Puppets / found materials, papier-mâché, paint, wood / October, 2010
Will Black Sheep Return?
Video from 2nd Black Sheep Puppet Festival, 2000
The Black Sheep Puppet Festival took place from 1999 through 2008 at the Brew House, Pittsburgh. Puppeteers from across the country converged on the South Side during the month of October for performances, workshops, and impromptu happenings. Black Sheep introduced Pittsburgh to puppetry with an activist edge. The collaborative nature of the event made it difficult to compare with anything else in town. Black Sheep offered a critical view of society, without the pretentious layers of the art world. It operated as far as it could be directed from the corporate, commercial world. It was driven by the hard work of organizers, who volunteered hundreds of hours to see it through.
Perhaps the festival will return on a small scale and gradually build up to a city-wide event.
Grand Guignol
I’m bringing the puppets back for an appearance at the New Hazlett Theater’s Halloween Party (Pittsburgh) on October 22nd, 2010. I’ll be playing a Punch and Judy-style show, plus a show that invites the audience to participate. The event theme is Grand Guignol, Theatre of the Macabre. It should be a great party!
For event details, check out the New Hazlett Website.
Warning! This puppet show is not for children.
Abstract Sculpture
Over the past year, my sculptural works have become a lot more abstract, but still retain some of the whimsical elements of puppetry. Being close to the Dia Beacon Museum and Storm King Sculpture Park may have influenced me somewhat. Unlike the unwieldy steel sculptures of Serra and DeSuvero, these are made out of wood, (sometimes found scraps) paint, glue, screws, and often an electric motor. They are easy to move, but are not suitable for outdoor exhibition.
When I make these, I don’t make drawings or sketches first. I work piece by piece as if I am drawing three dimensionally. I have a general shape in my head, like an old piece of farm machinery or rusty mechanical device that I recall from post-industrial Western PA. These three are Tiller, Gear and Chopper. Tiller and Gear appeared in abstrACTION, a show curated by Dara Meyers Kingsley that took place at the Arts Exchange, Westchester NY, over the summer.
Tiller, Gear, Chopper, 2010
press:
Celebrating Artists Who Keep the Action in Abstraction, New York Times
Filed under Art
Oil Spill Response
I submitted this piece to the Visual Response to the Gulf Oil Disaster show curated by the Foster Collective at Landslide Gallery in Chicago. (July 23rd through August 13th 2010) The show required artists to create responses to the oil spill on gas station paper towels. I think this was a great idea. The Foster Collective did a fantastic job of covering the event on their blog.
http://fostercollective.blogspot.com/
The show now travels to the Flying Monkey Art Center in Huntsville, AL. (Saturday October 16th from 4-6pm at The 2nd Floor Connector Gallery in The Flying Monkey Arts Center. Show runs through November 3rd.)
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today…
I encountered a grown man talking into a lobster microphone. It was a big red lobster attached to a megaphone. He told me a story about his mother’s talent for portrait painting and awarded a stranger with nice shoes a pot of yellow flowers. She seemed baffled by the gesture. After that I purchased a package of tapioca starch for seventy-five cents at the Asian grocery. The stuff works great for making paper-mâché. After running into the man with the lobster I didn’t feel so strange carrying around a couple puppets in my computer bag.
While driving home, I noticed a sign for the fifty-two million dollar lottery prize. Buying a ticket was tempting, but I only had twenty-five cents left after purchasing the tapioca. When I arrived, I watched MTV Cribs for about five minutes. A man was sitting on an outdoor toilet facing the ocean on a private island in the Bahamas. I turned off the TV and made some campanelle with tomato sauce.
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Time Travel to 2002
This shot was taken during installation of a piece at the MF in December of 2002. I didn’t have any gray hair then. It was right before the war in Iraq began. I was dealing with issues concerning the media spin on the impending war. What a disaster!
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Tom Sarver 