My newest Long View study pictures the stratification of architecture and ice below the Antarctic surface. The piece is inspired by the 56-year old history of the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Research Station whose earliest structure is buried under an estimated
184 feet of accumulated snow.

Read more about Halley’s first five phases on my latest Antarctic project blog post at the California Academy of Sciences site.

Termenon-Bartalos spread from RRR.002

I just received some nice news from Scott Massey, publisher of the RRR Project. His second issue which I contributed to will be included in the exhibition Millennium Magazines at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The survey features over 100 artists’ magazines published since 2000 that push the idea of what a printed object can be.

The show will be on view from February 20 – May 14, 2012 in the mezzanine of the Cullman Education & Research building at MoMA. The curators are David Senior and Rachael Morrison whose updates are found on the Art Mag blog and the MoMA Library blog.

My latest installation, titled Tomorrow’s Headlines, is up now through January 26 at San Francisco’s SOMArts Cultural Center. I created the piece for the exhibition Get Lucky:
The Culture of Chance, a centennial birthday celebration of John Cage that investigates
the implications of chance operation in the arts and across cultures.

Tomorrow’s Headlines is an interactive piece that invites the public to manipulate a set of forty cardboard boxes of various colors, shapes, and embellishments to create an evolving series of structural and graphic permutations over the course of the exhibition. By combining the boxes’ diverse letterforms and symbols in various ways, guests may speculate on future language hybrids with which to write tomorrow’s headlines today. 

The future viability of these invented headlines is unknowable of course. So I added a more quantifiable element of chance to the art by assigning a ‘correct’ order to the boxes. While that secret arrangement isn’t likely to be re-created during the run of the show, the match would quite certainly occur if the boxes were re-configured in perpetuity according to the infinite monkey theorem. This well-known parable — which my ‘correct’ headline references — states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter key-board for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Ultimately though, I’m more concerned with unpredictability than inevitability. I’m interested in the installation’s course of mutation (and mutilation) over time; a narrative driven by human interaction. As these cardboard towers of Babel rise and fall daily, they generate streams of shifting typographic prophecies box by box, glyph by letter, and color by shape through intent and accident, amounting to unique convergences of cause and happenstance. The only guarantee is surprise — a winning proposition.

Photo by Jesse Meade.

“Get Lucky: The Culture of Chance” is curated by Justin Hoover and Hanna Regev.

Exhibiting artists are Nick Agid, Kirkman Amyx, Michael Bartalos, Richard Berger, Antonio Cortez, EXCOR (led by Sherry Parker), Mauro ffortisimo, Nancy Genn, Bryan Hewitt, Vita Hewitt, Robin Hill, Janet Jones, Nolan Jones, Theodora Varnay Jones, Jonathon Keats, Scott Kildall, Naomie Kremer, Jon Kuzmich, Garrett La Fever, Tony May, Jim Melchert, David Middlebrook, David Molina, Luke Ogrydziak, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, Zoe Prillinger, Renee Rhodes, Tim Roseborough, Micky Tachibana, Kenneth Wilkes and Michelle Wilson.

Kenneth Baker’s San Francisco Chronicle review of the show is here.

SOMArts Cultural Center is at 934 Brannan Street at 8th Street in San Francisco. Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12–7pm, Saturday,12–5pm. Admission is free.

This month over at my Long View blog, I’m posting more discards I brought back from Antarctica. This latest set consists of four beer cans whose origins appear to span four distinct decades. The exquisitely oxidized can above (shown in two views) is probably the oldest of the trove, utterly de-branded by the elements.

These artifacts are being incorporated into my Long View Project artwork along with the the other found items being cataloged in the Waste Stream Reclamation category of the LV blog.

I’m pleased to be taking part in “Age of Wonder,” a group show around the theme of art engaged with the natural world. My new sculpture, LV Installation I, marks my first exhibition of The Long View project, which has been in progress since 2009.

Featuring four custom-built shelf units to create a semi-enclosed space, the installation juxtaposes discarded material I collected from Antarctica with a recent series of mixed-media art panels whose diagrammatic graphics reinvent visual codes of scientific and design theory. I’ve combined these objects and elements to create a sculptural narrative describing Antarctic science, history, and environment with the larger goal of examining humankind’s relationship with the natural world over time.

Recycling is a central theme to the piece. I used wood to reference Ernest Shackleton’s repurposing of wooden crates to make Antarctic hut shelving and book covers a century ago — an early instance of polar resourcefulness. In homage to Shackleton’s Aurora Australis, the book form appears on every scale of the installation, from the hinged shelf pairs to the art panel ‘spreads,’ down to the small wooden faux-books between and throughout.

The well-produced exhibition catalog is authored by Bay Area art writer, critic, and curator DeWitt Cheng, who wrote of the show:

[The artists] link human survival with the reuniting of reason and emotion, intellect with spirituality. These artists, so fascinated with the natural world, point the way toward genuine human stewardship of the planet.

