The art opening was great! The Jasper Art Center put on a very nice party with food, wine tasting, and wonderful Celtic music. Plus it was wonderful to see Jane and my art up on the walls together.
Here’s an overview of the show.
Tag Archives: collections
A Collection of Collections
Jane and I collect lots of really interesting things–well, things that we think are really interesting. Corn cobs, seed pods, a piece of paper from the street, fake flowers from the cemetery trash, cat hair, Barbie doll accessories found in the street, twist ties, twisted metal from the street, game pieces, pantyhose, unusual branches, bent eyeglasses, tire tread.
Some makes it into our art. Some waits to become art. Some is perfect just the way it is.
For our current show, Jane and I had fun bringing our collections together to fill 90 display boxes of intriguing and interesting items. It left us excited and dreaming about future projects and shows.
Found: art from detritus
Yay! The show’s up at the Jasper Arts Center in Jasper, Indiana!
There is new work, old work, and collections of the very cool and interesting materials Jane and I have found.
The opening is this Thursday, April 4 from 5-8 eastern, but the show will be up for the entire month of April. Check the Jasper Arts Center website for gallery times.
Things to Remember
Here’s a piece that will be part of my upcoming art show. I thought I’d call it Five Things I Want to Remember. It’s made with fabric trim that was given to me in a giant container of cast off odds and ends, wooden spools of thread that came in other big bins of cast offs, beads, and gold leaf.
A couple years ago, I got a whole bunch of gold leaf as part of yet another big box of cast off art supplies. I’ve enjoyed incorporating the gold into my found object art since then. I like the visual metaphor of gold leafed trash. I like thinking of the layer of gold like the layers of meaning that we all give everyday objects. They’re unremarkable objects, yet we handle them and they become precious to us. This can be good and bad.
The gold leaf can also suggest the practice of searching for joy and beauty in the everyday things around us. The gold adds significance and calls attention to details such as the way that thread wraps itself around the spool or the subtle undulations of a roll of trim as it unrolls itself.
Bundles of Art II
As I said in my previous post, my friend Jane Case Vickers and I have a show coming up April 3-28 in the Krempp Gallery at the Jasper Arts Center in Jasper, Indiana.
Our show will be made up of lots of found object sculptures, plus we’ll display some of our odd collections of trash and weird objects. As part of all this, we’re experimenting with the concept of bundles of found objects and assorted materials that are left outside for the elements to weather. The items included in the bundles may have special meaning and that meaning may be enhanced by the weathering process.
Pictured above is Jane’s version of this idea. As expected, it’s a little different than mine, but very cool. That’s part of what I like about making art with Jane. Similar ideas and materials interest us, but we have different approaches to them. Jane envisioned the bundle as more of a stack. Hers has an old chair seat arranged like book covers with a flat stack of papers in between. On the front cover are some bark and turkey feathers that she picked up last week on our journey to check out the gallery. I like the way it blends into the tree she tied it to.
Did you know that Boar’s Head brand turkey lunch meat originates with birds raised around Ferdinand, Indiana? We didn’t until we went looking for the reason why there were so many turkey feathers blowing around town.
Fresh Starts in 2013
There’s nothing like an upcoming deadline to help me be productive. Jane Case Vickers and I have a show coming up in April at the Krempp Gallery at the Jasper Arts Center in Jasper, Indiana.
This weekend I’m working to make art out of my sister’s bead collection. I had one, too. When we were in elementary school or junior high, we discovered a store in Toledo, Ohio that sold nothing but beads. Our bead collections are the result of hours spent searching through all the glittering cups of beads. We would sort them, string them, resort them, and restring them.
I’m working to find a way to highlight the beauty and value that my sister and I gave to these things of little real value, and through that, broader themes of collecting, saving, creating value, and creating beauty.
Amy Rich 