Extreme Craft

A Dish Best Served Cold

I was a good boy all winter, secretly toiling away in my studio.  I can finally reveal the fruits of my labor, a new solo show at The Clay Studio's Bonovitz Space in Philadelphia.  The show opens today, but I'll be there for the opening on February 6th.  I'm showing sixteen new altered collector plates, ranging from decorative to a serious lack of decorum.  I've created a web gallery on Extreme Craft for those of you who can't make it to the show.

Collector plates have been my muse for almost ten years now.  Every now and then, I'll go on an eBay jag, buying a dozen at a time.  It's kind of heart-breaking to buy these plate collections.  They represent the one-time hopes of collectors who hoped the plates, usually purchased for around $30 a pop, would escalate in value.  The golden age of the collector plate was the early 80's, when prices soared.  The late 80's saw a crash of near Beanie Baby proportions.

Sometimes, the alteration a plate deserves springs quickly to mind, and sometimes they have to marinate for months...or even years.  Each plate goes through a minimum of three firings, as I sandblast away old imagery, then add china paint, gold luster and decals to finish them off.  I love adding text to the plates...sometimes they call for elaborate quotes and phrases, and sometimes, just a few words will do.

I love using (and bastardizing) quotations on the plates.  Old, battered sayings are sort of like collector plates.  They're kitschy, tired, and worn-out, but there's something compelling about them.  Anyone that's opened a junk email or cracked a copy of Parade Magazine had noticed that the Obama administration has ushered in a new era of collectible plates.  A public that is hungry for change apparently wants it served up on crappy commemorative plates.

I'm honored to be showing work at the Clay Studio while they are showing the work of my greatest ceramic hero, the late, great Howard Kottler.  Kottler was a trailblazing artist who pioneered the potent mixture of art, hobby craft and sarcasm that's so prevalent today.  Kottler also liked to work with plates, manipulating and collaging hobby decals on porcelain blanks to make bizarre one-off collector plates.  He also had beautiful embroidered velvet bags and wooden containers fabricated to hold his plates, adding an extra whiff of luxury to his beautiful, debauched objects.

So visit the Clay Studio!  If only to see this once-in-a-lifetime Howard Kottler show.  This show put quite a dent in my plate collection, so if you inherited Great-Grandma's plate collection, I promise I'll take reeeeeeeeeally good care of it!

LINK to Clay Studio Website
LINK to gallery of images

The Price is Right On!

Lucky in Love
Originally uploaded by Totally Severe

I never thought I'd see the day when I would read the words "Drew Carey is surprisingly easy to embroider."

Forget Me-Not
embroidered love from the new craft movement
February 6 - 27
Opening reception: February 6th, 6-8 pm
@ gallery hanahou
611 Broadway, Suite 730, NYC
galleryhanahou.com

via CRAFT

Caught by the Fuzz

I was just spending my allowance on the (ultra-awesome) PictureBox Yes We Can! sale, when I encountered this little gem.  I had no idea that Mike Kelley had gone into the stuffed animal business!  After years of recycling sad, abandoned thrift store stuffed animals for his artwork, now he's produced a thrift store stuffed animal of the future!

Huggable talking plush toy friend created by artist Mike Kelley, produced in Hong Kong by PAM & Medicom. This pillow-sized toy is covered in blue plush and speaks twenty different phrases in random order when you squeeze it…eg. “Hurt Me, I Don’t Mind!” and “Do You Really Love Me?” Plush toy with plastic eyes, felt hands & feet; 480 mm tall; talking voice w/ 20 phrases; in color cardboard box; first edition of 800.

Drive the child in your life to become a depressed art critic!  Invest in their future today!

LINK

Shooting Some Footage

Check out this great Bolex camera mod that popped up a few days ago on eBay.  Apparently, this unit was used by a cameraman in Vietnam, and it only shows "slight" signs of wear.  Whatever genius created this mashup went as far as linking a trigger to the camera's mechanism.  God bless old world craftsmanship.  I'm thinking of adding a gun mount to some objects in my life.  How about a garlic press with a laser scope?  Too much?

LINK via Gizmodo via BoingBoing Gadgets

Peanuts Suck!

I'll apologize again for the dearth of posts on Extreme Craft lately, as I catalog and organize the thousands of entries for the book.  Danielle from Etsy sent me this amazing item, which can only be described as Extreme Craft.  The title is "Circus Peanut Suckling Her Young".  I just KNEW that circus peanuts had to reproduce sexually rather than be manufactured, because they're always in convenience stores, but nobody is ever stupid enough to buy the stupid inedible things.  The only time I buy 'em is when I want to torture a foreign friend on a road trip.

Is she shooting milk out of her nipples to force feed the babies directly into their navels?  They're probably on a hunger strike because they were BORN FREAKIN' CIRCUS PEANUTS!  I'd be upset too.  One more mystery explained.

LINK thanks Danielle!

The Poops Hit the Fan

God bless Etsy...I love to support them as a way to support handmade things in general, but sometimes they baffle me.  Check out the above post, from Etsy seller KatrinaBelle.  She inadvertantly typed "What do you think about men's SHITS" instead of "shirts".  The nannybot at Etsy automatically changed it to "What do you think about men's POOPS"?  At least it's a juvenile nannybot, rather than a schoolmarmish one.

