Film: Wood Green Jazz Club (1956)

New News: Updates from January 2012

Recent and fun things include:

* Photos from the excellent London Artifice / ILK reading are up here.

* Some really exciting print and publishing projects are in the works for my return to Chicago this summer.

* I now have two author WorldCat library entries, which is pretty neat.

* A review of mine was published in the newest edition of Art in Print, on Richard Deacon's prints from Paragon Press.

* My 2011 poetry collection, Grow No Moss, was recently accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection.

* I've been invited to be the juror for the 2012 Mid-America Print Council exhibition, to be held this spring at Spudnik Press. Quite looking forward to seeing lots of new printmedia work!

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Madame Cézanne with striped skirt, c.1877, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

I've been researching a bunch for school, and after thinking so much about Picasso's 1912 use of printed paper collage last term, I've become very interested in the use of printed, painted wallpaper in early modernist painting and portraiture. I'm starting to realize just how bizarre it looks. This is especially after seeing the Cézanne et Paris exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg (Paris) a month ago—an excellent show.

Wallpaper: it was everywhere for a long time! And now it is nowhere! I'm headed to the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Art Library for more explorations later this week. Very exciting.

Art in Print (Issue 5) Review: Richard Deacon at Paragon Press

British sculptor Richard Deacon’s newest prints from Paragon Press are, at first glance, linear and flat in the Greenbergian sense of the word, refusing illusion and emphasizing the frontal surface of the picture plane. Based on a series of drawings Deacon completed in 2008 while on a trip to Mali, these monochrome, fractured polygons in metallic red, blue, silver, and gold reference the African patterns and architecture of the capital Bamako, a city in which maps have little function and buildings serve as the main points of reference. The angular lines of the Bamako prints echo the nesting loops of Deacon’s twisting geodesic sculptures, but set against flat white paper rather than within the spatial context of a surrounding environment. The Bamako prints become cross sections, laser-thin dissections of Deacon’s three-dimensional work. Yet despite this deceptive flatness, without a trace of relief embossing the ink stands heavy, with a velvet surface subtly mottled by the pull of the paper from the block.

The plates have been subtly rotated and layered, forcing depth in the diamond-shapes where color overlaps—the metallic ink forces you to move around the prints, to look from many angles, to consider them spatially, and it is this bodily effect that returns Deacon’s line to sculpture.

—Julia V. Hendrickson, for Art in Print, vol. 1, no. 5

Artifice & ILK in London.

I'll be reading at this tomorrow night, along with James Tadd Adcox, Caroline Crew, Kerri French, Pete Bloxham, and Jack Castle. Probably something related to A Very Short Introduction to the Atlantic Ocean will happen. See you there.

Easing In

There are these things about which you should probably know.


1.) Ash, London, is what we find inside wood, inside buildings, inside each of us, is the thing revealed by heat, is (as you noted) the secret heart of gray.


2.) ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::  [Red Lightbulbs #5] 


3.) "Your Personal Panopticon: An Interview with Christopher Meerdo" [The California Printeresting Printmaker]


4.) Oxford once, Cambridge twice. Venice for the Biennale. Paris next week (mainly for this). Then Ohio. Then, further secret adventures with compatriots await.


5.) It has been collage. Newspaper. Yet. Lately, my thoughts tend toward wallpaper.

Bonjour. Au revoir.

Tremendously excited about projects in London. Writing a lot. Working on a new poetry/prose collaboration using found and re-edited text, and very much enjoying the freedom and time to read books at my leisure and think about thesis-related ideas. It's nice to allow myself thoughts that evolve into new creatures after hours and days, rather than only having the headspace for short bursts of activity quickly forgotten. I am still myself, I will always have one too many things to do, but for now, for here, in London, in one of the most bustling cities in the world, I've managed to slow down a little. 

Mostly I've just been noticing how otherworldily-similar this city is to Chicago. Life seems to be the same, it's in the same language, except every third thing is just a little bit different, just that much more removed from what I expect. It's like Amelie changing her neighbor's shoes to a size smaller, or his lightbulb to be a bit dimmer. It's deja vu but not quite. It's a dream lived only in the corners of your eyes when you're trying to test your peripheral vision.

Today I visited Christie's South Kensington and had the treat of seeing an upcoming auction lot on display from the mysterious "Travel, Science, and Natural History" department. Loads of very strange and wonderful things.

Three taxidermied hummingbirds, c. 1850.

A Huntley & Palmers biscuit from the stores of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1908-1909, Cape Royds.

British National Antarctic Expedition, 1901-1904.  42 contact prints, the majority by Reginald Skelton, the subjects including Discovery in Winter Quarters at Ross Island, Mount Erebus and the scenery around Hut Point, sledging scenes and camps on the Barrier, and the return of the Southern Party.

A THREE-ROTOR ENIGMA CIPHER MACHINE, circa 1939. Number A-1206, with electric core, three aluminium rotors each stamped WaA618, raised 'QWERTZ' keyboard with crackle black painted metal case, plugboard in the front with ten patch leads, carrying case with spare bulbs, and green night-time filter.

A FRENCH TREPANNING SET, Leseur, late 18th century. Signed on the drill LESEUR also with a punched maker's mark of a crown over an A, drill-heads, perforators, elevators, lenticulars with turned wooden handles, in fitted case. 13.5in. (34.5cm.) long in case.

A MODEL OF THE 1784 GÉRARD FLYING MACHINE, FRENCH, LATE 19TH CENTURY. Painted wood and metal model with two wings on model engine mechanism, the tail feather and forward rudder operated by two interior handles, two opening doors, on three wheels. 21in. (54cm.) long.

Gah! It has feathers and a tiny door and tiny wheels!

Wonderful. From the larger poster, below.

TABLEAU D'AVIATION , French, Circa 1880. Lithographed poster illustrating mechanical flying machines from 1500-1880, by E. DIEUAIDE, 18, Rue de la Banque -- Paris, backed on linen. 21½ x 27in.

A BOXED AMERICAN ORRERY AND TELLURIAN SET. Josiah or Dwight Holbrook, mid-19th century. [With an accompanying awesome book: The teachers guide to illustration... 12th ed. (Chicago: Andrews, 1873).]