Showcase @ P!ay Hair Lounge - Teaser

One thing that hasn't changed in the past couple thousands of years of people making art is that they're always being really pushy about getting people to try and look at it.  I am definitely no exception!

This Wednesday night, you might be able to find me and my husband yutzing around at P!ay Hair Lounge in Simi Valley, where my art is going to be showcased for eight weeks.  We'll have a few hours that afternoon/evening get everything installed.  If you're in the area, please stop by!  P!ay is not "just" a hair salon (although I do get my hair did there and nowhere else), it's an artistic outlet: the salon is owned and operated by Brig Van Osten, the winner of Shear Genius Season 3.  She is one of those awesome business owners who helps out the artistic community by showcasing local artists and advertising them on their website.  It just happened to work out that she and I connected at the exact right time, and it just happened that she liked the digital mini-portfolio I provided.

With that luck, Brig extended the invitation for me to install my art.  So for the past couple of days I have been calling up folks who own my work and asking permission to borrow pieces for the showcase.  I've also been going back and touching up details on pieces in storage that I think may look too worn or that have been damaged in transport (I have moved twice in the past three/four years!).  It's not a very simple process, unfortunately, so my dining room has taken a pretty hard beating while I get organized for Wednesday.

This picture doesn't look too bad, but please don't be deceived!

I've also been super motivated to finish a couple of pieces that have been on the backburner for too long!  All three peices in mind happen to be parts of series.  You remember the untitled photo series I hinted about a while back?

Photo Project: No.6 (left) and Photo Project: No.13 (right)

I've finally got these two babies mounted and completed.  The only thing I don't really like about them is the size of the photos themselves because so much photographic detail is lost, although that's what happens to work best with the additional pieces of the collage.  My goal was to have the photos work with these other pieces to evoke a sense of poetry...although there are 11 more parts of this series that are not completed and not ready for display yet, so a lot of that poem is lost.  Hopefully these will stand on their own for the time being!

I AM super excited about the dried flower in No.6...it got preserved better than I'd even hoped!

Gamera Tours Tokyo!

Then there's a new piece in my series called "Animals That I Like, and Some I Don't."  You may recognize another piece from this series called "Paul Eats the Moon!"  I'm still sketching this series out, but it's been a lot of fun...it's a huge mood leap from the Photo Project, if not a complete 180.  But it's something I feel like people of all ages can smile at.

Just as a sidenote, you may recognize the name "Gamera" from such Japanese monster movies as "Gamera vs. Viras" or "Gamera vs. Giron" or even "Gamera Strikes Again."  Tokyo DOES get destroyed in a lot of these kinds of movies; however, Gamera is the name of our turtle and she doesn't actually live in Tokyo, she lives in a tank.  She's also far too fat and lazy  to destroy anything the size of a bread box, let alone a city.  We do take her for walks on the lawn every now and then, but I thought it would be nice to take her someplace a little more exciting.



The current view at P!ay Hair Lounge

More updates to come later this week! For now, I will leave you with the nearly-empty walls of P!ay to muse over.  See you soon!