Merry X-Mess, Mr. President
Monday, January 16th, 2006
I have been home for the last two months, doing the whole family holiday thing and working at a couple stores as a seasonal worker. It has been nice to be in the land of iced coffee and and chowdah where I cannot walk on the street without running into a lifelong friend, and I feel rejuvinated for another stint at BsAs. Nonetheless, I must tell you all about one of the reasons I came home, my installation at the Dirt Palace.
I am a silkscreen printer, but most of my work serves as posters for rock bands or promotion for political or art related events. Rarely do I get an opportunity to make art for art’s sake, and even more rarely do I get an opportunity to display that work. I have often said that the street is my gallery since I tend to wheat paste my posters on poles and boxes around town, but for the first time I had a REAL exhibition experience.
The Dirt Palace is a women’s art collective in Olneyville, a post industrial neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. The first floor of the building once was a department store, so they still have the large display window that faces the street from that era. The women of the DP along with the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts (RISCA) invite an artist a month to put an installation in the window and I was their artist from mid December to mid January.
My installation is called "Merry X-Mess, Mr. President." I created a print to serve as wallpaper in the installation. The print is a five color silkscreen I printed at the Dirt Palace in their screen printing studio. Additionally, I added some Christmas decorations such as lights and garlands and topped off the whole thing with a little note to Mr. George W. Bush, president extraordinaire.
Basically, I gave the President a 1-way ticket to the North Pole. I figured it was a fitting holiday gift, he likes to go on vacation, doesn’t he?
For the closing, I invited friends and family to the Dirt Palace and opted out of the whole cheese plate tradition and instead created a kicking ice cream bar. We had three flavors of Newport Creamery ice cream, both hot fudge and butterscotch topping, M&Ms, Reese’s Pieces, two kinds of sprinkles, Trix cereal, pink waffer cookies, nuts, cherries, and whipped cream. And booze, of course. It was awesome. I also raffled off a framed print and my buddy Zach Markovitz won it. He never wins anything!
In any case, that is the scoop on my first exhibition. I hope to have many more, and who knows, maybe we’ll have more exciting treats at future events. As always, the more the merrier.
