Blah Blah... a few things.

2008-05-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

Taryn Simon roots out commonplace American oddities. Like William Eggleston’s portrayals of the suburban American south, Simon shows us images of strange goings-on that happen everyday, only the situations she portrays are mostly overlooked because they are ‘behind closed doors’. In order to witness some of these events and places, one typically has a certain level of involvement, or at least some sort of badge. Somehow, Simon manages to lug a viewfinder camera into customs seizure facilities, nuclear storage tanks, cryogenic labs, operation rooms, and even George Lucas’ house. In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Simon addresses the scattered use of technology that has characterized America in the last quarter-century. From subverting the authority of death to absurd aesthetic endeavors, our attempt at control over the realms of genetics, geology, weather, disease, sexuality, aging, society and culture has helped shape the American national identity. The exhibition is a overlap of journalism, portraiture and still life that creates a different vision of an idiosyncratic culture with seemingly very little to do.

Exotic white tigers born retarded through inbreeding, hymen reconstruction clinics that restore ‘virginity’, fireworks testing sites, customs clearing rooms and even radioactive waste storage facilities are all exposed through Simon’s lens. The images reveal things and places you’ve heard about or half-expected to exist; but have never experienced; and, like a grade-school trip you took to the mint where you got to see money printed, it’s probable you will never get the chance to do the tour on your own.

Most of the two-dozen images in the exhibition move back and forth from a narrative, journalistic realm and one of portraiture and cultural edification. They are not blunt criticisms or ethics debaters, but more reflections of the reality of the American condition and what really goes on behind closed doors.

2008-05-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

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Bill Burns at The Institute for Contemporary Arts, London – Digital Studio

Below the café/bar area at the back of the ICA, there is a display of objects produced by a small Saskatchewan company headed by Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals – Burns' book, company and raison d’etre, it seems – is a Canadian export that is part activist, part capitalist, part artist and part literature.

The digital studio contains three or four lateral vitrines full of tiny gas masks, work gloves, life vests and hard hats in one, a one-quarter scale set up of the provisions one receives as a guest at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and another with an assortment of prosthetic animal parts, mainly eyes and dentures. The last, Burns’ told me, helps in readjusting traumatized animals back into their social structures, because of the important role of physical attraction in mating.

A pile of purple and yellow material sits next to false giraffe eyes, they are small tents and bivvies, complete with little poles. One of them has a hazardous materials sign on it.

The start-up company itself is documented through a display of letters and notes, often on SGSA’s letterhead, to heads of state requesting their support in a project to save small animals from the trials of accidental urban dwelling by outfitting them with tiny reflective vests, hard hats, leather gloves or whatever their respective situations call for.

On the floor, in a complicated hydroponics watering station are half a dozen buckets with onion and garlic sprouts – straight from the Fertile Crescent of Iraq. The entire time, squeaking and shrill whips come from a video being projected behind me. As part of the Bird Radio project, children were filmed describing rare birds and replicating their respective chirps with a manufactured call.

At the book reading and signing, I met Burns and we began to talk about the project. I half-expected an explanation of them as metaphor for our suburban over-protectiveness or outlandish endeavours in the name of activism. The more I talked with Burns and the more he told me about the objects, the more I realized he wasn’t kidding.

When a crowd gathered, he opened his book, Safety Gear for Small Animals, and began to read the chapter, ‘Our Early Days’, which recalls the growth of his life-long project. He described, in very humorous prose, his childhood during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the Cold War as one of constant fear of apocalypse and regular tests and drills in case the big one came. He and his brothers realized that in the event of nuclear winter, the little animals he saw in Saskatchewan would never be as prepared as the Burns’ were. This inspired a series of experiments and fittings for groundhogs, chipmunks or whatever he could safely trap.

A great part of his life has been committed to this project. So now, here we go... If Burns is genuine in his call for gopher gear, then its relationship to other ‘Eco-Art’ asks us to look at it seriously, as a 'cause'. The ridiculousness of the agenda suggests it is a performance that mocks the genre of guilt-inducing ecology funds. It brings to mind those commemorative wildlife collector plates, the proceeds of which went to saving baby orangutans or killer whales. (In the ICA bookstore, you could buy such a plate with a deer wearing a day-glo vest in a field or, in an appeal to more contemporary youth, a small skateboard with a blue whale on it.) As far as causes go, I can think of worse, but why not get behind this one? Is it any more silly than The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VEHMT) that asks its members to kindly not reproduce in order to save the planet? Those guys are serious.

See the Safety Gear for Small Animals website here.

2007-04-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

Here are installation images from the last Houston show I was in with Ariane Roesch, many thanks to DeSantos Gallery.

2006-10-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

Other work:

TeaTime 2003, pigment transfer on w/c paper, 40" x 52"

Dessicant (bet you can't) 2005 transfer on w/c paper 48" x 52"

my feelings are more important than yours 2006 pigment transfer on w/c paper 30" x 40"

Like you got somewhere's to go (diptych) 2005, pigment transfer on w/c paper 24" x 18" each.

Quatrain (boy poetry) 2003, pigment transfer on w/c paper 24" x 24" each.

2006-10-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

So check this out:
I have a store now. I've made images to put on American Apparel T-shirts and coffee mugs, etc. It's a little cheesy, but really.... how cool is that?
www.cafepress.com/andyblahblah
There are a couple of images on products already, and more to come!

2006-10-04T21:37:00.000-07:00

The Lawndale Art Center -impossible exchange, curated by Lynn McCabe, features the work of Rotem Balva, Amy Blakemore, Andrea Callouet, Duncan Ganley, Barna Kantor, Mimi Kato, Karen Mahaffy, Amanda Moon, Demetrius Oliver, Mike Osbourne, Jill Pangallo, Stephanie Saint Sanchez, Adam Schreiber, Dave Woody and myself.

2006-09-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Houston Center for Photography - Andy Taylor: a good man is hard to find

2006-09-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Art Studio, Inc. - natured and nurtured

This is a body of work that I finished early this year for a show in Beaumont at the Art Studio, Inc. The show was then sort of re-mixed and hung at Travis Tower in Houston through an art consulting firm - Kinzelman Art. THEN, it was further mixed and paired with much older work at the Galveston Arts Center.