Robinwood Zine

Printed in conjunction with the Robinsong exhibition, a Robinwood Zine is now available.

The plans for Robinwood, my maternal grandparents' hand-built Michigan home were lifted from the December 1946 issue of Better Homes & Gardens. With this origin in print, the Robinwood series now includes a special zine that tells the story of the house and the relationship of its residents to it, illustrated with the artworks that make up this series.

The zine is available for purchase for $18 + shipping.  To order, please use the contact page here >

Jillian Piccirilli, Robinwood Zine, cover (2016)

Jillian Piccirilli, Robinwood Zine, interior spread (2016)

From the Dark Room

It's been a busy time in the dark room running test after test, screwing with negative color profiles, experimenting with different pigment combinations. Many of the results should be burned. But some mysterious surprises have also emerged.This print is an unexpected pleasure: base print of cyanotype with a sketchy layer of Van Dyke Brown on top. It is spurring more new ideas and, of course, more experiments. The idea of incorporating some more painterly, gestural work into this series is an exciting and intimidating one for me...  Stay tuned.

Ordinary Time

After attending Catholic school for 12 years, I sometimes conceptualize time within the liturgical categories of "Ordinary Time" -the ordinary everyday periods- and ... Exceptional (?!) Time -e.g. Advent / Christmas, Lent / Easter, et cetera. However, since moving to California, it feels as though the patterns of our seasons have yet to settle into any "Ordinary Time." Once daily rhythms settle into one groove, something (an exhibition, a new job, et cetera) comes along to shake it all up again.

In keeping with this truism, the year has seen its share of re-adjustments, marked significantly with the decision to dramatically scale back my free lancing "day jobs" to take on a post more resembling a 9-5. In the studio during this time, I have been plugging away at a new body of work...or, rather, I have picked up an old thread that was lying dominant and unresolved as my current main studio project. Loaded with struggles on technical, conceptual, and formal fronts (like all new bodies of work) PLUS my reliance on midday sunlight for my archaic printing processes, the project has been slow going with this new schedule.

But enough is enough! There is work to be done, and it is time to find ways to do it. There are fresh prints cooking, and new testers in the pipeline. Fresh colors have been added to the stock (thanks!! to generous benefactors), and new combinations are being mixed.

Pictured is a second (third? fourth? fifth?) generation test of different color combinations and negative processing for one of the subprojects.

What's so special about Ordinary Time anyway.

TechnoColor Alt Printing

New adventures in archaic alternative photography printing: cyanotype + 3-color gum bichromate + van dyke. Voila!

The idea of incorporating color and more painterly techniques into my darkroom work  has led me to delve into gum bichromate printing, which uses watercolors and split tone negatives to make "full color" images.  Pulling upon all my various printing medium experimentations, I have found myself with a five negative process that gives some exciting results.Preview pictured. Hopefully more to come...

Glass Experiments

With the new year has come new studio experiments, such as printing cyanotypes on glass.After immersing myself in the cyanotype on paper process for my Hemland and Robinwood projects, I have been trying my hand at printing cyanotypes on glass (plus some coffee toning).  The experiments have been quite hit or miss, and it may not turn into a process that I pursue with any seriousness. But there is some pleasure in the trail and error process. 

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Credit to Joseph J. McAllister, whose videos and documentation have allowed me to get as far as I have on this lark. 

Robinwood at Hinterland

ROBINWOOD
Sept 12 – Oct 3 | Opening Night Reception 6-11p
Hinterland Art Space
3254 Walnut St, Denver, CO

 ROBINWOOD

My new series Robinwood chronicles the life of my maternal family’s past handmade homestead. A three-bedroom-two-bath set on northern Michigan cow pasture land and inspired by blueprints lifted from a Better Homes & Gardens, Robinwood was the house that my grandparents Jim and Mae King built together. Being the Kings’ only grandchild, I have created an illustrated ode to the space, which had been a constant against a typical life marked by transience. Through a merging of archaic photographic printing methods and painting that mines the family’s archives and artifacts, I have attempted to mime Jim and Mae’s impulses of creation and sharing. Robinwood is a re-creation and re-telling of the story of the space, which seeks to both contain and extend the homestead’s life. 

