CONduit runs May 24-26 in Salt Lake City.  Here’s my schedule of panels and presentations:

Friday:
4:00 PM – Dark Gods, Deep Ones, and Dagon, oh my… The obligatory H.P. Lovecraft Panel

Saturday:
12:00 PM – It’s called Horror, not “Gore”or
3:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Live MST3K (with Larry Correia)

Other than that, I’ll be at my table in the  dealers room during all open hours. (Or maybe running to the potty.)

Thanks to making creatures, creature containers, and my upcoming assemblages, unusual things have been arriving for me in the mail. I love Ebay for the sheer expansiveness of the long tail: no matter what you need, somebody will be selling it.

Recent arrivals have included antique square nails:

… and tiny antique phlebotomy test tubes (these are under three inches high):

And soon to arrive are a rubber alphabet stamp set:

…fake ice:

…and, of course, vaccuum tubes:

And no, these aren’t all meant for the same thing.

Last night, Michele and I ran to Wal-Mart for a few things right after she picked me up at the station.  Nothing had been started for dinner, so we decided to pick something up.  Big Daddy’s is a hot-and-ready pizza place (except they have to call it something else, because that’s a Little Caesar’s trademark).  This was about 6:15 p.m. on a Monday night, so I figured they’d be all decked out for the suppertime trade.

They had nothing ready.

So I went to Plan B, which is the Little Caesar’s kitty-corner, in the shopping plaza on the northwest corner of the intersection.  And when I got there…

They had nothing ready.

Fine.  The plaza that held Little Caesar’s was anchored by Macey’s, a local supermarket.  I’d just grab a fried chicken dinner from their deli. And when I went in…

There was no chicken ready.

Had I died? Was this Hell?

I surrendered and went to the Papa Murphy’s take-and-bake pizza outlet on the northeast corner.  (For those keeping track, I’ve now visited every corner of this intersection except the southwest.  There’s nothing on the southwest corner except a Panda Cafe, and I’d sooner eat my socks.)  We called the kids to turn on the oven as we went home with out pizzas.

I said to Michele, “I know that modern Western civilization has many many problems, but it’s one redeeming grace for me has been that things are there when you want them.  But I am witnessing the failure of the hot-and-ready paradigm. I am losing faith in my cultural milieu.” Pause. “I can probably get a blog post out of this.”

I took a trip to Smith & Edwards Superstore this morning, where the motto is “We Have Everything You Need… If We Can Find It.”  It began as a military surplus store in 1947, and while it has expanded out to hunting and gun supplies, fishing and camping, hardware, housewares and various bargain store bric-a-brac, the military surplus remains an anchor.  Not only is there the standard assortment of uniform pieces, tents, and mess kits, not only do they have a terrific assortment of unmarked mystery hardware, but they have… the yard.

In a fenced area several acres wide, there are racks and pallets and stacks of military surplus equipment, dating back almost to the beginning of the company.  Much of it has sat in the elements so long that cardboard boxes have dissolved, wood has weathered and warped, and iron has rusted to a bright orange.  For someone who is getting into assemblage art, it’s an embarrassment of riches — everything is evocative textures and shapes.  I didn’t bring home anything from the yard (I was only on a fact-finding and imagination-hopper-filling mission), but I could set up shop in there and do nothing but churn out interesting pieces from old wood and metal.

The main reason I went there was to find an appropriate box to be the case for the latest creature on which I’m working.  I was hoping for something metal — an old toolbox or first aid kit, perhaps — but settled for a plastic military first aid case in terrific condition.

I don’t have any new creatures to show you, but here’s the ambitious work in progress of what will eventually be that box’s inmate:

Dwayne Johnson Fan: The Rock is absolutely the first wrestler to become a real movie star!

Roddy Piper Fan: Hey, Junior, lemme school you.

Santo Fan: You’re both a couple of whippersnappers.

Tor Johnson Fan: Sellouts, all of them. (Sob.)

I ran out of the small spice jars I had been using for the Siberian bloodworms, but I found these on Ebay for about a buck each in a case of twenty-four, including postage. Also, O what a difference natural light makes!

