I finally gave in to temptation and bought the multi-multi-pack of many-colored permanent markers from the Big Top Flea Market in Atlantic Mills:

Given that these are from the flea market, they are not actually Sharpies but Shoupies, and they cost me $2. This was not the temptation to own a lot of colorful permanent markers, but the temptation to own a product very carefully crafted in imitation of a really-carefully-branded product. I probably should have left them in their packaging as an art object, but I’m too practical for that, and… there’s a lot more where they came from. (At the flea market, I had the choice of two other non-sharpie ‘brand’ names, written in the same font, both with the same capital S. No photos: I didn’t want to attempt explaining to the friendly Chinese girl working the booth that I am a graphic artist with an arcane interest in fake products, not the undercover trademark police…)

They did a pretty good job. I am always thrilled by seeing off-brand objects that use graphics to imitate the product they are ripping off — (more…)

… I spent a day & moved everything on the main secretdoor site around into different folders, cleaning up the root, with the main aim of organizing the posters and prints by year.

This involved finally learning how to use relative URLs, setting up MAMP on my computer so I could view the site locally, figuring out how to use it right, and a lot of redirecting links and image file paths. Nothing too complicated, but it took some time. It only makes a tiny difference to anybody looking at the site, but is significant for my own “knowing that things are organized” inner-calm, and also is crucial in getting ready for a bunch of new documentation that hopefully should go up soon — at the beginning of June I handed off 50+ prints and other smaller things that hadn’t yet been photographed to Scott Lapham, so I’m hoping to put up many fresh images, of work new and old (going back to 2001!), very soon.

Also there may still be broken links that I overlooked… if you come across anything of that nature, please let me know!

The “farmers’ markets / mercados de granjeros” poster is done!

I finished printing the morning of June 4th, wrapped the posters up in paper and then a couple of plastic bags, and biked them across town in the rain. I arrived at the Farm Fresh offices with dry posters and wet everything else. By now, they are up around town (at least, so I’ve heard, since I’ve been away!) and the farmers’ markets have actually begun, so go check them out if you’re in RI… or go visit your local farmer & help them pull up some weeds! with all the rain, they will need the help.

last steps, from ink drawings on transparency to printed color stages, follow.

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and it’s almost ready.

[The back room/drawing room mess pile. I will document the show & put up some better images — for now, if you want to see any of this in focus, well… you gotta come to the gallery!]

I finished the brand new “57-59 Curtis St.” print at around 4 am — printed a third color on a bunch of copies of the “Ruins” print (aka “Pierre Van Passen Interviews Buenaventura Durruti, Aragon, Spain, 1936″) — washed the ink out of that screen — now to take a shower while it dries. Out of the shower — set up the screen again and print the fourth color. Then — done! and, sleep.

There will be other logistics to think about (for example, it’s raining, so I’ll have to find a ride to get my stash of posters over to the gallery), but if I can get that last color printed and looking all right on at least one copy of the print, I will be happy and feel that my somewhat perverse last-minute determination hasn’t failed me, at least not this time.

Today, Sunday, May 4, 4-7 pm, AS220’s project space (on mathewson, off washington, downtown providence). map & street view here. Come by & see the multiple reasons why I am so darn sleepy right now.

[front gallery, friday, before adjusting the lights, obviously. Stephen’s work is to the left. This is the part that looks like an “art show”… as I guess it’s supposed to? no logic here, sorry, too sleepy!]

Oh and yes, it is 9 am, and yes, I’m still awake!

A trip with Scøtt in the van to a creepily perfect still-almost-brand-new shopping plaza in Smithfield RI, a visit to the giant chain home improvement store, twenty-three dollars spent, some cutting with the knife, and a little time with the white paint =

new homasote boards for pinning stuff up on!

I have been making notes on small cards and laying them out to think about how things are related. This probably traces back somehow to witnessing some of my friend James McShane’s comic-making practice, in which he works on narrative sequences the same way, as a deck of card/pages that can be ordered & re-ordered.

Laid out on my desk, whatever arrangement the cards are in is bound to get destroyed in less than a day (since I’m also using the computer, reading & taking notes on books, trying to do my taxes, organizing stuff I pull out of my backpack when I come home, etc, all on the same desk). The pinboard solves that problem. Also it lets me look at many things at once, keep many ideas up in front of my eyes, and thus in front of my ever-distractable mind.

