"Ace Me" / Installation at RAC / August 2011

"Ace Me" / Acrylic and oil on panel / 5' X 5' / 2011

Group show at the Regional Arts Commission,

St. Louis, Missouri, August 2011

Creative Stimulus Project,

Critical Mass for the Visual Arts

♥

“Ace Me”

– A sinfonietta of paintings, drawings, photographs, and books

“Ace me:” a cocky gauntlet, a whispered plea, surrendered, confident, raising the bar, have my all.   Sort of like but way beyond: bedroom’s ‘F*** Me’, or checker’s ‘King Me!!!!’  Here — My life is on the line.  What is worth it? How do I do it?

For years I’d bike Manchester and only see those first two syllables of the ACE METAL building; that sweet mandate phrase would come foreground, percolate, ring around me. Hence the seed intention to create large paintings of places in STL that light me up like that — sites that tether me in love with here, sites that hold either the memory of, or capacity for, a mundane/mystical sacred space.   I envisioned creating a series of paintings as ‘portals’ to amply explore that vein of consciousness that the place and its energetic implications dangled to come near.

And, life complies ~ ~ as I began the first painting~ ~ an unexpected plot twist, a serious illness, changed the lens through which I investigated sacred space.  “Body as temple” became foreground as I inquired, “well then, how to live this ‘Ace-me’…??”  Tending to my own skin with the mercy I’d only thought to offer others.   Letting threads be drawn between the planet’s pain and my own.   Loving what it is, not just it’s potential. The mandate became my mantra as I embarked on the daily persistence, patience, tenacious faith, and self-nurture required for a healing journey.  The world opened as I came alive to the power of the plant world, and to the power of the feminine spirit to lead us back to balance. Art as a place to practice asking.

For the first time I’m sharing “books” I love to make – taped and sewn heaps of sketches and visual detritus that flow through my studio as I make.  I typically consider them an accidental byproduct of the ‘real work’ but share them now as a vulnerable window to my process, as well as a curious waymarker in an increasingly paperless age.

"stLight" / Photograph and oil on canvas / 8" X 16" / 2011

Above: "Baubo" / Oil on metal with cardboard and magnet/ 8" X 10" / 2011 Below: "Voila" / Oil and collage on canvas/ 6" X 6" / 2011