Art House 2 Installation

Art House 2 was a great success! It was a pleasure to meet and work with the guys at Hot Lullaby, and I can't wait to collaborate again. Here are a few photos of my installation from the show on 02/11/12. The installation is titled "Family Portraits." In it, I'm using hand made or antique clothing/objects to create portraits of my ancestors and tell their stories. In two of the pieces, "Eula Anne Hathcock Brown" and "William Henry Rushing", two of my grandmother's grandparents, the clothes are actually sculpted into action poses relating to stories that my grandma tells about them. Take a gander...

"Eula Anne Hathcock Brown" (My 2nd Great Grandmother)

Handmade Clothing, Polyurethane. 2012

Eula Anne's Story: Eula Anne was a leading midwife in Chilton County Alabama for many years. Coincidentally, she suffered from severe endometriosis (decay of the womb) and thus was plagued with bladder control issues. My grandmother recalls "Maw-maw Brown" frequently stopping her daily chores outside on her farm, lifting her skirts, and relieving herself in the middle of the yard because she couldn't get to the outhouse. This portrait is of my grandmother's memory of Eula Anne.The dress is actually hollow, and stands with no infra-structure or brace. 

"William G. Brown and Evaline Rowe Brown" (My 3rd Great Grandparents) 

            Hand-made and antique clothing, Japanese rice paper, ink, thread, printed daguerreotype, 2012. 

The photograph in this drawing is a print of an actual daguerreotype of William and Evaline from the mid 1800's.

 "Alfred S. Baker, 1st Mayor of Baker County Alabama" ( My 4th Great Grandfather)

Alfred's Story: Alfred inherited a large stretch of land from his father, with which he founded Baker County Alabama (now, Chilton County) in the early 1800's. He promptly named himself Mayor and married Rebecca Anne Mims, the daughter of one of his father's friends. 

Alfred was known best for his lecherous behavior, he had a habit for drinking and gambling. It is documented by several accounts in the Chilton County library by local historians and people who knew Alfred that he had a running bet with any man in Baker County. The bet went: "If any man can produce a larger manhood than my own I will personally give him 200 acres and $200 in gold. However, if my manhood proves to be the largest, then I get to choose the challenger's wife or daughter to bed for one night."

Apparently, and this is supported by various birth records, there were a significant number of illegitimate children born in Baker County under Alfred's administration with a middle or last name of Baker. Alfred was never documented to have lost or sold any of his land, and despite his pension for poker, his finances were never troubled. So, it would seem that Alfred won his bet more often than not. I am related to Alfred through his legitimate line of children with his wife, Rebecca. 

Installation Shot

 Installation Shot 2

"William Henry Rushing" My 2nd Great-grandfather.

Hand-Made clothes, glue, polyurethane.

William's Story: According to my grandmother, William, or "Paw-paw Rushing" was a gentle, sweet man. He spoke with a stutter, but had a beautiful tenor singing voice. One of his favorite pass-times was hunting for deer that "Maw-maw Rushing" would use to cook. One day he went out on a hunt and didn't came back at his usual time. When his family finally found him, he was in a clearing in the woods. It appeared that he had dropped his gun and accidentally shot himself in the torso. He didn't die immediately, because there was a trail of blood leading from the gun to William, who was resting his head peacefully against a fallen tree. He had removed his shoes, socks and glasses, combed his hair with the comb that he always carried in the front pocket of his overalls, and assumed a position of repose to wait for death. 

* The photo in the installation is a real photograph of William and his wife Martha Emaline. 

** The clothing used in the portrait of William Henry Rushing was actually shot with a shot-gun in the same way his own body was shot, with the direction of my grandmother and the gun expertise of my grandfather. 

Thanks again to Colleen for hosting this event in her home, and all the folks at Hot Lullaby for putting this shindig on!!!

Upcomming Shows: Hot Lullaby and Art on the Green

Y'all, I'm so excited to announce that I've got two art happenings lined up in February!

The first one was brought my way by my sweet brother-and-sister-in-law up in Nashville. It's called "Hot Lullaby: Art House" and you can go take a gander at the line up for the show right here: http://hotlullaby.com/arthouse/ . Hot Lullaby is a groovy little art collective in Nashville, and I can't wait to work with them.

The second is right here in Birmingham. It's called "Art on the Green" and is being put on by Operation New Birmingham. The "show" will inhabit all of the vacant store front windows that run along the stretch of 20th Street North in the heart of downtown Birmingham. My space will be between 3rd and 4th Avenues North, so drive or walk by and check out my installation soon! You can go here: http://www.yourcitycenter.com/Home.aspx?ContentID=1008 to find out more about Art on the Green and Operation New Birmingham.

Stay posted for new work and installation pics soon!

Better Photos: Self Portrait in Grave Dirt

Almost a year later, I am finally posting some better photographs of my BFA exhibition. The piece is "Self Portrait in Grave Dirt" and is a full body cast of myself, in grave dirt. I've been working away on a new series, so hopefully pictures of new work will be up soon!

