The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 2

A second piece I knocked out during layovers when I was traveling back from Brasil. I'm not sure what direction it wants to go in- I like the sketchy pencil quality it has right now, with the line work. I'm always hesitant to add detail to work that appeals to me in it's unfinished state- I'm convinced (due to experience) that I'm going to pick the wrong direction to take it in and mess it up when it's still brimming with potential.

Ideas, internet?

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 1

OH MY GOD IT'S HUGE.

(I finally figured out how to make images larger in blogger.)

Now that I'm home from Brasil, work is going full speed ahead on the Next Big Thing- the Wandering Dream Circus, a project that my performance bestie Nathen and I are putting together for a tour in June. This is some of the concept art I knocked out between flights yesterday, and it's one of three pieces that I'll put up here as I scrub the extraneous pencil marks off them in Gimp.

That would be me with the hedgehog hair sitting on the moon, by the way.

The website and facebook page for us Wandering Dreamers should be up by next week, but here's a taste of who we are and what we do:

"The Wandering Dream Circus is a fantastical exploration of a world beyond our own, steeped in darkness and whimsy, brought to a boil under a bruised and roiling sky, and served hot with a sliver of moon and a wink. Using acrobatics, juggling, fire and aerial arts to tell the story of two night travelers who find themselves lost in a strange world of darkness and dreams, the Wandering Dream Circus will conjure up stars in your eyes, spark wonder in your hearts, and plant deceptively simple questions to blossom in your mind."

The current tour, which is subject to change, takes us through Phillidelphia PA, Baltimore MD, DC, Carrboro NC, Chattanooga, TN, Tucson AZ, Monteray CA, San Francisco CA, Ashland OR and Portland OR.

What's that you say? You want fantastical circus artists to come to your town, conveniently located roughly along our current route? CONTACT US. My email is hungrily awaiting more Southern venues that we can cast out spell of childlike wonderment over. Feed it with ideas here: mishkotek@gmail.com.

Espaço Impróprio

In retrospect, re-starting my bloggery the day before I leave Brasil and travel for two days may have been a bit at odds with my daily posting schedule. No mind- space/time constraints have not slowed me down yet, and I don't intend to let them start.

Although this isn't my art, and my dear friend Ian took the picture, this is the art I've been living inside of for the past three months in Sao Paulo. Espaço Impróprio is an eight year old punk venue/collective/lunchcounter/bar and event space that is coming to an end as I leave Brasil. I've been incredibly lucky to exist within this space for the past three months and get to share it with some really amazing people, music, art and events. And dogs.

Fifteen minutes to go- see everyone on the other side of the ocean.

Back? Oh, I think yes.

It's been exactly one year and one day since last I haunted my little artistic corner of the blog world. In those 366 days, I graduated from Evergreen, spent a summer in Olympia running my screenprinting studio, drove cross country, moved to Brasil for six months, learned to speak Portuguese, trained my ass off in at an aerial school in Sao Paulo, and didn't produce nearly as much art as I did when I was in college.

I am endeavoring to change the last part of that (although I'm also coming back to the US from Brazil tomorrow, so the rest of it will change fairly drastically as well). I have a sketchbook of drawings that are just waiting to be scanned in and see the murky light of the internet, so we'll start with those.

Hi, world. It's good to be back.

Iterative Self Photoshoot 2 (Electric Boogaloo)

More shots that I'm using in my Iterative Self project. The loose concept behind it from when I was shooting dealt with performing the non-performative self- co-opting make-up to create bruises and black eyes, being aggressively unpretty, baring my teeth at the camera. It's coming from a place of reaction to all the time I've spent in front of a camera doing the opposite, more or less in the same vein as that "Fuck yer audience" piece I did last year.


It helps that I'm feeling massively overwhelmed and under a lot of stress right now. These are not exactly difficult emotions to get a hold of and perform here.


Shooting this solo, without anyone mitigating between me and the camera was really liberating. As was smearing fuck-loads of make-up on my face and emptying a bottle of water over my head.

Iterative Self Photo Shoot

Sorry for the radio silence all- my current class schedule has me chained to the printmaking dungeon and I've only been coming up for air to sleep. My professors seem determined to break me with my credit load this quarter, and truth be told, they're starting to succeed.

These are a few images I took of myself for the iterative self project I'm currently immersed in. I was tethered by the remote shutter control, which is why they're all so damn close. The idea is to work one image through a series of processes, changing it subtly every time, until you go completely fucking insane and burn everything in your studio in a purging fire.

