Gallery Opening and Music!

This weekend was amazing.  On Friday night the gallery opened early for family and we had some wine and looked at all the pieces.  So much good stuff!  I'm going back to take pictures next Monday so I can post them here.  Friends came and brought beers and everyone was in a great mood.  It felt a little like a wedding though in that you have two hours to talk to a million people and it goes by in a flash.  Afterwards I had that day after Christmas feeling where you're like...oh wait, it's over?  What now?


Saturday I thought we had to be there all day so I went to school for my abnormal psych class at 9am and then headed over to the gallery at noon.  It was completely empty.  My mom and pa came up to the gallery and checked everything out with me.  It was spooky being in there with maybe two other people.  It was St. Patrick's day and everything was pretty horrible downtown AHHHHHHHH - slutbarf was everywhere and girls that were way too young were chugging whiskey and every single person it seemed had on green, except me and the frat boys were playing with their junk and saying chug alot and there were drunk people holding babies and leprechauns snapping bras and ....you get the picture. So we packed up into my mom's van and I drove us out of downtown.  We had to go south to go north because the traffic was in....sane. It was fun having them in town for a couple of days.  My mom and Jerry are such a hoot. We went to Red Apple which is a polish buffet  and ate far too much food.  Afterwards we went back to the house and I put my mom down for a nap and got ready for the show at Quenchers.  Quenchers was awesome.  Lots of people there and we played two sets.  One sober, one blitzed but since everybody else was wasted I don't think anybody cared.  Our friends are awesome.  


So, I guess it's time to start a new project.  I have an idea of what I want to do but I'm not sure exactly how to configure the situation so I'm going to think about it for a couple of days.  I do know it will have to do with Jew Holes or...the hole in the sheet.  

Gallery Opening Friday March 16th!

Tomorrow night (3/16) is the opening for the show I've been working on.  If I can take pictures of the other work there I will post them here.  Some pieces are great/inspirational, others -for instance where the artist is scribbling all over the wall a bunch of incoherent sentences in different colors or scraping the paint off the wall - not so great.  There are a couple of pieces that are particularly amazing but words won't do them justice.  


This should be fun!

Installation Finished without a hitch! 3/11/2012

I was in the gallery all week starting on Wednesday installing the piece.  John and our friends Jonah and John Albert helped load it in and get the wall set up.  Our friends are awesome!

front:

Back:

I put the three shoes that didn't get used as the broken off foot under the curtain in the front.

FINISHED!

Kiln Fire results and Building the Wall

Last night I went to school to see the results of the firing of the upper and lower portion of the figure.  It turned out 99% perfect (except for the shoe I knocked off while putting it in the kiln ).   My adviser put the extra shoes I made into the kiln when I got there so they'll be ready when I install on Wednesday.  I had to wait until the firing was complete to start on the wall because I had to measure the distance between the floor and the hands so the hands would roughly be at the window's bottom edge.  The shrink rate for this type of clay is 13% but the piece, after being kiln dried, shrank more than I anticipated and is 35" rather than 36.5" and the hands rest at 17.9"  John helped me build the frame for the wall last night.  

Here are the plans I made originally...

 Here is the result:

Tonight we're going to distress some slats (hehheh) and nail them to what will be the 'outside' of the wall.  Then we'll put drywall on the other side and make it look like the inside of an old house.  I only have a four by four space so it's a little bit small, but because the figure is so small I think it works.

Firing!

So the piece has been firing for 2 days now and it will be finished firing tomorrow.  The shoe broke off because I caught it on the lip of the drying shelf but I've made four replacements and they're drying in my oven.  I'm going to fire those separately (hopefully Monday?) and figure out which one is Cinderella's glass converse and glue it on at the end, similar to how I'm connecting the bottom and top half of the figure.  I was assigned the space in the gallery yesterday and it's really close to the front door.  You walk in, turn left and it's right there!  woohoo!  It's a weird spot because it, like all floor space spots is right in the middle of an aisle so there are no walls, except the one I'm going to have that is part of the sculpture.  Exciting!  I can't wait to see the fired results on Monday.

Kiln Load

I accidentally caught the shoe on the lip of a shelf when I was loading the kiln and it broke off.  I guess it's the best possible part to break but it's heartbreaking.