The art of documentation

With a little help from some friends, I got my sculptures speaking. Here is a newly edited expose of little voices. Thanks to IMC Lab & Gallery and James and Carrie Tunick for tech support and sound programming and to Colby Cannonwill, Colleen Flanigan, Isabelle Garbani, Katya Usvitsky, Dionisio Cortes Ortega, Daniella Engen and Ian Trask (and their dogs), Jacob Rath and strangers who inspired the sculptures, provided sound and generally helped with project development and documentation.

He stepped in a pool of red paint...

I may have mentioned that I started writing poetry again, inspired in part by the wonderful poets with whom I interacted through my @EmbroideryPoems project. In a direction related to that work but with a twist, I am stitching parts of poems on dolls and their accoutrements and environments. This is my first attempt at this new process, in which I put together bits and pieces of ideas from various other projects. It is a very time-consuming process!

A lot of work and ideas lie ahead! This is just an excerpt of a poem in which I and a number of others appear. I should mention that my poems are like stories written in poem form with some internal rhyming.

Obamacare, Year 1

I don't know about you, but the advent of a new market for health insurance in the United States has given me new flexibility in my work life, something I've wished for since graduating from college in 1997. No longer am I required to have a full-time job in order to be able to see a doctor. Woohoo!

In talking with friends, colleagues and business associates, I've heard many sides to this story. I'm excited; others are less so; some are even more ecstatic than I can imagine. 

What will happen this year?

If you have an Obamacare-related story to share, get in touch. I am planning to create an embroidered portrait of sorts of year one of this new legislation. Below is my own portrait - paint and embroidery on tyvek.

Starting off 2014 with a non-literal but literary Bang

(freedom is a trip)

a concrete (i.e. visual) poem by Montana Ray 

My re-interpretation in embroidery and fabric manipulation with stuffing...A "soft" gun. Flat, before stuffing and embroidering, the separate fabric pieces I cut resembled Montana's original - I traced her poem to get the right shape. Somehow in the translation, the shape morphed. For one, I added extra fabric at the extreme right because I ran out of space for the top 3 lines of the poem. 

As you can tell, the piece is small
- 3.5" h x 7" w x 1" d