click here to go to the Exactitudes site or watch the video below. (Thanks Christian!)

Hello All! I wanted to mention for those of you not on my email list that there's a very special event at Relish Design tonight. I'll be on hand, along with Dinah Coops, Leah Nobilette, Moufelt, and Stubbornworks, showing, telling and selling my collages from my residency earlier this year at the Julia and David White Foundation in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. I will also bring a few of my original necklaces and sculptures. Relish will continue to show my collages and necklaces, but tonight's the only night I'll be around to tell you all about them. Please stop in and say hello! Click here for more info.

Hey Beautiful People! Last weekend I ventured out of the studio not once, but twice--which is a rare event these days. Saturday night was my very favorite annual Portland event: Junk to Funk. I couldn't make last year's event due to a family gathering, but this year there was no stopping me.

I have a very special place in my heart for this event partly because one of the participants every year is someone who is very special to me, Jen LaMastra, who gives me the best haircuts I've had in my life. Not only that, it's really fun to hear her conceive of and create her crazy submissions for this competition where 30 people create amazing outfits out of items otherwise destined for the landfill. (I read an alarming story in the Oregonian today about local recycling woes--maybe this is our solution!)

Jen's ensemble that you see here is titled: "Miss Reverb Fever." It was made out of hundreds of Cds and DVDs. The pieces were cut with a band saw and drilled to make sequin holes and then sewn onto a pair of pants built out of old curtains and fabric scraps. The coat is made out of hair she swept up off of her salon floor for the past two months, which she then bleached, colored, and sewed onto reused denim to make a bolero coat.

The wig is made out of spiral notebook springs, passed on from a news reporter/sustainable junkie, who unwound all his notebooks from YEARS of writing-- recycled the paper, and saved the wire springs in a shoe box, waiting to figure out how to recycle them.

If you're in the portland area, you can view, "Miss Reverb Fever" at Montavilla Sewing Center in Gresham. It will be on display as marketing for a design class that Jen is co-teaching with Sharon Blair, (Professor/sewing guru) at Art Institute of Portland.

There will undoubtedly be more pictures from Junk to Funk available on the web in the next week. If I come across a nice collection, I'll be sure to let you know. (Thanks to Corey Ravens for these adorable pictures of Jen.)

Hey all! I had a great time tonight at the opening for the Sitka Art Invitational. I even sold some work, including my big piece I showed you the other day. That was actually a bittersweet experience because I wasn't quite ready to let it go yet. Oh well--hope it gets a happy home! Here's some more pictures I took at the event, which will be open only through this weekend so get on up the hill, see some work by the region's finest, and support a great organization. Click here for more information.










work by Deborah Horrell, Allen Kinast, Shanon Schollian, John and Robin Gumaeleus, Dana Lynn Louis, Thomas Orr, Mar Goman, Andrew Hayes.

I have to give a special! shout! out! to OPENWIDEpdx, the side project of Calvin Ross Carl, a local artist who takes some of the greatest shots of Portland art openings I've ever seen and posts them on this blog. I know I'm giving all props to Calvin here, but I must mention that just as many of the great images are taken by Chelsea Linehan. What I love the mostest is the way it captures the big event--the opening night--including people experiencing the art rather than just droll publicity shots of what the artist or gallery typically submits for public consumption. Seeing the shots Calvin has taken of my two most recent shows in Portland has made me think again about what makes a good image to document an installation. He took one of my favorite shots of my recent Natural Selection show simply because it is the only image I have that captured the way it felt that night to see people experience the show from both inside and outside the greenhouse structure. Right now the OPENWIDE blog has some beautiful images of shows by Storm Tharp and Dan Gilsdorf, which just make me want to crawl out of my studio and see them in person.

Don't miss the images from Bruce Conkle's latest show at Rocks Box that I went to, loved, meant to blog about, but all of my fall gallery picks have gotten swallowed in the whirlwind economy that I'm determined to poke in the eye with a large sharp stick! Before I go, I gotta give a plug out to my new favorite fall brew, Full Sail's Wassail. It's a great recession-priced beer (unless you don't mind supporting the McCain campaign) and sports a lovely wintry image of Mt. Hood on the neck.

I dropped my work off today for this weekend's Sitka Art Invitational and started to get excited for the opening event this Friday. That's because I ran into several friends there (Deborah Horrell, Dana Lynn Louis, Lori Mason and Allen Kinast) whose work I love and it feels like it's going to be a really great year. Economic crisis be damned!

I brought five pieces altogether--three of them are works that I pulled from the final cut for Natural Selection because they didn't seem to fit with the rest of the group. I still think they're strong, just a little more...two dimensional...or something like that. I have to show you one of them that I'm particularly excited about--remember my blogging about it last summer, dear readers? It was a spectacular large one about exhibitionism. Last weekend I ditched the multicolor palette that just wasn't working and painted it a glorious dark dark almost metallic brown with some areas lightened slightly for contrast.

click here for more information on this annual event to support a fantastic organization!

