Last week we saw a very special SNL one after the election. We saw comedy legend Dave Chappelle hosting for the first time as part of his return to public life, and Hiphop legends A Tribe Called Quest as the musical guests supporting “We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service,” their most recent and final album after an almost 18 year wait.
Black America Again
The latest entry in a long list of powerful music based projects by black artists, that fully engage the complex and historically significant issues we face in society today. Common's Black America Again is out now. I'd encourage you to check out the full album.
Theaster Gates
Right now I'm trying to write about what my art means and what I want it to become in the next few years. I've discovered that the art of Theaster Gates, the work he's doing in Chicago neighborhoods, and how he thinks about art and the world is very much the direction I want to be moving in. Art matters and it relates to everything. It's a long video, but I find it fascinating. also check out his TED talk to understand a part of his practice.
410's Project Bike
How We Got Here: New Work By Cameron Jarvis and Miranda Moen
I needed a few days to recover after hanging the show in Chatfield and having the opening day. It was a big success and I'm finally getting around to sharing pictures. It was really nice to collaborate with Miranda and to look at a place from somebody else's perspective. I'd Also like to thank Tom Hilgren and everybody else at the Chatfield Center for the Arts who worked hard to get the gallery space constructed and helped us organize the show. I'll probably write a longer reflection about the show and the collaboration sometime next week but no promises.
The 1916 gallery is open:
Thursday 4pm - 6pm
Friday 4pm - 8pm
Saturday 11am - 4pm
Sunday 11am - 4pm
Here's this
The World of Groundbreaking Artist Kerry James Marshall
Large Squares
Just as traveling by car is a good way to experience the US highway system, and delivering pizzas was a good way to experience the city streets of Saint Peter at night, I am hoping that biking will be a good way to experience a lot of the county roads that divide up the farmland near my house in Cottage Grove. Still thinking about moving through space.
Goodbye Rainbow
Rainbow Foods on East Point Douglas Road in Cottage Grove was knocked down to make way for a Hi-Vee. It's interesting how it doesn't take much height for a building to completely define your experience of a place by enclosing you in a defined space. Rainbow Foods, and more specifically the fact that you can't see any part of the block behind it was a distinct part of my childhood here in Cottage Grove. It was not a large part and never took up much space in my memory, but it was a very concrete and well defined thing that could not have been any other way. My parents tell me it used to be a K-Mart.
Abandoned basketball court in St. Paul Park
Fall events
I have artwork in several shows this month, so I thought I should run down all of the details here here where you obviously are interested in looking. Please pass on these events to anyboy you know who might be interested. You can always check my News and Events page for what's going on, or if you want the news delivered to you, sign up for my email newsletter. I will send you absolutely no chain letters! It's not the early 2000s. Well it is but we are past that as a species. Mostly.
Exhibition with Miranda Moen at Chatfield Center for the Arts in Chatfield, MN
I am happy to be collaborating with Minneapolis architectural designer Miranda Moen to presentHow We Got Here, an exhibition at theChatfield Center for the Arts in Chatfield, Minnesota. The building that houses the historic Potter Auditorium is undergoing major renovations and a new gallery space has been constructed as part of the renovations. Our show, which is open September 17 - October 14 will be the inaugural exhibition. Join us for a reception on Saturday, September 17, 10am - 12pm.
Group exhibition at Heyde Center for the Arts in Chippewa Falls, WI
My prints Stop Here and Slow Here have been included in Land: Mine, an exhibition at theHyde Center for the Arts in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The exhibition, co-curated by Eau Claire artists Lori Chilefone and Jyl Kelley, features visual, musical and performance art by more than 30 artists. The pieces in the show are inspired by our changing natural landscapes, and focus on the different ways in which we interact with our surroundings. The exhibition is on viewSeptember 1 - October 14 and will feature an artists reception on September 9 from 4 - 8pm.
Exhibition at Hudson Hospital and Clinic in Hudson, WI Aug 17 - Nov 13
For those who missed my exhibition in Saint Peter last May, you can see many of the pieces I showed at Hudson Hospital and Clinic as part of the Healing Arts Program, a collaboration between Hudson Hospital and The Phipps Center for the Arts. My work is on display in theMedical Office Building Lobby from August 17 - November 13. You are invited to group reception for all the 2016-17 exhibition artists on Friday, November 4. More information about the reception will be available closer to the date. You can read more about the Healing Arts Program here.
Sons Of Kemet - In The Castle Of My Skin
I'm back home after a fantastic month at the Anderson Center in Red Wing. I've returned to work and am getting back into the swing of things. I don't think I will be posting as frequently during these weeks leading up to the show in Chatfield on the 17th, but stay tuned for more details about the opening. There are a few more shows that I am involved in at the moment, and you can read up on them by visiting my News and Events page. Once I things have settled after the show I have some plans for interesting new content for the blog. Have a good Labor Day weekend!
I have been having a lot of conversations about balancing a creative life recently. I ran across this interview with Nancy Spector, the new Chief Curator of the Brooklyn Museum talking about the same subject so I thought it would be a good idea to share.
I moved out of the Anderson Center this morning and am back home in Cottage Grove. Here is a drawing I did of the granary at the Center that houses the printing studio.
Last day at Anderson Center
Today is my final day at the Anderson Center. I spent the day packing the last of my things and conducting exit interview with the director, Chris. This month has been a really productive and an opportunity to learn. I thought I should just list some thoughts and reflections in list form, because that's what I do best.
- Having a dedicated studio space has been invaluable to generating and refining ideas.
- I really want to develop a better method for making linocut prints. I had a lot of trouble with creating multi-layerd prints because of blocks that are difficult to keep clean. I'll keep you posted.
