Alpaca Beretta

I've been playin old time music with my friends Dani and Margot - we've been playing some "gigs" and have some more coming up, so we gussied ourselves up a name, Alpaca Beretta (its got a dual meaning, you can figure it out) and a myspace page with some home recorded jams on it. Check it out. And check out the band name inspired photoshop gloriousness above.

Oh, and add us on myspace.

Deinstagravation

So I'm working now on de-installing the 55th Carnegie International: LIFE ON MARS!!!!!¡¡!!!¡!!!11

And obviously, it isn't as fun as installing it. Most of it I don't really mind though - the work has been up for 9 months now and I've pretty much seen it all enough times that I'm eager to pack it up and see the new installation of the permanent collection. But, there are a few pieces that I will be sad to see go, so I'm going to do a little commemorative posting of things I particularly liked (some of which I may or may not have worked on). To start - the Richard Hughes walls. When the show was open there were three sculptures by him sitting in the space here, but they were very fragile and quickly packed up. I spent two weeks of my life helping him do these walls, along with my friends Ed Parrish and Robin Hewlett.





Richard Hughes was, well, really cool. I was going to say he was different from the other artists I worked with, but as I considered that, I realized that most of the artists I worked with were very nice, insightful, and interested in talking about the art. Richard Hughes and Richard Wright seemed genuinely concerned about what I thought of the work, and even took my advice a few times when there were moments of decision (nothing of great import...lunch decisions maybe?). Thomas Hirschhorn was fantastic about discussing the work as it was going up, and rationalizing his decisions for us. Mark Manders was great when it came to discussing his materials and how he fabricated things, as was Matthew Monahan. Mark Bradford spent a while telling me about his thought process for creating his paintings which, although I hadn't realized it in the beginning, turned out to be created especially for the show and for the space he was given. The only artists who I worked with that don't fit the above description were Barry McGee and Manfred Pernice. Barry was definitely very nice and easy to work with, but not particularly insightful - and I don't mean that in a bad way, it just didn't really come up with his art. He was mostly just really hilarious. Manfred Pernice, on the other hand, made me want to kill. I'm sure a large part of that was that he didn't speak a lot of English, but fuck him regardless.

moleskines

I've been messing about with these book projects for a while and haven't figured out a great way to document them. This is an attempt.

I did this book in the summer of 2007 in Thurmont, MD. I was staying with Robbie Whelan and we were supposed to be fixing/destroying various sheds at Thurmont, and other things to maintain the place. At the same time Robbie was working on a manuscript and I was messing about with this. This is an excerpt from the book.




I started this second book in the winter and it progressed fairly slowly - mostly because I was doing a lot of other things at the same time, like installing the Carnegie International. It is almost complete, but there are a few little additions waiting to be made.



This third book is a work in progress - the amount in the video is the only completed section. I began this around September.



Media (for all three): ink, acrylic, silk screen, collage, image transfer, paint marker, lacquer.

corriesiegel.com!!

A work in progress..
I'm hoping to make an interactive and collaborative site.. I have a lot of grand ideas and no programming know how so it's really slow going. The images are place holders.. but you can move them around and click on them and stuff..
Hopefully eventually the photos will take you to other sites and image galleries.
Stay tuned!

http://www.corriesiegel.com/

Watts House Project

(Watts Towers, under maintainence)

The Watts House Project is an artist driven urban initiative led by Edgar Arceneaux. The projects intention is to revitalize the low income neighborhood surrounding Watts Towers, a United States National Historic Landmark, and one of Los Angeles’ best known examples of vernacular architecture. Constructed by Italian immigrant, Simon Rodia over the spam of 33 years, the Gaudiesque structure rises over about 100 feet and is made mostly out of rebar, found pottery, and bottles.
For the next 5 years the Watts House project will refurbish four houses a year on 107th street .The project is inspired by Rick Lowe, the mastermind behind Project Row Houses, a public art project in Houston.

The Watts House project mission statement is to:
“Develop an incremental, nuanced and sustainable model that marries ecological concerns and practice with social and cultural remedies. The neighborhood surrounding the Watts Towers presents a stark contrast to the well-maintained aesthetics of this national monument, and currently the residents have limited means to capitalize socially or economically on this cultural currency. By creating a physical and social infrastructure for creativity, WHP will catalyze artistic production and community pride of place, forming partnerships that can lead to real solutions, hope, and change.”

(project board)
When first considering being involved in this project I approached with caution. Artist community collaboratives run the risk of imposing art world pretension irrelevant to the communities that have been targeted, resulting in a product that only serves as an artifact of the misunderstanding and hubris of the artists involved. The Watts House project manages to avoid much of these problems through real honest collaboration and discussion to meet needs of the community with creative solutions.

Artforum and the Los Angeles times covered the project.. You can even see a video where I’m painting precariously here!...http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-watts2-2008nov02,0,7393094.story

Happy New Year

blinds

"blinds" acrylic on panel, 12x18

done. (who is what man?)

A View of the Boundary Between All Things from the Peak of Mount Traros Pondengara: A Compleat Map of the Discovered Universes, A Partial Chronology of the Artist, and a Spell for Self-Emanating Joy
2'2" x 2'6" ink, blood, and cyanoacrylate on craft paper

begun on october the 7th. 2008.
finished on january the 8th. 2009.

bars

ink, acrylic, newsprint, and silkscreen on panel, 12x16

things have been slow lately - I have an excuse, I'm in the midst of putting together my grad. applications. where the posts at?

EDIT: first post of 2009! wooooooo! Happy New Year fools.

RE-EDIT: uploaded a better picture.