I’ve started working as an artist/painting assistant to Federico Solmi, a wonderful artist who combines technology (3D animation) and tradition (hand painted textures for the animations) to make satirical animations about our contemporary situation. I’m helping him with his most recent project, which will open at the Postmasters Gallery September 9th. See his work at FedericoSolmi.com, or on instagram.

I also got the chance to work with director Amanda Friou. We workshopped the early stages of a devised theater piece she is formulating which ties together a personal narrative about her grandfather and his participation in the Selma march with the function of protest today.

Finally starting to get things together to begin developing new projects- have had to spend a lot of time organizing and cleaning out a section of the basement to work in.

Doing a lot of reading- Finished Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis and other stories”, currently reading Johnny Cash bio, Dylan’s “Quite early one morning”, and Kafka’s “The Trial”. Also have checked out Joyce’s “Dubliners”, Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the underground”, and Gogol’s “Dead Souls”.

And Finally, here is a photo of the photogravure I made, many thanks to Randy– “The Snowyard”–

OPEN, the performance festival on Sunday, was a lot of fun. All the performances were great, and I had a great chat with Maiko about performance, puppets, and more.

My performance, “a list of terrible things to do”, was structured like this-

The audience was asked to fill come and fill out terrible things for me to do in sharpie on pages of an old gospel book (on which I had letter pressed “a list of terrible things to do” in the top left). After the first batch, they could continue to do so to influence my performance. These lists were collected and slipped under the door by my assistant (thanks Basia!).

I remained in the room adjacent to the main performance space, with the doors closed. A live feed of audio and video were projected into the main space for the audience to view. In the room with me were various props – puppet/sculptures, rope, tape, sticks, etc.

The performance was based off a song I wrote by the same name, where each verse begins with a variation of “I’ve got a list of terrible things to do”. I thought it would be interesting to react to the terrible things other people came up with.

There are a number of reasons for separating myself from the audience by the live feed. For one, I was interested in how it made people have to tell someone to do something terrible who they could only see in a mediated way. It mimics our relationship with the media, with television and video games, with drone strikes, etc. Second, I wanted to perform in the actual space of the LIPS building. The room full of church pews is more interesting to me then the concert hall, but can’t hold an audience. Third, I wanted to double/ rearrange the space. I was right next door to the audience, but also right in front of them, and in the room with them.

Anyway, here are the videos –