w o n d e r c a b i n e t

New Orleans beauty

I'm in New Orleans taking a much needed vacation with my hubby.

The three photos here I found on Flickr here, and I hope its OK with KathyV, whoever you are, that I am using them. She has some gorgeous polaroids on her Flickr site right now too - what a photographer.

I've never been this far south. We are here for the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and we've really been feeling like tourists, floppy hats and all. Its complicated feeling. The Festival has gotten huger and huger over the years, the audience whiter and whiter, and older and older. An aging audience. Korben has witnessed all of this because he has been coming for many years. Since Katrina things are changing faster.

Never having been here I only have assumptions, fears, hopes, etc about whats happening here. I feel the colonization of culture happening, and also resistance to colonization all over the place.

We biked all over the city and saw all the different neighborhoods and different class realities. Monday we're going to the 9th ward, one of the areas hurt worst by Katrina and FEMA and the Bush administration, to visit some of the places where Korben relief work with Common Ground Health Collective and Acupuncturists Without Borders. Ugh, I am so tired I can't even be bothered to go find you the links to those orgs. Forgive me! Maybe I'll beef this up tomorrow.

We spent time Audubon Park, where I saw more herons and egrets in one pace than I ever could have imagined. I felt like I was in prehistoric times.

I'm beat. I saw amazing music all day, my favorite being cajun and zydeco, and starting to learn how to dance to it. Ozomatli kicked some butt too.

xoxox. sleep tight.

Best Friends, Superheroines, and Women in Ministry

My best friend in the whole world, Sarah Sentilles,  just published her second book. It's a bad-ass feminist book. It's a book I have seen in the making since before she started writing it, one that draws on very personal experience and then reaches out to include dozens of incredible women and issues that are in my opinion nationally and globally critical in terms of sexism, oppression in general, the environment, humanity...its a brilliant book. It's a big challenge to our religious institutions (especially Christian ones).You should read it. (Special alert to all my fellow crafties: She interviews a founder of the Church of Craft!). I'll say more when I finish devouring it. 

It's called "A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit." Find it here.

Sarah and I co-directed a community art center together (which I had founded in 1996) from 1998 - 2001. We wrote grants and dreamed up huge things and discovered that we are extremely happy when collaborating on creative projects together. Our minds get firing and we get all spazzy and brilliant stuff generally pours out of the connection.

Sarah and I were also superheroines together. Being a superheroine is hard if you don't do it with a best friend. I mean, being a woman minister is hard - can you imagine being The Mad Priestess? That's her up there, in her pink and gold robes, getting ready to street-corner preach with her Holy Booble, and then sprint off to fight injustice with me.

My superheroine power, of course, was to maintain hope and optimism even when I would run face first into a telephone pole while sprinting off to fight injustice. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we could all maintain self-confidence in the face of our shortcomings?

Green Light and The Mad Priestess are still waiting for our music video, which we hope to have choreographed by Paula Abdul, hopefully on one of her wackier days. If anyone has a contact for us in Hollywood, please leave names, numbers, etc in the comments here. Does anyone know Michel Gondry?

Time to vote on the subject of my next gocco print.

OK, so I am sketching away like crazy, thinking about my next series of gocco prints, which will involve nature, miniature-painting-style decorative pattern, and my usual cities that are both in a state of decline and creative reconstruction (depending on the day). A bunch of versions of various drawings in progress are now at Wondercabinet Flickr headquarters. which are your favorites? comment on the best ones. i'm curious what y'all think.

Erik's new shadow puppet show, and where have I been?

This beautiful image is a scene from Flight: A Mythic Journey of a Person Displaced by my collaborator, Erik Ruin. He's going on a tour of the Northeast with the show now, so go here for info on where and when to find it. It's a beautiful, beautiful show and not to be missed. I'm so psyched to be working with Erik. The show is accompanied by violinist Katt Hernandez.

Where the hell have I been? Not blogging, apparently. I suffered a great debilitating sewing tragedy over the weekend: I spent en entire day working on pants from a pattern, only to find out at the bitter end that the pattern had been printed incorrectly and there is no way I could have avoided the strange results.  Lets just say I won't be wearing these pants for fear of being committed to the fashion hall of shame, or perhaps another kind of institution for public indecency.

But I did get to stare at a whole lot of snow and rain and trees and mountains while visiting my parents in New Hampshire. It was a sweet trip.

Looking forward to getting my blog on some more this week. Stay tuned!

Oooh la la...a new header image.

I was just getting tired of the old banner. What do you think?

The image is from a painting I did on the inside of an old book cover, one which I happily finished and rushed to post on my Etsy shop, only to be intercepted by my poor husband who regularly grieves when I send my work off to strangers via U.S. post. So I promised I wouldn't sell this one just to give him relief from the pain!

Its funny how when you are the maker of lots of artwork, it becomes un-precious, its on to the next idea, and its other people who get attached and can't let go.

Although I do remember crying the first time I packaged 2 favorite paintings up and sent them to one of my first Etsy customers. Some time soon I will post pictures of some of those old paintings for you to see.

More podcasts by and about artists on a rainy sunday.

