Diverse Findings at NIAD

I was invited by Em Kettner at NIAD in Richmond, California to curate an online show, and this is what I came up with after scouring the NIAD archive with no curational theme or intentions of thematic coherence in mind.

Here is a picture by James Heartsill of what looks to be a house, except it has teeth, and there is a sky and trees and the roof looks like it has a hair cut, and a tongue is coming out like a door mat.  Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, wrote a song called My Head is My Only House Unless it Rains, and that's what this mixed media on canvas piece makes me think of.  We walk around in our heads that protect us like little houses.  We inhabit our bodies.  They are our homes, and we may own them, but they are on loan to us.

This is a ceramic piece by Ann Meade and it looks like a hatted bust with a cat.  I really like the colors here, at least that's what first catches my eye.  Then, after looking at it a bit, I see that the ceramic part of the head looks like it has a nose on the right side of it, making the head facing to the right, so the face looks like it's on the side of the head.  I think that's a little bit cubistic and fun.  The figure just looks happy.  The palette works for me.  

This untitled Jeremy Burleson piece is joyous.  I believe it's a bunch of people on sailboats.  But you can see through the sails, and you can see through the hulls of the boats.  This is exactly how Superman feels with x-ray vision.    I love the shapes of the sails, kind of Christmas tree-like.  

This is Shostakovich's 5th Symphony a la Christian Vassell.  A long while back,  I was looking online for the most popular symphonies of all time, and the website, I forget which one, recommended Shostakovich's 5th, so I listened to it and liked it.  I could relate to it.  It resonated with me.  I don't always feel like listening to it, but there is a place for it in my little beating heart.  So, when I saw this piece, it was a fun surprise.

Records are usually associated with sound, but when you put paint on the record, it covers up the groove/grooves so that it won't play any more.  It becomes a sculpture.   It's funny to think that if you listened to the symphony it would put you in a grey, dark mood, like the color Christian painted the record.  Maybe Christian's artpiece could be considered visually analagous to the experience of listening to the symphony.   In other words, you could look at the painted record and get the same feeling you would if you listened to the symphony.

Maria Dalisay's untitled piece reminds of pictures of the Himalayas I've seen before.  When I see mountains, I think of how small I am and how they've been here on Earth for such a long time.  I pretty much love landscapes and paint them as part of my own art practice.

Peter Harris' Untitled Acrylic on Canvas is intriguing to me because I like the brushstrokes, the change from transparency to opacity, how the blob of red doesn't stay in the rectangle and how there's room for pareidolia like when you see your dog or cat in the shapes of the clouds.  I also like the hazy qualities of the grayish image under the red blob. 

Audrey Pickering's Untitled dry media piece plays with dimensionality funly, in a fun way, in a playful way, a playful but serious way, like Wayne "Pastry Chef" Thiebaud does in his paintings of San Francisco hills.  I also really like how the sky and grass looks like combed fur, as though these houses could be placed on a large furry animal, or the houses are really designed for fleas and they are on a dog.  The drawing seems painterly to me, probably because of the dark base color poking through, creating shadow everywhere the pencil marks are lighter or more sparse.

Jason Powell-Smith's untitled text piece is part of a series of text paintings that remind me of posters advertising sporting events where one team plays against another.  I like to think of AC Transit fighting Muni like gladiators in a giant coliseum, but I suppose that would be rather gruesome and gory.  Maybe they're playing jacks competitively or checkers or who knows.  But it is fun to imagine these contests.  I could also see the people at AC Transit wondering why they must go to battle against the people of MUNI.  Again, this is one in a series, and there are many other noteworthy imagined contests. 

Luis Estrada's untitled piece looks like a mysterious treasure map.   The fact that there's a mystery that's not explained is a lot of fun because then my little imagination can conjecture what is happening.  It makes me think of the Iliad or some such epic voyage even if I don't know if the land mass is a real place or not.  It looks like there might be ships with oars in the water, but I'm reluctant to assume and I'm ok with ambiguity.  I like how I can read on it the names of days of the week as if it were a journal or captain's log.

Heather Hamann's Teacup Ride is a ceramic scene of a pastoral countryside with a path going through it, and on the path is a platter with a tea kettle and tea cups as if they were taking a ride through the country.    What I like about it is the sense of fun and fantasticality of it and that she made it come to life.  She imagined the impossible and realized it through art, moving it a little bit closer to being possible.  I like to imagine that it's an everyday occurrence to see teacups traveling through a beautiful countryside on their own, having a great time, and maybe if you're polite and nice, they'll let you have some tea.

I didn't see the Frida Kahlo show at the De Young

I went to the de Young Museum, but it was closed to the general public because of the pandemic. I went to go pick up my painting from the prematurely closed art exhibition made up of local artists' work.  And so I got my painting, took a photo of it with Frida Kahlo's image on a window and left.

 

While my art was up in the museum, I went there on three different occasions:  alone, with a friend, and with my pandemic bubble.

