Calamity & Ruin Opens!

Hot Dog Angel - Wrapper courtesy Courtney Moy

Brian Budak as our Nancy Scab takin' orders

Cold beer and call sheets.

The all important red & yellow stuff.

Cate Giordano knocking for service.

 Arthur, Marco and Chris debating the existence of an objective reality.

Two nice ladies and one skull in a basket.

Jeremiah telling of group of folks about the time he forgot his keys up in

 the International Space Station.

Brian Willmont scoping out the grill.

Chris Wawrinofski washing down his dog with Rhode Islands best.

Keeping the PBR chilled in the homemade cooler.

 Lined up at the window for snacks.

 Courtney Moy enjoying the festivities.

 Nancy getting an order from Mary Kate.

Hot Dog God crests.

 The grill warming up.

 

The grill warmed up.

The Busted Monument with candle light and Maggie Sullivan's colorful additions.

Mr. Budak rockin' it.

Special thanks to Brian Budak who played Nancy the grill master, and also to Courtney Moy for her wonderful wrappers.  Thanks guys!

Calamity & Ruin is up now @ Projekt 722 so go see it!

Calamity & Ruin @ Projekt 722 - March 9th!

   The Oh Nancy crew has landed in Brooklyn! Take a look at all the great work that can be seen at Projekt 722.  Calamity & Ruin will run through the month of March but I'd suggest coming out for the opening on the 9th at 6 PM - we got some special things planned like hot dogs, dudes in drag and coolers filled with the best shitty beer.  A proper tailgate Oh Nancy style.  If you're in town we hope to see you there!

 Arthur Henderson

 Fionn Mccabe

 Chris Wawrinofski

 Brian Willmont

 The Grill fired up.

 The grill with her legs on.

 Memorial Helmet

 Installing Fionn Mccabe, Katie James, me, Sam Gibbons and Summer Wheat & you can see Chris Wawrinofski through the window working on his contribution to the "Busted Monument."

 Installing Stacy Scibelli, Brian Willmont, and Chris Wawrinofski. 

 Mr. Wawrinofski making a toe - ya can't see from the picture but that's what he's doing. 

 Katie James

 Nate Wellman

 Matthew King

Sam Gibbons

Stacy Scibelli

Stephanie Goode

Summer Wheat

Michael Handley

A bit of signage for the gallery.

The Ides of March (or a profitable opportunity if Hallmark liked my ideas)

  I went to the Hallmark offices in midtown.  I showed them that I went to the internet and collected the best images in the spirit of the holiday. All they had to do was to commission their artists to make watercolors from the provided photographs and then print those on a good quality card stock.  They'd make a bundle and I only want 4% - after cost (I'm not greedy). I said, eventually once the Ides caught on, they could crowd source their content and the movement would fuel itself - they'd only have to exploit it.  

  After security escorted me out I had a troubling thought.  The behemoth of love and feeling that is the greeting card industry just might steal my idea and cut me out of the profit.  Watch for it. I'd bet everything on Hallmark using the "The apparition of Jesus in a Dog's ass," but that's just me.

All images courtesy the webernets-

The Ballad of Mr. Palmer (or when Objects Revolt)

This is a story.

This story could be true.

This story feels true.

This story reaffirms my views.

This story feels true because it reaffirms my views.

This story must be true.

This story is true.

This story and its trueness must be defended.

This is a story I’m heavily invested in.

This story will always be true even if it’s not for real.

This true story may not be real but I believe it is.

This is a believable true story.

This believable true story depends on my saying so.

This story has to be true.

Mr. Edward Palmer built the first stocks in Boston colony.  Stocks consisted of two hinged planks of wood set upon a pair of legs placed into the ground at an agreeable depth so as to resist the flailing of an active body.  The violator would be put in the stocks with his wrists and neck locked between to heavy pieces of wood, effectively hanging him (I say him b/c it was mostly males who were put into stocks, women faced much worse punishments such as branks (Google it)) by the most delicate of body parts and exposing him to public mockery. This punishment was meted out through bodily pain and community shame.  Palmer, from all accounts, was a professional.  He worked his trade and delivered his wares on time. When the Governors of Boston commissioned Mr. Palmer to build some stocks for the marketplace he obliged and charged them for his work.  They approved the contraption.  Not the price. 

So into the stocks Mr. Palmer went.

He served his time, one hour as justice demanded, and was released. We don’t know what happened to Edward Palmer after his parole – history didn’t take much notice of the unlucky carpenter after his brief incarceration. Life in the colony went on and the stocks were rarely vacant – Mr. Palmer did good work even if wasn’t at a fair price. 

This story has to be true.

This believable true story depends on my saying so.

This is a believable true story.

This true story may not be real but I believe it is.

This story will always be true even if it’s not for real.

This is a story I’m heavily invested in.

This story and its trueness must be defended.

This story is true.

This story feels true because it reaffirms my views.

This story reaffirms my views.

This story feels true.

This story could be true.

This is a story.