Varying a bit from my fantastic grotesqueries in jars, here’s a historical grotesquery in a box:

If you can’t read the label, it says, “Witch finger’ amulet to ward off evil.”

I’m almost as proud of the box as of the finger:

When I started, it was a plain balsa wood box from a yard sale.  I beat it, varnished it, beat it again, rubbed black shoe polish into the cracks and scuffs, varnished it again, baked it so the varnish would bubble, and buffed it with a wire brush.

Coming soon: Things that aren’t as badly affected by my poor photography, I hope!

Writing about art is famously like dancing about architecture, but I’m gonna attempt it anyway. The first part, not the second. Though you should see my Frank Lloyd Wright jitterbug retrospective.

Waaay back, I got an Art Minor with my Lit degree, but I never felt invigorated by the possibilities of my own work. Despite wanting to be a comic book artist through high school, I was never more than an indifferent 2-D artist (never had steady line quality in my ink work, and I hate paintbrushes with a passion that astounds even me), and I felt uninspired even in my sculture class.

Sometime near the end of that whole schooling thing, I discovered back issues of a magazine in the library — I’m not even sure what it was now, it could have been American Craft — that stunned and inspired me.  The premise that ran through every issue was that of fine art (however you want to define that) created with the techniques and materials of craft production.

Inspired, as I said, but I was married with one kid, living in a tiny place, laboring in the poverty of studenthood so I could move on to the poverty of the private sector…

So recently I started making the creatures in jars which you see photographed poorly all over this site, inspired by such sites as Propnomicon, and I think it was through a Proponomicon link that I discovered this site: the art of Ron Pippin.

Inspired again.

Looking at Pippin’s work got me looking at other assemblages on Etsy, on DeviantArt, etc.  In looking around and seeing what I like, I think I’m discovering WHY I like what I like.

1) I like design, which I simply define as “arranging elements in such a way that it’s aesthetically pleasing.”  The abstract art I enjoy conveys a sense of design and purpose, even if that purpose isn’t explicit; that’s why I appreciate Mondrian and can’t stand Pollock.

2) I like texture, and assemblages — especially those which incorporate found objects — can put texture front and center.

3) I love assemblages that take identifiable objects or forms — a drawer, a candlestick, a chicken bone — and display them in such a different context that the viewer no longer simply labels them as that familiar object, but has to rediscover them in terms of form and shape.  That sounds unbearably pretentious and precious, so let me explain it further (and hope that I end up sounding less pretentious, not more):

We don’t really see the things we’re familiar with; we identify them.  If you really saw and examined everything you encounter every day — the fiber of the bedsheets, the sensation of the carpet under our toes, the bevel at the edge of the bathroom mirror, the quality of sound as one steps into the shower, and so on throughout the day — we’d be paralyzed and unable to focus.  So instead we identify and dismiss, or at least relegate to its function in our lives: That’s a chair.  That’s a cereal box.  That’s a spouse.  A good assemblage doesn’t hide the origin or identity of its pieces so much as place them in such a context that the function with which we identiy them doesn’t make sense, and we end up looking at them in terms of shape, color, texture, etc. as if they’re new objects.

(Note: As far as I’m concerned, recontextualization by itself is not sufficient to label something as “art.”  That’s why I hate hate hate Roy Lichtenstein’s (mis)appropriations of comic panel art, because all it had was recontextualization: In a comic book under a child’s pillow it’s just trash, but in a gallery under inviting lights and surrounded by educated people eating pricy hors d’ouevres, it’s art!)

Anyway.  All of this means that after I get done with my current slate of creatures, I’m going to try my hand at assemblages.  Hopefully, by then I will be a marginally better photographer, and I’ll exhibit them here.

On the left, a septic parasite; on the right, more Siberian bloodworms, as the label clearly states.  These will also be for sale at CONduit on Memorial Day weekend. (I’m planning to have an oodle of bloodworms; everything else will be one of a kind.)

Using Photoshop to help correct the flaws of my poor photography…

By the way, all the creatures I’ve posted, and ones yet to come, will be for sale at CONduit at the end of May.