- I came in thinking that this month would be just about creating a large volume of work, but instead I've taken the time to relax and think, while still creating work.
- The mosquitos here have been kind of bad in the woods and at dusk. Then we had a few days of heavy rain and the river got really high, and for the past week they have been TERRIBLE ALL THE TIME!
- I've been appreciating the value of having conversations with creative people in different disciplines. There is one other painter in residence this month, and the rest are writers. It has been really cool to learn about an art form that I haven't experienced much, and learning how to talk about writing and its process.
- I've decided I need a hobby. Art has turned into more of a profession in the last few years, and while still enjoy it, I can't rely on it as a means of stress relief.
- I've decided my new hobby is going to be biking. I recently bought a road bike and I'm excited to start riding. I figure I should start a few habits to stay healthy before I'm middle aged, and I'm never going to run, so...
- I love having lots of tables in my workspace so I can spread out.
- New York is a great but difficult place to live (I learned a lot from talking to the three New York Residents)
- I'm excited to wrap up these last shows this fall and take a break from painting to just read and think for a few months.
- Hanisch Bakery in Red Wing makes really good doughnuts.
- I'll write more when I've had more time to reflect.
Everything you know and love will cease to exist one day.
Public Pool, 2013 Oil on canvas
I went home this weekend and visited the swimming pool in my neighborhood where all of us kids learned to swim in grade school. It was the subject of one of my paintings for Departures in 2013. I was so surprised to see that they had filled it in! now it's just a field with a strange green building next to it. walking on the sidewalk under the overhang of the roof still made that metallic echoing sound that I remember from the cold, early morning walk to get from the parking lot to the pool, freezing in just flip-flops, a swimsuit and a towel. You had to pass through from the side facing the street, take a quick shower and then continue past the swim instructor's office onto the pool deck, where you would hopefully find a open beach lounger to stash your towel. Even during the middle of summer I dreaded the water, because the sun hadn't yet warmed the day.
The pool had been closed for many years by the time I painted it in 2013, and I had to hop a fence to get in, and I squatted in puddles of old, leafy water to take photos for the painting. That time I visited on a grey day, and the melancholy mood of the sky reflected the forlorn, closed off pool which no longer received visitors. It also reminded me of the slight dread from going to swimming lessons as a child-- not so much dreading learning to swim, but having to be up so early that the day hadn't decided what it would be yet, and overcast mixed with daybreak. And then being ordered to hurl yourself into the chilly water before we were even fully awake was terrible indeed.
I was familiar with and prepared for this well preserved sort of abandonment, but a solid grassy field was the last thing I expected to see on this visit. They had even removed the fence, as there was no longer a need for it. I always knew that archiving history was a part of my work as a painter of buildings, but until that moment I hadn't been confronted with the reality that these paintings are a documentation of places as they are at a particular time in history, and all of it is going to change someday. This is the first time that my painting doesn't match with reality anymore, as the ground has quite literally shifted underneath the scene I captured.
When my parents moved into their house on Jasmine Avenue South in the summer of 1992, they told us that theirs was only the second house on the street, and the rest was just open fields. in the past few years, while I have been still based in Cottage Grove, but away living in Saint Peter, A Walmart has crept up and claimed the small field and wooded hill that remained at the end of our dead end street. It was a tiny section of wilderness that was always familiar when we were growing up, and well used as a place for sledding in the winter, and riding bikes in the summer. It reminded me that we lived kind of at the edge of the boondocks. Today, I had the chance to talk with a member of the Anderson Center staff who, it turns out grey up in Cottage Grove. He lived across Jamaica Avenue right by Armstrong Elementary, and informed me that when he was growing up where he lived was new, and everything on the other side of the street was undeveloped farmland-- the frontier that my parents would settle decades later.
As a young adult I see new developments planned and erected in places that I have only known as farmland, and I always think "What a shame that they are ruining this farmland to build new developments. So much is changing so quickly." I now realize what an arbitrary starting point I use to determine how much a place changes. What I know as Cottage Grove as it used to be is so much more recent and so different from the memories of anybody who has been here longer than me. I guess my takeaway from this long, self-indulgent list of memories and observations is that everything you know and love will cease to exist one day, and half the people you know have more reason to be upset about this than you do, and the other half don't know what you are talking about, so take a picture and write a story while it still matters.
Mid-process review and editing
I decided I should do like Kanye and show you some unfinished work. I promise there will be no meltdowns or inconceivably brilliant work. The personal debt is about the same though.
These two pieces are more about how I structured the paintings than the way in which they are painted, but I've reached a point where I have to decide what big things I need to change, and what small details I need to add to make them successful paintings. I am also making sure that none of the layers of the painting clash with each other, but instead creates a unified whole.
I took made a quick sketch and wrote some notes about each piece just to solidify the idea and direction that I want to start work with tomorrow. Articulating it in a way other than painting helps to preserve it in a way that can be translated later without the ideas getting lost.
Some more well placed lines scratched in so that the front resembles the back a little bit more. There is a good focal point. I just need to bring the very front into better conversation with the back layer because the back is so interesting that it would be a shame to cover it up with something so much less dynamic.
I just need to go crazy. There is so much careful structure that I can't possibly mess it up. The building fronts are at such an angle [and] in the murky shadow that it really lends itself to impressionistic painting. It would look more real to just have abstract touches of color than to actually study how each part of the surface is functioning. I also need to have fun breaking up the flat storefronts between the two layers of glass.
Here's a picture
It's been an odd couple of days, and everything has been keeping me busy. I'll post a summary of what's been going on, along with some info about events coming up when I have time in the next few days.
I am really happy with the prints I finished today. They came out really clean which wasn't the case with the earlier ones. My paintings are coming along well too. I'm trying something new with these ones and it's been cool to experiment with layers.