End of Week 4

Progress is being made. We've completed piecing the largest sturgeon, and are on to the smallest one. I'm patiently (well, maybe not so patiently!) awaiting shipment of the blue tortillas from Mexico. I had to have 110 lbs of smalti made especially for this project. For those not familiar with smalti, a "tortilla" is the large slab of mosaic glass they make. Usually destined to be chopped up into the small pieces you see the sturgeon made out of, when an artist wants to cut up larger pieces, or tesserae, in mosaic-speak, we order larger chunks of the tortilla. In Italy, the large smalti pieces are called pizzas. Get it? :-)Here are a few photos from the last week.

Sturgeon Mosaic week 1

Beginning the fabrication…

Garden of Surging Waves

I've started a commission for a mosaic paving to be installed in a Chinese garden in Astoria, Oregon. The garden is currently under construction. There will be several elements of art being created by local artisans, including and art glass lantern to hang above the mosaic, glass donor wall and steel story screen with a moon gate. Also to be installed in the garden are artistic elements created by artisans from China. Eight marble columns carved with dragon designs will surround the mosaic and be topped by a wood lattice.

I'm fabricating the sturgeon mosaic with Mexican smalti, glass made especially for mosaics. It is a 10 feet diameter circle. I have a number of assistants helping me, and we'll be working toward a completion date of September 15, with installation to immediately follow.

Here is a website that describes the garden's design and concept in the Astoria Heritage Square project.  Astoria Heritage Square.

I'll be posting updates weekly to chronicle the progress.

Review of "Transposition"

A groundbreaking exhibition recently closed in Seattle. Mounted in the Inscape Arts facility, the former INS building, Transposition gathered 15 artists from the Americas in a site-specific show. I was honored to be among this group of artists who are leading the charge in taking mosaic to be recognized as a legitimate expression of contemporary fine art. Nancie Mills Pipgras, editor of Mosaic Art Now, wrote an excellent review of the show. You can read it here, and view some of the works she specifically refers to. I highly recommend reading this article. I'm so excited about where contemporary mosaic art will is going!

The piece I had in the show is called A Long Road. I wrote a blog post about it in March, which you can read here. Here I am viewing it in the exhibition last April:

Exhibitions in Hillsboro, part 2

The other show I'll be participating in is at the Hillsboro Public Library. The main library, at 2850 NE Brookwood Parkway, has undergone a large expansion, and includes a new gallery space in the finished upstairs level. The inaugural show will feature a group of local artists. The grand opening is  Sunday June 2  from noon to 6:00pm. The show will run till July 29. See the library website for location and hours. I'll be showing my works Navy Pier and Untitled in this show.

Exhibitions in Hillsboro

I'll have work in two exhibitions in Hillsboro this summer. First up is the June show at Sequoia Gallery + Studios. Titled "Celebration of Students and Teachers" work will be in various media from students who've taken classes at Sequoia and that of some of the instructors as well.Below is the show postcard with details of dates and times. Join us for the opening reception on Tuesday, June 4!

2013 SAMA Mosaic Marathon

The annual conference of the Society of American Mosaic Artists came to an end a week ago in Tacoma, WA. It was an amazing week, and the culmination of more than a year's worth of work for many people, namely our fearless local co-chairs, Richard Davis and Kelley Knickerbocker. They, along with SAMA staff Dawnmarie Zimmerman and Chris Forillo, pulled off the largest conference in the organization's history. About 500 mosaic artists and enthusiasts descended on the glass-topia of the Northwest. The exhibition was held in the Museum of Glass, Chihuly glass art is everywhere in this town, and the conference hotel, Hotel Murano, is decorated with glass art, top to bottom. One aspect of our conference for the past seven years has been the Mosaic Marathon. It's a group project where a lead artist (or artists, in our case) are chosen to work with a non-profit in the conference city and design a project that is fabricated during the conference and then donated to the organization. More than a year ago, my colleague Mark Brody and I were chosen to lead this project. The host committee selected the Boys and Girls Club of South Puget Sound as the recipients.

Suffice it to say that this is a gigantic undertaking. We learned from the outset that having a team of two leads is the way to go with this. We worked on the project together on and off for over a year, and by the time the conference rolled around, we were ready! Still, it was four solid days of very long hours, with bits of the conference squeezed in. A little finish grouting and cleaning on Saturday, and installation on Sunday, and SUCCESS!

