Here For Now: July 2010

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Silk Flowers

"Silk Flowers began in Autumn, 2008, bringing togeter Peter and Aviram of Soiled Mattress and the Springs and Ethan of Car Clutch. During their first year, the band released 2 7"s, an LP on Post Present Medium, a 12" EP on Captured Tracks, and played over 50 shows. For many of these shows, in collaboration with designer Jamil Azim, Aviram created posters; colorful, spooky, unique posters. This full color, 8 1/2" x 11" zine presents the first year of these posters, each reproduced on its own page. In addition, the zine includes an original, 11" x 17" poster from Silk Flowers west coast tour. The accompanying cassette presents exclusive recordings from this first year. The A side presents the full recording of Silk Flowers record release show, from July 2009, recorded professionally by Dan Hewitt. The B side is a 22 minute motorik collage, carefully culled from the bands massive library of practice space recordings. Edited together into a seamless whole, these snippets are transformed from nascent song ideas to a cohesive, hypnotic whole. Edition of 100."

SILK FLOWERS "shadows in daylight" from brian degraw on Vimeo.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Teenage Smoker

Valerie, a commissioned drawing for Chad Merritt

James North art crawl recap

excerpt from Stephanie Vegh's blog for a recap of July's art crawl, a review for my show at Know Your Ghosts Studio

What to all appearances started out as an art student’s apartment-gallery is still going strong in the summer months, with Know Your Ghosts at 255 1/2 James Street North (through the nondescript door then all the way up the stairs) featuring a solo exhibition of drawings by Jason Lee. The many modest portraits in The Middle Ground are refreshingly direct precisely for that very modesty, which allows Lee’s deft draftsmanship to shine through in compositions that balance areas of decadent colour with brief, suggestive line. A more vulnerable, diaristic hanging of loose-leaf drawings presides over a hidden corner of the space, and features here primarily because it was the most easily photographed. If Know Your Ghosts is in this for the long run, I would implore its inhabitant-curator to invest in some decent lighting. And I do hope this space endures for a while longer yet - at the other end of the spectrum from curatorial essays, impromptu galleries in artist apartments can breathe fresh new life into an art community, and Jason Lee’s current showing there is a vital demonstration of that fact.