The passage accurately describes what I strove for with this installation and hope to achieve to a greater degree as the Long View Project progresses.

Age of Wonder runs through December 31, 2011 at the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding CA.

Participating artists are Michael Bartalos, Tiffany Bozic, Mark Brest Van Kempen, Isabella Kirkland, Judith Selby Lang & Richard Lang, Carrie Lederer, Aline Mare & Olivia E. Sears, Susan Middleton, Rick Prelinger & Megan Prelinger, and Gary Brewer who curated the show.

My piece takes aerial surveillance technology for its subject. The artwork consists of a dense panoply of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) silhouettes arranged to float within a circular shape, as if observed through a viewfinder. This ‘lens’ functions both telescopically to view large satellites and microscopically to depict nano-drones.

This installation grew from my interest in Earth observation satellites whose remote sensing technology helps scientists monitor environmental changes over time. Further research led me to the intriguing field of micro aerial vehicles modeled after winged animals such as bats, hummingbirds and mosquitoes for monitoring human activity. My composition represents this wide array of instrumentation, inviting viewers to contemplate the various uses, motives, and consequences of surveillance.

The title RGB-123 makes reference to satellite naming conventions and video color. While the visible sides of my artwork are black, the back sides are red, green and blue, casting RGB shadows on the wall behind them. This ‘video glow’ serves to address the medium while enhancing the dimensionality of the silhouetted UAV collection.

My installation was created with plywood, acrylic paint, and hardware, and measures eight feet in diameter. It is visible from outside street level as well as from inside, and will remain up through October 26.

The Performance Art Institute is at 575 Sutter Street, San Francisco CA . Tel: (415) 501-0575. Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 PM. Free admission.

Participating artists: Rosa Maria Alfaro, Michael Bartalos, Guillermo Bert, Lisa Blatt, Jim Campbell, Enrique Chagoya, Antonio Cortez, Allan deSouza, Rodney Ewing, Roni Feldman, Sean Fletcher, Angus Forbes, Farley Gwazda, Taraneh Hemami, Brooke Holve, Justin Hoover, Sherry Karver, Scott Kildall, Barbara Kossy, Tony Labat, Mark Leibowitz, Charlie Levin, Jennifer Locke, Kara Maria, Andrew Mezvinsky, Daniel Newman, Nigel Poor, Isabel Reichert, Tim Roseborough, Roberto Rovira, Elizabeth Sher, and Michael Zheng. Curated by Hanna Regev.

Bay Area artist-bibliophiles: come check out the SBCB’s 15th Anniversary Exhibition opening Thursday, September 15, 6-8pm. The show highlights some of the best work by the San Francisco Center for the Book’s instructors, students, and collaborating artists. I’m particu-larly proud of my Imprint crew’s complete set of SFCB Artist-in-Residence artist’s books on display along with my own 29 Degrees North edition which inaugurated the residency program six years back.

The exhibit runs through November 25 and admission is free. The SFCB is at 300 DeHaro Street (entrance on 16th Street) in San Francisco. 415-565-0545 | www.sfcb.org | imprint@sfcb.org

Announcement image: Church on Fifth Avenue by Jim Campbell

The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 10, 6-9 PM and runs through October 22nd at the Performance Art Institute, 575 Sutter Street in San Francisco. Tel: (415) 501-0575. Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6 PM. Free admission.

Participating artists: Rosa Maria Alfaro, Michael Bartalos, Guillermo Bert, Lisa Blatt, Jim Campbell, Enrique Chagoya, Antonio Cortez, Allan deSouza, Rodney Ewing, Roni Feldman, Sean Fletcher, Angus Forbes, Farley Gwazda, Taraneh Hemami, Brooke Holve, Justin Hoover, Sherry Karver, Scott Kildall, Barbara Kossy, Tony Labat, Mark Leibowitz, Charlie Levin, Jennifer Locke, Kara Maria, Andrew Mezvinsky, Daniel Newman, Nigel Poor, Isabel Reichert, Tim Roseborough, Roberto Rovira, Elizabeth Sher, and Michael Zheng. Curated by Hanna Regev.

Installation photos and more info to follow when the show is up.

This weathered can is among the many discards I retrieved from Antarctica as part of my Long View project. It’s the latest (but hardly the last) of my collection to be posted to the Waste Stream Reclamation category of my Long View blog along with the artifacts’ histories — or mysteries, as the case may be.

I’ve been incorporating the items into my larger artwork whose present incarnation will be exhibited in “Age of Wonder,” a group show opening September 30th in Redding CA. My piece will take the form of a free-standing installation in which Antarctic art and artifact engage each other in dialog. Look for a post and pics of the completed installation here and on the LV blog in the weeks to come.

My new Long View Study visualizes the unseen “warped side” of our Universe; objects and phenomena made not from matter, but from warped space and warped time. Read more about the research (much of it taking place at the South Pole) and its importance to cosmol-
ogists on my latest Antarctic project blog post.

The art was created with found printed matter, cut paper and graphite.