One of my computer generated pieces will be shown at:

More info of this event at:

http://suburbanprojections.wordpress.com/

By Baylea O’Brien

Published November 10, 2011

Illumination from the Hult Center usually occurs inside — not on top of its neighboring parking garage. Aside from a few stray cars, you wouldn’t expect to see much activity after 5 p.m. around this concrete mass. But the off-the-grid location, open area and environment this parking garage provides is precisely why (sub)Urban Projections chose it for its first Wednesday night gathering that is showcasing local and student digital art pieces.

(sub)Urban officially presented itself to the community on Wednesday, but its beginnings stretch back to 15 months ago when it was nothing more than a class project. Roya Amirsoleymani, second-year graduate student in the University’s arts and administration program, is among the four creative directors of (sub)Urban Projections. Amirsoleymani and her co-creators were inspired for their project by other art showings across the world.

“We wanted to blend contemporary and emerging art with new, digital media in a public space,” she said.

But once Isaac Marquez, Eugene’s public art manager, got whiff of Amirsoleymani and her colleagues’ idea, they began to talk about this class practicum becoming reality. With support and funding through the City of Eugene, (sub)Urban Projections was given creative freedom to choose how to go about producing their showcase.

Wednesday night, while projections danced upon the concrete atop the parking garage and lit up the roof level, spectators watched a series of digital art clips featuring work by artist and adjunct professor for the University’s digital arts program, Jon Bellona.

Bellona’s specific focus is intermediate music technology. His interactive featured project, “Human Chimes,” was composed by an Xbox Kinect and used the motion from the audience to bounce a small ball back and forth with other balls.

“(With technologies like the Kinect) we are free to use the human body as the instrument,” Amirsoleymani said.

The movements were projected on a large concrete backdrop. Spectators moved through the area and watched as the ball mimicked their movements with a sound when it hit other balls. Bellona said the digital technology and arts make “an extension of our human capabilities.”

(sub)Urban Projections also allowed digital artists from around the world to submit their video digital art creations to the program. (sub)Urban rounded up three judges to examine the work, and the City of Eugene helped sponsor cash prizes for the top three placers. The top winner received $1,000. For Wednesday’s event, the (sub)Urban team compiled all of the submissions to present to the community.

While spectators huddled atop the garage and were served hot chocolate, tea and cider, they also witnessed and participated in an another evolving form of art. On an iPad, the audience could draw graffiti that was then projected onto the side of a building for cars and everyone below to see.

All the presentations for the next two Wednesdays will feature different artists, and the showings will be located throughout Eugene.

“We wanted to look for neglected places in Eugene, such as back alleys and rooftops,” Amirsoleymani said. “We also wanted to find core spots of Eugene that had the right aesthetics and for crowds.”

Despite the cold weather blowing into town, (sub)Urban Projections works to mesh students with members of the Eugene community to celebrate people’s accomplishments and broaden understanding in the new age of digital art in a new kind of gallery.

(sub) Urban Projections is a digital media festival that will be celebrated in the back alleys of Eugene OR. November 9th, 16th and 23rd 2011.

I was chosen as one of 26 artists to participate in:

“26 Feet of Art”

at The Washington Center for Performing Arts

Olympia, WA

On display beginning September 1st.

Each artist was asked to create a one foot square piece that will be sold in a benefit for the theater

The piece was created with mixed decorative papers.

Click on image for closer view

My piece “Torture Chair” was chosen for the “Not for Sale” show at FICTILIS

Maintenance page

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• A live, virtual shoot-out with the world’s 150 most successful living artists inside landscapes modeled after actual galleries and museums. Homemade handheld flamethrowers modeled after toy guns. An assemblage of copper wire, insulators, and electric fence, not to be touched by persons with pacemakers. A cell-phone-killing machine. A chair that tortures you with corporate niceties. A forced mad-lib confession based on Orwell’s 1984. Jesus embodied by twenty famous actors. A suggestion of Charlton Heston. Paul Amlehn’s “Tears of Eros” text treatment. Peeping Tom watched with eye-tracking software. Tubes of stolen paint. Haikus on toast. Hundreds of hand-stitched paper pillows made from the architectural drawings of a non-architect. Taxidermy from remnants of an orphaned pet. Memories of a deceased son and a Thai prince killed in a tsunami. A dark family story involving bacon. A lost contact. A device that shreds your dreams. Unnumbered editions placed at random across the city.
  – from the 2011 Not For Sale show description

 MODblog at the Tollbooth Gallery

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An image from Michiko Tanaka’s digital blog.

