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IAN PEDIGO

Call it big-box-store haiku: the sculptor turns the stuff of Home Depot, Pier 1, and their Dumpsters into pared-down, poetic assemblages. Bamboo placemats are arranged on the wall in an octagonal “O,” a stylized emblem of emptiness. A scrap of carpet is paired with a birch branch and a fluorescent tube like industrial ikebana. The young artist plays clever games with the conventions of indoor and outdoor, turning the light coming through the gallery windows into a piece titled “Emptied Projections,” using commercially available diffusion material that casts shadowless light. Through Feb. 14. (Von Nichtssagend, 438 Union Ave. 718-383-7309.)

LINK

Life is going on. Moving ahead. Second by second and it is lovely.

We do as much stuff as we can, and try to just hang out a little bit as well. Right now we need to turn things to the DL for while. Hang out some more and do nothing while expanding our minds resonating past experiences against calm stress free nights.

Hug and kiss.

Being there. Not everywhere.

Butt Johnson @ CRG,
originally uploaded by Ro.E.H.

I love this guy

This is my contribution to VinylCPH Red Cross charity event.

Exhibition at Danish Center for Architecture
Danish Center for Architecture
VinylCPH

Studio cleaning time.

Can’t wait till I am done and I can start my new sculptures.

NEW MAN - how cool, I loved that brand, as what, 10 years old. Weird. The logo was cool. Almost as cool as Quicksilver and Mistral.

My new sculptures are going to be awesome. Yeah. Post you later

Cool mixed tape by Danish company Aiaiai - aiaiai.dk
http://fairtilizer.com/track/60807

Studio November 2009,
originally uploaded by thomas.ovlisen.

Preview on the small sculptures in progress going to this years Asbaek Gallery x-mas exhibition

I am in love with Janis Joplin. And i wonder why. I know why.

She appears to have done what ever she wanted to do. I am doing all the things expected of me or what I want to do? Do I have a free will(y)? And if i had done the opposite would it be seen as exactly what I was supposed to do, as well! Obviously it would. I am going to have a beer and a smoke. Thanks Janis!

The rebel. What is so intriguing about rebellion. Doing what is wrong. What does not make sense. I love it. I feel it. It is inside me, harnessed coming out in small bursts of expressions and actions

In this day and age everybody is trying so hard to be healthy, ecological and that is great. I am all for it, but you know what - don’t go bragging about it. Just be cool. Be cool.

Dan I wish you well.

Who am I kidding. Only me. One can only kid one self.

I just posted a massive comment on this website - http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/jackson-pollock-jack-the-dripper/

The Selvedge Yard - http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/

It is a great site on which I found the film below in this article on Husqvarnas and Steve McQueen - http://theselvedgeyard.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/husqvarna/

It made we want to look more into the circumstances and relationship with the beats and the painters of the era, but I really don’t care. It is cool and interesting, but my priorities lye differently right now. JP has many cool articles and I haven’t read half of them

The Wow Effect.

Fuck the wow effect. It wears off. What is left when it is gone. That is what matters. Does the experience grow or does it wash away.

Will the second and following layer of experiences carry itself further.

The wow effect is most often linked to the first visual impression as in most POP art. Though a lot of art puts the wow effect in there as a surprise - like wow it is not a photograph or wow it is not real it is made of hand painted polyurethane.

The wow effect is closely linked to the western mentality. Impressive. Impressing people is at our core. Like those miracle medicine tonic salesmen of the old west. Seeing is believing and wow look at that. We get impressed and conned.

There are some basic elements that impress us -

1. Size, wow those iron arches are huge.

2. Technique - skill, that looks exactly like my late grand ma.

3. Labor - wow that must have taken for ever, like a full size replica of the Bounty made in matches

Unfortunately a lot of art relies on these factors. And it is difficult not to. I do it my self. It satisfies me to work on my sculptures for a long time adding layer after layer, taking them off, crating some kind of actual experience of aging and a lot of layers, so people can go wow look at all those layers of paint. Hopefully there is a lot more to ponder than the wow effect.

The wow effect though, is also a matter of linguistics. I showed at The Copenhagen Science Fair and got a lot of wows. I explained that wow is sort of not what I am looking for as a response. The problem was however not that they didn’t want to express more and give a thorough and in depth response, but that they lacked the vocabulary to satisfy me as an artist. My friends from college and contemporary colleagues share a language that pinpoints our common understand of present art. The employees at the Science Fair just used other words and in lack of words wow. But their wows expressed their liking of material choice, process and first look. They just couldn’t use the words I wanted them too, because they didn’t know them.