 

I never saw the concurrent Frida Kahlo exhibit, but I did see some exhibit about artificial intelligence. But I didn't get it.  I didn't get the point of it.  I frequently feel that tech engineers and programmers and that ilk like to slap each other on the back, flatter each other or themselves, and I felt that there was a bit of that in this exhibit.  It's probably because I'm anti-intellectual and willfully ignorant and maybe even unwillfully ignorant that I didn't feel compelled to understand it.  I'd like to talk to an interesting, not boring, person who liked this exhibit, the artificial intelligence exhibit.  I want to know why this was in the museum, what the point of it was.

 

I feel funny, or I feel that it's funny how I didn't ever go into the Frida Kahlo exhibit.  I might have been able to get into it for free on the day I had an artist's pass for the museum because I had a work on display there, but there was a line to get in, and for some reason, I'm not completely and utterly riveted by the story of Frida Kahlo.  I like her, but as with so many things, I'm a bit blasé about her, at least compared to people who seem to love her.  My level of love is at about 7 or 8, and that's based on I don't know what,  the stuff of hers I've seen and what I know about her struggles in her life. I don't really like art that much anyhow.

Even though the museum is closed, you can still look at it from the outside. It is over 20 feet tall and has a tower that looks like a triangle. Pretty much the whole thing is covered in a metal mesh that looks weathered and makes me think of decaying ships wrecked on Normandy beaches in World War 2.

I didn't run my fingers along the mesh, but I should have. I just kind of looked at it and wondered why they put it over the building. I'm not sure it offers any functional advantages, but maybe it provides shade to offices in it by diffusing the light in which case the mesh functions like tree leaves, so that's pretty neat.

There's a sculpture garden on one side of it, and it's pretty nifty actually because the natural surroundings of the sculptures is pretty or whatever adjective you wish to use to describe gardens, alive. The sculptures are all dead, but they are in a living garden.

Kevin Mutch's The Rough Pearl

Here is a picture of a book.

I bought this and read it, but not very well.

Originally I wrote out all my thoughts, but then I deleted what I wrote because it takes me a while to read something and understand it.  But now that I feel like I have some kind of understanding of the book, I have to say that I don't know why you just don't read the book yourself.

I bought it because I'm fascinated with art school adjunct teachers/professors.  I know some pretty well,  and the role/position of adjunct seems kind of shitty, and it seems like everybody knows that.

After looking at the book a second time, I see some guy who's married to a teacher, wants to be some kind of working artist, isn't excited about a lot of his students, wants to fuck a student whom he can relate to.  I don't know, am i forgetting something.

I see a student who is stripping to get through school, who has transcended her environment, who is somewhat interested in her teacher, who is interesting and thoughtful.

The characters seem mostly 3-D.  The teacher wife isn't fully fleshed out.

I don't fully understand the Ron Vitare guy.  He seems like he embodies the energy of the cosmos, like he represents fate or some kind of master plan that guides us through life or seems to fail to guide us through life.  And Adam, the protagonist, rebels against this plan and rejects complacent settling.

It looks like Adam rejects the fake and pursues the real, and I can get behind that, and he comes to this realization through drugs!!!  Hooray for drugs!!!

Even though this book was created by a man, it's still pretty good.  It's not as good as any book created by any woman, but it's still pretty good.

Vernon Ghrier Accused of Sexual Harrassment

Please note.  This story is fiction.

Vernon Ghrier of the Vernon Ghrier Gallery has been accused of Sexual Harrassment by a former employee who was fired after she filed a report with the Brooklyn P. D.

Vernon Ghrier

According to the complaint, Ghrier would repeatedly make completely unwelcome suggestive gestures with his tongue at the Gallery Assistant.

When asked for a statement Ghrier responded, "You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a Gallery Owner, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

"Review" of Blinky 40th Anniversary: CSUN

There was so much art at Jeffrey Vallance's art show that it was overwhelming.  For a male, it was an extremely strong show, amazing even.  It was a lot of chicken art.  Just go see it.   The walk through with the artist is today. It's at CSUN. "CSUN" means California State University Northridge.  You can get there if you try.

CSUN Art Gallery

18111 Nordhoff st
Northridge, California 91330-8299

This is a drawing of Blinky's exhumation bone in a reliquary.

This is a drawing of a very early chicken work by artist, Jeffrey Vallance.

This is a drawing of a  Jeffrey Vallance Blinky collage.

Again, just go see it unless you don't like animals and don't think you share anything with them as you wake up each day and live your life.

In the same building, there was an exhibit of guest artists' work entitled, Free Range.  It was a show within a show.  It had all kinds of artists' work in it, a lot of artists' work about Blinky and anything related to her.  There was work by Laurie Hassold, Jeffrey Gillette, John Kilduff, Dave Shulman, Victoria Reynolds, Doug Harvey, Dan Green, Marjan Hormozi, Rude Calderon, Auralynn Nguyen, Carlos Rodriguez and many others, a lot of other people.

And there was a show of student work in the shed gallery nearby.  The students each got a poster of Colonel Sanders looking down at KFC from the clouds, and they were charged to make it their own, to use it as a springboard for their imaginations.  There were many nice pieces of student work.

