One Hundred Days: The Online Collaborative opened Friday, May 13 at Hinterland in Denver. We had a great turnout, beautiful weather, and a positive reception. Here is my press release for the show:

One Hundred Days brings together seven artists from across the county who participated in the online collaborative project 100 days during the summer of 2010. The project, begun by painter Carianne Mack Garside in 2008, creates a platform for participants to engage in creative production every day for 100 days and then share their individual projects with the community, creating a network of momentum and motivation. Interdisciplinary and democratic, each participant defines their individual project within the framework, with disciplines ranging from video and drawing to poetry and cooking, and backgrounds ranging from professional artists to inspired spouses. Daily practice and interactivity draws the work together as each individual act becomes tied to the group and necessarily influenced by it. The project will continue this summer, beginning in late May of 2011, and the exhibition will serve as a hub for inviting new participants.

This was my first curatorial project, and I enjoyed receiving the work and installing the gallery. The artists include myself, Carianne Mack Garside, Neha Bawa, Steve Ersinghaus, Claudine Metrick. Carol Mack, Jessica Somers and John Timmons. The exhibition will continue through June 11, and will be open for First Friday on June 3, and from 12-5 on June 11 as part of the annual RiNo art district tour.

Here are a few more installation photos of the show.

I recently purchased a new Diana camera, a redesign of the orginal plastic toy camera from the 60′s, and have been excited by the analog magic that comes from the film – strange focal legnth, vingettes, and light leaks. In fact, I was so excited by my initial experiments with it that I entered a few into Bystander, an upcoming  juried show at Working With Artists, a local photography school and gallery. Two photographs were accepted into the exhibition, including the one above, which will open April 29 from 6-9 pm.

Below are some additional photographs I am excited about. Photography has always been a part of my process, and I am interested to see what direction these new images can take me. I’m already thinking that they may be the basis for my 100 days project this summer, perhaps printing the photographs on paper and then painting into them.

lull, ink and gouache on stretched paper, 35″ x 46″

I just finished this painting this weekend, it has been in progress for a long while. The title is working, so let me know if you have any feedback on it. Other thoughts are conceal, interim, standstill. What I am describing in the work is a landscape that is concealed in snow. I love the way that snow creates negative space and breaks up a continuous landscape into map-like pieces.

Now, I am beginning a new group of slightly smaller paintings, as well as some very small experiments, which I will post soon.

I am excited to report that my work is included in the current edition of New American Paintings, No. 90, West Edition. New American Paintings, a “Juried Exhibition in Print”, can be found at your local bookstore, or online at www.newamericanpaintings.com. Please take a look!

Also, I am at work on a new group of small paintings, as well as a large one. Above is the first of the small works, as of yet untitled. I am working with some of the directions I explored this summer in the 100 days project, including moving outside the picture plane, a bright and highly contrasted color palette derived from images of sunsets, and a sort of hybrid, invented pattern that takes its cues from both natural and man-made landscape elements. I will continue working on these over the next few weeks, during some uninterrupted studio time, and will post as they develop.

The 100 days project has ended for this summer, and my studio is filled with small, 5 x 7 drawings that explored a variety of new ideas and directions that will begin to find their way into my new work this fall. To see the entire 100 days, visit the blog here.

Excited by the range of background, media, geographic location and approaches of the 100 days participants, I proposed an exhibition of the work made this past summer for Hinterland, in Denver. I will be curating the show, along with Sabin Aell of Hinterland, and will highlight both the diversity and the interconnectivity that occurs in the project as personal ritual becomes a shared site.  This will be the first exhibition of this annual project, which is continuing to grow. The exhibition will be opening May 13, 2011, and will accompanied by a book and essay. Look for more information here on the show as it begins to take shape.

Also, my work will be included in the upcoming issue of New American Paintings, #90, West Edition. It is scheduled for news stands in mid to late October. For more information, or to order a copy online, visit the New American Paintings.

This dewdrop world, latex on wall, approx. 13′ x 48′

I finally have some images of my finished work at the Foothills Art Center. This dewdrop world is a site-specific piece that responds to the space, and investigates the intersection of architecture and the natural world. Here is my statement for the piece:

Upon entering the gallery space at the Foothills Art Center, the first thing I noticed was the silhouette of a tree within the space of one of the stained glass windows.  In my work, I am interested in describing this type of intersection of the natural world and built environments.  This conflation of landscape and architecture describes a subjective experience of the inhabited landscape and the human impact on it.  The title for the wall painting, This dewdrop world, is taken from a poem written by the 18th century Japanese poet Issa:

This dewdrop world
It is but a dewdrop
And yet – and yet

This haiku describes the tension between the knowledge of the illusionary nature of the world, and yet its strong pull on our emotions and consciousness.   In this piece, I also explore this tension; the complex image that both mimics and camouflages a cast shadow in the window of the gallery space equally invites a belief in the illusion, and an attempt to deconstruct and understand how it was made.  The poem and the painting also describe both a longing and a loss: a longing for the pleasure inherent in the illusion, and a loss in the knowledge that it is only temporary.

Stark at the Foothills Art Center will be open until July 3 – just two more weeks to view the piece!

Stark was recently reviewed in the Westword.

lit, ink and gouache on paper, 5″ x 7″

I am participating again this summer in the 100 days project, an online collaborative started by my friend (and past collaborator) Carianne Mack Garside.  She started the project in 2008 as a way to structure her summer of production, and soon her solo endeavor had turned into a group of artists from around the country (and now internationally) who are producing one thing a day – a poem, song, painting, drawing, photograph, video – and posting them on individual blogs that are linked to a central website.

My individual blog is http://tenweeks.typepad.com, the same address where I blogged about my fall residency at Anderson Ranch.  Each day during this 100 days I will post a new 5″ x 7″ ink and gouache drawing; the drawing above is the first I’ve made for the project.  These drawings are derived from the 100 photographs that I took last summer for the project, and are also in dialogue with the work being created each day by the other project participants.  You can find links to each of their work at the central site for the project, http://onehundreddays.net. Follow my blog to see each of the drawings this summer as I produce them.