Awareness

First look - top layer visual appearance. Context and Lineage

Materials - structure actual presence. Context Lineage

Process - actions physical performance. Context. Lineage

Nicole also gave a speach while I was at RISD. She chose to speak to the juniors, so it must have been 1999 or 2000, rather than the seniors feeling that she would have more impact. I hope she is doing well. She was so nice. Is so nice. This is a 1996 Gallery Beat video - gallerybeat.net

James Turrell gave an awesome lecture at RISD and he spoke of these one person light experience chambers he had made (Gasworks). The prone visitor is rolled into a light-saturated 12-foot wide fiberglass sphere in a manner that resembles having an MRI. The subject is then exposed to light flashes in a certain way to impact the brain. A Japanese cartoon artist altered the patterns and put it into an episode of Pokemon that created an almost Jungian social brain epilepsy seizure.

Joop Van Lieshout also gave an inspirational talk - Leon Ransmeier was prepared with a cap gun shooting like crazy at one point during the talk. And Sara Auslander actually went and lived in the Lieshout compound. This is Tampa Skull, 1998

Tampa Skull is a claustrophobic living unit. Its dimensions were determined by the absolute minimum amount of space that a human body needs in order to move from one section to another and use its facilities: a toilet, a bathroom, a kitchen with a deep frying pan, an office, a living room and a bedroom. Compact yet complete.(from Lishout website)

The Transcendental Meditation technique, or TM technique is a form of mantra meditation introduced in India in 1955 by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917-2008).

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi describes the Transcendental Meditation technique as one which requires no preparation, is simple to do, and can be learned by anyone. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says in his 1963 book, The Science Of Being and Art Of Living, that, over time, the practice of allowing the mind to experience its deeper levels during the Transcendental Meditation technique brings these levels from the subconscious to within the capacity of the conscious mind. According to Maharishi, as the mind quiets down and experiences finer thoughts, the Transcendental Meditation practitioner can become aware that thought itself is transcended and can have the experience of what he calls the ’source of thought’, ‘pure awareness’ or ‘transcendental Being’; ‘the ultimate reality of life’.

According to the Maharishi there are seven levels of consciousness: (i) waking; (ii) dreaming; (iii) deep sleep; (iv) transcendental or pure consciousness; (v) cosmic consciousness; (vi) God consciousness; and (vii) Supreme knowledge, or unity consciousness. The Maharishi says that the fourth level of consciousness can be experienced through Transcendental Meditation, and that the fifth state can be achieved by those who meditate diligently. Higher levels are attainable depending on one’s commitment to meditation and purification. (See section below for research concerning long-term effects.) The Maharishi says that his teacher, Guru Dev, had achieved the seventh level of consciousness

Transcendental Meditation is rooted in the Vedantic School of Hinduism. The Maharishi and Guru Dev were from the Shankara tradition of advaita Vedanta. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi “makes it clear” that Transcendental Meditation was delivered to man about 5,000 years ago by the Hindu god Krishna. The technique was then lost, but restored for a time by Buddha. It was lost again, but rediscovered in the 9th Century AD by the Hindu philospher Shankara. Finally, it was revivied by Brahmananda Saraswati (Guru Dev) and passed on to the Maharishi. The Maharishi believed that since the time of the Vedas, this knowledge was lost and found many times, recurring principally in the Bhagavad-Gita, and in the teachings of Buddha and Shankara, a cycle discussed in the introduction to his commentaries on the Bhagavad-Gita. In addition to the revivals of the Transcendental Meditiaton technique by Krishna, the Buddha and Shankara, the Maharishi also drew from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

I am currently making an Instant Solitude Helmet Robot Head. It is made out of my materials of choice - shaped in polyurethane foam, covered in fiberglass and painted with auto lacquer.

I am also making a VinylCph designer toy into a self portrait with just such a Solitude Helmet Robot Head.

For the first time I am making a functional sculpture. And the material seem to be perfect for the job. It is light weight so it doesn’t way down on your head or shoulders. I guess it stems from sensory deprivation chambers discussed with Gabe in college and photographic self portraits with a motorcycle helmet from Mallorca 2002. Come to think of it. They might be inspired back then by Pierre et Gilles self portrait. But not visually. The idea of hiding in public at the same as sticking out is pretty cool. The artist as the weirdo.

Solitude or Transcendence instantly.

Sensory Deprivation Chamber

Pierre et Gilles Motorcycle helmet picture