Lava Fields Forever

 Now the story can be told.

My trip to Iceland was arranged so that I could work on a new man made hot springs spa.This trip, during the raging COVID-19 pandemic, was only made possible with a signature and letter from the Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I arrived in Reykjavik in August of 2020.At the very outset I was hypnotized by the landscape. The cab ride from the airport to Reykjavik proper was my first look at the moss encrusted lava fields, a beautiful alien landscape unlike anything I've ever seen.I managed to escape a full lock down in the flat that was rented for me and got to work at the, then top secret, Sky Lagoon. The job was a detailed duplicate of Icelandic lava flow formations that needed to match the color, textures and lichen/moss growths in such a precise way it could fool native Iclanders. No easy task!

During the time I was working on the Sky Lagoon I had the opportunity to visit some of Iceland's beautiful locations. It was enjoyable and a necessity to do this in order to better understand the Icelandic landscape and lava formations.

Mississippi God Damn

 There are limits to what one can say on a hunch. No matter how certain one may be that the assertion is correct.

For the end of 2019 and into 2020 I was working in Gulfport Mississippi on the new Mississippi Aquarium. This was a time that saw the beginning of the drawn out emergency that we are still experiencing from the Covid-19 pandemic. This post will span the time in Mississippi, New Orleans and a bit of Colorado.

As a first time visiter to the Gulfport/Biloxi area I was impressed by the hospitality shown in a town that is still recovering from hurricane Katrina and the optimism that the normal person on the street displayed.

We came to Gulfport to help build a new aquarium on the coast from scratch, everyone was excited and we were treated like family. At least some of us were.....

During my stay I began to notice through my research a distinct underbelly to the area. I mean this physically and metaphorically. There were several underground nuclear test blasts in this area, the only to be done on United States soil. These blasts, named Project Dribble, were done by the US government to see how detectable underground tests of this nature would be, or if they could be hidden. This occurred in 1964-1966. I was intrigued by this and also wondered how it was not common knowledge among Mississippians. It was like a secret out in the open and became the subject of some sketch book work. Another interesting historical path about Gulport is it's founding. The city was created by William H. Hardy and a yankee from PA- Joseph T. Jones. The later actually dredged the harbor and made the city into a working sea port.

As my research continued the history of racially motivated crimes, natural disasters and a tendency to be on the wrong side of progress in general became tiresome and I set my sites on New Orleans instead.

Only about an hour away by car I was excited to see some art in New Orleans that I had loose connection to. The permanent installation of The Music Box which is maintained and spearheaded by the art collective Air Lift.

The Music Box is a little cluster of artist made musical architectures. It functions like an amusement park of sorts. There are all kinds of ways to interact with the structures.

https://www.neworleansairlift.org/index.php/musical-architecture

Airlift has collaborated on several incarnations of The Music Box. One of these collaborations was in Tampa Bay Florida and included a collaboration with local art/design atelier Livework.

There was also an exhibition that precipitated from the actual event at the USF Contemporary Museum of Art which I was invited to and made some work for. There is a post on this blog from 2016 that covers the subject nicely.

                                                                Another fun experience born of this area was the "King for a Day" project. Based on the traditions surrounding the "King Cakes" made around the time of Maudi Gras in New Orleans and Gulfport I proposed to the supervisors at the Mississippi Aquarium work site that we bring in cakes and whomever finds the plastic baby in one of the cakes runs the site for the day. This idea was laughed off by all the supervisors but the day rolled around and I came in with 7 cakes- one with the precious plastic infant.

The night before I went to Burger King and asked for one of their paper crowns which they happily provided. I then spent some time properly decorating the crown for the new ruler of the job site.

   

The project was a success but the supervisors wouldn't let DQ run the job site for the rest of the day. They did reply with a surprise purchase of pizzas for the crew the following Friday.

You get what you get out of these experiments- I get a lot of joy.