In her 14 years as a scenery artist, Seattle-based Michiko Tanaka has created worlds for others to inhabit or to explore in the form of painted interior backdrops for theater, opera and museums. Over the years, her own artistic interests have fanned out in many directions, leading her to far corners of the world, and to artist residencies in six countries. She has studied pottery making with a Japanese master in Tokyo, bamboo furniture craft with artisans in Costa Rica, and plein air painting at a residency in San Miguel de Allende. Religious tableaux were her subject of study during a residency in Paris – information deployed in a subsequent residency in Malawi, Africa. Here in Washington, Tanaka took up a chisel to explore the art of Native American wood carving.

“Japanese Calendar” by Michiko Tanaka

At the moment, the artist finds her creative universe contained within the walls of a computer. She is designing a video installation, MODblog, which will be on view at the diminutive Tollbooth (“The World’s Smallest Gallery”) in downtown Tacoma from July 15 to October 31. Unlike the richly rendered but stationery backgrounds she has created for the theater, the Spaceworks-supported MODblog will offer a visual stream of pop culture iconography.

“I love the easy access that the computer provides for anything that I can think [of] to make,” said Tanaka via e-mail. “The computer is a great place to make renderings for ideas” that may eventually be translated into 3-D objects.

The Tollbooth video will be drawn from the blog she writes for her website. “I post a conceptual art/comic piece weekly.  All of the pieces are about some philosophical issue I am grappling with or some observation I have made; in this way it is like a comic.  I use computer programs to augment images and create other documents so the format is a little unusual…in this way it is more like conceptual art.”

Tanaka’s video loop will be arranged in chapters, each prefaced by a title slide for each group of images. The artist will also include an “answer key” that will expand on the work…or perhaps inspire more questions. MODblog, the Tollbooth Gallery, 11th and Broadway, July 15 – October 31, 2011. www.yellowlaboratories.com

Check out more information at Spaceworks Tacoma

http://spaceworkstacoma.wordpress.com/about/press/

(more tollbooth press)

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• This is the best compliment I have ever received.
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• I have one piece in this show
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• this is the piece that was exhibited anonymously and it sold!
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I am one of the 206 Seattle artists invited to this project.

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• more info at: www.gallery206.net

I was one of 21 nationally picked artists to participate in The Billboard Project, hosted on April 2nd in Nashville, TN.

http://www.billboardartproject.com

Excerpt from The Tennesean

By Chris Echegaray

Digital Billboard Art
The Billboard Art Project is taking over roadside digital LED billboards to turn them into free public art venues for 24 hours.  Those in-your-face and colorful canvasses that you see as you sit stuck in traffic are turned over to local and international artists for a little break from everyday advertising, larger-than-life art in glowing colors.  Catch a snippet in your car as you drive by, or pull over for a tailgate party with new friends as you join the fun of discovery and discussion.  You won’t know what is coming next as different artists explore this medium, with the electronic canvas morphing every 10 seconds.

David Morrison passed billboard after billboard during a drive to Virginia and wondered what it would be like to turn those roadside advertising panels into canvases featuring local art.

Today, Middle Tennessee motorists can see what that looks like, but only until midnight tonight.

The Billboard Art Project will display 1,440 images of art from 22 artists, including local talent, on four digital billboards. The 24-hour event began this morning.

The art can be seen at these locations:

• 2809 Gallatin Pike near Burchwood Avenue, under Brown’s Automotive and across from McDonald’s.

• 1274 Murfreesboro Pike near Briley Parkway.

• Dickerson Pike, south of Due West Avenue and just north of Mulberry Downs Circle.

• 3813 Nolensville Pike, under Precision Tune Auto Care, near the Windlands Shopping Center.

Nashville is the second city to have the Billboard Art Project, which Morrison originated in Richmond, Va.

Morrison, the project founder and curator, says the billboards are a good way to bring art to people who might not have the time or the money to visit art galleries.

“They may have never been exposed to some of this art,” Morrison, of Richmond, said. “Or it’s out of their cultural circle, but to put it there and see it, it’s free to all. It also gets people to look at the billboards differently, giving them art, philosophy, thoughtful images.”