Life Jackets Float (but don’t keep you warm)

I met a man on the train and we talked about flooded tunnels.  What he would do in the event – what I would do in the event.  This man imagined his pickled liver as an emergency floatation device. He told me that his drinking drove off his beautiful wife and innocent children (a boy and a girl).  He called his daughter “the whispering angel.” He believed that his liver had prepared him to survive the worst of life because it allowed him to visit the worst of himself upon other lives. I considered what he said – it had a strange logic to it.  While I was corralling my thoughts to counter his point with my own - I realized this dude reeked; and I was the only other person in the subway car.  Every other rider had switched in between stops- and no one else had been getting on.  He kept talking and I eventually got home, but not before I changed cars.  I didn’t even excuse myself – I just walked away from the guy when we pulled into a station. Maybe I helped to make that liver more buoyant? When I got home I woke my wife and told her what this guy said.  And she told me to sleep on the couch.  “Why baby,” I asked.  “Because dear…you fucking smell.”

What’s Mine was Yours but now it’s Mine not Yours (or a Method for a Seamless Lifestyle)

On the occasion of What is Yours is Mine by Environmental Services currently on view at DODGEgallery in NYC.

Enviromental Services, owned/operated and staffed by Doug Weathersby and commonly referred to as ES, might be defined as a corporate entity masquerading as an artistic endeavor – or an artist playing at blue collar professionalism to justify artistic events that concluded when the client receives their invoice.  Talking about Weatherby’s project in the terms of “artist as company” is not interesting – and thankfully something the artist doesn’t pursue.  What is interesting about Weathersby’s ES is that his practice and product cannot be divided – and I don’t mean this in the boring the “artist is his art” kinda’ way – I mean it’s fascinating because ES as an entity is always open for business. The caveat is that thru ES Weathersby does not have to choose between work or play, the studio practice or the “getting of money to pay my rent” practice or any other dichotomy you could think up that typically divides an artist’s day to day routine.

When you step into the show at DODGEgallery you’re presented with a bunch of objects in a bunch of styles (to be perfectly scientific about it).  There’s photography, woodcarving, carpentry, painting and drawing – all very well done respectively. Weathersby knows how to make shit and he knows when to do something really well (a carved 8’ X-mas tree that resembles a cartoon tear or a really dangly severve head-cold like booger) or completely backasswards (cutting, what looks like, a 12” diameter, 1’ tall and then some, stump with dangerously unwieldy saw-zall) to get what he wants.  Each object in the show originated with other peoples art.  He visited the stable of artists at Dodge and gave them a very simple premise – let me use something of yours (whether it’s scrap or a finished piece) and I’ll do something for you.  His one rule was that whatever he took from those artists he must put to use – no waste.  This idea plays out in the gallery in two beautiful ways.

1. Can you be didactically didactic? Yes.  Does that mean it has to be explanatory and dry? No. Weathersby exhibits photos that have a bit of floating text describing his day’s activities, with dates and other pieces of vital information, such as money spent and hours worked - ES Logs as they’re called. Really these photos are not much more than someone’s diary except that each and every image is worth spending time with (they ain’t lazy pictures).  A video plays on a corner wall that recorded (from what I can tell) the fabrication of most of the pieces in the show.  You can pick out which artists made it into which piece in Weathersby’s exhibition but that has no bearing on its successes or failures.  This is why the show is so good -the source material is essential but it has no inherent value for this viewer.  Taylor Davis’ bits got cut up into a wall shelf/pedestal.  Weathersby decided to divide the material exponentially in half. He made cuts in her sheet goods by half every time – which results in this wave of squares that grows elegantly from the floor. Davis’ wood lost its brooding edge – Weathersby makes it laugh.  But the point is that it doesn’t matter that the material belonged to an artist – that’s just a neat factoid – gravy drizzled over the meat of the show.

2. If you throw it away does that means its garbage? Maybe, but not always.  What does it mean if I find things I really like in the trash? You’d be fun to hang out with.  The failure dumpster is largest sculpture in the show and appropriately titled ES Art Storage.  Imagine a large dumpster, so big it has one of those sliding square doors near the top and you’ll get the idea.  This dumpster contains every bit from every artist Weathersby involved and acts as a centerpiece for the exhibition.  Inside the dumpster one of the ES Logs is perched in a nest of shards and leavings. The exterior form of the object looks like a dumpster but because the walls of the thing are made from steel stencils and various plywoods and the “hatch” is a pitch-back (a little-leaguers device used to practice accuracy whereby a ball is thrown at it and netting strung in the aluminum frame bounces the ball back at the thrower – a one sided game of catch) and little green army men glued into platoons adorn the surface - this thing almost begins to resemble a fort.  Like a kid’s playhouse where everyone from the neighborhood came over with whatever they could steal from the shed out back and threw it together.  The fort-like appearance of the object makes a nice symmetry with the thrust of the show as a whole because in a way it is the analog version of the video that plays in the corner.  Point of fact Weathersby built ES Art Storage in the gallery with his leftovers.

Weathersby has designed a project that allows him to make art all the time – literally.  And then he is literal about display and putting this work into the world.  This could be very boring and dull and easily overwrought but Weathersby pulls it off.  And I know why he pulls it off.  Firstly he uses a wood-glue that cures to a perfect hue of safety orange and secondly there’s no nonsense. This dude, from the work at least, is not in the world throwing pigment in the air and quoting shit poetry while dancing in the dark.  The work is direct and clear and offers something very tangible to the viewer. Weathersby suggests that the creative moment is not isolated to a certain time of day or financial comfort and, thankfully, on the other hand he’s not proposing any romantic nonsense of art and artists.  This show works for all the right reasons.

Enviromental Services

J. 12 – F. 17 @ DODGEgallery 15 Rivington St., NYC