Endurance Tests

You can always count on Iowa weather.  It can be really beautiful watching a storm come across the rolling hills.  Not so much when it heads downtown on a Friday at 5 dumps torrents of rain on your reception.  I think, however, that it didn’t affect the attendance at the Visiting Artists exhibit reception last Friday.  After the rain the evening was beautiful. There was a very respectable turnout.  I got to chat with some people I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I am, as always, very grateful to my friends who came out.  It was a genuine pleasure to be featured with such a talented group.  

To see work from the other artists in the show click HERE

No sooner had that ended than it was time to engage myself and others in the “Found And Donated” project for the Des Moines Arts Festival happening this weekend.  Each of us was tasked with creating a design on pre-made wood panels featuring found or donated materials.  As I mentioned before I chose CDs because of their prevalence in my life as a techy, but also because they were readily available thanks to several generous donations… and they’re shiny. 

Many many thanks to the help of a wonderful friend and human being; to whom I owe one of my kidneys; who stood by me in the toasty-hot studio smashing CDs and gluing them to boards.  By our estimation we used around 1200 CDs in all… or 840gb of data.  It took roughly 4-5 hours per board once we got a system down.  It was an unpleasantly hot, muggy week here in good ol’ Ds of M.  It was exhausting and fun and the second June I’ve gotten myself (and others) into a grueling ordeal for the sake of Art (see last June’s posts).  I love it.  Wonder what we’ll do next time…

One mooooore thing and then I’ll go for now.

There’s another group show coming up at Instinct Gallery in downtown Des Moines.  John Bosley contacted me a few months back about this show and I’ve been looking forward to seeing more of his new work.  Plus Luke Elliott’s work looks pretty intense.  I’m anxious to see it in person.  We’ll be seeing you at the reception July 10^th!

Cheers,

R

Pew! Pew! Pew!

Greetings, True-Believers!  Why "Pew Pew Pew!"?  The show at RayGun was a real success.  Get it?  RayGun?  it goes pew... oh forget it.

This has been a banner couple of weeks at the Reeves household.
First and foremost: my youngest son learned to tie his shoes. I'm extremely proud of him and take a lot of personal joy in his accomplishments. Especially the little things.  I mean how far can you get if you don't learn how to tie knots?  I know. I know. "Velcro", you say but c'mon.

Secondly I got to spend an evening in the company of some great people by way of my solo show, "Finding a Place to Stand" at RayGun last Saturday.  We had a lot of people through and I, for one, had a great time getting to chat with friends and getting acquainted with a few new ones. My friend, Michael's bacon-chocolate cookies were so good they very nearly brought one person to tears.  Ah, the power of bacon.  Thank you, sir.  Thanks to everyone for coming.  Maybe you only stayed because of the brief, but torrential rain, but I'll take it. 
I'm happy to say there are a number of other things going on, but I won't go into them at this point with the exception of one.  A group of local artists are designing large recyclables containers for the Des Moines Arts Festival.  We were each tasked with coming up with a design and then creating it from found or donated materials.  I work with a lot of software in my day job.  A lot of useless, excessively-distributed software.  CDs are like shiny, round cockroaches.  They turn up on your desk.  In your drawers... So with the help of a number of generous people I'm going to try to turn them into something new.  I have a lot of CDs to shuck (ie: remove from the little, paper sleeves).  Then I'm going to find a way to wholesale smash or shred them.  I've got a few options.  If you've got any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Cheers,

R