HINTERLAND

HINTERLAND is Sabin Aell and Randy Rushton. Early 2008 the couple opened the art space, where Sabin curates and exhibits adventurous contemporary art. The term HINTERLAND originates in the german language, has been incorporated into the english vocabulary and means: Beyond what is visible or known.Reflecting on the name, HINTERLAND is explicitly featuring artists who work with extravagant and coherent visions. The art highlighted plays and seduces with compelling concepts within the roam of contemporary art. HINTERLAND shows artists who practice in a variety of medium, including: painting, photography, sculpture, video, glass art, textiles, fashion and design.HINTERLAND is entirely built with reclaimed and salvaged materials. All artists and guests are appreciated who are in resonance with the desire to share, exploit fun and co-create within living as energy efficient as it gets. HINTERLAND is part of the Rino Art District.

New Work, Upcoming Exhibition

Exciting announcement: Denver's Hinterland Art Space will premier my newest series of photography/painting works this autumn.

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ROBINWOOD

Sept 12 - Oct 3, 2014
Hinterland Art Space
3254 Walnut St, Denver, CO

ROBINWOOD

A three-bedroom-two-bath set on northern Michigan cow pasture land and inspired by blueprints lifted from a Better Homes & Gardens, Robinwood was the house that my grandparents Jim and Mae King built together. Through a merging of archaic photographic printing methods and painting that mines the family’s archives and artifacts, I have attempted to mime Jim and Mae’s impulses of creation and sharing.  Robinwood is a re-creation and re-telling of the story of the space, which seeks to both contain and extend the homestead's life. 

HINTERLAND

HINTERLAND is Sabin Aell and Randy Rushton. Early 2008 the couple opened the art space, where Sabin curates and exhibits adventurous contemporary art. The term HINTERLAND originates in the german language, has been incorporated into the english vocabulary and means: Beyond what is visible or known. 

Reflecting on the name, HINTERLAND is explicitly featuring artists who work with extravagant and coherent visions. The art highlighted plays and seduces with compelling concepts within the roam of contemporary art. HINTERLAND shows artists who practice in a variety of medium, including: painting, photography, sculpture, video, glass art, textiles, fashion and design. 

HINTERLAND is entirely built with reclaimed and salvaged materials. All artists and guests are appreciated who are in resonance with the desire to share, exploit fun and co-create within living as energy efficient as it gets. HINTERLAND is part of the Rino Art District. 

Oakland Open Studio

OPEN STUDIO | PRINT EVENT
Saturday, Jan. 25th | 2:30p - 7:30p | 3246 Ettie Street #15, Oakland

I will be previewing my newest work here in Oakland before it travels to Denver for its formal premier at Pirate: Contemporary Art. Hemland, a series of hand-painted cyanotypes exploring my maternal family's relationship to Sweden through travel artifacts and language. 

The event will be co-hosted by the wonderful artist Carol Ladewig.  She will be opening the flat files, showing and selling a selection of prints in a variety of media. Also on view is her Year in Color series.  Come see her newest works documenting 2013, including the most recent incarnation Painting Days.  And both of her large Year in Color works from 2012 + 2011 are currently installed! 

Journey to Sweden

Almost two weeks spent traveling through Sweden in the company of my mama, here is a sampling of my images paired with my mother's photographs from her tenure in Stockholm in 1981 and slides from my great Aunts Hup and Marg's visit in 1964.

It was a beautiful journey, heavy with meaning and memory.  We frequented many museums, cafes, used book stores, and vintage shops. Explored the country by train and on foot, from Stockholm to Dalarna to Malmo and back again.  I took hundreds of photographs, made sketches, and collected a plethora of ephemera ranging from old naval brochures to cocktail napkins to flower petals.  With these artifacts, I am currently working on a special art book project that examines our relationship to this country that was home to a familial branch three generations back and that we keep returning to.  For now, though, here is a scrapbook of sorts...

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Swedes / Cyanotypes

Lately, I've been flying excited circles in a holding pattern waiting for these two important personal art events.

1. The epic voyage to the matriarchal motherland: Sweden (see earlier post).  It is almost upon us!  I have just been teeming with inklings and leads for various work that I would like to create out of this loaded journey.  The anticipation is difficult to contain.

But, as the Swedes say, "Det ar ingen ko pa isen."There's no reason to freak out.”

Literally: There's no cow on the ice. 

2. Learning about cyanotypes.  After my return, I am slated to take a class on this original photographic printing process at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.

The process is marked by a basic list of chemicals, the potential to use the sun as your exposure light source, and a liberal list of grounds that one can print on. Plus, one can then paint on the resulting print!  The possibilities for combining my photos and painting through this medium seem just endless, from the Paws work to the Mama series.

Watch out world.

Ghost Town Farm Stand

With our favorite urban farm bursting at the seams with a beautiful bounty, the Ghost Town Farm Stand has been revived!