So while we're on the topic.....what DO you think of men's poops?

LINK

Who Loves You, Baby!

Oh my Gaaaaaaaaaaaaawd, I love humans. Last night, I was watching an episode of the PBS documentary "Make 'em Laugh", and they had a great section about "nerds".  Did you know that Dr. Seuss invented the nerd?  I sad to admit that I didn't.  Some comedian or other gave a great definition of nerd as "someone who's unashamed to like what they like".  I can totally get behind that.  I know I'm a nerd for collecting Buddy Hackett memorabilia, and I don't really care.

The Dr. Who Scarf Website is a towering monument to nerd-dom.  The curator of the site delved deep into the history and lore of the Dr. Who scarf, writing a comprehensive history about the design and versions of the famous striped scarf.  The website uses screen grabs to document some of the fabulous scarves for the series, then offers patterns and tutorials to help you make your own.  You can also buy handmade Dr. Who scarves by the site's proprietor on eBay.  I can't tell you how much I love this!  Go team!

LINK via CRAFT via MAKE

Terrier of Tiny Town

I can't stop giggling over this picture.  Why are Boston terriers so awesome?  Check out Bean (that's the dog's name) in a variety of lovely handmade hats, scarves and other accessories by Etsy seller Beantown, who lives in my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska.  Go corn!

LINK

Pattern Recognition

Extreme Craft is going to turn FOUR YEARS OLD in a few weeks.  One of the best parts about keeping the website up is seeing how artists I wrote about in the early days have evolved over the years.  Many people who started out with crackpot ideas have spun their obsessions into interesting and tangled careers.  I wrote about Atlanta-based artist Matt Gilbert back in the early days of the blog--particularly his geekalicious "scrollbar scarf".  I even ordered a scarf for myself, wearing to death, until it finally looked like a tattered baby blanket.

Gilbert has moved up in the world!  He's getting his Master's degree in Human-Computer interaction at Georgia Tech University (go Yellowjackets!).  His most recent project combines his love of computers (did I mention that he is the son of rogue mathematicians?) and crochet.  Gilbert started digging into the history of crochet and the history of computers, and found surprising parallels:

One of the most important breakthroughs in computation was made by Charles Babbage and his designs for the Analytical Engine. Unlike his earlier Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine was general purpose, meaning it could be programmed to perform any mathematical task and print the results. Babbage's method for storing programs was the same as a recently developed method for storing woven patterns for automated looms: punched cards, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801.

While the Jacquard Loom allowed for the beautiful and elaborate patterns to be woven again and again effortlessly, it automated the process of textile production, putting many people out of work and separating the producer from their product. Most of the weavers (or "spinsters") who lost their jobs were women. Knitting was also automated in 1589 by William Lee, out of sheer jealousy that his wife was spending more time with her knitting than with him. Surprisingly, a similar historical event occurred in computation; the term "computer" was once a job title and those workers were also often women. Much of computation was seen as a kind of clerical work on par with typing and many of these jobs were lost once computation was automated.

Gilbert built on the work of the Institute for Figuring by creating a computer program that generates very complex radial crochet patterns.  With this project, he's using the technology of mass-production to create work on a more intimate scale.  These gorgeous sweaters would stand out from the crowd with their unusual design alone, but when you know about the thought behind them, they become wearable art of the highest order.  I wonder if you could hypnotize somebody with these!

LINK

Buried in Recycling!

Once again, I'm sorry for the quietude on Extreme Craft!  I've had to hole up in my living room on my computer for the past weeks, sorting through all of the entries to the Creative Reuse book.  I'm incredibly grateful for the thousands and thousands of submissions that everybody sent in.  Here are but three of the nearly 300 images that I've selected so far.  First up is Athens, GA based artist Mary Engel.  I'm incredibly excited to have her in the book.  Her sculptures are like a tour through the seedy underbelly of American tchotchke market, incorporating all of those little porcelain figurines that are so easy to overlook into incredibly detailed 3D mosaic sculptures.  I got plenty of mosaic submissions, but nobody compares to Mary Engel.

Next up is Rüdiger Schlömer, a German artist that I've featured on Extreme Craft before.  His "ransom-note" remixed German soccer fan scarves were an easy yes for the "Art" section of the book.  There have been plenty of other projects that use the same glee in repurposing the original objects, which was the reason I originally wanted to do the project.  There's going to be incredible diversity in this book.

Next up is Sandy Drobny, who was also an easy pick for the book.  Her aprons are not only funny and incredibly well-crafted, but they're amazing pieces of art as well.  Check out the above piece, which includes rubber gloves and a repurposed tablecloth, but also an awkwardly typewritten (and hand-corrected) note from somebody to their cleaning lady.  Drobny was also an artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Recycling Center.  This hard-to-get residency was a perfect fit, yielding work like the one you see above.

The deadline for the book has passed.  If you flaked out or missed the call for entries, I'm quietly accepting work for the next few weeks while I sift through the entries.  I would especially love to get more entries with clothing, paper craft and geeky craft.  Go to www.creativereusebook.com for details.