Corridor Project at Plaza Live

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Patrick Greene helped facilitate a parking lot performance before the Deerhoof concert at Plaza Live. It was the second Corridor Project production.  When I got there it was just starting to get dark. Patrick had a megaphone and there was some negotiating with the Plaza Live staff to clear an area in the parking lot for a staging place. Having no idea what was to come, I decided to step back and sketch a long shot of the parking lot scene to see what developed. Hannah Miller parked a pickup truck and pulled out a huge tree trunk set piece. A car was asked to park at the end of the row to avoid any other cars from driving into the staging area. I saw brown sheets being unfurled on the pavement and on the tailgates of parked cars. The parking lane was being converted into a forest glen.

An Ibex puppetry kite hinted that the performance was about to start, so I finished the sketch and moved closer. Voci Dance performed with the help of Tiny Waves and The Shine Shed Collective. Performers were all dressed in exotic woodland creature costumes. The dancers moved nimbly between the tree trunks, performing to live music. I sketched a strange bird-like creature with drums before he marched off into the woods. I wasn’t sure if Sarah Lockhard was a fox, beaver or a hound but all the dancers moved with grace. Hip bones became headdress eyes and antlers. It was all very primal. When the performance ended, sheets and set pieces quickly were gathered up and the magic disappeared.

Art and Process

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On November 14th, I went to Urban ReThink to hear artists Brian Phillips, Dina Mack and Tory Tepp talk about their Art and Process. Dina Mack lead off showing her work from inception to today. She worked in the beginning by doing collages. Her work later matured and become austere in its simplicity and abstraction. She did an instillation in which she froze written documents in ice and then let them melt in the gallery. For the Corridor Project, she had a series of cloth napkins which she used to blot her lipstick. She vividly remembers her grandmothers perfume, so she scented the fabric. The lipstick stained napkins were an autobiographical look back at memories she had of her mother and grandmother.  Her grandmother used to give her a butterscotch candy if she sat still in church. The sound of the wrapper still brings back the memory, so she filled a vintage purse with butterscotch wrappers. The ephemeral installation was installed on the lawn of the Mennello Museum for only a few days. The sense of smell is only now being researched. Apparently all the Marriott hotels in the country use the same perfumed cleaning products. A scent can trigger many vivid memories. Much of Dina’s work speaks in a whisper, implied, like a scent on a breeze.

Tory Tepp is now a resident artist at the Atlantic Center of the Arts in Daytona Beach. He began his career as an artist doing traditional paintings. He hit a wall where he felt painting didn’t have any meaningful place in today’s society. He stagnated, not knowing where to go as an artist. Then he started planting seeds and growing a garden outside his Los Angeles studio. This garden helped him feel more connected to the people in his neighborhood. He started using abandoned shopping carts as planters. This evolved into Urban art with a taste of nature. An installation at a college consisted of a series of grass covered dirt mounds that acted as a natural place to meet, lie back relax and mingle. He is now working on a similar installation as part of his Atlantic Center of the Arts residency. With any luck, I’ll get out there to sketch the work in progress.

Brian Phillips showed his illustrative work. He has a whole series of paintings of house fires illuminating the night sky. He has some of his paintings hanging at Urban ReThink now. One piece in particular caught my eye. It was a painting of a stone arrowhead with a bold flat backdrop. This simple image implies much about the violence of survival. That image lingers. Brian didn’t claim any deep rooted underlying themes to his work. For the people intent on finding hidden meanings, he did a painting of a house fire and diagrammatically circled some embers. The diagram pointed to a bird, leaf and phone. It was pure nonsense. He paints because he loves the process.

I’ll be giving a talk on my art and process this Wednesday December 12th from 7PM to 9PM at Urban Rethink, (625 E Central Blvd  Orlando, FL, 32801). Rick Jones will be presenting, discussing and displaying his works on the ReThink wall, along with photographer Hannah Glogower. Stop by and say hi.

Peacock Trivia

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I decided to go to the Peacock Room following a lead in the Orlando Weekly that said there was going to be a trivia night. Believe it or not this was the most sketch able event that evening. Someone suggested I call such events Thor-Able. Anyway I arrived right after work, ordered a beer and started sketching the five or so other patrons. By the time I finished my sketch, I realized there wasn’t going to be any trivia.

A Rob Leaman flower was outside on the sidewalk, a remnant of The Corridor Project. The bartender let me know that they had to take it inside several times when it rained. Some of Rob’s day glow green branches were also above the bar. Art on the walls was all by tattoo artists. Some work looked like what you would expect to see on skin, but some was highly polished black and white oil paintings that I thought were great. One showed a rabid Easter Bunny attacking screaming children.

Artists Process

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As part of the Corridor Project‘s first show, Walk on By, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, a UCF art instructor, sat in a thrown outside Urban ReThink starting at 6pm on September 5th accepting trash offerings. That evening artists gathered at ReThink to talk about their art and process.

