroundings and the gardens they've sewn in an attempt to bring real food to their neighborhood.





For those who know it, West Oakland's unique situation within the food justice struggle demonstrates the severe reality of inaccessibility to quality foods in low-income neighborhoods. From People's Grocery,

There is only one supermarket to serve over 25,000 people...With a short supply of full-service grocery stores, many residents depend on over 40 convenience stores for their food shopping. These convenience stores carry mostly canned, processed, and poor quality foodstuffs and promote the consumption of candy, chips, liquor, and cigarettes. A 1998 community food assessment of West Oakland showed that only three of these convenience stores offered a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables (Farfarn-Ramirez, 1998). Prices at convenience stores were found to range between 30%-100% higher than prices in supermarkets.

Though some indirectly, each of the contributors to the exhibit address the issues surrounding our food systems in their own way. Some point to the abundance of foods in the urban landscape ready for the picking. Others illuminate the intimacy and sociality lost by the factory farming and sterilization of commercial food commodities. The juxtaposition of each of the components paints a truthful, critical and most of all hopeful picture of emergent views on food justice. The show stays up throughout the month of November, but more importantly I'd encourage anyone with free space to curate a show like this one. Different to your own place and the facets of food justice prominent in your own community, but present. Because I promise you it's present. I'd venture that if you go looking, you're likely to find some pretty remarkable folks at work doing similarly radical food justice work in your own city. You won't even have to look very hard.

Megawopolis

One more thing you should be sure to catch this Friday is the opening of the Megawords storefront, located right down 11th street from the FH studio. I mean, we'll be practically neighbors! In case you're so unfortunate as to have never heard, Megawords is a slick d.i.y. publication out of Philadelphia, openly curated, that includes the words and photos of many different kinds of people. Despite its creators being less than formally trained journalists, the substance of its pages are frequently on par with the most widely recognized examples of solid reporting I've seen. The photos are equally, if not more captivating, so that taken together, the bound volume presents a fine example of indie publishing. It is therefore not surprising that the journal comes out of the famed collective powerhouse at1026 Arch St.



The creators, Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy, bring Megawords to their audience at a bargain: that is, free. The project is deliberately non-commercial and thus, you will find no advertisements hogging valuable centerfold real estate. Every last pixel is substance. They aim to achieve in doing this, "the exploration of the modern urban environment and the establishment of an open and active dialogue between the magazine and the community at large." As a result, however, the magazine only comes out twice a year--no small feat--though not as often as I would be happy to read it. To satisfy hungrier devotees, the creators also broadcast a radio show every Sunday night through their website.



Bringing it back to tonight, the storefront at 1125 N. Cherry St. is about bringing all this information and energy into a tangible space. With a rotating cast of famous and not so famous artists, the magazine hopes to ground its work in a single address for thirty days of installations, speakers, performances, music, workshops and film screenings. The point of the experiment as it was conceived is to document the learning process and the creative process among interesting, driven, artful people. And it is totally free, so everyone's invited. That's it, and then it'll be gone. For the thirty days the project exists, you can expect to find a veritable onslaught of things eminating from the space and the creators hope, a slurry of things inside it as well.

Carrie's Latest & Greatest

Somehow, amidst everything else happening at FH this summer, Carrie Collins has managed to put together a show. In collaboration with local lady Beth Brandon and curated by Annette Monnier, the event entitled "10% Tiger Fire" opens tomorrow, Friday evening at Copy Gallery 7-11 pm. Annette has provided lovely and insightful interviews with both artists on her lovely and insightful blog. See August 17, 2008 and August 23, 2008 for Beth and Carrie, respectively.



While I cannot very well give hints as to the offerings of this opening--sadly,I am as spacially removed as you are these days from the inner workings of Carrie's brain--I can provide you with the artists' statement. And trust me, it will whet your palate. They write:

10% Tiger Fire is the work of two artists; Beth Brandon and Carrie Collins.

Beth Brandon is an accomplished young artist who is or has been involved with several local artist spaces (Space 1026, Padlock, The Fabric Workshop and Museum) , and exhibits regularly in Philadelphia and beyond. Carrie Collins is an accomplished industrial designer (with her own company, Fabric Horse) who also creates what we can call 'fine art" (she was a founding member of Black Floor Gallery). The exhibition's curator, Annette Monnier, has brought them together because she believes the work of each artist will compliment the other's, allowing the viewer to pick up nuances in the artists' oeuvres that might otherwise be missed.

The remaining 90% of the exhibition is as follows: 40% function as it applies to "non-functional" objects, 10% home-coming party, 20% interior decor, 10% fantasy, 10% whiskey. For a more detailed description we (Annette, Beth and Carrie in alphabetical order) invite you to see everything for yourself at Copy Gallery. The opening of the exhibition will be held on Friday, September 5th from roughly 7-11. Refreshments will be an integral part of the celebration, please join us.

Bring your friends.
Copy Gallery, 319A N. 11th St., 3rd Floor