This term is really starting to get to me.

Punching yourself in the face with Photoshop!

Back and bloodied! Well, not really, unless you're counting the scrape I gave myself in the print studio yesterday. I'm back in classes, taking a masochistic 20 credits for my last quarter, and making Stuff again. My last (last!) program at Evergreen is a digital media and printmaking intensive, so I'm finally doing Serious Shit in Photoshop. I'm slowly feeling my way around PS4, and today our assignment was to mess around with a self portrait.

Here's the original mugshot. I punched myself in the eye with the clone stamp tool for awhile and mucked around with the levels- nothing major, but I'm still beginning.

Final enameled pieces

These are my two final, and probably most ambitious, thin-metal enameling samples. Not to be content with the only relatively unstable pieces I had made so far, I decided to do a ridiculously flimsy one out of painfully thin metal, and fire it about ten times.

This first one is all of my sketchbook scribbled fantasies come to life, namely, me on my future lyra. My class notes are messy with sketches on me on a hoop, it made a lot of sense to turn it into an enamel piece.

This was the last one I did, yesterday. Again, born of idle sketching and figures that tend to crop up in my drawing. I'm not thrilled with it, but it felt good to get one final piece out before I had to say goodbye to enameling forever.

Eye Teeth- Final

Eye Teeth, in its final, completed iteration. I put the last coats of enamel on the mask on Friday, and created the barbed wire choker/title today. I vacillated a lot on how to display it, but I think having two white styrofoam heads on either side of the full mannequin is going to balance my final show well.

I wound up doing the nose bridge and the head attachment with braided wire (Claire's idea to braid it, mad props to her). I tried to keep it wild and organic, leaving some loose ends to curl around the sides and back.

I mimicked the wild feel of the mask with the choker, braiding it loosely and wrapping bits of wire around the connections like barbed wire. I hammered out the title piece with thin copper, so the letters are really deeply recessed. If I had had the time I would've enameled it the same colors as the mask, but I just hit it with some liver of sulfur and called it a day.

Side view- there are layers and layers (17, to be exact) of subtle greens, browns and reds in the mask, but they're mostly lost in the picture. I enameled the spikes of the eyes and ends with opaque black, which is again, too subtle to be really picked up by the camera.

Close up to give some idea of the colors that went into the mask. I built up more enamel in this piece than I ever have before, mostly because it took that long for me to be satisfied with it.

I'm really happy with this one as my final major piece of metal working. Tomorrow's the last critique of the term, I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else's been up to.

Enameling! You're probably sick of it by now, but I'm sure as hell not

Following my tentative experiments with enameling thin metal onto pieces yesterday, I threw myself into it with absolutely no thoughts of how cut up I was about to get today. Octopods! Sparrows! Other iconic images that are easily sheared out of metal! The list goes on.

I initially approached it like cutting out stencils, but I quickly realized that because metal /= paper, there was no need to avoid going into negative space by cutting through connections. Which is good, because piercing and shearing out metal that thin would have been a hassle.

Doing the colors on the octopus was entirely too fun. I almost made it purple, but I restrained myself.

This one I made with my aerial teacher, who goes by Sparrow, in mind. The wing tips got a bit banged up because of the fragility, but it's holding together surprisingly well for being so delicate.

The Medusa is the first piece I did with two layers. I wanted to distinguish between the snakes and the profile, so I built up the snakes with a few layers of wetpacked enamel. I even left my transparent enamel comfort zone and touched it with some opaque to get the depth.

Tomorrow- this madness, in its finished enameled form. And meditations on the end of my relationship with the fine metals studio.

Enameling samples

New enameling pieces! I've been working non-stop in the studio because this is the last week we have open hours before it shuts down until fall. I was too sick to put these up yesterday, so today I'm posting the first and second layers of these two little sets.

I made the freaking cool discovery that I could enamel pieces of thin metal to a base when I was messing around, so all of these are experiments along those lines. I cut the tree out of 22 gauge, and fluxxed it to the base.

Same for this one- every subsequent layer of enamel adheres it more strongly.

And this was mostly an excuse to use up my leftover scraps of thin metal.

Day two! I've done about 5-10 layers on each of these pieces at this point.

The tree turned into an experiment with painting on klyrfire in patterns and tapping off the excess enamel.

I wetpacked the fishy to give it some dimension, and messed around with creating a blue gradation.

And with this one I just kept fluxxing it to build up dimension.

Apologies for the brevity, my sinuses are interfering with my writing-brain. Possibly I will cast myself a new nose in studio today.