I've been hacking away at a design project today and my shoulders hurt. I'm looking forward to shifting my attention towards sewing tonight, and my ongoing quest for a perfect uniform pattern. I'm going to alter the pattern I used for my last shirt and add sleeves. I'm dying to use this new fabric I got at Spool, a lovely and amazing new fabric shop here in Philly. Here's what I am about to try out in podcasting land while I sew:

Interviews with artists: Bad at Sports

Interview with El Anatsui the Met

And I think I'll try out Muxtape (a great new way to make and share mp3 mixtapes) - I've been seeing it mentioned around the blog world and it looks like a great way to find new music. Yay.

Shadow Puppets + Sculpture: more progress

Erik and I spent the day yesterday working on our second shadow sculpture. We seem to have hit a nice stride as collaborators in a short period of time, one that includes much inspired and blissful crafting and building, spiced up with a hearty dose of funhearted bickering and arguing. The perfect recipe for honest artmaking. We enjoyed the satisfaction of delivering our freshly completed piece to Dyhana Yoga in Philly's Center City last night for a group show. Its the first time in a long time that I didn't spend at least 4 hours installing a piece. We just plopped it n the floor, plugged it in, and high-fived each other. Its also the first time I ever delivered a piece via subway. Here's Erik on the train with our masterpiece:

And here is a little series of images documenting the progression of the shadow side of the sculpture (you can view the sculpture from the this side or the other side, where all the innards that make the shadow are visible, which becomes its own crazy little world).

I'm happy with this little piece. It's a sketch really, and opened up a bunch of territory for us to explore further. Its so interesting working with Erik, someone whose work is so based in the drawn and graphic. My sculptures rely so much on the qualities of light and space, and even if they are clearly impossible invented worlds, there is something very naturalistic/realistic about them. So its fun to introduce the hand-drawn, paper-cut, more graphic and drawn images, like the people sitting in the windows. In fact, I never inhabit the spaces I make with people and this is also a big stretch. I feel like we are really crashing a couple of different kinds of realities together by collaborating, and its a really fun learning process.

RANDOM FINDS:

A great quote about art: "Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent."

Stewart Brand

And how about homemade trucks? These are amazing and totally inspiring.

Giant Ocean Eddy! Nomadic Art! Beet painting!

Some interesting finds this week:

Starting off on the on the "Oh yeah, we live on a big mysterious beautiful blue marble floating in an infinite universe" front: giant ocean eddy

Here's a really interesting collaborative traveling art project: The Sandwich Box

And a listing of more interesting participatory art projects: Wooloo

And, a tutorial on something all of us makers need to start exploring in a major way! How to make your own paints from vegetables. I love this idea, not only because of the obvious environmental benefits to replacing toxic chemical paints wth natural, earth friendly ones, but painting with beets seems metaphorically a bit more satisfying to me as well. Why not address the CONTENT of one's art down to the very level of material ingredients?

(Image of a Giant Ocean Eddy from Bjork's Wanderlust video)

sculpture and shadows

Here's an image from this week's collaboration between myself and Erik Ruin. Between us, we have skills in paper cutting, sculpture, and shadow puppetry, and we are merging it all together in what we are currently calling "shadow sculpture." I just uploaded a bunch of images to my Flickr account here. It's all work in progress right now.

Bjork being monsterful and unstoppable again

OK, I've been immersed in my studio the last couple of days making "shadow sculpture" with Erik. Not a lot of time for blogging, though I am accumulating ideas for posts in my mind. Tonight I'll photograph some of our work in progress.

Its so good to be spending more time again in that lost place, that part of the creative process  where the work starts to lead you and you just follow along like an amazed child, and you are exhausted and hungry at the end of the day.

I found the new Bjork video today (Wanderlust). Ummmm......    W O W. You MUST see it. Even if it takes a really long time to download on your computer (mom, you are excused - I think this one would permanently break your dialup connection). Even if you think you think you don't like Bjork. Even if you think you know her, and she isn't your type.

You should especially watch it if you are like me, and you have a long and difficult relationship with her work, in which you have learned much. Like, that for someone to be a major influence and teacher for you, you don't need to like or understand some of that they do.

I happen to LOVE this video, which is made of stop-motion animation, live action, scale models, puppets, computer animation. It to me is about the creative process, the relationship of creator to Creator, to the idea of god as the unknown, god as creativity inherent in everything, the artist wrestling with herself, with her humanity. And, it is like much of her work about nature, experienced through an Icelander. I went to Iceland twice in the dead of winter and traveled the back roads and rural areas, and I understand a teeny bit about the kind of nature in Bjork's work, and can begin to imagine how those spaces would reside in my consciousness if I had grown up there (I said begin to imagine).

Anyhoo, she's a role model for me, because she creates whole new universes to live in and share,  totally her own way. And they are not fantasy lands really, they bump into and struggle with the more mundane realities we know, they are dissonant and uncomfortable, they integrate our weird technologies, and she plops herself right into the center of each one, which I sometimes love and sometimes hate. She inhabits them so much that we sometimes can't inhabit them. I like to get lost in alternate realities, but in hers I am always aware of her very big presence. I kind of love that. Arg.

I think I'll try to give Medulla a listen again today.