feather2pixels

First dance, first fistfight, first girlfriend: having logged many seminal moments of my life at summer camp, it was with a commitment to the memorable that I recently executed my duties as art director for one week of San Francisco Boys Chorus away camp.

It’s never really possible to know what kind of impact you are making on eleven year olds, but my basic plan was to win them over slowly by focusing on a precise five day project. Something that would keep kids busy with their hands and look really cool when it was done. Since the goal was to construct set pieces and props for EB’s parallel kid operas, we ended up painting a 50×50 inch Resistance-style portrait of Camp Director Claire. In her creation class, EB helped the boys work the painting into their story.

We began with a photoshoot.

I digitally processed one of the better images into seven discrete layers:

Over the course of five camp days, I projected each layer independently for kids to outline and paint on canvas hung from the wall. Registration marks were used to line everything up.

Then we stretched the canvas on a frame, ready for the show.

So it was pretty cool. And I got the kids to call me Jono. The painting looked very fine from a distance and I think the boys were into the program. Of course we did a bunch of other stuff. We made signs and banners. One day I chopped up a bit of branch from an apple tree and we made medallions. Located in Sonoma County at a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school on the banks of the Russian River, the setting was a nicer than summer camps I remember but the food a lot worse. A huge thanks to EB, Camp Director Claire, and Jess the counselor.

I recently spent two weeks as destroyer-in-residence at the Breg-man family workshop in Santa Cruz, California, a wonderful coastal town with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of dreadlocked caucausions and aesthetically perfect fences.  Here are some of the items I completed during my time there.

Hillside Supperclub sign: Fabricated from reclaimed wood and carbon steel.  Screenprint to follow.

An armada of steel frames: For my imminent invasion of a gallery near you.

I must acknowledge the huge amount of assistance from Jonathan.  Without loads of his smithing assistance, this would not have been possible and  I would probably be in the hospital with third degree burns.  But not him:

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I wanted to write more about these mystery tiles.  They are a study for a large series that I am preparing, in which each one of these connected, free associative phrases gets its own treatment.  The so called treatment I am envisioning is a conceptual piece with a lot of working parts not shown here, but the backbone is this succession of wordplay.

(All of this is being prepared in parallel with a wordplay-based exhibition I am planning with a group of collaborators .  If all goes well, it might happen in July 2013. )

For now, this study was a way of giving the phrases a physical manifestation, to see what they looked like on a wall.

I am pretty happy with it.  The phrases are still subject to change and I would welcome any feedback from devoted colleagues.  In particular, I don’t know about “something retarded.”  I was hoping to sort of reclaim the word from it’s more uncomely usages, instead presenting it as the converse to the previous “something to quickly convince someone of something.”  But I don’t know if it plays right.  I need outside impressions, I think.