I got back my first prototype from Shapeways.com today. The plastic is light and has a powdery feel.
I have to wrap my head around what something looks like in modeling software versus the physical object; this came out with a much more subtle bas relief than I was expecting.
Next step is to work on a new model, playing around with maps extruded onto spheres - city worlds - and organic buildings.
It's been more than a decade since I made sculpture. The last big piece I did was The Shape of the Universe, which was a 7' wide donut shaped city.
Making that required building a plaster form, making a latex mold and mother mold, then laying up fiberglass to make eight segments, then splicing them together, etc. etc.
Fabricating sculpture requires time, space and money, sometimes lots of each. My studio space is pretty compact right now. We actually have a fairly large studio building - the carriage house behind our row home - but we use the ground floor to run Mount Airy Contemporary, so to really set up shop for making sculpture again would probably involve shutting down MAC and taking over that space.
So anyway...I have a solo show coming up in January at Robert Henry Contemporary in NYC, and the gallery asks artists to make Artifacts alongside the main exhibition content. I don't want to just do a print, so I decided to explore doing something with 3D printing.
Now, bear in mind: my day job is in computers (I work at IT Solutions Consulting as a project manager and one time application developer), but when in the studio I've always kept it old-school. Traditional fabrication techniques, hand holding pen on paper. Drafting tables with Maylines instead of CAD, when I was doing that sort of work. My dad was an architect so I grew up around that stuff and associate making with tactility and physical manipulation. Making is something the body does as much as the brain.
As a result I've never really picked up digital fabrication skills. I barely know how to use Photoshop, couldn't fight my way out of a Sketchup box.
So: 3D printing is going to be a challenge for me.
The required output is modest - it just needs to be a small sculptural object in an edition of 30.
Each piece will sell for $100, so factoring in gallery commission, the fabrication costs need to be under $50 to not lose money. Ideally fabrication cost will be under $10.
I decided that I needed to learn about the process at the same time as learning the tools, so I'm taking two paths here:
The first is to iterate through some very simple prototypes using Shapeways.com.
The second is to learn how to use Blender and SketchUp.
For Shapeways, I took advantage of their 2D to 3D tool, which just extrudes an image into three dimensions based on greyscale values - where darker=taller. Here's the drawing I worked with, the inverted image I used in the tool, and the initial result as a 3D model, ordered through Shapeways. I didn't bother cleaning any of the image up - my goal was quick and dirty to get a physical object in my hands so I can review it, play with it, think about it.
The Artifact is unlikely to be a flat extrusion, though. I'm going to be playing with remapping these things onto geometric shapes, tugging and distending primitives. I'm going to build some of these architectural structures from scratch too, and see how that goes.
This will never be something scaleable to large sculpture, obviously - these things get printed on trays that have maximum dimensions and are priced by amount of material used. But it looks like a fun prototyping tool for someone who still depends on physical objects for it to "mean something".
The second path: learning 3D modeling tools!
Working on 90" long drawing for a show at Robert Henry Contemporary in January. This is probably 1/3 done...and is an elaboration of Heliotrope, a smaller piece I made a year or so back.
Photos with iPhone; I don't get fussy with WIP documentation.
We're open from 12-6 PM this weekend for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours. I think this is round #7 or 8 for us. I'll post a recap after the event.
More here: philaopenstudios.org
Andi and I had an opportunity this week to talk at Arcadia University. We talked about our art practices, the gallery we run (Mount Airy Contemporary), our family and day jobs, and how all of that gets balanced and mixed in our daily life. We also spent a lot of time talking about DIY culture - how artist-run spaces operate, what kind of opportunities there are in Philly, regionally and nationally, and did a shout out to the 40+ artist-run efforts in the Philly area.
It was a ton of fun and the students were very gracious (no hurled tomatoes!).
I don't teach in my day job (a lot of artists do) so I'm not often among 20 year olds still trying to figure out who they are, much less what their plans might be. I ended up reflecting on how things were when I was their age, in a much less interconnected world. How I spent my first year out of school in St. Louis working as a carpenter for a theater company; how I moved in with my dad for a year in Boston, and had a studio on Harrison street. I especially recalled how confusing, lonely and tentative life was as a 21 year old.
One of the students invited me to come visit their AUhaus design group after, which turned out to be a student roundtable discussion held weekly. That was tremendous fun, and made me wonder what my life would have been like had I gone into teaching instead of carpentry (and later technology) for my day job.
The folks at Robert Henry Contemporary and I have been talking about a show in January. No official announcement yet, but I'm working on a much larger piece for that show (42" x 90"). I haven't worked on that scale since 2007, so this is going to be fun (and a lot of work)! Will post in-progress pictures in a few weeks.
Just an update on some new work in the past year...
That's the thing we're working on downstairs at Mount Airy Contemporary. It's organized by Organized by Rose DiSalvo, Michelle Grabner and Alexander Herzog of The Suburban (formerly in Oak Park IL and now in Milwaukee WI).
