Untitled (painted shadows) preparatory drawing for B'Low Me, The Fire Show (1999) group show

illustration for, untitled (painted shadows) installation

Oh such wonderful failures are we. This is a preparatory drawing for an untitled installation planned for The Fire Show at B'low Me in the summer of 1999. This timely little space occupied a smallish 2 bedroom apartment that was located on the edge of Wicker Park in a house set back from Bosworth Street north of Blackhawk. The main event for the Fire Show was several artist performers that had travelled up from St Louis. They would be displaying pyrotechnic based work along with a few other Chicago artists that were also invited to participate. The untitled installation in this drawing consisted of a wooden harp back chair that is painted red and superimposed with a black floor painting of the chairs shadow. Behind them was to be wall painting of an empty text balloon in both red and black.
The piece in the drawing was passed over in favor of another work, Hot Foot. It incorporated an empty bookcase and several cedar shingles each with stylized drawings of flames. These shingles were a high concept cell animation intended to activate a work on the theme of the Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451 and the Truffaut film of the same name. Like much of the work that I was exploring at the time these pieces were immediate reflections of my interests in purpose and intention as it could frame and be framed by meaning, context, or narrative. Like much of that work these also relied at least superficially on establishing relationships with immediate culture to establish a baseline by which objects, actions, and relationships could be assessed by the viewer.

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