Well… it has been a while since I’ve posted on here. No worries, I’m not dead, but worse, I’m being productive. So many major things happening in the studio and in the classroom that I can’t write about it all in a single post, which means you should expect plenty more posts in the coming days and weeks.
Last year was a pretty big year for my artwork and studio practice. It is my hopes that 2022 will be just as big and thus far it looks like it might be that way. I started the year off in January with work in a show in Hermosa Beach, California which featured “Persistence Through Fear” from my portrait series titled “Highs, Lows, and Everything In Between.” The show Intergalactic Open 3 was at the Shockboxx Gallery, which is a great space and they have an excellent shop on Artsy to help artist with sales during this COVID time. This marks the first time one of my portraits from this series has been exhibited and is great validation that my work is heading in the right direction.
Because of the success of “Persistence Through Fear” I’ve continued to work on more portraits and have expanded to include more models to hopefully show a wider range of emotions. I’ve also worked to create more works for my already successful “Lost” series adding most recently the largest drawing I’ve done in a decade “Lady in White.”
Also in January my identity for the Two Can Keep a Secret Podcast that I completed this summer was selected as a runner-up by Creative Quarterly and will be featured in their online gallery at the release of Issue 66. It has been a while since any of my design work has won or been featured in anything other than the AAF Addy Awards. As an educator it can be difficult to find and retain clients given our schedules with teaching and service to the university. Most of my time designing still falls to doing work for the School of Performing and Visual Arts. Some of the work I just completed for it were several event branding suites for our annual Revelry Arts Festival.
Below: Event branding for Revelry 2022
This month I worked with fellow SPVA colleagues; Dr. Candice Salyers (dance), Kelly James-Penot (Theatre), and Allen Chen (Ceramics) on a special dance performance of the “Gaza Monologues.” The text from the monologues were written in Arabic by an ensemble of young people from Gaza in 2010, under the supervision of theatre artist and director Ali Abu Yasine and therapist Nadel Sha’ath. Fida Jiryis’s English translation was provided by Ashtar Theatre. This play has been shared in over eighty cities around the world and translated into eighteen languages. For our performance Dr. Candice Salyers performed a dance with an expressive projection of film and motion graphics that I created with showing the monologues being written. The performance featured the first 6 of 31 monologues and is Volume 1 of what will be a 4 Volume series of performances. Last year’s collaboration with Dr. Salyers, Chen, and James-Penot, titled “Carapace” was featured in the World Dance Alliance Conference.
Those who know me, know I hate talking about myself so I’m really looking forward to writing the next post where I get to talk all about how badass my students are.