Wanda was dressed in a tight red corset and had a huge wig of purple hair which was woven and balled up. Red and white jewels glistened in her hair. From the moment I entered, I knew I wanted to get close to her to sketch. Wanda’s regal performance piece had previously been done at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.


She began her discussion by asking the audience what they felt her performance was about. I hadn’t seen her performance, so I kept quiet. Her question rang forth like a challenge. The room was dead silent. A little boy started shrieking and complaining in the corner. With a regal flair Wanda raised her hand and shouted out “Excuse me!” The mom ushered her son out the door. Wanda explained that people often dump their shit on the people closest to them. She said her performance art was about intimacy. In one performance piece she invited people to lie in bed with her. In the quiet moments, some people cried.


Jessica Earley who yarn bombed the front of Urban Rethink discussed her art. She is soft spoken and began her talk by warning us of her shyness. As she discussed her art, she was never at a loss for words. She gazed at the far wall of the room as she spoke. Her thoughts and passions rang true. The projector wouldn’t work but Dina Mack helped her get it running. Jessica showed us some of her more controversial paintings that she had done. One painting she did was actually censored by a costumer in a local restaurant. Her paintings often visualize woman’s issues. Some show a woman’s longings to someday have a child. A painting showing a nude woman and child couldn’t be hung. The woman had some knitting covering her lap and a single strand of yarn lead to a baby who had on a knit cap and diapers. Black crows then flew up from the child’s head towards a flaming blue cell. Jessica has been painting for the past three years and her work is astonishingly intimate and sincere. A common thread through the evenings discussions was that artists love to experiment and explore different mediums. Jessica wants to continue performance art, music, dance, installations and visual art. Self expression can come in many forms.

The Corridor Project – Walk on By

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The Corridor Project’s  first show, titled “Walk on By” was spearheaded by Patrick Greene, the events coordinator at Urban ReThink. Over night almost 100 art installations popped up all over Orlando. The largest concentration of artwork appeared along Mills Avenue in the Mills 50 District. I knew that artists were out between 4AM and 7AM installing their work but I wasn’t sure where the pieces were being installed. I set my alarm for 5AM but swatted it off and fell back to sleep. The next day I decided to sketch this sculpture installation by Bethany Mikell outside Wills Pub (1042 N Mills Ave, Orlando). Painted silver, this modern looking couple is covered in metallic nuts and bolts. The piece exudes fashion with a chic industrial flair. Even the chains holding the couple to the site have an industrial fell.

Walk on By functions as a temporary, clandestine art museum with no fixed location. The works are site specific using empty storefronts and public spaces. In the past, Orlando has promoted public art in the form of decorated fiberglass Gibson Guitars and lizards.  These juvenile displays limit artist expression, forcing the work to be decorative. Even the decorated Mills 50 power boxes seem to lack any bold artistic vision. When public art is needed, as in the case of banners to hide the Dr. Phillips Center of the Performing Arts construction site, children’s art is used. If you have ever gotten a ticket in Orlando then you have been blessed to see the children’s art decorating tiles outside the parking ticket payment office. Walk on By has finally allowed local and international artists the ability to openly express themselves in an urban public setting. Finally the art is meant for a mature, enlightened, adult audience. It isn’t watered down for a Disney, white bread, homogenous, world view. This seems like a bold first step towards a city that can take spontaneous chances.

The art isn’t just for high society gallery gawkers. It is for anyone walking or driving by. Keep your eyes open and be prepared to be surprised. Some art performances happened only at 8:30AM on September 5th while other art pieces will remain on site until they decay. So turn off the cell phone and TV and get out to Walk on By. This gallery has no walls.

Yarn Bombing

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Jessica Earley hosted a Craft Society Meeting at Urban ReThink, (625 E Central Blvd, Orlando), where she introduced participants to the elusive craft of Yarn Bombing.  Yarn Bombing is a global urban phenomenon in which crafty people are covering urban blight with colorful knitting. It is a soft comfortable form of colorful creative graffiti. A hardcore group of four or five women and one man showed up to knit or crochet the pieces that would ultimately be used to encase the bike rack outside Urban ReThink. As Jessica said in her invite, “Come get your granny on.”

Each person knitted and/or crocheted individual granny squares, or rectangles and then those pieces would be sewn them all together to make one large collaborative piece to cover the earth with. She had a yarn bombing book which showed entire trees covered in a tight warm cozy. The guy was taught a way of knitting in which he simply looped the yarn around his fingers. The result was a loose knit square. Jessica had strips of fabric which were given to each participant so they knew the correct width for each knitted section.

With my sketch done, I went outside where Jessica was sewing the pieces together around the rack. There was a light drizzle which discouraged me from starting a second sketch. A couple had stopped to ask Jessica about what she was doing. He joked, “It would be hard for anyone to complain about what you are doing. Of course if you were feeding people, then you might get arrested.”  Knitting is a slow process but by the time I decided to leave, at least a quarter of the bike rack had been converted into a colorful piece of urban art. Jessica will continue bombing in preparation for “The Corridor Project” which will be sweeping into various Orlando locations soon. Details to come…