In conjunction with Oakland's First Friday / Art Murmur festivities just blocks away, writer / neighbor Novella Carpenter has been opening up her one-woman urban farm operation, Ghost Town Farm, to visitors. (Past posts about the farm can be seen here and here.) The first go around featured freshly harvested veggies, t-shirts, Novella's books, as well as a dramatic honey extraction demonstration. Perhaps the most amazing part of the demo was witnessing the bees that got stuck in the honey resurrect after our local bee-expert Emma carefully fished them out of each jar.  Nectar of the gods!Some photos documenting this season's first farm stand are below.To learn more about Ghost Town Farm / find out about the next farm stand, visit Novella's blog.

(And here is a link to Novella's post about this summer's farm stands, featuring my photos!)

Emak Bakia

I find that periodic doses of surrealist art are quite healthful. It helps keep my pragmatism in check, which can sometimes reach dastardly levels that threaten the art

.This latest infusion of surrealism into my life could not have arrived at a better time. Various projects have wound themselves into awkward, wrenching stalls, and self-doubt was becoming rife. In a recent interview, author Claire Messud articulated something that has gnawed at me since art school and was starting to reach a fever pitch in my thinking: "...the choices that are necessary to make art...are choices to make something that doesn't exist, that no body needs. ... People might be glad you made it once you made it, but before you made it, it doesn't exist. So what's the point?"

And then Surrealism waltzes in, an arrogant and self-affirming partner-in-crime. This angst about creating isn't even worth a dismissive nod. Of course one must create -- of course this world needs more art! Chance, imagination, irrationality, humor -- the salt of life.

Enter Emak-Bakia at the on-going San Francisco International Film Festival. Through "The Search for Emak Bakia," another life is breathed into Man Ray's 1926 cine-poem when Basque filmmaker Oskar Alegria sets out to unravel Man Ray's use of the title phrase, which translates to "leave me alone" in Basque. Through a messy yet beautiful copulation of journalistic intent and surrealist chance, the film proceeds with the most liberal definition of an objective.

La casa Emak Bakia, un film de oskar alegria. from oskar alegria on Vimeo.

This film was thoughtfully recommended to me with my still fermenting Sweden journey project in mind. And, indeed!, it is wonderful fodder while working through the various motivations / objectives / plans for documentation for such a endeavor. Both projects take the form of a journey through travel and time. We cobble together our paths through an artifact-montage of our predecessors' the journeys. We set out with vaguely held objectives, striving to remain open to chance. (Often despite "better" judgement.) And I think that my journey will be all the richer thanks to the work of Alegria.

Madame Nola

The wonderful opportunity to spend a few days in New Orleans recently arose, and it was with great pleasure that I loaded up a small backpack and headed back east. Springtime in the Crescent City meant that the lush greens were accented by blooming flowers, we saw some mild rain storms, and the air was fresh rather than thick.

I was there in the company of my mother and my aunt, the two originators of the Paws tale. So, we had lots of stories to swap and news to share about our favorite rabbit family.  We also took the opportunity to explore an extension of the Mama Series. Tentatively titled Mama Nola, we wandered through the French Quarter in the early morning hours and took a plethora of images with some old family texts as the props in this storied city. (A preparatory reading of Andrei Codrescu's collection of stories about his adopted city of New Orleans, "Mon Amour," gave me a great appreciation for the special place of literature here.)

My hope for the Mama Series is to someday print each series using different methods of old (photogravure, cynaotype, etc.). The idea first came from a dear photographer friend who hails from New Orleans herself, and it is an exciting prospect that is gaining in popularity in certain circles. But for now, the focus shall remain on the picture making and explorations that go hand-in-hand with that wonderful process. And New Orleans has, unsurprisingly, proved a futile land for such wanderings.

Ghost Town Farms: March

Here's the latest report on our progress at the neighborhood urban farm!March was a busy month, with the most notable development being a hard fought battle to cut through some serious concrete to make holes for fruit trees. My own part in the process was limited to clearing dirt to get to the concrete floor and shifting out rocks after the jackhammer did its work, which suited me just fine!We were rained out of our regular Thursday work session today, so instead let us reflect on the progress and know those newly installed fruit trees are enjoying their showers. (Photos of those to follow in the next batch.)To learn more about Ghost Town Farms and its farmer Novella Carpenter, visit her blog here! 

Ghost Town Farms

The first set of photographs documenting this season's growth at Ghost Town Farms.

