Thomas Hillman, a self-taught artist and member of Phantom Gallery sent me a note on facebook about a mail art project he started. I signed up to get a piece of mail art and it arrived, a lovely ink drawing on a watercolor paper postcard. The intertwined totems pictured in a kind of gridded space remind me of work by Phil Frost, also a self-taught artist, who had a show at PAFA’s Morris Gallery in 2002 (see my artnet interview/review with Frost).
Hillman said he was inspired to do this new mail art project by a previous mail art exchange with twenty Philadelphia artists a few years back. “It is great –instead of the mailbox being full of bills and junk it would be filled with art (and bills and junk),” he wrote.
Here’s a link to Hillman’s facebook fan page where you can see more of his art and a stop-motion video showing one of his drawings being made.
You can see Hillman’s work in the real world at the next Phantom Gallery show at Leopard Street Project Room (sorry I don’t have the street address–maybe someone can put it in the comments),
“Phantom Gallery haunts Fishtown June 2009”
Thursday, June 4 at 5:00pm.
“art – music – drinks – and of course COOKIES !”
show ends Sunday, June 7 at 6:00pm
Where: Leopard Street project room
Stamp art sleight of hand
Matthew Rose, my Paris ex-pat friend is a collage artist and mail artist. He also makes stamp art and was in the great show Axis of Evil at Nexus in 2005 which rounded up political stamp art from around the world.
Wikipedia says this about stamp art (which they call artistamps): “Depending on how the stamp is used, it may be difficult to distinguish artistamps from local post stamps.” I’ll say.
Rose’s envelope looks on the up and up. Inside is a folded sheet of xerox paper with a grid of the same stamp image that’s on the envelope, missing four members of the grid…..Aha. The stamps are really not stamps, they’re xeroxes! Of stamps Matthew made to look like real postage stamps–even down to the hand-made pin prick holes in the interstices which are a little wiggly and give it away, but only if you look closely. This is very successful stamp art–although when I saw Matthew last week at the opening of his show and told him the envelope arrived he was surprised. Me too, come to think of it.
Meanwhile, in case it missed your attention, USPS raised first class postage rates to 44 cents. Get your forever stamps now before they go up again. Why do real stamps have to be so ugly, that’s what I want to know.
Also, you can catch Matthew’s collage art, books, stamps and posters at his solo show in Cape May at SOMA Gallery. That’s up to June 14. We saw it last week and it’s great!
