In Review

Hello there friends,

It's snowing in Knoxville today and we left sheets and tarps over seedlings in the garden in a vain attempt to spare them from freezing.

In other news, I had a show recently at Fluorescent Gallery here in Knoxville. It was called "The Economy of the Amateur" and centered around issues of labor, value, and my own fantasies of neo-agrarian life.

Gallery visitors were invited to felt a sweetgum ball (the spiney seed casing of the sweetgum tree), which then served as a unit of currency. Those in possession of feltballs could use them to purchase bottles of walnut ink, screen printed packages of seeds, biodegradable planters, and/or screen printed and flocked bags of compost. Some people (the romantics, I think) liked the feltballs as precious object and kept theirs rather than spending them. Other visitors sat for hours amassing enough "wealth" to purchase several of each product.

Also on display were drawings by local artists made using my homemade walnut ink. I solicited artists via craigslist, email, and face-to-face to trade me one 12" x 12" drawing for a 4 oz. bottle of ink. Throughout the show, gallery visitors sat at a drawing table (equipped with nibs, brushes, and ink) and made more drawings with the ink and added them to the wall.

In addition to the smaller drawings and the aforementioned products, I hung four large drawings. Each featured an archetypal figure engaged in absurd parodies of agrarian labor. I've been told they are somewhat sinister and ambiguous, but I think they're funny. The figures are harvesting, digging, wandering and noodling (which is the word for catching a catfish using your hand as bait).

For those of you who couldn't make it, I'm posting photos to my flickr page here.