My partner, Mike Fleming, and I moved into a new studio space back in November. The space is a pseudo-office/business/gallery called Red Collar Incorporated. It's located in a small strip mall storefront in rural Wellsville, NY, and sits between a Dollar General and an H+R Block. The front room is a sort of gallery space and the rear houses a large open work space, all of which are open to the public when we're there, providing us with a forum for interaction with the local community. The neon sign that hangs in the front window was custom made by an Alfred University student named Zachary Velkoff. We plan on having a grand opening for the space sometime in March, so stay tuned.
Mike and I have been keeping ourselves busy proposing projects to a number of places. We proposed another version of "A Grand Opening For Gravity" to Vox Populi in Philadelphia, for an exhibition in their guest artist gallery. We would like to take the installation a step further by creating an hourglass effect with two waist-high piles of the colorful pennant flags. The idea being that as one pile diminishes, slowly disappearing into a hole in the ceiling, the other grows, slowly unfurling onto the floor. Each day, the direction would be reversed, and the contents would transfer from one side of the room to the other. The horizontally scrolling wall-mounted unit would hang between them on the wall. Essentially, the installation would explore conventionally disparate definitions of time (my favorite subject, if you haven't noticed) - cyclical vs. linear, finite vs. infinite.
Another proposal we just finished up is for a residency at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. We proposed to make a 16-foot tall replica of a "Nature Scent" aerosol air freshener. The monolithic can would mimmic the real deal by spraying mist (water) at regular intervals. It would hopefully act as "a catalyst for raising questions about man’s relationship with nature, and serve as an absurd and ironic monument to the chasm created as society continues to distance itself from its origins, preferring synthetic substitutions of nature rather than the real thing." Most of all, we just hope it would be a fun thing for people to visit during the hot months in the summer. We've been invited to raise additional funds for the project on kickstarter.com. We plan to launch our campaign really soon (we're in the process of making a video for the site now) so I will let you know when you can pledge your financial support and become a part of the project's realization.
"Air Freshener"
(rendering by Mike Fleming and CAD drawing by Stephen Rooney)
So that's the gist of what I've been up to, plus lots of other things... applying for teaching positions, attending the College Art Association conference in Chicago, and teaching 3 classes at Alfred University this semester. You can check out my student work and assignments here and here. Okay, time to go back to work....
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