More Bricks for your viewing pleasure.  Stay tuned for more on "Brick City Project"!!

Parking

The meter rules around the studio keep changing. I was talking to Bud about parking and it was so complicated to explain so I thought I'd make a little map. This is to the best of my knowledge, but maybe you know something different? Please share. Anyway I thought I'd post it. Also Evonne knows of a lot that's $5/day. I think it's near Hobbys? Maybe this can be the first step of an Aferro neighborhood guide.  Other welcome additions would be good coffee within walking distance, what's open in terms of food on Sundays, who delivers, etc.

Double Fervor: The Black Nazarene and George Kubler's Nature of Actuality

"Brick City Project" is my vision of the beauty of Newark.  As a Newark resident my goal here is to show the world and remind our citizens of the beauty that Newark has to offer.  Growing up in this city i was blessed to witness its many positive wonders and every day miracles as opposed to the publicized negativity.  Each brick expresses a certain perspective of Newark and places together gives a never before seen look at the city and its inner workings.
I was excited about doing my residency at Aferro because it seems appropriate as a stepping stone for my installation.  During my time here i have learned so much, met so many people, gotten so many positive reviews (learned how to blog...lol), made many connections and the list goes on.  The most difficult part was plain ole time management for me.....basically setting time aside to go to the gallery and work....but once i got into the swing of it the ball rolled along smoothly.  One of the most important things i learned  was from Evonne who told me that as an artist i needed to be spending the same amount of time "marketing myself as an artist as i do creating the art"....that made so much sense to me....(thanx Evonne).

So with the residency over now what?  Good question....the painting continues....more bricks will be made and then comes the arts shows.   Stayed tuned for more photos and info on the  "Brick City Project"

invoking Deleuze

from Gilles Deleuze's "Control and Becoming," Negotiations; New York; Columbia University Press, 1995; page 174

Damming

Damming.  This is the highlight of my studio this summer.  It’s a verbal alternative - an analogically appropriate one- to the procedural term “masking” in drawing and painting.  I drew out the word from a review by a writer who used it to describe a particular aspect in the work of a fellow painter colleague and mentor Timothy App - an aspect I’ve also been starting to  use in my own work.  

As a method “damming” consists of taping, tracing, slicing, making templates so that a particular area of the drawing or painting is secured, bound, extracted and made specific.  This sectioning off of areas privileges each area in a way that the hierarchies previously set between the different parts of the work are eradicated.  As I “dam” this area and that area, the form of each area becomes thoroughly specific and attains a status of equal importance or equal unimportance.

As the form of each area attain clarity through the “dam,” each area then becomes their own reality: a reality that is distinct -but not completely removed- from the reality of the bound area adjacent to it, and other bound areas in the work.  The resulting totality is a growth, a development, and a patchwork construction consisting of multiple constructed realities where each possesses their own particular set of internal dialogues, and whose clearly defined boundaries are the very spine that holds together the complex totality of the drawing or painting.    

This is not to insist that “damming” is the ultimate method to achieve this holding potential.  It is merely one of possible methods, all of which are equally potentiated to a particular goal.  But in the case of what I’m doing, “damming” works:  it clarifies categories;  it interferes with expectations; it’s a reprieve from the power of subjectivity; it checks and limits persuasiveness and fluency; it questions habits; it is doubt circumnavigating to make me unsure.  

CLUI does the Meadowlands

 The Center for Land Use Interpretation did a report/talk presenting their survey of the Meadowlands. It was interesting (weird, too?) to see the familiar examined by an outsider. They have put together a great interactive map and also a great print map (available at the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop) which includes the Smithson grave not far from Medieval Times in Lyndhurst. Matthew Coolidge, director of CLUI also talked about the unfinished Nancy Holt's Sky Mound which now houses that dirt mountain of solar panels near 15W. I love solar, but wish there were methane flares to look at when I drive home from the studio.