The show was spiritual, about spirit, the energy, the contagious energy of life that penetrates our beings through our senses and maybe even outside of our senses.  Blinky had a spirit, a life, a pluckiness, a pulse, a libido, an eroticism, a motivation and an electricity that made her move around and make sounds.  And then her life ended suddenly, tragically.  Wham! She was dead, gone, processed without appreciation until Mr. Vallance celebrated her life 40 years ago.

Jeffrey Vallance has a long history making art, and Blinky is not his only work.  He celebrated Blinky's life, but that's not the only thing he's done.  He's done a lot of other things, but we won't get into those right now.

Go see the show.  It's up through March 16, 2019.

Interview: Blinky the Friendly Hen 40th Anniversary

This is a drawing of Bahuchara Mata.

If you don't already know about Blinky the Friendly Hen, let me tell you the story.

Jeffrey Vallance bought Blinky, a Foster Farms fryer chicken, at Ralph's supermarket in Canoga Park in 1978 and paid to have the complete burial and memorial service at the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery. His act of treating one chicken's life and death with dignity proved to resonate with a whole bunch of people and still does today. If you want to know a lot more about Blinky, you can look her up on google or read the book Mr. Vallance wrote about her or listen to him talk about it on Youtube.
 
And so it's the 40th anniversary of Blinky's burial, and California State University, Northridge is celebrating with a big Blinky show that has a lot of chicken art in it. And when I say "a lot", I mean a lot.

I had the chance to Interview the artist, and so I did. What you read next is the interview.


PEPIAJW: How do you feel about chickens?

JV: I love chickens.

PEPIAJW: After 40 years, why are we still talking about Blinky?

JV:  Blinky made a crossover into popular culture, so it got out of the art ghetto and into the minds of regular folks. Blinky is out there in the culture as an archetype. It keeps showing up in all these kinds of venues and forums, in punk rock songs or cartoons or little jokes on TV shows, so I think it keeps going by popular culture.

PEPIAJW: If you could be any kind of chicken, what kind of chicken would you be?

JV:  I think I would be a guinea fowl. That was the wild bird that became the domesticated chicken. It's a chicken but it's wild, lives in the forest and has a natural life. I'd want to be a guinea fowl because domesticated chickens live pretty horrible lives on corporate farms and don't have much space and they're crammed in cages stacked on each other, and sometimes they cut their beaks off, and it's not a very good life for chickens now.

PEPIAJW: Do you feel that being a male artist has limited the reach of the phenomenon of Blinky?

JV:  Very much so because Blinky is a hen, a female and I'm a male, and I think Jesus had the same problem because in the bible he says he would like to be a mother hen and would like to embrace all people like a hen embraces her chicks. That's the ultimate conception of god, a mother hen, instead of god being like a stern father. Mostly we have the stern father in the sky image.

PEPIAJW: Have you ever met Bahuchara Mata?

JV:  Yes, actually in my bedroom, I have a shrine to her.  She was a woman in India, and she was walking along and then these criminals came and they were going to rape her, and she didn't want to be defiled, and she had a big knife and cut off her breasts and that turned off the marauders, she became a goddess, and she rode a chicken and that image of her riding a chicken became a symbol. She's worshiped by the transgender community in India. They have festivals and shrines for her in India. People dress up, wear make-up and have great rituals in her honor.

PEPIAJW: How did Blinky evolve in your mind after the initial acts of burial and the memorial?

JV:  The first idea was more like a prank, to see what I could get away with... if a pet cemetary would go through the ritual with the animal.

Very early on, I started to see Blinky as a symbol for all of the trillions of chickens that are slaughtered every year. Blinky started to take on a more serious role, and then a funny thing started to happen.

Later, as I looked back, I saw that all the things I did were symbols for Christ: burial, resurrection, sacrifice. Unknowingly, I went through all these rituals, and it was only later that I saw that Christ saw himself as a mother hen. That opened me up to how the different world religions see chickens as sacred. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and tribal religions, voodoo and Wicca, and it goes over the scope of religion. That's where the current show is going. My personal take on all this is that I see heaven as a big fluffy chicken. It's a warm and fuzzy place. You're embraced by this giant chicken, and you're safe under the wings.


Opening Reception: Saturday, February 2, 4-6pm
Artist Talk: Monday, February 4,10am
Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, February 16, 1pm

Steven Garen at Around the Block, Oakland, CA Sept 29, 2018

Stephen Garen stands next to his creation.

I went to Oakland Museum's event, Around the Block, in Oakland and ran into the male artist, Steven Garen.  He was a featured artist at the event partly held on the Lake Merritt BART plaza. His artwork was a big musical instrument he made. It was a stringed instrument, a rainstick instrument and a gong.  The kids liked it and spent good time having fun, making noise, hitting, plucking and tipping the created object.

I asked him how his creation was art, and he responded that the A-frame structure created five fields and that these fields are like frames in art and that whatever was contained in these frames became art because of their being framed.

I asked him what art was. I said to him, "What is art?" and he responded that it is standing around for hours, that art is exercise. He laughed because he thought his response was humorous.

I asked him what he was going to do with his contraption after the exhibition, and he told me he reassembles it in his house, that it doubles as a hammock frame which he uses to sleep in.