#ArtistsWhoWrite @TheBrooklynCottage

Thrilled to be teaming up again with Jenny Douglas of The Brooklyn Cottage for a new literary reading series mining multiplicity. Artists Who Write features sculptors, installation artists, dancers, designers, performance artists, painters, crafts people, book artists, for whom writing is an integral part of their creative practice and a pursuit on its own.

Seldon Yuan, Plant Poem. 


Join us this Wednesday, 6/10 from 7–9pm for Artists Who Write Salon I, featuring Yazmany Arboleda, Kent Shell and Seldon Yuan – heavy hitters in the visual and literary art worlds and in design.
Tickets are going fast. Get yours here now!

Join us also Wednesday, 6/17 from 7–9pm for Artists Who Write Salon II featuring
Swati Khurana, Montana Ray and Iviva Olenick 
Tickets available here.

Thank you, Jenny, for your warmth and radiant generosity, which pulled the inner curator out of me. And thank you roster of artists I've admired for years. Assembling us in a collaborative series of evenings is a dream come true.

Join us!

Brooklyn in Stop Motion

One of my favorite parts of being an artist are impromptu collaborations. Friends and strangers become part of my work by sharing their stories, which I record and transform into 2- and 3-dimensional embroideries. I sometimes even make stop motion animations using the audio recordings (which I edit).

Stop motion is new to me; I read an online tutorial to get the basic concept. And I now make these pieces which to me have a handmade feel. They're not clean and overly produced and edited; they're more about finding another way to share narrative in the digital age.

The piece below, An Old New York You Don't Really See, is narrated by my friend, Sherri Kronfeld, a native New Yorker and current Brooklynite. She is particularly gifted at capturing 1908s NYC through the eyes and impressions of a child. I wish my own memories retained the feelings of being a kid.

Successful Open Studios + sneak peak of interactive sound!

Last Thursday's open studios at IMC Lab and Gallery was a success! Visitors shared in our excitement over the launch of new projects at the intersection of handmade and digital realms. And there's more - stay tuned for details as each of us rolls out solo shows of our new works later this fall and early in 2015. Colleen Flanigan is up first with a show opening in November; I will debut new works in January-February 2015. 

In the meantime, here is a sneak peak of how James Tunick took sound files of my interviews with friends and acquaintances (and dogs!), and turned them into an interactive piece relating to my sculptures.

Shoestring Press

I discovered a lovely new space for art making, taking workshops and meeting Brooklynites: Shoestring Press in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a collective operated by Lane Sell and colleagues.

Ever excited by the idea of collaborating, Lane and I are cooking up a combined screen printing/ soft sculpture workshop in mid September - stay tuned for details! And Lane, interested in embroidery's graphic capabilities, is planning to experiment with collagraph printing using an embroidery as the source image. With printmaking, one must reverse the direction of the source image so that it reads properly, so note that the below embroideries (at least the front side) have been reversed left-right!

Shoestring back and front reversed direction.

Livre d'Artiste d'Aujourd'hui: Artist Talk at Center for Book Arts, Wednesday 8/6/14, 6:30pm

Dear friends and readers,

Wow - the summer is flying by! Does that mean I'm having so much fun I cannot remember what day it is? Or that I've made so many embroidery stitches my hands and sense of time are wrapped in thread?

Regardless, I plan to come up for air this Wednesday evening at my Center for Book Arts Artist Talk. Ximena Perez-Grobet, Béatrice Coron and I will discuss our works individually, followed by audience Q and A and group discussion. 

Wine and cheese reception to start.

The Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
Wednesday, August 6, 6:30-8:30

Join us!

Hens Rene, the latest from FiberGraf

August art openings in New York

In August, many New York galleries go on vacation. The ones that stay open tend to have large group shows, and to show more experimental work.

At top is a photo of me in front of my Were I So Besotted pieces at "Condition X," an exhibit at the School of Visual Arts curated by Keren Moscovitch in consultation with David Gibson.

The photo below is of Jon Baker, the graffiti half of FiberGraf, in front of our piece, "Henz," at Kunsthalle Galapagos in a huge group show, "Can't Hear the Revolution," curated by Julie McKim, Albert Shelton, Eric Hougen and Gracie Kazer. Both exhibits are on view until August 20th. If you're in the New York area, check them out.

HenZ

This is the latest from FiberGraf, my collaboration with graffiti artist, Jon Baker.

We are dreaming up ways to translate the complexity and detail of pieces like the one at left to something replicable on clothing and bags...Can you picture it? More to come very soon on this idea.

Urban images - signage, graffiti, FiberGraf

This piece at left is the latest in my collaboration with graffiti artist, Jon Baker. He has provided me with colorful images, like the one at left, which I transform into embroideries. This one is from his black book, a sketchbook graffiti artists use to perfect their tags (signatures).