Murder Sculptures , two different kinds

Back in Colorado and doing all that I can to avoid the Denver airport. No, not because of COV-19 but because of Blucifer's evil red gaze. I knew in advance that driving was the only option but it did make me chuckle about Blucifer and I thought I might tell his story and more.
  Blucifer is a public sculpture by Luis Jiménez with the actual title "Blue Mustang". It appears in all of its 32' high glory as you enter the Denver International Airport. The sculpture is puzzling and almost bad until you research the earlier work of Jiménez and realize the aesthetic and intent of such a piece. We could ask him in an interview but thanks to "Blue Mustang" he is not among the living. Luis Jiménez was killed by a section of the sculpture in his own studio. My research points to an accident while moving a section that led to it falling on the artist with fatal results. This has led into and fed conspiracy theories about the airport itself, a shelter for The New World Order and hideaway for outer space lizards. I will leave these areas of research for you to approach as you see fit.

  I first met Blucifer a little more than a year ago. After my work was done in Colorado I briefly worked on a project in Baltimore and then moved on to a more involved project in St. Louis. It was here in St. Louis, Missouri that I had a second "Murder Sculpture" encounter.
  Baltimore is the US city with the second highest murder rate. St. Louis is the US city with the highest murder rate, so as I left my brief visit to Baltimore to settle in for a longer, more involved project in St. Louis those statistics were not lost on me. The way the statistics worked their way into my life was swift and unexpected. Our first day visiting the site we would spend the next few months working on had us pass a public sculpture by John Henry. The recognizable style of the red abstract metal monster made me comment on it as we passed and I vowed to have some details the next morning.

 That evening I looked up the sculpture, as well as other public works in St. Louis, and found that it was called "Treemonisha" and was part of his "Falling Cards" series of sculpture. I went further to research the name of the sculpture and found that it was named after the protagonist in Scott Joplin's "ragtime" opera of the same name. A strange story of education triumphing over superstition with conjurers and a supremely unusual part where the protagonist is almost put into a giant hornet nest......my attention faded and I was off to sleep in my hotel room.
   The next morning when I brought up my findings during our ride in to work one of my coworkers informed me that she had seen on the news that someone was found murdered next to the sculpture earlier in the morning. As we passed "Treemonisha" that morning there was a bundle of flowers at its base marking the place where the body was found clearly visible.
   Time passed swiftly in St. Louis as the project I worked on progressed towards opening day and I am happy to report we lost no persons from the crew in that time. The St. Louis Aquarium, retrofitted into the elegant Union Station is an ambitious move toward vitalizing the downtown area and I am happy to have worked on it. St. Louis, after all, kind of stole my heart. Near the end of my stay, during a long shift, I was asked by the Aquarium's curator to produce a quick background for an extremely rare blue lobster named Lord Stanley. I can not express what a joy it was to be asked to produce a small painting for this purpose. Even though it was simply fill in for the soft opening I was stoked!

Maybe some day this strange canvas shows up again titled "Backdrop for Lord Stanley"

Back to Colorado, I was asked to drive from Gulfport Mississippi to Colorado Springs to help complete fixes on the Cheyene Mountain Zoo. With hesitation I accepted the job ( at least I would not need to fly in during the COV-19 pandemic and see Blucifer glaring at me) and drove to Colorado. My main reason for going was unfinished business of my own at the site of Tesla's laboratory in Colorado Springs. There, no sign of the structure remains, but there is a plaque that I wanted to make rubbings of. I ended up making rubbings and an actual mold of Tesla's likeness on the bronze plaque.

Well worth the trip back! There will be some use for these images down the road no doubt or perhaps I will send them out in gift packs/mailers. Lets see..... who is a face and who is a hairdo?

MS to CO

Now moving backward in to the womb, the Gulfport MS experience was and continues to be a treasured memory. Not to mention New orleans , I have recovered my youthful dreams of that city and learned lots about less fortunate towns that surround.  --->t he arrow still should be going the other way....

Notable Incidents

Taking a long break from writing any posts has its downsides. The most obvious is the decision on what to do next and what to cover on the gulf of silence between the last posts and now. I recently completed a draft "Exploring Jacksonville" which had languished in the saved folder for a year, now I will quickly sketch out some highlights of experiences and art making that fall between then and now using my digital photo library as a kind of tele prompt. Can I be forgiven for shuffling through these experiences like a flip book? Send questions and please follow.

