On to the Next Show

Just about an hour after I finished taking down my show in Belmar, the next show started coming in the door.  The intake for this annual juried show is a two day deal, so I opted to wait until today, giving me an extra day to figure out what to submit.

One of the rules for the annual juried show is that artists can't submit work that has been previously shown at the Boatworks.  Thanks to the exhibition of the Fourth of July, I now figure I've shown well over 400 prints there, and I'm running out of new stuff to exhibit.  Following the basement flood caused by Sandy, I removed a bunch of framed older artwork to my apartment, and I started my quest by looking at these.

One of the first things I thought about is the piece above, from somewhere around 2000.  Back then I had a seasonal job assisting with recreation for people with developmental disabilities, and that meant trips to Atlantic City once or twice a week.  Part of my job was pushing wheelchairs through the casino, and sometimes even physically helping our clients to play the slot machines.  Wedging myself between the wheelchair and the slot machine, I often saw my own reflection in the chrome surface of the controls.  It occurred to me that this might make for an interesting self portrait, if I was the kind of person who liked to gamble.  But I'd no interest in playing the machines myself, so I'd just have fun observing and sketching, getting ideas for other projects.  As time went on, I thought about it more and realized that I had experience with one big gamble, the decision to pursue a Fine Art major and the life of an artist.  I substituted positive and negative symbols of the art life for the typical images on slot machine dials, and different subjects for the LED counters.  To figure out the exact perspective on a typical slot machine, I took careful measurements of dimensions and angles of actual machines (measuring with business cards and other handy scraps) and built one out of scrap cardboard so I could draw the view from above.

I thought the piece, which I called The Art Game, successful, and the first proof even won a purchase award in a 2001 juried show.  I framed this second proof, and it appeared in a few solo shows early last decade.  It's a good sized piece, framed at 26" square, and decided to save money by using glass instead of plexiglass.  (the latter goes up in price as oil goes up in price)   When I pulled it out of the pile a few days ago, I noticed that somewhere along the way the glass cracked in one corner, a diagonal break of about 3 inches.  Not about to spend money on replacement glass or plexi for a piece that might not even end up in the show, I put it back for another time.  It may be for the best.  Looking at it carefully for the first time in years, I realized that once again I had unintentionally documented a world that no longer exists.  My indicated number of "years played" and "prints" are very out of date, and today's slot machines neither take nor dispense coins and most have computer displays instead of mechanical dials.

Regardless of what would be decided about The Art Game, I had decided on the above piece from 2004.  I was invited to participate in a group show with a theme of 10, and came up with the idea of the ten pins in bowling as my subject.  The upper part of the image was based on an old family photo I found, perhaps from the 1940's.  I invented everything in the bottom half, based on reference I found of old hand set pins.  This also allowed me to put the ten pins in the foreground.  This print, called Tenpins the Old Fashioned Way,  appeared in a number of shows in subsequent years, but searching my records, I don't believe I showed it at the Boatworks.  It was over at Manasquan, having most recently done duty as a prop in the staged house my parents sold last year.

Wanting to provide a second option for the juror, I went back to my pile and pulled out the above print from 1999.  My first real print after returning from grad school was an odd piece borrowing style aspects from the trance films of Maya Deren, and narrative element from a dream I had years earlier.  Needing a model for the multiple versions of the figure in the piece, I enlisted a former co-worker who has some interest in art and was willing to indulge my odd ideas.  The print was a success, and for me an indicator that I could successfully make art without the pressure of grad school to push me along.  A few years later she helped me with another odd dream based idea I had.  In 1999 the Trance print was accepted into a group show at the Newark Museum and I invited my model to come see herself in that setting.  She looked a bit different from her printed image, as she was well along in her first pregnancy. She used the opportunity to suggest a new project- she wanted a formal portrait of herself in this condition, an idea she got from some cable show.  I figured I owed her from the two projects she had helped me with, and it could be interesting, so made vague plans to do it in the late fall when she was nearing full size.  Looking for an interesting concept, I called her a few weeks before the planned session to ask her was she was thinking about with this pregnancy.  She said that she had been adopted (if I ever knew this I had forgotten it) and she had never met her birth parents.  So she figured this child would be her first opportunity to see the face of someone she was related to.  I could work with that.  For the set up I had her looking at herself in a large mirror, touching her enlarged belly and looking at her own face, a double portrait.  I added a calendar with the due date in the background, and the images on the mirror were various symbols.  For a title I directly quoted a Zen koan: "What did your face look like before your parents were born?"  Such riddles are meant to inspire meditation, not to answered logically, but I had one such answer here. It would look like your grandparents.  In her unborn baby's face, she might be able to see her parents.

I dropped off the two pieces at the Boatworks just before the deadline, two of about 200 submissions.  From this point on it's in the hands of the juror.  I'll know the results of the decision on Wednesday.