Flowers From "McKee"

My contribution to the Funeral project was a bouquet of paper lilies and a condolence card. Through these objects, I was hoping to illustrate the role that Paul McKee currently plays in the Old North community. He has involved himself by buying up properties, but remains an outsider. To highlight this tension between his involvement and his unawareness, I created a very generic funeral offering. Lilies are one of the most common flowers found in funeral bouquets. Made out of paper, this particular bunch is cold and detached from reality. The condolence card simply reads, "May God be with you during this difficult time." Out of context, it's a pretty generic funeral sentiment (I found it on an online list of condolences), but when given to someone who has just lost their chapel, it makes the giver seem unaware of the situation. They appear to only be going through the motions of giving comfort.

Hey class, the 1st year MFA show is broken into 2 sections this year, hope you can make both openings!

1st show includes: Zack, Kara & Will
2nd show includes: Meghan, Katie and Kristen

1st show: Thursday, May 6, 2010, 6-9pm 2nd show: Friday, May 14, 2010, 6-9pm Location: Des Lee Gallery Street: 1627 Washington Ave.

Calvary

This print is inspired by Calvary Cemetery in St Louis City where a corner of the cemetery has been home to an undisturbed patch of prairie. The print combines woodcut, collagraph, etching, and screenprinted sugarlift.

Nest Fort

This is a conceptual "fort" which mingles written word with natural world. Poems and prints of grass emerge fromthe book and, together with twigs, build a nest.

Pangofortopia

The initial idea for a utopia of pangoforts was spawned from this woodcut image of a generic landscape scattered with pangoforts:

Then through research on the utopian ideals of Sir Ebenezer Howard's "Garden Cities of To-morrow", I made a series of woodcuts to suggest how these communities would be laid out in plan:

From my initial woodcut, I was inspired to look at traditional Japanese woodcuts (Ukiyo-e). I then woodcut a series of four images depicting the pangoforts in idyllic natural landscapes:

The end goal for these images was to create a small journal for an invented character that recorded his findings of the pangofort utopia on a visit as an outsider.

The visitor also captured a series of polaroid-type pictures as part of his findings:

UPDATE! (click to see new PangoFort pictures)

Funeral Shrouds and Architectural Ghosts

Collaborative installation: Stephanie, Kara, Zac, Megan, and Kim (me)

Stephanie, Zac, Megan, and Kara collectively chose an abandoned funeral home that they discovered during their scavenger hunt in Old North St. Louis. We decided to hold a memorial for the building, and we each created prints inspired by a specific aspect of funerals.

Note the solitary pew, and the massive heap of tires that appeared between our first and second visits.

In honor of the Victorian architecture of the mansion turned funeral home, Zac researched Victorian lifestyle and came across this lexicon of Victorian flower meanings. Zac, Stephanie, and I each chose a flower and created prints inspired by its meaning.

I chose lilacs, which represent beauty and pride.

Using images of lilacs, I carved a woodcut that I then tiled on rice paper to make a funeral shroud.

Veils and shrouds represent the barrier between life and death, as well a barrier in the way of understanding. They are part of both weddings and funerals, so the funeral shroud represents not only mourning but also the cycle of growth and decay. I wanted my prints to interact with the space in a hopeful way, memorialize the space's better days, and leave a prayer or spell for regeneration.

Once I saw the space, I was fascinated the textures and patterns in the decaying building and really wanted to hang my prints against the brick wall and peeling paint.

We were armed with several kinds of tape, paper towels, and 409, but the grimy walls defeated all of my hanging efforts. Everything fell down after about half a minute.

This worked out for the best, because when we assembled our work in a sculptural construction using found objects from the space, my prints functioned as a literal funeral shroud.

My prints mirrored elements of Zac's scattered apple blossoms and Stephanie's lily bouquet, but the variety of styles and colors schemes gave the installation the feeling of a shrine to the funeral home.

A closeup of Zac's flower cutouts next to my woodcuts.

Overall, our project turned out to be a very hopeful memorial.

As a followup to the piece, I salvaged a couple of old boards from the collapsed part of the building. When I was trying, to no avail, to tape my work to the wall, the tape took off all kinds of paint, dirt, and weird chalky stuff. I thought maybe I could make some prints using the grime already on the boards instead of using ink.

Look at the gunk on those walls!

So I got some paper and some spray adhesive and ran the boards through the press, which worked surprisingly well.

I'm particularly excited about the texture of these prints - the grain of the wood is embossed into the paper, and some splinters of wood and paint stuck to the adhesive.

The prints are ghostly and ethereal, and function something like death masks, commemorating the face of the building in death. The colors also remind me of ashes and cremation.

I'm really fascinated with this process and I think I'll continue to explore it in the future.

Old North Community Flags

-Intallation at Urban Studio Cafe


-Installation at the Community Garden

If you took flags and hung them up please share the messages you wrote on them, where you hung them, and an image if possible. Thanks for participating!

Closer Up: