Beili Liu

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

 "Passage"

 

 "Burn Season"

"Windmaker"

"These works feature an ambiguous narrative that offers insight into the dilemma posed by science and technology's failed promise to fix our problems, provide explanations, and furnish certainty pertaining to the human condition..." (to read and see more, go here)

jamie bardsley

Palm Prints (2011)
hand built porcelains

"The memory of the clay reveals the lines from my hand and records the making of each intimate piece. The folds became a driving force, the pieces themselves began making me..."

-jamie bardsley

cheshire cat

Alice: but I don't want to go among mad people
Cheshire Cat: oh, you can't help that.  most everyone's mad here

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

—- electrons deify one razorblade

into a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish

returns on its unself.

                         A world of made

is not a world of born —- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this

fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if —- listen: there's a hell

of a good universe next door; let's go

-e.e.cummings

time

"I work from the deepest source of inspiration for an artist - my passions.  Anything else would be a waste of the finite moments that comprise my life.  Time is the only thing that we truly possess while we are on this planet, and for an artist, time is also a tool, another material with which to work.  An artists's greatest gift and privilege is to spend his or her time making art"

-Richard Notkin

fight or flight

margaret meehan

the pugilist (jab) - 2011

(i'm still learning from you.)

I Have Seen the Future

 

 Norman Bel Geddes' Costume Designs for The Miracle (1924)

 Float for a Macy's parade, Oct 12, 1926. Pencil, ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper.

"I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America" on view at the Harry Ransom Center (UT Austin) until January 6, 2013. He designed, predicted, dreamed up, and rendered some amazing things...an artist indeed.

glass books

well Austin Kleon, you are right again.  look around, or look back in history and chances are...you'll find that your totally uniquely yours idea in fact has a history. 

such is the case with glass artists' books:

 Tom Virgin "Your School"

8 in x 45 in x 3 in (open)        artist’s book    2012
“Your School” is an accordion structure book created from fused glass and cut copper drawings, bound with multiple ply waxed linen thread, and text printed on bands of Hahnemühle Ingres with a Vandercook 3 Proof Press. The book employs the metaphor of keeping a low maintenance pet (a fish) to examine multiple challenges that schools, and especially young people, are currently facing in Florida and Miami. This book is an edition of two with the second book being sewn with a codex binding.

This book came from my admiration of a friend’s creative use of non-book-like media to create a book. The glass process was enhanced by the advice and guidance of Gail Dahlberg at the Anderson Center at Tower View. The color and glass inclusions fused into window glass created a transparent structure for a very opaque situation, the state of schools. The fish metaphor came from a continuing collaboration with Michael Hettich, a “gringo Magical Realist” poet from Miami.

Bobbette Rose "Fleeting Memories"

 

The glass book called "Fleeting Memories" actually ended up relating to "Faint Glimpses," although I didn't make the connection until they were both done and in the gallery. "Fleeting Memories" is a book made up of seven thin sheets of glass that I dipped in wax. So they also have this translucent feel to them. I then wrote a journal entry on each waxed glass plate with a stylus–my private, stupid, profound rants on different days as I was making the book. I pushed paint into the etched words so, at one point, the words were quite legible. I then attacked each page with a heat gun. The color and the wax began to flow–the words coming apart, re-forming, dripping down and fading. To me, the vulnerability of the words was key. Where once they seemed so clear and organized, they reveal themselves finally in this fused state of ambiguity. It seemed like an appropriate way to describe the fragility of my own life-story. Not in a negative, falling-apart way but in this poetic dance-through-time sort of way that reveals the things you think are so understandable and solid one day can be so fluid and fleeting the next.

So as the book of my life, written in my own words, moves in and out of focus, so too, the ancient "book of life" has its own mysterious translucency to me. I realized, as I looked at these two pieces, that I'm vague in my understanding about alot things these days. And its funny, but that has brought a new type of clarity to my thinking.

And then the Glassbook Project, which does a good job of not allowing theft of images.  Go here to view the project, website, and images galore.