Thanks to ALL the volunteers who participated in the project, especially for our leads Ella Rhodes and Kate Jessup. And the other member of our "A" team, Karen Rycheck. Plus a big thanks to my husband Bob Faber, who helped Mark and me, along with B&G Club Director Gary Klein do the installation.

Through these photos you can enjoy the journey!

Just for fun

Sequoia Gallery's annual "Hip to be Square" open show is coming up for April. I've participated in the previous two years, and almost didn't think I was going to be able to do it this year. I was hoping so,  because the show was opened up to free-standing entries this year— previously it had only been artwork created on 12" square canvasses, to hang on the wall. I had this crazy idea to put together some found objects that had been hanging around my studio. But time was running out! Earlier this week I decided I could do it, and put the finishing touches on the little piece just this morning. Before running it over to the gallery where they were hanging the show! But they let me come in at the last minute since it was just to go on a pedestal. Here is "Playground."

A Long Road

Tryptich, each panel 12 x 12 inches. Rusted steel panels, granite, marble, smalti, lead type slugs, coated wire, tinted thinset.

artist's statement: I have long been a typography geek. Ever since I began to work in the mosaic medium, I’ve wanted to incorporate typography into my work.  Toward this end, I began collecting 1950s era lead type, including forty Chinese type slugs, twenty of which I used in this artwork. However, since misappropriated “foreign” languages on t-shirts, hats, and tattoos has become a global phenomenon, I didn’t want to incorporate logograms with meanings unknown to me. So I stamped each type slug onto paper (see below), and obtained a translation from a friend. The process revealed characters with meanings that could be considered evil, unpleasant, or criminal, so I eliminated them from inclusion in the artwork. This first stage of selection did not sufficiently reduce my pool of candidates, so for the second round of selection, I chose characters whose shape and form were pleasing to me. I realized in hindsight that my background check and selection criteria were discriminatory and subjective.  Nevertheless, I couldn’t incorporate all the type slugs, so I put the twenty rejects back into the box. Their fate is uncertain.

Exhibition in Seattle

Trans-Position:An Ancient Medium in a Contemporary World

I will be participating in this show with my site-responsive work titled A Long Road.

Curated by Seattle artists Jo Braun, Kate Jessup and Kelley Knickerbocker.

A little background for this exhibition: Trans-Position: An Ancient Medium in a Contemporary World is a site-responsive exhibition showcasing the work of fifteen to twenty invited artists from the Americas working in the mosaic medium.  The site is Inscape Arts, an arts and culture enclave occupying Seattle’s former Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) building, a 77,000 square foot neoclassical structure built in 1932.  Renovations have preserved the building’s original character and role as “the Ellis Island of the Pacific Northwest”; and the artists and organizations housed within both preserve and evolve the building’s role as a nexus of cultural vibrancy in the greater community.

The three curators invited the exhibiting artists to create works with these objectives in mind:

• Create an exhibition that emphasizes content in addition to medium
• Engage the surrounding community—geographic, virtual, and metaphorical—in a fun, thought-provoking visual and cultural experience
• Showcase American (Western Hemisphere, by birth or immigration) artists whose work is critical and experimental
• Provide visitors with an exhibition that bridges ancient and contemporary, past and present
• Provide visitors with an exhibition that expands their understanding of mosaic as a form of contemporary artistic expression
• Challenge traditional art world institutions to consider the mosaic medium in its contemporary incarnation(s)
• Inspire viewers to rethink borders, boundaries, categories, institutions, and other socio-structural forces in a critical, liberating way

For more information on the building, go to http://www.inscapearts.org/

For more on my work in this show, see the next post. 

Wall # 2 Install

On Monday, Peter and I installed the west wall— with the sink and window. Progress…

Installation begins

With the help of expert tile installer Peter Bral, the utility room wall backsplash was installed today. I was a tad nervous heading into this step. Wondering if all the measuring and cutting was really done properly! Things went quite well, and pretty quickly! Next Monday we will install the west wall— the sink and window wall. Then I have to finish cutting all the field tile to inlay the stove wall and east wall. It's getting there!

Working with the glass field tile

After a very long wait for the back-ordered 2"x 2" glass field tile to arrive, I finally received it on Monday. Now the task of cutting the pieces and fitting in all the ceramic ribbons and central medallions. I'll be having plenty of fun with my new diamond-blade ring saw in the next week!