Eye Teeth Mask- Work in Progress

This is my final mask for class, in all its eye-eating glory. I've been wacking at it (read: smithing) to try to get the shape right all today, and I'm fucking wiped. Also, thanks to all my work doing masks this term, I really hate noses. Useless, pointless facial mistakes. I tried to avoid the Nose Problem with a little piece of chain mail, but that still didn't totally solve it. Ideas, world?

It's still very much unfinished- I have the rest of the week to pour into it- and the way it sits on my face needs to be tweaked. Right now I've got a single-link chain attaching at the side spike and in the back, but that's not doing what I need it to.

The one element I really like and am running with is the bowl-shape goggle look. The eyes are very recessed behind the teeth/spikes, and it makes for a nice deep shadow.

One last profile shot because my eyes look creeeepy underneath this piece. All my work thus far in the term has involved on putting dangerous things by my eyes (sharp pointy metal, broken glass), but I think this is the only one where I've deliberately made spikes that came IN towards my ocular cavity.

I'm planning to enamel these, probably with a dirty, fluxxed white-to-red color gradation. I like the idea of red coming down the points, because my work clearly isn't disturbing enough without those implications.

Fuck yeah studio!

FUCK. YEAH. STUDIO.

I spent all day today (for a value of today that includes being up till six, sleeping for two hours in the morning, training for three on the trapeze, and collapsing for a little bit after that) cleaning the garage so I could work in my screenprinting studio again. And it is beeeeeutiful. All sexy and organized and full of shelving!

I even coated a screen for one of my jobs to see if my emulsion from a month ago is still good. Here's hoping- I'd love to put some of tomorrow towards printing some real work again.

Here, look at it again! Love it with your eyes! Be full of delicious anticipation for the art that is going to come out of this space! (I have been doing a lot of that part).

Art space!

Naked people Friday!

Not my best depictions of naked people this Friday, but I still dragged my ass out of bed this morning and made it to the studio with a few hours to spend on drawing. The first pose was frustrating as hell, and it didn't really mesh well for the rest of the session but I just focussed in on shading and worked it the best I could.

The little hand drawing says "can't draw today. bad hand!" I thought chastising it might help.

When I get blocked doing figure studies, I generally just zero in on one part, but the hands were coming pretty well so I sketched out some of the figure too. She's holding a mannequin head, so I decided to leave her real head out to balance it.

Last half hour pose, and I didn't trust myself to make it a single good piece, so I split it up into three. The yellow one is the most life-like, but the blue was the most fun.

Better stuff next week, hopefully!

Enameling=love

Oh, I heart it so.

I've been making leetle enamel samples for the past week, all with drilled holes for potential jump-ring necklace attachment. One of my classmates has been making these gorgeous luminescent pieces with layers of transparent enamel, which encouraged me to try firing with less enamel.

The PROBLEM with enamel samples is they're so deceptively easy. I get lured away from my projects by the kiln to slap a couple of layers on a scrap of copper in the morning, and the next thing I know the studio's closing and all I have to show for it is these little glass bits and pieces looking up at me all innocently from my desk, next to the work I was supposed to be doing all day.

The back of the above, rocking two layers of transparent turquoise and starting to develop firescale because I really should have used more counter.

I was a little annoyed by my lack of foresight with the other skull (absence of jump ring for awesome jewelry purposes), so I decided to do a cloisonne one using my silver wire. Unfortunately, I put it in the wrong kiln without thinking and melted silver all over the damn piece. I cleaned it up a little yesterday, but it still looks wonky and matte.

Cloisonne-thulhu. The old ones made me do it.

This was the most obnoxious, finicky piece to finish, which is appropriate I suppose. All those little tentacles are hell to wetpack, but I did like leaving it textured a bit instead of all glossy.

This is one I did for my friend Wes, who runs the circus barn where I train. The text is from a tattoo he has that I've always loved.

And the back, with his name on it so I wouldn't be tempted to keep it for myself. I want to make a few more pieces to give away to my friends, particularly the circus folks I train with who I can really easily imagine translating into enamel art, personality wise.

One last one, a tiny ouroboros that I made with Shira in mind. I'm really pleased with how I got the cloisonne to spill over the edge of the metal and still be able to hold enamel.

More sexy glass metal to come! I've got another month in the studio if anyone wants to commission an enameled piece. Text (like the fuck love make art piece) is particularly easy to make happen, cloisonne is much more complicated and labor intensive. Let me make your ideas into artstuffs!