Cassie visits February 7, 2008
my friend Cassie Thornton will be arriving later today for a meeting about collaborating in the Normal Space. we wanted to do this back in December, just before her departure for a residency in Finland, but probably all for the best as planning then would have given us only 3 days – or rather 67.6 hours! – to produce the event. This time around we’ll have two weeks, as I’m hoping to hold her exhibition in Normal Space on the 21st for the February installment of Flux Thursday. My next week is pretty packed with work, and two weeks really isn’t an incredible amount of time to produce these events, but then again anything is possible in two or three weeks with a committed spirit and the right resources (me, no Abrams tanks here, just some postcards and a network of blogs!).
more thoughts after the meeting…
Zon Sakai featured August 28, 2006
At the inaugural Normal Space exhibition I displayed a work by Zon Sakai, who has also been featured in the current – July/August – issue of Sculpture magazine.
An excerpt from the article can be found online here.
Lindsay Beyerstein took a photo of the piece during the 2006 Flux Factory Auction & Gala where I ended up buying this piece.
Click here to read what others have said about this piece, also.
artist map April 12, 2006
it’s approaching 2am monday morning and since i’ve pretty much resolved the location of all the work for the show, i’ve gone ahead and sketched out the artist map for the show.
the artist map of course will allow visitors to put name->to->work.
i considered several options for the show no doubt. name labels on the wall are the most obvious option, but as there are already over 20 works on the Space wall, with other works scattered about, the Space is already pretty crowded and name labels i think would have only served to add confusion to the array of works on display.
so i considered writing on the wall, with pencil. while i think this is a nice aesthetic, i didn’t conclude it added anything to the work or the show, and so dropped that option.
i eventually concluded upon a hand-drawn (with pen) map. this was simple as a majority of the works are all located upon a single wall, consolidated, of simple sizes and shapes in relation to each other, and could be simply drawn with annotations of artist names.
i will post the map online after the opening (i just don’t have the time to scan it and do this now), and it will be available at the Space as a letter-sized photocopy for viewers to walk away with.
Risa Puno at Normal Space April 10, 2006
Risa Puno is officially added to the inaugural opening of Normal Space @ Flux Factory.
i stumbled upon Risa’s work at the 2006 Scope art fair in NYC. my first interaction with her work was near a door gangway, and her machine suggested something part-insectoid part-retro-space-lander (the ‘bacteriophage’).
i put a quarter in and received a capsule that i have yet to crack open. the plastic is quite tough and suspect i will need to take a hammer to it to get it open (Risa says other people step on them!).
Risa had other work available throughout Scope including a free machine that included hand-written fortune-esque phrases such as ‘I love cowboys’ or my personal favorite ‘I like to take shit apart’.
At the time I did not know these works belonged to Risa, but i was curious enough that i wrote the Scope organizers and requested if they could tell me the artist’s name given my description of the work. They eventually wrote back, informed me it was the work of Risa Puno, and i tracked down her website, which i was pleasantly surprised to see contained an image of me interacting with her previously mentioned ‘Bacteriophage’ dispenser! Great!
I’ve sent an email to Risa inviting her out for the opening. I love the spontaneity of this all.
no speedo?! April 9, 2006
friend and fellow artist Jason Eisner – who is the only artist fortunate enough to have two count ’em two works in the inaugural Normal Space opening – just emailed me that unfortunately he suspects he won’t be in attendance as i requested… in his speedo! he will be here, but with the recent snow his chode is shriveling for salvation. tis a shame, really.
subway word April 3, 2006
Blair Butterfield, a fellow American i met while studying in London, who gave me a test painting over two years ago and who will be making her NYC debut at Normal Space, just emailed me an exciting rumour:
My friend contacted me to say they saw an advert in the subway in NY for the normal space show.
Sounds great!
hope your [sic] well, probably really busy.
Awesome! I don’t know who is responsible for this, but thank you, you rock!
Cassie Thornton – artist statement
Cassie Thornton is a great friend and fellow artist. She’s also a like-minded Midwesterner, and we met in London of all places. I was studying full-time and she was on an exchange and she’s a ball of energy, continuously impressing me.
She just forwarded me her artist statement. As I’m not sure i’ll have the space to display her words, but want to make sure her statement lives on, i thought it appropriate to blockquote her statement here:
The piece adopted by Mr. Nick Normal is of a series of re-modeled utopian communities in the style of Le Corbusier. As I work in this mode, I uncover the contemporary culture of myth that has descended from 20th century governmental and artistic attempts to create a clearly-ordered conceptual foundation to inspire and manipulate the steadily growing disorderly masses. Focused specifically on the utopian ideals of Le Corbusier and their vexed adoption by the French government, I am interested in this last ditch effort to remedy a happy people from the reality of humanity.
To emphasize this idea of tonic culture, I am using mythically healing root vegetables to print the facades of the buildings. A teller of wives tales I know has described to me the properties of root vegetable juice, especially potatoes, as a remedy for fatal sickness. With this in mind, I have used this essence to create a contemporary model for the progress of civilization. I hope to participate alongside Le Corbusier in the thwarting of the corruption of humanity and who have made an actual attempt to oppose monumental forces that they disagree with.
The building adopted by Mr. Nick Normal is a truck stop in the process of printing and building a large structure with the ideals and rules of Le Corbusier. The process started by meticulously carving root vegetables to the specifications of individual window designs of various self contained communities designed by Le Corbusier. In this piece I modelled the shape of the building and the window design to represent Le Corbusier’s residential project designed for and completed in Marseille, France. The mode of social architecture developed for this project is revered by many but equally distrusted and hated by others who relate it to similarly constructed city housing in Paris. Le Corbusier’s complex vision of successful urban living was cyclical: for communities to come into being and support themselves will need to be deeply connected and dependant on nature, but to maintain their existence they must fertilize the world outside of their community with the cultural nutrients that develop within their isolation. I enact this utopian cycle by delivering this small bit of well intended architecture to the doorstep of Nick Normal.
Now you have to come to the opening to see what the work is all about! of course I’ll add an image of all the work after the opening. Cassie’s work is currently one of my favorites: part sculpture, part architecture, part text, a complete work.
Dezso not Deszo March 29, 2006
AHHHHHHH!!!
I just got an email from Andrea Dezso who will be in the first opening at Normal Space; I have a small (6×7.5 cm) colour inkjet print mounted on card by her. So she just informed me:
I noticed that my name is misspelled on the invitation you sent me a link to. The correct spelling is Dezso (the z comes first then teh [sic] s). I know it’s totally counterintuitive, it’s only used this way in Hungraian [sic] as far as I know.
I sware, it’s impossible, something always goes wrong!! No matter how long one spends proofing everything, reading and re-reading, checking grammar, spelling, names, etc., you always miss at least one thing somewhere! Fortunately, it actually made me laugh to realize this! I’m sorry Andrea, I’ll get it correct next time!
transatlantic studio moves March 5, 2006
a little cross-blogging sensation going on here! i just got an email from Karen D’Amico who in case you haven’t already noticed will be in the inaugural Normal Space opening. Karen is a fellow American whom i met in London (she lives there still) while attending Central St. Martin’s. These days she’s big into two forms of communication that i absolutely adore: zines and blogs; she’s part of the inspiration behind this blog even! And she recently put up a post which includes an interview-exchange she had with fellow artist Carol Es about their near-simultaneous studio moves. Pretty interesting, and since the interviews are different you find yourself clicking back and forth between them reading the text like a mesh (I read them both on one screen and literally scrolled down them together weaving back and forth between them!)
Click here for Karen’s interview of Carol.
Click here for Carol’s interview of Karen.