Morrison wants to have the art project in cities that wouldn’t normally be considered centers of the art world. He said he wouldn’t do it in major metropolitan areas, including New York and Miami, because “there is more than enough art already there.”

“Why not do something like this in Scranton, Pa., St. Cloud, Minn., or Columbus, Ohio?” Morrison said.

Morrison, who owns a tile business, funds this project on his own, with the help of private donors. He hopes the project will evolve into a nonprofit organization. Right now, he rents the billboards from Lamar Advertising, which owns them.

Middle Tennessee artist Charles Clary of Murfreesboro will have his art on the billboards today.

“People feel intimidated in a gallery setting, not super comfortable, and this will be engaging people on their own turf,” Clary said. “Art is … not utilitarian. It’s more of an escape.”

Clary and other artists found out about the project by word of mouth, emails and social networking.

Below are the pieces picked for exhibition

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 I was comissioned to paint a mural for The Edmonds Mural Society in Edmonds, WA. The mural can be seen on the side of The Waterfront Coffee company building right before getting on the Edmonds ferry.

The Edmonds Mural Society is at it again.

• • The nonprofit has just announced the five murals that the society will create this summer.  The new murals will add to the existing six murals painted in Edmonds in the past two years.  This year’s project includes a wide range of images, including a skyscape, mountainscape, marinescape and two more abstract images.  The images were chosen according to this year’s theme of celebrating the city’s natural hidden treasures.   Each year, the society’s membership chooses the theme.  Selecting the designs involved an arduous six month, three-step process.  I know, because I helped found the Mural Society and continue its work all year-round.
  • Muralist Andy Eccleshall was chosen for the second year in a row.  Last year, his “Steam Mills 1893” was painted on the west wall of 214 Main St.This year, his mountainscape “The Brothers” will be painted on the east wall of the Beeson Building, alongside The Papery.  “I’m honored,” Eccleshall said.  He added, “One of the most enjoyable aspects for me was all the people I met painting the mural.  I’m looking forward to that again.”
  • Local developer Joel Patience’s skyscape “Edmonds to Starboard” was chosen to be painted on the side of the store Running In Motion.  Patience still considers himself a novice at painting.  Nevertheless, he is “thrilled to have one of my paintings selected as a mural.”
  • The five murals will be painted in the weeks from July 5 to September 1, the only reliably dry period in Edmonds. The city’s existing collection of murals continues to elicit praise for its diversity, which is unusual among cities who mount murals.  With the addition of this summer’s five, Edmonds will sport two historical, two contemporary, two realistic and five abstracted murals.  “There’s something for everyone,” said Edmonds Mural Society Municipal Liaison Manya Vee, who is also my wife.  The murals are widely expected to generate more tourist traffic among the downtown merchants.  “We owe a great deal to the Mural Society,”
  • Downtown Merchant Association President Frank Yamamoto said. “The murals bring a sense of community and interest to our town.  “Yamamoto owns Running In Motion, one of the sites for next summer’s murals.  Patience agrees.  The Mural Society, he said, “sends a regional message that Edmonds is a place to source quality art and meet sincere, level-headed artists.” “I really enjoy being part of that type of effort,” he added.
  • (Excerpt from My Edmonds News)

I showed two of my pieces as part of the 20th Anniversary of Dakota Art Store, where I work. The event was held at Smith and Vallee Gallery (www.smithandvalleegallery.com) Here are the two.

I was commissioned to paint an already constructed star to decorate the site where the future transit station will be installed. I was partnered with Rosehedge and Multifaith Works, two of Seattle’s premier AIDS care organizations.

Capitol Hill Chamber and Sound Transit present “Stars on Broadway”

The Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce and Sound Transit are partnering on “Stars on Broadway,” a program that shines some light on a few of the non-profit organizations that make life brighter for everyone on Capitol Hill throughout the year.

In the program’s first edition, the Capitol Hill Chamber has selected five recipients to honor with a lighted star, each created by artists from the Sound Transit Art Program (STart) Wall Project.  The stars will hang throughout the holiday season on the red construction wall on Broadway just south of John.  The public is invited to attend a short dedication that will be held at 6 p.m., Saturday, December 11^th at the site, with a blessing by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

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