Buy cheap art! Closing night party = Sept. 25th

 

Something Must Be Returned To Us (detail)

The Wallmountables show at DC Arts Center has been extended till Sept. 25th, when there will be some sort of closing-night party -- details to follow! Anyone who has bought our art can take it with them at the end of the party! (Or we can get it to you later.)

I do not have photos of the Opulent Tarnish pieces that are in this show, but they are exceedingly wonderful. You should buy them!

My own stuff (detail above) is mostly rose petal-mache and paper-mache with melted, salvaged bottle glass and other found objects. My work also has a lot of rage in it, again. A sizeable chunk of any proceeds I reap will be diverted onward to local abortion funds in the U.S. (30% to 60% of sticker price.)

Hope to see folks at the gallery! Just the tops of your faces. Masks required. I am also happy to do a virtual tour for anyone who wants to "zoom"/Jitsi in, on a day when the gallery is not crowded.

Art Ingredients -- Wallmountables 2022

The new show at DC Arts Center looks gorgeous. They posted everyone's names on the wall in a lovely format (extra lovely: it's right next to my pieces :-)

The only other labeling is a QR code on each wall, so you have to look things up on your cellphone to see who did what (& if the artist is using the right widgetry, you can buy the art directly online). 

This means that I don't have my usual DIY labels listing all the materials I used in each piece. The fabulous friend who took the above photo asked me if this was a melted plastic bottle -- it's a melted glass bottle, which I salvaged from an old bottle-dump on a Shenandoah riverbank.

 The old bottle is wrapped in rusty barbed wire, backed with a vintage lace collar, and mounted on a discarded construction sawblade.

Other pieces in the show also use salvaged bottle-dump glass, as well as bones and old tools.

Unseen Toolkit 1: Unsaw

This piece, Brooding, is salvaged glass, seashell (earrings), cicada wings, and rusty wire coathangers set into an old wooden box lined with papier-mache'd pages from The Bible and an Oral Roberts text about speaking in tongues. (I really like this one. My photos don't do it justice; you should come to the show!)

Brooding

Buy cheap art! Support reproductive health & freedom!

 The DCAC "Wallmountables" (unjuried, fundraiser, community art) show opens tomorrow -- Friday, August 12th at 7:30*.

This homage to my IUD is over 2 feet tall & thus will not be in the show, which is organized into 2'x2' squares. There will, however, be other rusty metal and uterine iconography in my pieces for sale. A goodly chunk of the profits, if I sell any art, will be donated to abortion funds in besieged states.

* This year for the first time , they specifically set aside a wall for children's art. "Our young artists will have their own opening reception complete with ice cream and photographs with family and friends starting at 7:00 PM. At 7:30 PM we’ll celebrate our adult artists with beverages and light refreshments." My stuff is...not on that wall.

SignPostA: Playa del Fuego 2022

Signs made by participants at the spring Burn in Tamaqua, PA -- thank you all for playing!

SignPostA

 As built on site at Playa del Fuego (Tamaqua, PA)...

Non-Virtual Arts Festivities (Hopefully) Upcoming!

Some of the Collective intend to show up in-person at a nonvirtual Playa del Fuego Mid-Atlantic BurningMan Regional festival at the end of May. (May 2022, we hope!)

We plan on making art beforehand that can be reassembled on-site. I learned this the hard way when I made the Cabinet of Extinct Curiosities for the 2012 spring PdF -- I think I spent two full days of a 4 1/2 day festival working on the thing. It was really fun but I could have had MORE fun if it had been more pop-up book, less house of cards.

Art grant applications have been submitted! We are waiting to see what happens with that, but at least some of us are going to be there either way (if it happens!) and will make art, make merry, and hopefully not superspread anything but joy.

Artistic Jumpstart, with safety goggles

2021 brought me several instances of fierce creative elation, and I will write more about that. All physical art things, not writing. Mainly instances of sharing art/creativity with other people. (I did not get into the DCAC Sparkplug thing, but that feels fine to me because I am at a creative juncture and might not be cranking out a lot of finished pieces right away. I just want to play with materials -- including hot metal!)

Step 55: "aim flame into pig's nose to burn out excess oil"

Donna Reinsel teaches welding at the Art League in Alexandria, VA. (Her portfolio features, in addition to jewelry and furniture, some of her amazing lamps and chandeliers. If you have ever had the misfortune of hearing me go on and on about the fantastic lighting fixtures that used to hang at Perry's in Adams Morgan, and now presumably hang in the owner's house, which is so unfair to the rest of us, then you may have some small inkling of the elation I felt when I realized that my impending instructor was in fact the creator of the Vanished Chandelier I Was Obsessed With.)