This one is nearly finished, although I would like to add more French knots to some of the smaller squares of ink above the "Hens" tag (Jon's tag).

I usually post this work on another blog, but wanted to include this here, mostly because I find myself very drawn to urban imagery lately, as evidenced in my previous two posts about "Forgotten Brooklyn" signage. 

I also discovered that another fiber artist, Marie Elcin, recently created an embroidered graffiti piece. You can see it here. 

Thanks, readers, for your feedback about "Forgotten Brooklyn." I appreciate your honest comments. 

Baker's Dozen

About two months ago, I sat down with my friend, KC, a poet and collage artist. You can see and read her work here. She gave me some poems to read, and I gave her some of my artwork to look at. We decided to try to combine our artistic voices.

At top is an image of my embroidery of one of her poems, "Baker's Dozen:"

Pretty is a pat on the head,

The folds of the body she swims in

and from which she is fled.

Pretty is a pat on the head.

It isn't the form that locates her dread,

it's the distance from whom she's been.

Pretty is a pat on the head,

the folds of the body she swims in.

We did end up talking a bit about swimming, which is a sport I have no talent for (I think you all know by now how I feel about running). We agreed that an undercurrent of water ran through a few of the poems. 

I stitched this poem on a piece of an old bathing suit that never quite fit. I actually have had it since I went to summer camp as a teenager. It always seemed old fashioned to me, and was intended for a body with more curves than mine.

The Paper Bride at McNally Jackson Books and Window display at Muriel Guepin Gallery

Esther Smith of Purgatory Pie Press, a collaborative book-making venture with her husband, Dikko Faust, invited me to be a guest artist at a promotional event for her new book, The Paper Bride, which shares step-by-step instructions for using paper left over from our daily lives to create invitations, decorations, and gifts for a wedding. Esther and Dikko teach at numerous New York City arts and crafts venues and universities. Their spirit of creating through collaboration is present in everything they do. 

Last Sunday, on Valentine's day evening at McNally Jackson Books, a lovely bookstore in Nolita, Esther led audience participants in a group project to make a paper garland out of recycled bridal magazine clippings. Later on, I shared my narrative embroidery. I had brought with me fabric, thread, needles, scissors, as well as a framed example of my work. I invited audience members to share with me stories of love and broken hearts. I asked participants to share with me the one sentiment they had wanted to tell a loved one but hadn't. Several young women approached me. As we talked, I shaped their stories into a sentence or two to embroider onto fabric. Working quickly, I made sure to hand each woman her finished piece before the end of the event. 

Thank you, Esther, for inviting me to participate in your event. And thanks to audience members for making it successful by trusting me with your stories.

To purchase The Paper Bride, click here.

Also on Valentine's Day, Muriel Guepin of Muriel Guepin Gallery kindly installed about a dozen of my post-it note pieces in the gallery window. The picture above shows part of the installation. Thanks, Muriel, for creating this display.

I thought this might be the start of our artistic commingling...

"Thursday night one month later, he strode into the bar with a manila envelope. Inside was my sketch. I thought this might be the start of our artistic commingling..."

Here is the sequel to "He disappeared into a whiskey night."

Thanks to Phil for his sketch. (By the way, this is the print of the sketch, not the actual sketch.)

This piece is important to me because it allowed me to embellish on an actual event without being as confessional and personal as some of my other pieces. I consider it a bit more playful. It is very difficult emotionally to share the level of detail I have displayed through my work. The process of recording and recreating sensitive, intimate events has been cathartic, but has also embroiled me in the originating emotional experience.

When I began "Were I So Besotted," I imagined creating a caricature of myself, where I would embellish actual events. I am still surprised by how open the work became. I think the "truth," or my truth, is simply more compelling and relatable than any stories I could create.

In this piece here, I created a version of myself that does not quite look like me. I feel a sense of freedom in having done that.

Collaboration

Conversations with friends and acquaintances informed the creation of my embroideries, providing a context and some balance so that not all anecdotes were mine or from a female perspective.

I began a more formal collaboration with a female friend my age, also living in Brooklyn at the time, in winter 2007-2008. We got together for tea and brainstorming meetings, enlisting a male friend as a "moderator," and male point of view.

Many of my journal entries in the winter of 2007-2008 developed from these group sessions. Here are some of the embroideries and journal entries inspired by our conversations.


above left: Physically and Emotionally Photoshopped. 2008. Embroidery on fabric. 5.5" X 9". For sale through Shop Art Gallery. Contact Muriel Guepin, contact@shopartstudio.com, www.shopartstudio.com

Above right is the journal entry leading to the finished piece.