Hey Beautiful People! For my current show at the Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, I delved just a bit into the wild world of model trains. It was a task made much simpler by my dear grandfather who always shows us the train scene he built with my cousin Brandon when we go visit him. I wish I had a picture because it's soooo cute the way he has it rigged up on pulleys in his shop so it's out of the way when he has work to do, but can be lowered when an admiring crowd is handy.

This experience didn't convert me completely, although I must admit I have long been a fan of the kind of hobby store that sells model trains for many years because I sometimes find things that work well in my mixed media repertoire. In the Portland area, I highly recommend The Whistle Stop on SE Division which has the largest inventory I have ever seen.

Christian had heard about an annual show in Portland put on by the Columbia Gorge Model Railroad club and last weekend it finally opened. This is an amazing full room model of the Columbia Gorge and you'll see many familiar towns and buildings here. My understanding is that this modular N scale layout lives in the basement of the Hobbysmith Hobby shop in NE Portland. It only lets the public come in for a peek on weekends right before Christmas when it moves to a building on Vancouver Ave that looks like a little train station.

This year's exciting addition is a drive-in theater with actual moving images on a tiny screen. (video, not projected, but still--I love the effort.) In the section of Portland, there's an accurate replica of Union Station that is a nice homage to this beautiful Portland building. Christian noticed this unusual scene on the sidewalk out front that looks like some sort of mugging. Hmm....

I liked this groovy orange pants suit worn by this woman who is about to partake in some of Portland's world-class public transportation.


The show is only $5 to get in the doors. Yes, it's not your typical art show, but if you're sentimental about the beautiful region we live in, I think it's a really great way to show some local pride. For more information, visit their website by clicking here.

Here's my little election night party...just me and the pup crying some tears of joy as our country made history. Yesterday wrapped up work on my latest show at the Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Craft--but no rest for me--I'm back in the studio today finishing up four pieces for the Sitka Art Invitational next week, as well as some new neckpieces for a holiday event at Relish on the 18th.

I stopped by Ogle today to pick up the last of my things and saw that Val had taken down most of the letters that had been on the wall for the past two months. Good thing I had my camera with me! As we speak, the greenhouse is on a truck headed south of the border.

My mind is blown a little bit. Lets take a moment to collect ourselves……Ready? Rjdj is a new iphone app. Why is that special? It does something new….and by new I mean you have never experienced anything like this. The short answer is that your thoughts get placed into a ambient landscape. Lets step through this: 1. install rjdj [...]

Hardy of Dead Confederate This episode of the Pampelmoose edition of the New Music Hour on Portland’s 94.7FM is slightly shorter as we had special guests Dead Confederate in the studio to play an acoustic version of The Rat. After the show Squid and I saw them put on an amazing show at the Doug Fir. [...]

You Will Be Pwned by RemoteTreeChildren My buddy John Askew, who plays alongside me in Faux Hoax with Menomena’s drummer Danny Seim, has a band Tracker as well as running FILMguerrero, spent whatever free time he didn’t have recently working on an album called ‘Veteran of the Loudness Wars’ by RemoteTreeChildren. When you visit the band’s [...]

In one of those weird twists of coincidence, I was having dinner last night with Dave Dederer, he of The Presidents of The USA fame and now of Melodeo, when he brought up the Monochrome Set. It has been a while since I’d thought about these dour, post-punkers. After dinner I went home and dug [...]

Camille. Pic Banu Cennetoglu More new music from the second of last week’s Pampelmoose edition of the New Music Hour on Portland’s 94.7FM. I’m on 94.7FM with resident DJ Squid every Tuesday and Thursday at 8PM. This is the show from Thursday November 13th. For more local and Northwest music you can also tune in to [...]

My favorite local kick-ass, proto-punk outfit The Thermals, have changed teams moving from Seattle’s Sub Pop to Portland’s Kill Rock Stars. There’s a new album underway that should see the light of day around April 2009. After three albums on Sub Pop, ‘More Parts Per Million,’ Fuckin’ A’ and ‘The Body, The Blood, The Machine,’ [...]

The Moose’s favorite modern folk singer, Alela Diane, has signed to Rough Trade for the USA, Canada and Japan. “Rough Trade Records is pleased to announce the forthcoming release from Alela Diane. Her new album, To Be Still, will be in-stores on February 17, 2009. Here’s the story: Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade Records, says “Alela [...]

Another fine post from Nilina Mason-Campbell - - It’s never too early to get into the Christmas spirit, right? I mean Thanksgiving is just around the corner meaning holiday shopping will soon be in full swing. To help us, as we inch along in the season, is 22 year old Brazilian Fernando Nogari with his [...]