How can you be in two places at once if you're not anywere at all

Where do you live?

Welcome to another installment of Blog Carnival** a monthly project of the notorious international art cabal EtsyMetal. This month’s subject is “Where do YOU live?”, or, from our perspective, “where do you LIVE?”.

For some artists location is important, and granted some places are much nicer than others. But when it comes down to it, art happens where ever you are because, well, you’re an artist and you don’t store that at some location. So, to answer the question, we live on the corner of What If Street and Why Not Avenue. We have lived here for a very, very long time.

It’s an interesting neighborhood filled with creative types and we are comfortable here. We’re way off the beaten track, outside the comfort zone, and navigating our neighborhood can be disorienting but full of fun surprises.

Which is exactly why living on the corner of What If Street and Why Not Avenue is so interesting. We like surprises, and are willing to park our car in unknown places just to see what happens. We’re quite used to things going “wrong”. We’ve learned from the folks living on Why Not Avenue that maybe it’s our expectations that are “wrong”, and that things are really OK.  Either way something gets trashed, “things” or “expectations”.

 We have to sort our trash in this neighborhood and we have a special bin for Expectations and Preconceived notions. These get thrown out about once a week, but we also recycle these things. It’s a bad habit.

The result of all this is not so much a paradigm shift as a paradigm merry-go-round. Our perceptions, expectations and preconceived notions are always shifting, being tested and resetting. Meanwhile “things” are flying off the merry-go-round at an alarming rate.

 “What kind of things?” you ask. 

Things like this:

 

Disco Chicken . Mixed media. This piece is the result of a game artists play called Exquisite Corpse. To play,one artists starts a work and then passes it on to another artist to add something. The piece is passed among each player the last in line being the one who “finishes” the piece. Disco Chicken was the result of three artists. We were the last in line, having received the silver square and the branching pendants.

 

Sylph on the move. We have been exploring the concept of alien life forms and how they might manifest themselves. This images is also an exploration of how we depict these pieces. 

 

Sylph Arabia. This is one of many recent pieces where we are using our artistic voice in a conscious effort to counterbalance the mindless demonizing of all thing Arabic and Middle Eastern in western culture. We are doing this by incorporating Middle Eastern design elements into our work to demonstrate the sophisticated and sensitive nature of these ancient cultures.

 

Slinking. This is a purely experimental piece that is the result of working with our friend and fellow artist Jillian Moore  http://www.jillianmoore.net/. We are now beginning to develop our own voice (this isn’t it) using the techniques that we learned from Jillian

Lastly, for all you who don’t like metaphore and are thinking “just cut the artsy-fartsy crap and show us where you live”…Here ya go, Rancho 2Roses in LaLa Land.

••Blog Carnival is the mind-meld of Etsymetal an International group of artists who write each month on a common topic. In doing so we demonstrate how we each interpret the same subject from our own realities.