Author: Paul

Four hours seemed like a ridiculously long time for an opening but just as we turned the projector on people were walking through the door. Most of them were short of breath after climbing four flights of stairs. Gail and Jim Thomas took the elevator. They got off with masks on so we temporarily suited up. I was happy to see them but so surprised considering their recent heath issues. There was a steady flow throughout the evening with a nice lull around 7:30. A few windows were open to keep the Covid away and I’m hoping it did the trick.

I had pictured myself trying to hide from everybody but I was engaged in conversation non-stop, most of it about the work. Everybody had different favorites. Some the slideshow, others Los Inmigrantes, the color fields, the stations or the shapely Arcadian Forms. In fact they were surprisingly the favorites. This is just what I gathered. If they hated hated it all they didn’t tell me.

I talked with George Wegman the longest. Discovered we look the world the same way. George used to play guitar with The Hangmen back in the middle sixties. We bought one of his paintings a while back. Pete and Gloria watched the slideshow until it started repeating. I didn’t think that was possible. Jim Mott helped me move one of the paintings after I told him I wished it was lower and to the right a few inches. Scott McCarney wore a Personal Effects shirt that he designed. A cassette tape was pictured on the front labeled ”This Is It.” But the sweetest thing that happened all night was the call from Anne Havens just before the show.

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Before Peggi and I started hanging the Manifestation show in the Anderson Arts Building, Colleen took us in the back room to show her array of tools – everything in its place, laid out on a table like an art installation in itself. Picture a row of needle nose pliers from small to large, the nose of each pair between the handles of the next. They looked like they were going to have sex. She told us she shared a studio with Scott McCarney and learned the organizational feat from him.

She pointed to hammers in all sizes and called attention to one with a felt tip – “for tapping in push pins.” I had never heard of such a thing but days later I used the velvet hammer to hang some last minute additions to the show, six black and white photos taken in 1976.

Peggi and I decided to hang “Los Inmigrantes” first. I’ve had them hanging in my studio for about a year now. I drilled a couple of small holes in the back of each, corresponding holes in the wall and then backed a finishing nail into the holes in the wood pieces. This allowed me to push the piece toward the wall but not but not flat against it. I did this rather organically and started to take measurements of all the holes so I could transfer the piece downtown. Peggi suggested that I take a tracing of the holes, a brilliant idea that she said sprung from her sewing background. We laid the tracing paper out on the freshly painted wall and I drilled right though the paper.

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We were so lucky to find a house that that had not been overly mucked with by previous owners and hapless contractors. There were a few real clunkers, the barn wood in the kitchen and the ornate, white wrought iron railing along the opening to our basement. Julio Sanchez Baños designed and installed the hand rail that you see coming at you in the photo above. The heavy red oak, matching our red oak floors (which were milled from trees growing where our house stands today), is supported by thin stainless steel rods and appear to float.

A few years back we found a metal frame in the trash while we were out walking. I carried it home and made a wood top for it. We used it as an outdoor table, under our overhang and near the fire when we sat around with friends during the pandemic. When our neighbor came over with muddy shoes and found nowhere to sit by our door we realized we need a bench there so we brought the table in and started using it as a bench. We use it everyday.

My brother, John, a woodworker/craftsman has made a number of pieces for us – a chair as a wedding present, a coffee table made out of redwood from our old deck and a utility table in our office. We asked him if he could make us a bench that worked with the red oak in our railing. He dropped it off a few weeks ago and we love it.

It looks particularly good with the “For Fritz” paintings. I have sixteen of them and I was planning on hanging the six shown here at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio. The show opens on Friday and I’ve just decided to show a different batch there. This grouping will include the white one.

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I was looking for a title for this upcoming show and also kicking around ideas for an album title for some recent Margaret Explosion songs. I found both on two succeeding pages in Musa Meyer’s recent book, “Resilience.”

Writing about her father’s work in the early seventies she described how Philip Guston was dogged by questions about why his work had changed, from abstraction to figurative. One critic complained the “manifestation” was different. Guston answered, “That is our fate. Constant change.”

“You have to keep learning how to play in new ways all the time. It’s always good for the first time. There is a popular Italian song called “Per la Prima” – “For the First Time.” It’s about a love affair, but it’s the same thing. It’s always good for the first time, and somehow, that has to be recaptured, constantly.”

Margaret Explosion improvises. Each song we play is being played for the first time. When we do try to recreate a song it is never as good as it was the first time. “Per la Prima” will be the title of our upcoming lp.

This art show would more accurately be sub-titled “Paul Dodd | Recent Play.”

Opening Reception: Friday, July 15, 5-9pm
First Friday Open Studio August 5, 5-9pm
Margaret Explosion performance w/ slideshow Friday Aug. 12, 7-8pm
Open by appointment July 15 through August 28, 2022

Anderson Arts Building, Studio 401
250 N. Goodman Street Rochester, NY 14607
(Enter behind Good Luck Restaurant)

Exhibit also includes “Brief History of the World” slideshow
(detail shown below)
ePub book format of “Brief History of the World” is available
as a free download at www.popwars.com/artist-books

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The projector I plan to use during my show at Colleen Buzzard’s will only read a flash drive formatted on a pc and I only have a Mac. I had Dan, across the street, format mine. But then when I copied my files to the flash drive I found these tiny _files right next to each of my .jpg files and the projector trips over them before moving on. So I put my files in a Dropbox folder and had Dan put them on the flash drive for me.

The slideshow consists of about 500 screen captures from my ”Brief History of the World” series. Ideally I would like the duration of each side to be around 15 seconds so you can both see the images and read the captions but short of writing the slides to a movie file I’m stuck using the closest default setting which 10 seconds. As you might imagine, it is a long history. I’ve been working on this series for 21 years and I currently have 8 of the 21 volumes available as eBooks. At 10 seconds apiece the slideshow won’t start repeating again for an hour and a half.

The spread above is the very first one I did. I like the juxtaposition of the wooden sculpture by a German Expressionist with a musician from Nigeria. And below the Dali Lama and El Greco’s Saint James have the same gesture.

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I loved the way flat acrylic paint looked on the plastic panels I found. the material was perfect for my Stations of the Cross. But now that I plan to show them at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio this summer I’m having a hell of a time getting something to adhere to the back of panels so I can hang them.

I loved the plastic panels so much I did another set of pieces with them, shaping the sheets with a jig saw. Pete Monacelli helped me mount a wood frame to the back of those and I caulked around the frame just to ensure they stuck. The frame pushess the shaped panels, called “Arcadian Forms,” off the wall. It took Pete all of of a morning to miter the corners and I spent another gluing and caulking the frames to the panels.

Pete told me a few times, “Don’t use the plastic.” I didn’t want to tell him that I already have twenty small panels in the basement that are in the works.

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