VELVEASL!

"VELVEASL! Deep in the heart of velvet" from Christopher Blay on Vimeo.

Frank Artsmarter awoke from a cryptic and mysterious dream and was instructed to convince 20 artists to create velvet paintings. What ensued was a harebrained scheme of sly, cunning rapprochement to involve these unwitting souls in yet another test of patience and endurance.

VELVEASL! was a one night only exhibit at the William Campbell Contemporary Art Gallery in Fort Worth, Texas that ended in an auction benefiting the Emergency Artist Support League, EASL.

Participants included Calvin Abucejo, Greg Bahr, Carol Benson, Christopher Blay, Rachel Bounds, Ann Ekstrom, Billy Hassell, John Hartley, Jesse Sierra Hernandez, Benito Huerta, Carol Ivey, Angela Kallus, Brian Scott, Lorrie McClanahan, Elaine Taylor, Nancy Lamb, James Lassen, Ray Liberio, Devon Nowlin,Harmony Padgett and Riley Padgett.

 Hosted by IRA Black of Christopher Public "bro"casting radio(CPR). There's a video, in 5 acts, is VELVEASL!: Deep in the heart of velvet. Music by Justin Sherburn of Montopolis and Okkerville River.

Machine Time

Review of Machine Time

Machine Time screen test. Alpha and Beta protocols for both priority T and V.

Summer Art Camp at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth

In July, I worked with 12-14 year old students at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's summer art camp. The theme was "The Modern: Remixed".For the two dimensional portion of our projects we responded to the works of Sean Scully,, Chuck Close and Hans Hoffman. I asked to students to create signal test patterns based on the works of Scully and Hoffman, using their compositions and some of their colors as inspiration. For the Chuck Close inspired pieces, we created our own system of building up value in a composition, using discarded photo slides. For our video and audio remix, we recorded sounds and images based on the work of Michelangelo Pistaletto and Martin Puryear  Here are the results!

Frame Count

Frame count is an installation that talks about the construction of images. The appearance is reminiscent of a film editing room and re-contextualizes movies and color slides as a way of talking about how fragile meaning becomes when images are out of context. The viewer is invited to create their own narratives by advancing slides that interact with still frames, and movie posters. Frame Count is a collaboration between Christopher Blay and Timothy Harding.

American Trip Road

I collect old slides, films and pictures. In my search I rarely come across images or footage of African Americans. It reflects the condition of an entire culture living in the shadows of the dominant culture. It's as if they'd been edited out. I created American Trip Road for an Installation at the Historic Texas Theater, Dallas in the summer of 2010. I re-edited the classic American road trip to include families that lived and travelled the same roads but were rarely recorded.

Art The Smarter Way, With Frank Artsmarter

Art, The Smarter Way!