Over the next few weeks we'll be receiving work from around 30 artists and we're going to somehow shoehorn all of that into ~300 s.f. Alex is building a mobile or stabile to hang artwork from, there's going to be a bookshelf for publications, and some salon-style hanging.
You can read the press release for the show here, and this is the Facebook event.
I've always felt like MAC was sort of the mom-and-pop version of an art gallery: we have a very occasional schedule, we only do shows when we feel like it, we talk to everyone who drops by, sit down with them in the back yard and make it a social thing. So when we do something that's a bit more visible than our usual two-person shows it can sometimes feel like, "how did all of these people hear about us?" I think this show's going to draw a bit larger crowd than usual - have already had calls from people in the midwest who want to stop by.
Anyway, we're excited. The show will be up during POST too.
I had my first set of business cards printed by an old print shop near Canal Street in Manhattan. It was 1994, and I'd looked the place up in the Yellow Pages shortly after arriving in New York. The interior smelled of printing ink and oil, and I picked my card design from a rack of maybe twenty designs, classified by profession (like "Accountant" or "Dentist"). I picked the Dentist design, and a few weeks later I went back down to pick up a box of 500 cards with just my name and the phone number I shared with four other people.
Today the experience of purchasing business cards is a little different. You go to moo.com, and something like 45 seconds later the Postal Service hands you a box of fresh-off-the-press cards that 20 years ago would have come out of an ad agency. Branding isn't just for manufacturers and retail franchises any more - we all seem to be in the business of self-promotion. I sometimes wonder if, culturally speaking, we've substituted finding a purpose with defining a brand.
All of which is to say, I ordered new business cards for POST. My first time shopping on moo and I recommend it.
Andi and I have done POST since we moved to Philly in 2007, and this year's no different. Last year was a bit dicey because most of our work was out in a two person show at Millersville University, but this year we should have a fair amount of inventory around and new stuff to show.
I like POST. I like the fact that totally random people walk in the door. I like that some of those people come back every year, I like the social experience of having folks in our studios which for us amounts to having them in our home, in our back yard (our studios are in a carriage house behind our row home).
This week and next week we're probably going to continue cleaning up the attic and doing some general refurb of the space. In September we'll be too distracted with school starting, a new show at Mount Airy Contemporary, and getting work ready for POST, so if it doesn't happen now, the fall cleaning will never get finished.
Oh, that show at MAC: we're hosting The Suburban.
Yutaka Sone, Panorama: Little Manhattan New York, New York
We did a day trip up to NY to catch America is Hard to See at the Whitney, and caught this little gem on the High Line.
Driving into NYC as a former resident is an odd experience. Seeing the skyline as you approach triggers memories of a place that, upon close inspection, you realize no longer exists. The Chelsea of the 90's is long gone. It's a cleaner, more upscale place, with greenery growing in the shadow of two million dollar apartments, where only a few outlier meatpacking warehouses hold on in a vast sea of biergartens.
It's funny how the image of a city can imprint us, though, and live as a kind of internal map, an outline of where things happened at a given point in time. Cities are where our history happens.
I saw this to the south, for example, and it looks wrong to me. Even though we didn't leave NYC until 2007, the NY I drove into in 1994 is the one that sticks, and in that NY, Manhattan is anchored by the World Trade Center. It's not in Yutaka's sculpture or in this photo, and it won't persist into future mappings.
Andi and I finished the shelves last night but I conked out - giving blood and heavy lifting don't mix.
So Andi cleared everything out while I slept and this is what it looks like early this morning.
Looks like I owe someone!
I still have to figure out where to store Heaven, we forgot to talk about that last night. The storage racks for it are not small.
Andi and I have been re-organizing the studio attic. Our studio building is three floors, and the organizational structure used to look like this:
Ground Floor: Mount Airy Contemporary
Second Floor: Our Studios
Third Floor: The Trash Midden
Part of "Trash Midden" problem was that I have a lot of old sculpture from the late 90's and early 00's. Most of it hasn't really held up well - it turns out that the casting plastic I used for buildings wasn't archival, and yellows really badly in the sun, for example.
Anyway: I didn't plan on showing most of this ever again, so it was time to clear the garbage out. We've now added in painting racks and we're building shelves to go in all of that newly found floor space in the attic.
What's getting kicked to the curb.
New shelves!
I've tossed Wordpress and am now on Squarespace (and coincidentally slimmed my Artist's statement down to four words). I'm also dipping my toe into e-commerce - depending on how things go I'll be offering items for sale in the Store here...
In a week or so I'll be posting a steeply discounted item, just to see what happens - stay tuned.
In early 2014, after about 2 dozen artist run spaces in Philly did a big citywide exhibition called (of course) “Citywide”, I was part of a half dozen artists/writers that wrote essays for inclusion in the event’s accompanying publication. The book came out in spring 2014.
