Two Weeks In September

I was in Florida again for the first two weeks of September. It was a very busy time working on a prototype for an award, buttoning up loose ends around the studio and finally planning and participating in a performance art piece at the Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. Along the way I also got to take see a great exhibition opening at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery and participate in an exhibition at the Silver Meteor Gallery in Tampa ( the gallery's 20th anniversary show ).

I created a new process to make a life time achievement award for the Tampa Bay Businesses for Culture & the Arts given posthumously to Theo Wujcik. The award was meant to be a sculptural echo of Theo's 1984 painting Tampa Tornado. Using thermoplastic cut into patterns the shape of the tornado was achieved.

 The tornado was then attached to a cast plastic snail shell ( one of Theo's most enduring images )

Originally I was going to have the object 3D printed but the scans had much of the information missing. So the prototype was used as the actual award.

Cast plastic, black lab epoxy and concrete.

Next I traveled to Fort Myers to participate in an Experimental Skeleton, Inc. performance piece at the 24 Hour Festival at the Florida Gulf Coast University. The group was commissioned to create a half hour performance piece to entertain the crowd as judges made their choices on the student participation in the 24 Hour Festival. We created a framework for executing the first laser level generated poem in human history. Using methods adopted from surrealist games such as exquisite corpse, recently generated collage panels from our Silverfish Revolution project, a skill saw and a crew of interpretive agents filtering down to a typing poet, we did just that.

Also in Fort Myers I had the luck to see the Wayne White exhibition "Here Comes Mr. Know It All" at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Wayne White showed his paintings, drawings and put on a puppet show. Probably best known for his work on Pee Wee's Playhouse and animated music videos Mr. White's artwork is equally engaging.

Most of his paintings are text based and excited on thrift shop canvasses that he finds. Some of the text looks as if the fonts are sculptural studies- like this one above. It reminds me of Max Ernst's painting "Garden Airplane Traps"

The puppet show featured Mr. White himself in a large Rauschenberg puppet that took several other student volunteers to operate. Strange and very unwieldy, the figure moved through the crowd.

The puppet show culminated in the Rauschenberg painting a canvass which grew arms and painted on to its own surface.

Fini!