Having more pinboards also makes my room into even more of an art-making nest. It’s pretty tiny (about 8 feet by 10 feet), with flatfile storage, bed, clothes, giant 4 foot by 4 foot drawing desk, many shelves, cat litterbox, etc. fitted in on multiple levels. The pin-up boards definitely are kind of tipping the scales towards “work” and away from “other life”. wait, is there such a thing as “other life”?

More cards, with images instead of text, are probably going to be in evidence soon. There’s a drawing of them already, but I need to be able to move them around & rearrange. The second print looks like it’s going to be some kind of catalog or chart of various different ways doors, walls, corridors, windows, stairs etc. can create different degrees of privacy between personal spaces and shared spaces. At least that will be one of the things that is happening in it… My tenuous prediction/hope is that it will be some kind of cross between the rigor of an Edward Tufte diagram, and the nonsense-within-order of a Bernard Tschumi drawing for the Parc De La Villette in Paris. Plus some perspective drawings. In awesome colors. WHO KNOWS.

This stuff happened about a week ago, it just takes me a while to record things and write about them. The non-internet comes first.

Reading:

• The Social Psychology of Privacy, a 1968 essay by Barry Schwartz, which was a standout in Robert Gutman’s 1972 anthology People and Buildings, dealing with the implications of sociology on architecture. In general, pretty interesting and relevant, even in its datedness.
• Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, by Catherine Ingraham, 1998.
• A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture, by Ann Cline, also 1998.

The late-90s critical theory and the late-60s sociology provide a really good counterpoint to each other. Like Fanta and cheap red wine. I mean it!

After a lengthy stretch of time occupied with logistics, being out of town, dead ends, “getting organized”, being sick, preparing, finishing, cleaning up, things not working (including this updates page), and consequent general frustration, this past week some things started to come together.

The results:

• a more-or-less fully working web site
• new & reliable web hosting, which was encouraged into existence by Andrew Oesch and the “cooperative not collective” internet project (more on that later)
• the realization that I already have more than 10 pages of notes and drawings (made in three different notebooks and on scraps of paper) over the course of the past month, about the layout of residential spaces — following that, the realization that I had already started on the thinking work for the next posters in the ‘everyday spaces’ print series…
• becoming excited about the specifics of those next posters, and how they all fit together…
• the realization that all the thinking and drawing work I was doing on the forbes kitchen project was already leading directly into the work for the next couple of posters…
• a large drawing, begun tonight and started very fast, that now takes up my entire desk (the blurry photo above is a detail) that is the first attempt to make those 10+ pages coalesce and cohere, to create the logical backbone of the patterns that deal with common and private, centers and edges, work and relaxing, symmetry and asymmetry, in the spaces from kitchen to bedroom and in between.

So, this page is back, the print series is back (for those who might have been wondering), and I’m back, excited about next steps and possibilities.

For two years, I’ve been excited about changing the awkward and hard-to-use layout of the kitchen at the house my friends own in Worcester. Starting this summer, they’ve done a lot of demolition, and now the construction stage of the project is actually starting to happen. It’s super exciting.

The photo above is from September, as the housemates at Forbes St. were working on taking down plaster and moldings around the doors, closets, etc. (Kelly is in the middle of washing dishes.) The picture below is from this past Saturday. You are seeing a lot less plaster, a lot more mess, and part of Andrew working on the chimney. The stud wall in the center of the picture will eventually disappear, being reduced to smaller structural walls that will be part of a ‘box’ surrounding the central chimney.

Briefly, we are combining two rooms that contained (and separated) the kitchen functions into one room, adding more work counter space, and building lots and lots of storage. This past weekend we finally took down some real walls, and built a new real wall. It’s small, but it’s structural. It includes an alcove that will become the most heavy-duty spice rack ever built.

