SWEET BELIEVER EXIT @ 2ND FLOOR PROJECTS

top : John deFazio, Cloned Dogs, Siegfried & Roy, 2007; glazed ceramic.
bottom : Daniel Minnick, Chief Imitation, 2009; (detail) photobooth photograph

SWEET BELIEVER EXIT: John DeFazio and Daniel Minnick

A knock-out honor to have been invited to write a text for Margaret Tedesco's incredible 2nd Floor Projects, and a knock-down drag-out fight with self to have actually gotten it done "on time". But I did! And it's a crazy freaking piece of writing, so please do try to acquire it. Margaret commissions a text for each exhibition, and produces the result in spectacularly beautiful editions of 100.

AND, there's always a reading to close the exhibition. So, on Sunday, November 1, at 5pm, Brandon Brown will join me, and we'll read from our collaborative work-in-progress IT'S A FICTION!, with, we think, a little help from the marvelous Lindsey Boldt.

On the subject of the text: Daniel Minnick stages detailed, costumed performances in photobooths, and John DeFazio makes ceramic objects, in this case, elaborate ceramic bongs and, as seen above, freakish panting hybrid Siamese cloned ceramic pets [and pets and pets and pets]. Both artists' work have qualities of psychedelic, kaleidescopic, grotesque kitsch. In addition to these chewy, hyper-natural pop distortions, I was especially interested in the opposition of duration in the fabrication of the objects. IE, the instant flash in the photobooth with its single-positive produced by the machine, vs the hundreds of hours of hand-casting, hand-carving, firing, painting, firing, glazing, re-glazing, decaling, & re-firing the ceramics require. I found myself not sleeping for several weeks while writing this, inducing a frantic, half-hallucinatory, internal state-of-war, and producing a work in three parts, with three adjacencies, & three mad stabs at duration. One for John, one for Danny, and one for me. It's called THREE-WAY. (I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying.)

You can acquire the "broadside" (it's 8 pages) for $10 (+ $1 s/h) from Margaret, go to the website, or email: 2ndfloorprojects [at] earthlink [dot] net.

Here's the project page.

And here's the front page (RSS it; her exhibitions are excellent).

Hope to see you at the reading.