Tea Bags and Cast Paper and Found Objects

First Wife

Vestments

We went off to Fredonia State, to the Rockfeller Art Center, to view the show by our friend from the CI, Judy Gregory.  It was a very successful show, with lots of students, and friends from the CI.  Here work is  very iconoclastic as she uses materials unlike what most of us think artists use.  There is little if any painting or sculpturing; rather she takes objects from the natural world and the world of products (tea bags) and puts them together to form her object d'arte.  Almost all of the objects were interesting to view, the colors and texture were what drew you in.  She makes her own cast paper, which enables her to shape it in anyway she wishes though it must be enormously time consuming.  When she starts out, she has no end in mind, just let's the object go in the direction her instinct and intuition takes her.  One wonders about what goes on in the creative mind, where their inspiration comes from, what they are trying to say or get us to see, and how it shapes our understanding.  We certainly see things that she didn't see and we don't get all of what you tries to communicate. There is a playfulness to her work, and a sense of humor which makes it fun to view.  Much of her work explore social issues and women's culture, making it very contemporary.  What installation was made with the help of the Fredonia art students; they took ashes, and using rubber bands, they splashed it upon a wall, then they stenciled the work MEMORY over the ash dust on the wall, leaving the rubber bands to fall on the ground.  She likens memory to a rubber band, how it expands and contracts like our memory, and eventually breaks.

My favorites were FIRST WIFE, made from what looks like hosta leaves, covered with cast paper and if you look carefully, you see arrows sticking out of the upper portion of the figure, with drops of blood on the wall.  And I also like GUILT,  what looks like an altarpiece from a church, covered in gold,  but on the edges one can see labels from various temptations: butter labels, a Godiva chocolate label, and truffles.  Finally, the VESTMENT object is made of tea bags, each dismantled, connected, and she uses the labels, like Lipton's, as well as the string as decoration.  It's all enormously times consuming and creative.

After the show, we went to DE John's Italian Spaghetti, a little Italian joint in town and we  really liked it.  The owners are third generation, and its been in the same place since the 1930's; the main part is an actual dining car from a railroad, surrounded by additions.  We got to talking with the owner, actually its his wife's family.  He was very outgoing, told us all about Fredonia and the surrounding areas, places to visit.  Interestingly, he's also from Fredonia, and his father has had a barber shop in town for quite a while and he works at it during the day, at the restaurant at night.  We had a beer at at the bar as we waited for our pizza, which we took home because we afraid of the weather turning icy.  It was a place worth stopping for.  I forgot to mention that as we talked about the menu, he went back and gave us two meatballs with sauce to try because it was homemade from the Grandma's recipe.  Evie said she would like to drink the sauce it was so good.

A miserable, rainy day so far, in the 40's already, and it's not supposed to get any better.  Tomorrow perhaps 3/5 inches of snow if it cools down.  Lots of flood watches around here today.

We went to the gym, worked out because of the terrible weather outside, hit the library, picked up three books on reserve, and came home for lunch, a salad with salmon and pita chips.  We ended up vegging out, watch a movie with De Niro and Franco called CITY BY THE SEA on Netflix.  It was a B-, the story of a cop whose son, because of his drug problems, gets in serious trouble.  Not much else to do today except wait for dinner, read some, surf the web, and wait for our movie, our second time watching  THE SOCIAL NETWORK.  I hope we like it more the second time than the first.

We just finished making oatmeal/raisin/nut/chocolate chip cookies. We had nothing sweet for after dinner tonight, so we whipped them up quickly, between the two of us.

Guilt