The challenges, which are also the things that (already) make the project awesome and extremely rewarding:

• Instead of having one or two clients, I’m working with 9 to 11 residents/part owners of the house, who all cook and use the kitchen, all are involved in some way in the design process, and all want to help and want to know what’s going on. It can be crazy and frustrating, but in that process of explaining something over and over again, I realize new things or come to new conclusions — and I have that many minds pointing out where something is not going to be right, and contributing that many more awesome ideas to the process.
• We’re not working in the traditional ’stages’ of architectural practice, where once signed off on, a design is hard and expensive to change — instead, things are flexible up till they are nailed in; potentially changeable even after that; and, where possible, are designed to be modified and added on to during the process of occupying and using the kitchen, seeing how it works, bumping into the corners, etc.
• I am leading a loose crew of the people who live in the house in doing the actual building. Some have construction experience, some don’t. Everybody gets a chance to do things. This might take longer than rounding up some more experienced people to come in and do the work after we had finished the drawings, but it means that ideas can get contributed in the middle of building and up to the last minute, and that after the kitchen is ‘finished’, there will be a whole bunch of people living in the house who now know how to use a circular saw, a screw gun, and other tools, and who will be able to fix things around the house, make new things come into existence, and take more initiative in making the space their own.

Basically, it’s a totally revolutionary way to make living spaces, difficult and complicated, incredibly simple, possibly only practicable on a very small scale, but completely fascinating and compelling. I am super excited to have the chance to be involved in this project and this process. I’m writing more, and more in-depth, about the implications of this, and about the specific elements of the process — when that writing is a little bit less rough, it will also be here.

well, as James Amoeba says, a website never gets done. tonight, however, this one is more or less ready to look at.

it starts here:
http://www.secretdoorprojects.org/

totally redesigned & remade, finally a gallery of images!!!, a place for rantings & writings, some stuff for sale, info about all projects collected into one place and organized well enough to put my brain at ease. let me know if anything’s blatantly broken.

…or, almost cleaned up, but 90% cleaner than it was earlier this evening, and 300% more organized and cat-proofed. Ready for me to leave town, ready for Scott to print some stuff while I’m gone, ready for me to return and jump into printing as soon as I get back.

Recently, time has been taken up by (in no specific order):

• working more on the Magic City Repairs installation in Worcester, then dismantling it this past weekend, godzilla-ing the cardboard mountain/structure, and bringing 15 boxes of buildings back to storage in Providence.
• attempting to get cat-pee smells out of the studio area: working with my housemates to pull up carpet and sub-carpet, sand (!) the floor and put on a couple of coats of polyurethane. Successful so far. The studio cleanup is another step in the anti-cat-pee direction.
• mentoring and working on projects at New Urban Arts. So far I have a bunch of students who are all working on totally different things, most just testing out the silkscreen medium, one very large (almost 4 feet long!) graffiti letter poster, one emotionally and politically complicated poster about an eviction and real estate development in the student’s neighborhood… They are all exciting projects!
• visiting Andrew’s family in Maine…
• attempting (so far, unsuccessfully) to sort out some thoughts about control, structure, initiative, responsibility, purpose, etc. into essay/zine/broadside formats. These will come into existence at some point, but aren’t ready yet. If anyone is interested in being a reader/editor/advice-giver, let me know.
• logistics surrounding the poster series, mailing out posters, contacting potential subscribers, etc.
• “wasting” time looking at “interesting” things on the Internet.
• reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire.
• everyday cooking & eating projects (which always take me a long time), as well as making sauerkraut, carrot-ginger pickles, and applesauce, with the intention of not letting seasonal fruits and vegetables go to waste.
• worrying about how difficult it was going to be to clean up the studio, after the sanding project, and after a bunch of months of printing things and not really organizing at all after any of the print runs. As it turned out, it was hard and demanded persistence and focus, but it wasn’t as bad as I had thought (of course). Now — it is done, and my brain is still realizing that I don’t have to worry about it any more…

I think that is about it.

The new washout sink, next to the regular sink: previously there were two slop sinks (like the right hand one) in a different part of the studio — over a wood floor. The screens didn’t fit into the sink, water went all over the floor, and all over whoever was using the nearby sink for photo washing. (Now the photo darkroom has its own sink — in the dark! The photographers are happy [see below…].) This part of the studio used to be the kitchen for a restaurant that was here previously, so we took advantage of the tile floor to make a rugged cleanup area.

We also no longer have to pick up water in yogurt containers and splash it over the screens: innovation!

Inside the silkscreen darkroom:

New screen coating table, built by Pete. Squeegees have their own shelf, on the left.

Storage shelves for ink and other supplies (no longer in the basement!)

The light table, which finally has a table of its own.

Darkened screen storage is below this table, behind a dark curtain. The rack behind it provides storage for other screens.

Last but not least: one of the happy photographers, mentor Erik Gould! (if he doesn’t look happy, it’s because his hat is falling off…)