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)