DECEMBER 2008
See ya later 2008 and roll on 2009. Rounding out one of the most productive years to date and ringing in the next big year is another solo show:
That's right, I've officially lost my mind and am putting 1000 photos together in a show. You should come.
LONDON BANANAS: 1000 Portraits of Bananas Consumed and Abandoned on the City Streets
AUSTIN GALLERY
119A Bethnal Green Road (at the top of Brick Lane!)
JANUARY 8 - 22
OPENING PARTY THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2009, 7-10PM
For more info, email me or visit LondonBananas.com (which has gotten a little revamp!). Tell your friends.
OCTOBER 2008
What a long summer it was, tons going on. There was a load of banana activity - banana photos, banana publicity (cheers BoingBoing), bananas coming together into a book that's scheduled for publishing in 2009 - as well as continuation with a few ongoing projects, a major leap forward for a project I'm not telling anyone about yet, miles of calligraphy, and the development of a new media installation called Fiat Lux which made its European debut at the V for Venice festival in Venice in September. We also just performed at The Big Draw event in London. It's an installation that allows you to draw pictures with light in real time. Check it out: www.fiatluxproject.net.
(Oh - and London Bananas will be compiled into a show at ArtKandy's Austin Gallery in early January 2009. Details to follow. Don't worry, you're invited.)
JUNE 2008
For the last year I've been coming to terms with the fact that much of my work has to do with documentation and telling stories through collected information, in whichever form that information happens to take.
I've got several projects on the go that started between late 2007 and early 2008 that operate on this premise. One of these projects involves banana skins found in London. Seriously, they're everywhere. I don't know what kind of story it is yet, but the documentation is ever-expanding. To check it out, go here: londonbananas.com.
MAY 2008
In a stage of idea development. It's fruitful but there's not much to show yet.
In other news, I'm emptying out the notebooks I've carried around for the past twelve months. I have written about a thousand words a day for a year - mostly utter shit, but sometimes some gems shake to the surface. I've been polishing up these vignettes and collecting them in one place, mostly as documentation of a time in my life, but also to make sure they don't get lost. I've made them available here: http://yourbenzedrine.blogspot.com
I've put them on Blogspot so there's an RSS feed that I don't have to worry about or look after. There's a link at the very bottom of the page to an XML file you can put into your newsreader, if you're so inclined.
APRIL 2008
Not so much new, but newly added: a page on mixes.
I have a long-standing love affair with the medium of mix tapes. I've put up mixes that I've been making lately and written some stuff about it. Go check it out.
MARCH 2008
My only goal for February was to survive it without getting horribly ill or burned out. Mission acccomplished. My immune system amazes even me.
There is new documentation up from a performance I did over two weeks called Do Your Work. It happened from February 5-16 at the Foundry in London. The work that came out of it was 42 pieces, mostly collage and involving a lot of text. It was a complete departure for me; I don't generally do two-dimensional work. It's something I'm going to be doing more of, most definitely.
The day after Do Your Work closed I went back to the Curfew Tower in Cushendall to make a scarf to go around the building with another artist, the phenomenal and endlessly pursuasive Jane Twigg. That was an adventure - we collected old jumpers from everyone we could talk to, then cut them up and sewed them all together with the help of everyone in town. The resulting four-foot-wide and two-hundred-and-fifty foot long scarf was installed on the tower for 24 hours. It was a beautiful, hilarious, soul-affirming experience. There was an awful lot of press in Northern Ireland and elsewhere about it on TV, radio and in the press.
I also squeezed in another Hoxton Square Gallery project on March 5 as part of the EAST Festival. The theme was making a studio out of cardboard boxes, so I made myself a box to sit in. Viewers could ask the box a question through a grid in the front and an answer would appear written on a slip of paper out of the back. It was pretty funny.
Pages that have been added with new work:
Do Your Work Scarf Box
2008 is here, I'm still in London, still doing more work than is reasonable. Here's the latest:
In December I installed a piece at the Hoxton Square Gallery as part of TimeOut Magazine's First Thursdays project, when galleries in Shoreditch stay open late on the first Thursday of the month. The theme was "Do We Look Desperate?". Pictures can be seen here. The installation consisted of twenty plastic bags that were hung in the trees. Each bag contained a piece of paper on which was stamped "Desperation Is A State Of Mine" and was lit by battery-powered LEDs. (It rained like crazy and I learned that they were all suitably waterproof.) The bags ended up in the fountain in the middle of the square.
Check it out:
Desperation Is A State of Mine
What's new? Pretty much everything.
In July 2007 I spent two solitary weeks in Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland as an artist-in-residence. This tower has no internet, phone, movies, television, mobile phone signal or distractions of any other kind. Basically, once you get over the isolation it's the most productive place on planet Earth.
I finished *nine pieces* in fourteen days. This is what happens when you don't have anything to waste your time and you're forced to get down to the business of making art without excuses. Four of the pieces are now in the tower permanently as part of the Curfew Tower Collection. It was fourteen days of expansion, experimentation, exorcism and excitement.
Highlights of the new stuff:
Hello It's Nice To See You Call Me Keyhole
I've also left Toronto, and am currently in London, UK.