Tracking the Dodo

Three of my pieces have been accepted into the “Second Time Around” show at Del Ray Artisans in Alexandria (all art made with recycled/repurposed materials). Starts Friday, Sept. 5th (reception 7-9 pm)!

Detail, "License"

The current show at Touchstone Gallery, where my piece "Pliable" is currently hanging, ends on Sept. 1 (they are generally open Wed-Sun 12-5 but will also be open on Labor Day).

Another small piece, "Moon Box" (which hung in last year's Artomatic) has been accepted for the upcoming multi-gallery "Women of the DMV" show. ("DMV"="DC, Maryland, Virginia." For some reason, my term "BalWash" has not caught on.) "Moon Box" will be at the McLean Project for the Arts from 9/11 to 11/1, with an opening party on Sept. 18th (7-9 pm).

More on the "Women of the DMV" show here.

Wallmountables 2025

 It's that time again! DCAC is having its annual community art show, and I will have work in it, alongside friends of the collective Opulent Tarnish, Taina Litwak, Ursula Seckel, and many more!

The opening night party is tomorrow -- Friday, July 11th -- from 7 to 9 p.m. After that, the gallery is open from 2 to 7 p.m., Wed.-Sun., and the closing night party (& last chance to buy all that fabulous, inexpensive local art) is Sunday, Aug. 10th.

Go to real places and look at real art made by real people! No salesbot will come to your door.

Detail, "Grass Side (Hope)" - DJH, 2025

Collaboratively minded

Two of us are applying for the COLLAB show at Touchstone Gallery, with works that share ingredients (similar/identical found objects, glass and rust collected on shared explorations) and are otherwise "in dialogue" with each other.

Detail, "(throws the whole world) Into chaos" by Dave Eastlack

Detail, "Pliable" by Dorothy Hickson

We will not hear back until the latter part of July. The show is in August. (Watch this space!)

Small Things

Note: We have deactivated our Facebookery due to InfiniDim's anti-LGBT discriminatory behaviors/horridness. (Working on alternatives to the Instagramming.) Comment below -- all comments are private -- if you want to give me your email address to receive a little note whenever this blog is updated.

Both of my Small Things in the Touchstone Gallery show have been sold! Visit Touchstone (Wed-Sun. 12-5) by Feb. 9th if you want to see them in all their rusty, boniness. (Closing reception is Feb. 8th from 6-9; they will not have regular afternoon hours that day, but will be open Sun. 2/9 from 12-5. Also, a few extended hours: Jan. 30 & Feb. 5, the gallery will be open till 8 pm!)

On View Now

 A fellow artist who was working the floor at Touchstone Gallery yesterday sent me the happy news that both of my pieces in the District 51 show have been sold! I am delighted -- this is my first time in a juried show, and the overall quality of the other artwork on display is so high. It's really a lovely show, with a fabulous variety of mixed media, paintings, encaustics, amazing ceramics, etc. You can see them all (including my little assemblages) until February 9th (Wed-Sun 12-5).

"Tarmac" and "Climb"

The back of the thing

 Still writing "2024" on my rust...

(Detail, backside of “Climb” — delivered today to Touchstone Gallery for the District 51 show.)

District 51

I am in this show: https://www.touchstonegallery.com/exhibits-all/the-district-51

(Two of my tinier pieces will be on view, and for sale. One of them, "Tarmac," was also at DCAC; the other, "Climb," has not yet been shown outside the NIRV.)

The show opens January 9th. It sounds like fun to me -- the application wanted to know my specific connection to the city (I told them, "I pick up bits of art fodder everywhere -- rusty wire, vine wood, rat bones; the city is not only an inspiration but is literally woven into my sculptures...") I'm interested to see what other people contribute.

Weighing "Tarmac"

Images for work in progress

If you are falling through the cracks -- if the cracks are widening, because the powerful have crowbars -- weave your own webs in the interstices.

pining for petrichor

The good thing about this dry blazing heat is that paint and varnish dry fast. I venture outdoors only to spray foul chemicals, then retreat back to the coolth.

Petal and wing on rust

I am making new art. Come see some of it! This year's Wallmountables at DCAC opens Friday, July 12th. One of my fellow Arts Collective members will also be hanging his work, for the first time! We are excited.

Talk Trash With Me!

It's the penultimate weekend for Artomatic 2024, and the show has been amazing. If you haven't seen everything yet, come back and explore! This Sunday at 2 PM, we are having a fun little guided tour of various artists' spaces in conjunction with Earth Day:

Trash Talking Artists! The Earth Day Tour

I have already seen (& adored) several of these installations, and highly recommend checking it out! It's another opportunity to meet and chat with the artists, on a smaller scale (the last Meet the Artists day reportedly saw 7,000 visitors, including a Secret Service presence??) Focusing on one path through the building can help you avoid that Saw Too Much Art, Eyes/Brain Full feeling.

In other news, I have sold quite a few pieces! The link to the full list is here. Folks can pick up their purchases anytime during Deinstall (April 29 to May 11); email me to coordinate. Thanks so much!

"Brooding"

Coming up at DCAC

WallMountables 2023 opens this Friday...

"DC’s largest open community exhibition" (at least while Artomatic languishes in its interminable liminal state) will run from July 7th to August 6th. Friend of the Collective Joan Arkham has already installed new work, and my own installation is scheduled for this Thursday afternoon (i.e. the last possible date). Come and see! And buy art. WallMountables is a fundraiser for the DC Arts Center, so you can support the gallery while you acquire new art.

Opening Celebration: Friday, July 7th -- 7 p.m.

Closing Reception: Sunday, August 6th -- 6 p.m.

work in progress for WallMountables 2023 -- DJH

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.

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.)

Mettle

 Filth & I had been talking about learning to weld, and the notion continued to smolder in me... then I happened upon the course listings for The Art League (at the Torpedo Factory), and now I am going to learn how to weld. (Details to follow!)

Also, I got in my application for the DC Arts Center's Sparkplug Collective. I started to type, "so I'm waiting to hear," but I'm not waiting. I've decided to behave as if I am in. Deadlines and shared projects energize me, so I am tapping into that energy as much as I can. Getting my atelier/aerie more organized in the direction of making more art. And making more art.

Rust, glass, wings -- and paper

 Realizing I haven't bragged enough about being in the paper.

This was in the Washington Post's what's-in-the-galleries-this-week roundup [a few weeks ago] ...

No Appointment Necessary!

DC Arts Center is holding its annual Wallmountables right now -- it's like a tiny Artomatic, all in one room! -- and you no longer need an appointment to visit (though I think you do need a mask).

Wed-Sun. 2-7 pm

through August 22nd

My stuff is on the front wall. "I'm Not Trying To Move You."

If We All Go (djh, 2021)

12 Things of Bourgeoismas (Extinctual Retrospectivism)

I had an idea to do this post on December 25th to commemorate the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Louise Bourgeois (above), but somehow sheltering in place & being unemployed keeps me so busy?! But here it is, the cusp of a clean calendar, and here are some of the many Things that we at the Extinct Flightless Arts Collective contrived to create in 02020...

Be Alone With Art

DCAC is still taking appointments for 1 to 5 people at a time (quarantine-buddies, masks required) to visit the Wallmountables 2020 and NanoGallery shows. Wallmountables ends Oct. 18th -- your last chance to see this chunk of rust (with bird's nest, rose, and safety glass), since evidently it has been sold! Hurrah for little red dots!