The essays are now getting reposted online on Title Magazine, the first one is here, on the life spans of artist run spaces.
http://www.title-magazine.com/2015/03/longevity-on-the-life-spans-of-artist-run-spaces/
The book itself is available at Vox Populi or on Amazon:
Andrea and I are pleased to have another 2 person show, this time in Philly, at Allens Lane Art Center. January 9 - February 6, 2015
Cocktail reception Saturday January 10, 2015, 7-9 PM $25 / person. Purchase your tickets online for this event.
There’s a lengthy review of the current Drawing Now show written by Jacob Feige and published at Title Magazine. Here’s the link. It’s worth a close read.
In many of the best pieces, drawing becomes the conduit between the inner space of the mind and the vast exterior space of the natural and cosmological. Alexis Granwell and Colin Keefe both make thin, intuitive line the elemental unit of some unknown phenomenon, smoldering solar flare or dream architecture, but not quite either one. From a distance, these works appear to be little more than a light haze on a white ground, the great rewards left entirely for a close, sustained look.
Yeah, so I’m not so good at updating this blog thing.
Married: Andrea Wohl Keefe and Colin Keefe The reception for Married: Andrea Wohl Keefe and Colin Keefe was last Wednesday. Andi and I gave a 1/2 hour talk to two undergrad classes - contemporary art and printmaking - during the opening. The evening was organized by gallery director Gloria Mast and the instructors who accompanied their students were Dr. Christine Filippone (Assistant Professor in Art History) and Brant D. Schuller (Professor in Printmaking).
We put a lot of work into this show over the summer and are pretty happy with the outcome.
Drawing Now Philadelphia
There are several more opportunities to engage with this show. I’m just going to list them in order.
October 3:
October 25-26:
Philadelphia Open Studio Tours We will have our studios open October 11-12 from 12-6 PM. We’ve done open studios for the past 7 years and it’s a lot of fun. Feel free to drop by.
Andi and I have been collaborating on some stuff so that’s what we’ll have up on the walls among other things.
Mount Airy Contemporary The opening reception for our next exhibition at MAC is October 11th from 6-9 PM:Miracle Grow - Josh Weiss and William Test. That is also POST weekend of course, so we’ll be rolling right into that Saturday evening.
So I’m included in this show coming in September (Sabina Tichindeleanu, curator, Emelie Keim Viss, assistant curator) - it looks to be a great collection of Philly based artists who focus on drawing as a studio practice. All the other artists are folks I look up to. Here’s the roster: Ruth Scott Blackson, Astrid Bowlby, Amze Emmons, Alexis Granwell, Daniel Heyman, Sharka Hyland, Colin Keefe, Erin Murray, Michelle Oosterbaan, Serena Perrone, Mia Rosenthal, Hiro Sakaguchi, Caroline Santa, and Samantha Simpson.
Opening’s September 5th at ArtSpace Liberti. Press release here on ArtGrind, and included inline below. Click through the images below for credits.
Drawing is a process of investigation, of testing, and questioning, a meditation on the medium itself. Drawing pushes beyond being a simple (in some views, preliminary) medium; it becomes a language, an extension of the artist. It is used as notation, as a means to translate streams of consciousness or experiment with ideas and processes. Shirking grandeur, ostentation, and effect, the flexibility of drawing as well as its economy of means allows for a sincere revelation of the artist’s mark and purest aesthetic gestures.
I am proud to introduce DRAWING NOW PHILADELPHIA, highlighting local artists who exemplify the versatility of drawing by stretching the traditional boundaries of the genre. Philadelphia’s response to Drawing Now Paris/Le Salon du Dessin Contemporain, DNP will feature 14 Philadelphia-based artists whose work is at the forefront of the medium: Ruth Scott Blackson, Astrid Bowlby, Amze Emmons, Alexis Granwell, Daniel Heyman, Sharka Hyland, Colin Keefe, Erin Murray, Michelle Oosterbaan, Serena Perrone, Mia Rosenthal, Hiro Sakaguchi, Caroline Santa, and Samantha Simpson.
DRAWING NOW PHILADELPHIA, hosted by ArtSpace Liberti, opens on September 5, 2014and will run through October 26, 2014. Join us for First Friday, Second Thursday, and Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, as well as artist talks, and other events.
Subscribe to ArtGrind or follow me on twitter (@tichindeleanu) for updates.
DRAWING NOW PHILADELPHIA
Sabina Tichindeleanu, curator
Emilie Keim Viss, assistant curator
ArtSpace Liberti, 2424 E. York St.
Opening: September 5, 2014, 6pm
So the stat counter on my art website colinkeefe.net was doing the usual dull percolation that an artist who doesn’t show very much gets - which is to say not a whole lot - and then yesterday likeafieldmouse on Tumblr posted images of Heliotrope on their feed. 1306 likes and reblogs, and a bunch of traffic back. Tumblr is crazy. Who are you awesome people?
Anyhow, glad you like the work.
