Sketches from blues dancing

I'm in Portland! As you may have noticed, my art output tends to decline sharply when I've got an exploded tour all over my hands and am trying to make my way cross country. But now I'm safely landed, in Gaylord's Paradise (not a slang term for Portland, in fact, but the name of my house) and I have the opportunity to Make Things again. This is exciting.

Tonight, I went to support one of my oldest friends (who I seem to inescapably keep ending up in the same cities with) at a blue dance competition she was participating in. The environment itself made me hugely uncomfortable- it was like walking into a room where heterosexuality was so thoroughly coded into the action I felt suffocated and overwhelmed by straight people being capital S Straight. The close quarters didn't help much either, of course. I mostly focused on the queer couples and scribbled in my sketchbook until my friend was done dancing.

Text reads: "Planet Queer (is very far away from planet blues dance)". My usual coping mechanism for uncomfortable spaces continues to serve me!

Trapeze

Another one from the sketchbook I kept in Sao Paulo. I went through a pretty difficult time for awhile in Brasil, and as usual, my aerial work helped keep me grounded (....heh) and sane. Sometimes, when I'm in particularly dark places, I feel like my trapeze is all that I'm clinging to to keep myself together.

In pleasanter aerial news, I have a performance in Manhattan this Saturday! It's this event at Santos Party House. I'm excited and nervous-I haven't had nearly enough time to prepare for it because I don't have a studio to rig in back East and I've been relying on the kindness of my friends at the Baltimore Free Farm who let me practice in their warehouse. Send me all the luck on Saturday night, and if you're in the New York area, come out and see me!

Set Phasers...to Delicious

I don't bake.

Except when I do.

And when I do, it's because there's a damn good reason for it, like my hugely talented and excellent friend Heather Danforth graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art. I could think of no better way to celebrate this momentous occasion than baking a cake with a giant Starfleet insignia on it, to match her Official Starfleet Pin that she wore on her MICA issued graduation beret.

So while the other graduates were getting flowers from their families and posing for pictures, I got to present one of my dearest friends with a Star Trek cake that I painstakingly iced with no less than three tubes of icing before the ceremony.

It tasted of pure sugar and geekery.

And ACCOMPLISHMENT.

Heather, you kicked ass through all your time at MICA and I have no doubt in my mind that you're going to continue to do so for the rest of your artistic career and life. You're amazing, and I count myself lucky to have you as my friend. Especially when it means getting to bake you a sugar-bomb of a cake to celebrate how awesome you are.

Tank Genderqueer

Okay.

Updating daily while in the midst of bringing a show into existence and splitting my time between four cities may have been....ambitious.

But! Here's a sketch I did in Sao Paulo, while watching Tank Girl. It's a gender ambiguous tank creature, who enjoys wearing hot pink tops and whacking things with it's equally ambiguous weapon thing.

It uses it pronouns and enjoys all things neon.

PS. Hundred and first post!

Metanol Recording Session 2: Brian

Apologies for the radio silence- blogger.com went down for a few days, conveniently at the same time that I was consumed with rehearsals. Universe serendipity?

Taking a break from my shameless circus promotion to return to my last days in Sao Paulo, here's the second piece I did during the Metanol FM recording session. My dear friend Brian, of Catharsis and more recently, From the Depths, did a live performance with Vanessa on air and it was....brilliant. Transcendent. Shiver inducing. Over the week I was lucky enough to spend with him in Sao Paulo, Brian explained to me how in the cartoon version of his life, his dreadlocks are highly animated and reflect whatever current emotion he's feeling, so I made an attempt at giving them some life in my drawing.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 2

In which Kevin Hollenbeck continues to be a goddamn photographic wizard.

We shot these in the barn on the farm, where I had rigged my silk as a cloud swing in possibly the tiniest space it's ever been in. I couldn't do much on it (and when I tried, I banged my shins into the sides of the stable) but we still got some amazing shots.

Before anyone asks, yes, there were a lot of ball jokes when the contact ball came out.

The photographic art of the Wandering Dream Circus pt. 1

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard who made me into a fairy.

He also made Nathen into a circus-y Peter Pan counterpart, turned a farm into a fairytale, and did it all in one night without lighting equipment other than two desk lamps and the sun shade from his car.

Kevin Hollenbeck is a crazy genius wizard photographer and he is made of pure brilliance and I utterly love him for turning two remarkably silly circus kids into something kind of magical.

(Full set is over on the facebook, if you feel so inclined)

Metanol Recording Session 1: Vanessa

During my last week in Sao Paulo, I had the ridiculous good fortune to get to sit in on a live radio broadcast at Metanol.fm that two of my friends were performing on air for. I was armed with my sketchbook and a single fine point pen, and spent the three hours of sitting Very Quietly and Listening scribbling away at my impressions of the session. This first one, which was done during Vanessa's set, was an attempt to capture a little of the feel of broadcasting over Sao Paulo and the sense of connection with the city that Metanol created in that tiny space.

I filled in the yellows and blacks with prismacolors later, partially to lose myself in filling in vast amounts of white space with big fuck-off markers, and also to cover up my thumbnail sketches in the top right. The colors ideas came from a set of yellow and black speakers in the corner of the recording room and I was trying to draw disks surrounding the figure as if they were shiny black plastic speakers, to not-quite-accurate effect.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 3

This is the last of the Wandering Dream Circus sketches I did during my trip back to the US- if it hasn't been abundantly obvious by now, I get suffused with creativity when I find myself in any sort of limbo with lots of time on my hands. I'm less enamored of this one, though I like the positions and posing that came out of my initial thumbnail sketch.

Drawing these has made me very sad that I don't actually have a giant moon to do aerials on (or trapeze boots that go to my thigh, or hair that actually looks like that). Being as the hair and boots are unlikely to come into my life outside of drawing, I'd settle for a Moon's Eye for all my future airborne play.

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.