Richmond

I zipped over to Richmond at lunch today and:

- Saw J.T. installing his show at Red Door Gallery. The work looks really good, and there's two pieces that are especially kickass. I'll post pictures when J.T. posts them.

- Saw a great Sally Mann show at Reynolds. At first I was a little bored by the big face photos, but after looking for a while they started working on me. There's one of a half-erased face, super-big, that is really haunting. Another one of a dark landscape with scratches too.

- Went by ADA and saw some more good stuff - Jered Sprecher, Jenny Laden and Chris Norris. It turns out I'm in a show ADA is organzing at Plant Zero there in Richmond, ("Salon Selectives: Excerpts from ADA Gallery Past" curated by John Pollard) opening tomorrow night! Yahoo!

- Unfortunately, I didn't get by Art Basel Stuffy's. Argh.

Kirkland @ Red Door, Samoheyl @ Second Street

I want to quickly mention 2 shows - one coming up, one just down - that I would really recommend.


J.T. Kirkland (of Thinking About Art fame) is having a show - Nature|Nurture - opening this Friday at Red Door Gallery in Richmond. He and I are pals (I wrote about his earlier shows here and here), but even with that bias that I can say this will be a great show. The opening reception will be on Friday, 12/1 from 6-10pm.





Sean Samoheyl just had a show here in Charlottesville at Second Street Gallery and I'm sorry my being swamped with work got in the way of writing about it while it was up. He had a ton of crazy figures, some new prints that cut-out into puppets and even a giant wood head. I even bought a piece - one I'll write about later because its a gift for a reader of this blog. Sean has also become a pal, but I really like his stuff long before meeting him.

Barrelhouse #3 and a Pushcart nomination

So this is the big news...

Issue three of the Washington D.C.-based literary magazine BARRELHOUSE is out and features a 20-page story, "The Only Child", written by Erin Pringle and visually adapted by me (you can read the text online here). The piece has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, an award that sets the standard of excellence for small literary journals. The Pushcart is a pretty big thing in the literary world, and we're both floored just to be nominated.

You can hear an NPR interview with us on KUT (Austin TX) here.

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BARRELHOUSE is a print journal featuring fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays about music, art, and the detritus of popular culture. You can purchase BARRELHOUSE via their site store.

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The Pushcart Prize - Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in the pages of their annual collections.

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Here's a couple more pages:

Thanksgiving Exquisite Corpses

Dad vs. me





Me vs. Mom





Me vs. Dad





Mom vs. me

Big news next week

Fitts talk @ Second Street

Yesterday at Second Street Gallery I went to a "Forum" featuring Michael Fitts. It's a new thing the Gallery is doing for memebers - having a lunch and conversation with an artists. Fitts is open and engaging and we all sat around talking about his work.

I have seen some of his paintings around - they're very realistic things painted in the center of a piece of scrap metal. I never knew what to think about them. There's mileage in rusted metal, there's a wow factor in the well done photo-style paint and the centered composition makes anything he places there feel special and holy.

His answers about content were about intuition and following his instincts, and he denied any specific agenda. To me the work is about spotlighting the everyday, making the mundane holy. He spoke about Warhol and Schwitters, and those fit right in.

UPDATE: Two things - First, there's been some trouble commenting on this post. I have not been deleting any comment - I think Blogger ate tham. Try again and maybe it'll work.

Second, in re-reading this post I want to make it clear that I like Fitts' work - I think he's a good artist and the questions he asks himself are the ones I ask myself. I've been under a crazy deadline recently so I'm blogging lightly, and writing quickly when I do post, so I don't think my opinion of his work got though clearly.

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