Tepid Tap Water

A New Life for Nooks of Decay with @acommonname

To see more of Paige Smith’s crystalline-inspired works, follow @acommonname on Instagram.

Graphic designer-turned-multimedia artist Paige Smith (@acommonname) has lost count of her “urban geodes” that occupy the nooks and crannies of decay in places as far-flung as Bali, Madrid and Istanbul.

It all began three years ago in downtown Los Angeles, where Paige was living. “I started noticing the cracks and holes and decaying surfaces of our buildings, and that no one seemed to be paying attention to them,” she says. “The idea clicked to utilize these spaces and create something beautiful.”

Paige started by using a paper-cutting and folding technique called kirigami to create three-dimensional installations that look like geodesic formations. While she still prefers this method for her large-scale installations, her process has evolved to incorporate crystals of silicon-molded resin. The resulting works draw attention by juxtaposing inorganic formations that appear natural against the backdrop of a deteriorating man-made landscape.

Reports suggest this document is about to be taken down from Pastebin. Pasting it here.

———

We are some cis and trans women and non-binary poets in the Bay Area who are concerned about ongoing issues of misogyny and gender/sexual violence in our communities.

All Things Grids: In addition to the work of Charles Gaines, this blog will highlight the work of artists who incorporate the grid. United by the theme of a “grid aesthetic”, the works featured represent a cross section of movements, generations and materials, and demonstrate the varied use of the grid in modern and contemporary art.

Ellen Gallagher, They Could Still Serve, 2001

"Gallagher has simultaneously adopted the grid and reversed its rigorous use by a former generation of Minimalist and Conceptualist artists: her patches of blue lined paper form a grid pattern, but it is liquefied, disassembled, blurred, and dematerialized with watercolor. Among the papers’ blue lines are small marks, a repeated stereotyped sign of race drawn from minstrelsy: wide eyes peering out at the viewer. These signs are paradoxically at once free floating and mapped in her grid structures. They Could Still Serve takes its title from an etching in Francisco de Goya’s series The Disasters of War (1810–20), a caustic meditation on the brutality and futility of human warfare.”