hot summer

It has been over 90F on and off the past month and a half., which is nuts....and august is barely begining! Last year we only had a few hot days over the summer and all were in August. My paint is stripping off the canvas!...i wish i lived in Canada at this moment.

As far as art stuff; we shipped work for a digital new media show in Melbourne, Australia last week and created a brochure from the money we raised from the auction several weeks ago. Unfortunately it wasn't enough for a plane ticket to send someone to install it, but oh well...Australia tickets are damn expensive...close to $2000!

what?

are we all just part of a process? when we map out our individual existence, is it some linear/organic(branch) pattern?... we go thru life searching for something, some explanation about who and what and why we are---we read the past, we theorize about the future...our life is spent trying to understand ourselves---hence philosophy, religion. in order to understand ourselves we have to step out of ourselves.

torture video

see if you like this very short video

soap drawing

sunday july 17-12pm

nosy neighbor

























and after he left i took this photo. Notice one "w" is missing and the "g" looks like a "c"..i need a new sign.

contagious brain blurbs

Artists Hyunjoo Oh and Noah Shibley recently had an opening at polvo. For more images you can see the web site www.polvo.org

light pattern

July 3, 2005 at 6:19am
Paola would love this...I was amazed when i saw this.

rogers park

some photos from June 25th, 2005

irn dream

I don't know what's going on with me but i hardly ever remember what I dream. The past two nights have been strange. Last night I had a dream where I was with my family at our old house in Little Village(Chicago) and we where in the living room talking and all of a sudden I looked over to one of the small tables and there was this electric clock/thermometer that would display the temperature (71F) and below it the word "irn". So I asked one of my sisters what that meant and she said the clock tells you an opinion on how the climate will be on a certain day and "irn" meant it would be a "raw, pleasant day"....whatever that means...and this morning at work i typed in "irn" on google and one of the first pages that pops up is some enviromental page called "International Rivers Network"..so I have no idea what my subconscious is trying to tell me....

strange dream

.

I had this lucid and strange dream last night: I was in some art school in a city that doesn't exist and with people i've never met. Everything seemed so real. We were staying in dorms in a neighborhood that resembled some low income/decayed area. And one of our assignments was to create public art, so we walked around the neighborhood and created installations using found objects and materials. We separated into groups and during our walk I saw this futuristic 2 wheeled cycle. My quick sketch is above. It reminded me of the vehicles in the movie "Tron". Anyways we were crossing the street as this 2-wheeled cycle was speeding. It tried passing this other futuristic garbage truck(i don't remember the design though) but the truck scooped up the 2-cycle and threw it up on top to it's disposal area crushing it and the driver...Talk about tapping into a parallel universe...

This woman from work showed me a photo album of her parents' wedding June 1960 and to see such a detailed record of an event so long ago was aswesome. That made my day. Since the last post I have bought a cheap used car to get me places. The only thing is my license is supended due to massive past parking tickets totaling $3500, so I am very careful and not driving it that much. I was a bad boy years ago.

Anyways, I was recently invited to submit work for this fall's Day of the Dead at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. They will dedicate the entire show to the life of Carlos Cortez, and activist, artist and poet who died earlier this year. So the image below is my homage to him. It is a digital print on canvas which will be shown with 500 postcards of one of his poems. And these cards will be free to the public.

Version 05 - Harold and Anna

Here are two wonderful artists who have shown at Polvo and are participating in Version 05's NFO EXPO. Harold Mendez will have a solo show in June 2005. Anna Mayer is leaving chicago this fall to California to complete her studies.

As soon as I walked into the Zou B. Center(who lent the space for Version 05) I saw the Kuntshalle Exhibition on the first floor and was blown away. I was bombarded by all these new media experimental projects. I knew then this surpassed all the art fairs from this weekend. The 2nd floor was just as good with alternative spaces/collectives and NPR(Neighborhood Public Radio) broadcasting via the net. Check out the web site: http://versionfest.com/version05/festival/nfoexpo.html

family stuff

And after hanging out at Version05, I had to stop by my parent's house for my nephew Jaime's 6th birthday party. Here he is pretending to fall asleep after blowing out the candles.

Version 05

Here are more images: http://subaltern.org/pedro.htm

a lot of art events this weekend in Chicago

There are 3 art fairs happening this weekend:
ArtChicago/Stray Show: http://artchicago.com/
Nova Art Fair:http://www.novayoungartfair.com/
NFO EXPO: http://versionfest.com/version05/festival/nfoexpo.html

I'll definitely try to go to the NOVA and NFO EXPO(forget Art Chicago) and report back next week along with some pics.

NIU art gallery

I stopped by April 1st to see an interesting show of latina women artists at Chicago's NIU gallery/museum(http://www.vpa.niu.edu/museum). The show featured work by Edra Soto, Paola Cabal, Dianna Frid, Gisela Insuaste, and Jessica Almy-Pagan. These are some of the most interesting women artists of latin american origin who are doing innovative contemporary work at this point in time in Chicago. Most of them have shown at Polvo at one time or another and are good friends of mine.

After I walked into the gallery the installation that was in the center was that of Gisela's vertical organic looking sculptures(the picture above is from her show at Polvo http://www.subaltern.org/dec2004show.htm) Well I remember from her show, the scultural pieces can easily fall since the black shapes just rest and balance on top of the sticks, so any movement can tumble them down. Anyways when I walked up to see it, most of them where on the floor. I thought maybe this time Gisela intended for some to be on the floor. You know artists can sometimes change their statement or can conceptually bullshit about anything. It wasn't until I was talking to Edra that she told me some visitor brushed up against one the pieces and that created a domino effect until most of them where on the floor. Wow! talk about an opening night performance!

ipod shuffle

i bought an ipod shuffle recently and it arrived yesterday! to my surprise i cannot use it on my mac os 9, so i have been downloading songs at work on a pc. it's so wonderful and so tiny! apple rocks!

photo

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Here's a shot of part of my show. You can see all of it here: http://subaltern.org/febshow2005.htm