First Light

These are some shots of Adam Young's lamp from the Secret Lighting show. Here us discuss this piece and his career in the most recent episode of Craft Works Dialogue. He will have work in both Secret Objects and Secret Furniture. See previous blog post for more info about the series. 

The Secret Series

Thanks to a generous grant form the Cultural Arts Division of the city of Austin and the hard work of a ton of lovely people, I have been able to put on The Secret Series at Cloud Tree. Borrowing its name from the great Secret Furniture show at Gallery Lombardi in 2003, the Secret Series is a three part event featuring the work of 50-60 Austin artists and designers. I am lucky to have the amazing Mark Macek and Rachel Koper to help curate the event. The first show in the series is (was, sorry posting this a little late) Secret Lighting April 7-9. Coming up quickly is Secret Objects on May 12-14 with the opening from 6-10 on Friday the 12th. The final show to push it over the top is a reprise of the original furniture show Secret Furniture happening June 9-11 again with the opening night on Friday June 9th from 6-10. There will be plenty of free Tito's and awesome work so please come join us. The address for Cloud Tree is 3411 east 5th just up the street from the beloved Justine's. The Series is sponsored by the following business who generously donated to this great cultural event: Abode/ Fern Santini, Blue Genie Art Bazaar, Big Medium, Dalgleish Construction, Kome, East Side Lumber and the great austin original, Tito's Handmade Vodka. 

Fooled

After 53 years of residing in the same house, my sister and I recently helped my father of  82 years move from his place out in Westlake into an independent living facility. He was born on Bee Caves Road in 1934 and I'm guessing he is/was the oldest living resident of the area. Seeing the house I grew up in empty of life and disheveled as we prepared for an estate sale was a confusing and somber task unlike anything I've done before. Our plan was to update the house and rent it out to support his care. It felt like we were running my families story through a series of filters sifting it all down till the house was empty. Throughout  the process that is more or less how I felt. Empty, bitter and bitter sweet as I ruminated on what to do with everything and what it was all about. At the end of one particularly difficult day I wrote the following poem. I decided I would share it here. Maybe some of you who have gone thru something similar can relate. Thanks. 

They said it was built of limestone, completed the same week Kennedy was gunned down. 53 years. A mixed bag of sorrow, 42 dominoes, Friday night hamburgers, packing out for Lake Travis, returning from deer hunts, Harlequin romance novels, indoor smoking, laughter, tragedy and the ghosts of a standard dysfunctional American dream. But they soon felt foolish with disbelief. They had been deceived. Not one fucking stone. Anywhere. In any wall. The truth arrived unwelcome that it had been made of sand all along. Incredulous and angered they raged and contested but finally faced the fact, hard to swallow as it was. And soon the tides came as they always do, from the cold ocean, driven by decay, weakness and bewilderment. The walls were slowly eroded at first but soon all was gone, washed flat and erased. As the fog of time rolled in, it was barely remembered and in the end forgotten, to a point of non existence by the next set of fools, blindly building, laughing, crying and hoping just the same. 

I Am You

I just had my first solo show of sculpture and wall art at Cloud Tree and it was one of the more gratifying accomplishments of my career. I was lucky enough to receive  a grant from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin to put the show on and am not only grateful to the city but also extremely pleased at the level of funding the city has been putting towards the arts in recent years. This is the second such grant I have received. The first was for the group art show Vessel which I curated in 2015. Below are some shots of the work from I Am You as well as the artist statement. 

I Am You - Reflections on Connection and Isolation

Welcome to Cloud Tree and thank you so much for coming. Though I have always considered my furniture and decor designs to be sculptural in nature it wasn’t until 2015 that I began to make my first pieces of sculpture and decorative wall art. 

For some time now all my decor designs have been done in a resin and grain matched series, typically via solid wood laminations. As I began to break them into separate pieces during the fabrication process it struck as a beautiful metaphor for something I had already been meditating on which is the idea of being an individual and yet part of a greater whole. Through various media including podcasts, ted talks, books, music and more the idea kept popping up again and again. I began to work this theme into some sculpture last year and decided it could serve as the energetic underpinning of a body of work for my first solo show.

Being a person who likes to see all sides of an issue, I thought I would explore the existential isolation of being human as well. I often like holding diametric ideas as both true. Though we are in essence, at least i believe, intrinsically connected to everyone and everything including the infinite, we bear the burden of complete isolation on a journey that no one can experience but ourselves. Again in a diametric way I find this fact both terrifying and beautifully special.

One area of the connection theme I chose to explore is the idea that we simply cannot do it alone. The sculpture Eureka embodies this the best as it represents that all great ideas have been built by the whole, one spark inspiring the next in an energetic thread that can be traced back as far as one would like to take it, even to the primordial darkness and mystery that stirred in the very beginning. In the spirit of this I would like to thank the countless people who have inspired, taught and helped me on my own journey of realizing my dreams this far. I simply could not have done it with out you.

Eureka

Ark For One

From top - Meteroic , Macrocosm and Cotton Mouth

Eureka's Twins

I Understand You Feel Alone But That Isn't Helping/ The Seven (Bad?) Behaviors