#1 "Stucky"

#2 Hypnosylvania (Kyley Gardens Version) at HCC Ybor Campus Gallery

#3 Mark Hosler in Orlando Fl

#4 Mark Hosler in Ft. Myers Fl.

#5 Colorado Springs

#6 Rio Rancho NM and Tinker Town

#6 Cripple Creek Donkey Races!

#7 MeowWolf Santa Fe New Mexico

Exploring Jacksonville

Treaty Oak near downtown Jacksonville

Recently I have spent a good amount of time working on a project in Jacksonville. I wanted to make a post about what I found there. Amid claims that Jax is an armpit town, we (Kym O'Donnell and I) discovered that this town has what many others are missing. That missing part, the part that is strong in Jacksonville, is a dedication to pursue your own city's history and proudly display that history. It is remarkable, in this time, to witness a hold out against corporate greed in favor of preserving a history. The funny thing is that the Treaty Oak shown in the first image on this post is just an early example of this tendency to work against development to preserve nature, history ( even false history ) and culture against the forces that "develop" spaces and properties. I will get back to that.
I am going to try to present the places we visited in a roughly chronological format.
First we visited the Kingsley Plantation. This site is amazing

Pictured here are the remains of the slave's homes. They are in stark contrast to the main dwelling (not pictured here). The history of this site and how the slave owners conducted themselves on this plantation were considered progressive- the slaves could actually work until freed. More like indentured servants. It just goes to show that no matter what the conditions, slavery was brutal.

We also visited the drift wood beach at Big Talbot Island State Park. Very beautiful and strange.

One thing that struck me about Big Talbot Island was that I saw no birds, no lizards no life. I found out later that this area was long ago reserved for munitions testing.

Speaking of testing munitions.... We visited the ....which had many documents pertaining to America's use of atomic weapons against Japan including hand drawn pictures of the shape of the mushroom cloud by crew members and this signed picture of the "Little Boy" bomb.

We also visited the Ritz Theatre and Museum which houses really interesting displays of African American centric items and even has an animatronic scrim show featuring animatrons depicting James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson recalling their history and creation of music that would influence our nation. Particularly powerful is the recollection of writing "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

Pizza sized cheeseburger from Blue Boys Deli. Try it if in Jacksonville! You have to bring some folks to share with because you can't eat it by yourself.

 NaNa's Dune, close to American Beach, is an interesting place to visit. Gopher Tortoises walk by oblivious to traffic and the largest dune structure of its kind in Florida rises before you impressively. Named after a famous Beach Lady

American Beach is another fascinating location close to Jacksonville. Once a tourist spot for African Americans established by Florida's first African American millionaire, it is now the only hold out on the long stretch that doesn't sport giant beach side condos. Designated in the Registry of Historic Places it enjoys a bit of immunity from the out of control development around it. The question is, How long can a small community like this hold out against the power and money that development represent?

#7 of the "13th Grape" Multiples

The 7th edition to the 13th Grape multiples - "Picasso's Castration or Black Sails"

An accumulation of references and symbols to and of the mythical minotaur with a special nod to Picasso's obsession with the image. Made mainly of materials found in Madison Wisconsin, the layers will be named here for the recipient's own interpretation.

The first layer under the "black sail" is a paper mask of a bull from a "cow chip" throwing contest in rural Wisconsin. There is a spray painted shape of the famous Picasso bull head sculpture on the mask. In the eye holes some of the elements from Picasso's "Minotauromachy" can be seen.

Under the mask "Minotauromachy" overlayered with a stencil made from a dorsal view of a corn maze shaped like a cow. There is also a tipped in castration tool in the composition.

The entire activity of lifting layers is very important to this piece and references the legend of Theseus finding his father's sword under a great stone as depicted in the 1643 painting by Reynaus Levieux de Nimes. Also the themes of divination and scrying are present in this work.