Metamorphosis

Rebirth Announcement:
"Nico", we think he's male, born in the studio, 7 cm, less than 1 oz.
Already on his way to Mexico.
Link to his voyage video (3 minutes, pure science/magic):

First Flight

RECORDS Release Party Tonight!

Tonight at Pure Pop Records in Burlington, Vermont, we will celebrate the release of RECORDS, my new artist's book with read-along-record soundtrack.


This project, begun in 2002, represents both my dearest wish come true and my gift to the world. Though it was conceived whole, in exactly this format, it has undergone a decade's worth of changes in content. I knew I needed to make a collaged book of my own visual samples of the world (photographs) with a companion soundtrack of collaged field recordings and samples. To print the full-color books and press 45rpm, 7" records was a prohibitively expensive project. Yet it was the only acceptable manifestation for me, as I needed to make an explicit reference to the read-along-record story books of my childhood. That I am both a visual and a sound artist, making recordings of the world around me, required this ambi-sensual format. But it took many years to save enough money to allow the project to take this shape. 


I owe a great thank-you to the Fools Gold Artists' Fund, who provided a significant portion of the funding. Without them, I'd still be saving for a few more years! I feel enormously supported by this wonderful community of artists, farmers, and other hard-working revolutionaries in Burlington's Old North End neighborhood. I am lucky to live, and raise my family, here.


Here's a review of the project:


Seven Days newspaper review of RECORDS

New mixed media work

Collaborative drawings, 1:

The kids and I have been collaborating, of late, on drawings. I start one while they're at school and leave it on the studio table with a note for them to read when they come home and I'm at work. When I get home (late, after bedtime) from work I can see what they've modified. On luckier days, "home days", when we're home together, we draw side by side. Here's installment #1 of our collaborative drawings series:

This one is called, "Dancer and Bear." Here are our notes from the back:


- started by Becca Mack
- Chaviv added bear and spear
- Kathir made thumbtacks and squares and sun behind the moon, a comedy and a star, pointy shooters, and a mouse trail.
-Finis.

Sound and Light Studio

During the darker afternoons of this school year, I have been holding a workshop with the preschoolers of the Burlington Children's Space, working with light and sound in a dimly lit room. We have been exploring threads of narrative generated by the children in response to the invitation to experiment with projectors, homemade instruments, paper, black markers, and basic recording equipment. They decided early on that we were 'making a movie'. From phonemes, amplified vibrations and light particles, we are indeed doing just that.

We use a drawing projector with moving strips of paper, a slide projector with transparent slides and black makers, various rubber band sound-boxes and recycled percussion implements, a cassette tape recorder, and a digital video recorder. Some afternoons we focus on sound, taking turns being the "conductor" of the rubber band orchestra. Sometimes we listen to quiet music and tape many feet of paper strips together, drawing stories to pull across the projector ( and hence, the wall).

One method sequence we are now concluding began with a session of "naming instruments", where we closed our eyes and listened to the homemade instruments, generating stream-of-consciousness images in an oversized notebook. The next week I'd put pieces of paper bearing the kids' mental images (in words) into a basket and gave them markers rather than instruments, to draw the words. Now we are uniting the associated instruments with the drawn paper-strip stories, filming the projected 'movies' with homemade instrument soundtracks.

The end product of this collaborative studio exploration deserves to be shared with our community. The children have made a beautiful 'movie' over months of continuous work. I am looking forward to sharing the children's work with the larger community, hopefully in the form of a gallery exhibit, as well as a showing of the "film".

This project has been instructive to me as a working artist, in that the 4 and 5 year-old minds are so supple in their ability to envision big ideas and immediately pull focus to the work at hand, keeping the creative process fluid. Artists, I heartily recommend finding children with whom to work. They will infuse your process with enormous energy and vision.