BFA Exhibition

So, the time has flown by and I've been doing a horrible job of keeping the blog up to date. It's already May and my BFA graduation exhibition has basically come and gone in a bittersweet flurry of stress, excitement, disbelief and joy. The show went up on April 14th and comes down this Saturday, May 7th. There were six exhibiting students this year, and all of our work in the show really came together nicely.
 I made two huge works for the show. Death Mask Map is  a map of my family tree made of "death masks" taken from a mold of my own face and cast in the dirt of each ancestor's grave. Self Portrait in Grave Dirt is the full body cast of myself in layers of the grave dirt (I showed some in-progress process pics a couple of posts ago). I must say that I'm overjoyed at the end result of all my undergraduate work. These two pieces ended up being a sort-of installation, complementing each other better than I'd expected. Now, I'll post some pictures that the lovely Paul Sholly took really quickly during the opening, but more elaborate ones are soon to follow.

This is me, in the middle of the Death Mask Map.

Self Portrait in Grave Dirt

This is me, with the other me.

The adorable man and lady in the background are my grandparents.

Photo Documentation

Since most of you probably found your way to this blog through my website (www.alexandrajohancock.com, for those of you who didn't) I feel that I need to give credit to the awesome folks who have been helping me photodocument my work in preparation for my online debut.

The photos of "Family Tree (Maternal)" were done by Truman Grayson, whose work can be seen at www.trumangrayson.com, and Mary Katherine Morris, whose site is www.marykatherinemorris.net .

Some sample images:  





Also, Mary Katherine helped me with documenting my drawings for the site over the weekend...they look great!

Sample Drawing Photos:

Family Tree (Self Portrait)

My next big project (expected to be completed by the end of March) is a full body casting of myself. The medium is the dirt from my ancestors' graves.

My thought process for the piece is that there are parts of all of my ancestors in me, in my body, my dna. I long to know who I got my blonde hair from, my sense of humor, my tendancy to sunburn..all the little details that make me, me. However, there is really no way for me to ever know, since the sources of my identity (my ancestors) are dead. I see myself as being a mashed up conglomoration of all of my ancestors... a mix of indicipherable, unidentifiable parts. So, to represent the presence of my heritage within my physical body, I am casting myself out of the only physical remains of them left in the world...the dirt of their graves.

The actual casting process has been a long and hard one... finding a binder for the dirt, how to position myself for balance in the final product without making the postion imposible to take a mold off of, making a core, a frame, and a base etc.

However, the work is in progress and I have a couple of photos (displayed below) documenting the body casting process and the plaster mold into which the dirt will go.

First of all, body casting:

To do the casting of my head and neck, I obviously couldn't pull a plaster mold off my hair, so I made a wax replica.

 

 Then put it all together...

 

More updates to come...

To Start...

Welcome to my blog!

Let's skip right over the formal stuff where I state my name and age and favorite color, because that's what the profile on this thing is for, and I've already filled that out.

I will tell you that I'm an artist, more specifically, a sculptor. I will also tell you that I want this blog to be mostly about my art, what I'm in the process of working on, what ideas I have for upcoming projects, shows I'm in etc. etc. So, first, I guess you should know a little bit about the work I'm involved in at the moment.

My mother died my freshman year of college, and as one would assume, that traumatic loss found its way into my art. However, after a few semesters of extremely weighty nest/egg imagery, the presence of loss in my work has evolved. 

Over the past year I've done extensive genealogical research into my mother's side of the family, and have found roots tracing all over the southeastern United States all the way back to England and Germany. My most recent body of work is about the ancestors I have "met" in my research, and the disconnection I feel from them. The best way for you to understand is to read my artist statement...

I consider my genes heirlooms. I have inherited no great wealth or “valuable” earthly possessions from my mother's premature death, but that does not mean I have inherited nothing, for better or worse. She left me her cheekbones and nose. She left me her short temper and inclination for creativity. She left me her emotional outbursts and a thousand other things. Her death also left a void stretching between myself, the living, and my ancestry. Without my mother I feel a disconnection between these heirlooms that she left in me and the people that she inherited them from.

In this body of work, I use my art as a means to seek out the enigmatic ancestors that contribute to the composition of my own identity. I am drawn to their only physical remains left: the dirt of their graves. I harvest samples of earth from each grave and use them as representations of the part of each person that exists within me. Deep down I understand that I will never really know these people who existed then turned back into dirt long before my time. Yet I still long to understand who my ancestors were, what they felt and thought and looked like. The only place I have to go in my endeavor to reach them is their graves, and the dirt they have become. As I try to bring myself closer and closer to these people, my art gives shape to, and attempts to fill, the abyss between the living and the dead.

So, that's basically what all of the work this blog will involve is about: the abyss between me, the living, and the dead.