I've decided I will be checking it out on opening day, and hopefully getting some pictures of what is going to go down, but I don't think I have anything that is sturdy and expendable in my studio at this time. Also I've been following Joan Mattera's postings about the Boston Chain Letter opening, and I've been growing steadily more suspicious of how insane it's going to be.
I think Chain Letter is pretty interesting, as a concept. There will be a major difference between LA and Boston in the type of pieces shown. You can see that Boston was almost all wall work. LA requirements are no wall work, so I'm anticipating a wild sculpture explosion. I would like to see more tracing of connections, or context. It seems like following the letter, or creating a map of all the connections, the paths that the letter took, would give the show an interesting effect. Also if all the pieces are simply going down without attribution, that's interesting, because it's stripping away names, leaving all the works to talk for themselves, but it also doesn't do anything for the folks who participate.
In my googling I've definitely seen artists who are already listing Chain Letter on their resumes....which is...well, this certainly is a show, with a good likelihood of a big audience. Angelenos love this kind of thing. Tell them food is in a truck only broadcasting its location on twitter and they will line up for HOURS to eat. Tell them this show is a mysterious thing for people in the know, and they will come. I think it should be just the right mix of underground enough to make it pleasantly packed. And all the artists will bring their pals. But. At the same time, ultimately, I'm not sure what will happen when all that stuff is out there, good and bad, in big heaps. I'm not sure if there's a conclusion to be drawn about this.
Anyway, the venue and timing weren't quite right for me, but on the other hand it was the push I needed to get to work on a big piece that I'm verrrry happy to be working on, and it's made me feel more excited to build up to a show worthy body of work. My building has a gallery which is open to me to use on artwalk nights, so that's a fun possibility for next month. I've also got some interesting ideas about what will be coming next. The sculpture aspect of working on this piece is making me think a lot about working in 3 dimensions. I worked in sculpture before my cut paper phase, and I'm sort of getting into the idea of curio boxes, screens and hangings.
Speaking of hanging check out paper artist Chris Natrop.
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