Well before our eyes turned West, I came across Novella Carpenter's book "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" in the New York Times.  A story of one woman's adventure turning an unused lot into a working farm (livestock and all) in inner city Oakland, I gifted it to a foodie friend from the Bay Area.  While I had it tucked onto my own "to-read" list, I never got around to it.  Until we were slated to be neighbors.What an amazing coincidence that the apartment we secured upon moving to the East Bay was just a block away from Novella's urban farm!  While we waited for our move-in date to arrive, I got my hands on my own copy of her book and loved it.

After we moved in, I would walk the dog past her fence and peer in to catch a glimpse of the honey bees and see what she might be growing.  It was December, though, and even in California things were in repose.  One day, she happened to be outside digging away with her daughter when I was walking the pup, and I introduced myself through the fence.It's essentially springtime now in Oakland, and Novella has begun holding regular farm work days on Thursdays.  (3-5p, here's her blog if ya wanna join!)  As we work to transform the plot into this year's incarnation of Ghost Town Farms, Novella has kindly allowed me to document the process.  So, here's the first installation! 

Mae Ella | Sverige

On the occasion of an anniversary, retracing the origins of a still gestating project.

One year ago, we kissed good-bye my beautiful grandmother, Mae Ella (Carlson) King.  She was 91-years-old and had been living independently in the home that she and my grandfather built until a few days earlier.  It was a sunny winter morning, and she pulled her car out of her driveway onto the two lane rural highway and into the path of an oncoming bus.  No one else was injured, but the accident proved fatal for her.

I could carry on all day about how special my Gamma was.  However, what I want to share here is how this tragic event lead has inadvertently led me into a new project that I am just now beginning to shape and form. 

The Sverige Project

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While going through her house, we came across three small slide boxes and a stack of neatly typed notes.  It was the slide show that my great Aunts Margaret and Alice Alphield assembled after their holiday to their ancestral homeland of Sweden in 1964.  It was an impressive archive : the notes detailed and sprinkled with wit, the scenes lovely.

Nearly twenty years after the sisters' journey, my own mother (and Auntie's namesake) studied abroad in Stockholm.  And from her tenure, we still hold the small Kodak 3 1/2 " x 4 1/4" snapshots that she took and a thick stack of postcards that she sent home.Perhaps in remembrance of that past generation, but certainly for our own sense of wanderlust/nostalgia/adventure, my mother and I are going to undertake the journey to Sweden together come this late summer.

I hope to bring the ephemera of all three expeditions together into a highly-illustrated text exploring the parallels and divergences of our treks through this loaded landscape. In the meantime, I really need to start learning nagra ord pa svenska.

Se ut for dorrarna, dorrarna stangs!

The proper project portfolio page can be viewed here.

Paws Revisited

An important part of the journey West has been to re-center my work on my art.

Over the past few years, some wonderful opportunities have come along and pulled away my attention at the expense of concerted and concentrated focus on the various projects that I have stewing in varied states of completion. So, this dramatic change in geography is being paired with a refocusing.

First on the agenda is a return to the work of the Paws Family.  The Paws were the object of my thesis work, an ambitious installation relating the historical narrative of a strange rabbit family.  Since their first showing, I have wanted to tell their story in novel form.  As part of my thesis, I did assemble and publish a transcript of the Paws Family's source material : a rich written correspondance between my mother and her sister.  Five years later, though, I am revisiting the work and re-configuring it  to be a more concise text saturated with illustrations.

A few sneak peaks into some of the early sketches are available on the Paws' portfolio page, as well as images of their past showings.

The Invisible Sun Being Returns!

A crew of drummers positioned themselves in the center of the old school auditorium, while their accompanying musicians arranged themselves on the outskirts.

The walls were painted by a variety of projections, and local video art pieces played at ground level.

As one moved through the space, the sound scape could change dramatically.

The audience accordingly varied its movements between lounging on cushions along the periphery, slowly marching a path through the performers, or settling onto open patches on the floor to melt into the scene.

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Organized by Ithaca Underground, hosted by the Community School of Music and Arts.

Special shout out to The Invisible Hand's Devin Conathan and Mark Pearson.

New Work: The Missy Commis

A newly finished commissioned series, born out of The Carlsons of Cadillac.  The Missy Commis portrays three generations of Carlson women.

Oil on wooden panels.

New Work: Mama Vinter

The final chapter of The Mama Series comes to a close with Mama Vinter, who takes us on one last rambling wander through New England, showing us her version of the world both through her companionship and her own lens.