A family of robins have moved into one of my window boxes! I’ve been filming them daily as they grow….
Remembering Walter de Maria
Walter de Maria died a few years back, and this post, from my old blog, was my moment of saying goodbye to an artist I loved. I am republishing it here because some things you just want to hold onto.
His life’s work is associated with minimal, conceptual, and land art and is profoundly exploratory: In addition to being a visual artist, he composed music (including Cricket Music, 1964, which was a recording of himself accompanying the sounds of crickets on the drums), produced films (Three Circles and Two Lines in the Desert and Hardcore, both in 1969), and was the drummer in the New York rock group with Lou Reed called The Primitives, as well as an artist/musician in the collaborative group The Druds, which was a precursor to The Velvet Underground. It’s a lively and expansive oeuvre.
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Glass Poems: The Making of sassafracas
Xexoxial Editions has published my book sassafracas, and I am elated.
sassfracas is a collection of my glass poems— yes, poems made of glass and photographed in the changing light of Mount Auburn Cemetery.
I began by making images of a series of one word poems (pwoermds), then etched them in dichroic glass using a high speed laser cutter. Over time, I reworked these into physical objects meant to be handled, turned about in the hands, held up to the light and experienced. They are very tactile and crave light and movement. The photographs in this collection replicate that act of seeing.
Because they are glass with the light of day shining through them, they are never the same experience twice. Because most of them are made with dichroic glass— a variety of glass which displays two or more different colors in certain lighting conditions— this variety is even more pronounced. Dichroic glass is wonderfully gaudy and transient, a passionate and lively material, filled with fugitive colors that change and engage playfully throughout the day, depending on the angle of view, the light, the weather, or even what is reflected, sky, face, or earth.
Lucinda Sherlock called them “delicate and delicious!” They are very yummy. You can buy the Xerolage here.