Post from Rob Matthews
Ben Volta sent me a link to his blog page and I thought you might be interested.
He has a lot of photos from the Basekamp Participate show up right now if you scroll down a bit. Ben had a piece that I think he referred to as “stigmarchitecture” where you could construct different structures out of wood that he had painted “flesh” color on the outside and white on the inside edges. Looks fun. Wish I’d seen it. There’s another cool piece on there where you could spell whatever words you wanted with some big lightbox letters (all three images from Participate show; light boxes, top, are by Heidi Cody).
Links to the posts are here, here and here.
I’ve only recently met Ben. Do you know him? He’s a good guy and I think an artist that has a lot going on upstairs. Really bright guy. Recently he was accepted/hired/whatever to start working with Tim Rollins and KOS up in NYC.
Also if you go to the blog spot, you’ll see some links (including one to YOUR page) on there. Dayton Castleman’s blog is also linked. Right now he has an installation at Eastern State Pen. and is currently working on another piece down near the University of the Arts where he’s going to suspend 12 windmills about 20 feet in the air in the sanctuary of a church down there. Crazy stuff. Should be great when it’s all up. It’s all related to a Leonard Cohen tribute thing that’s happening there next year. Anyway, you can see some of the windmill photos, a drawing I made of him as well as a photo of his kid who is very cute and crawling on one of his sculptures at a show.
Both Dayton and Ben work out of studios at Mt. Olivet Presbyterian Church at 22nd and Mt. Vernon. Dayton manages the site. There are 10 studios with, I think, 12 artists there. Dayton also organizes monthly lectures there called DIALogue and they have monthly critiques with one another. There’s a good energy going on in there. I think if you had the time, you’d enjoy meeting with Ben at the studios or something like that. Depends on how much energy you have these days. The cold weather is sucking me dry.
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In other news, Carrie Powell (Shelley Spector’s assistant) has started coordinating art stuff in the back of the Vagabond store on 3rd St. in Old City. The gallery portion is called Honeymilk, I believe. They have drawings, paintings, some sculptural stuff and some crafts as well. Tracy and I picked up a couple of drawings there this weekend.
That’s all the local scoop I have for now. Hope some of this is of interest to you.
–Rob Matthews, a regular artblog contributor and our favorite source for gossip because he spills, shows at Gallery Joe
