Getting Ready For North On 71

It's almost here.  North On 71 is about to open.  Let's take a look back and see what all was involved in making the show a reality.

There are a lot of moving pieces required to pull off an art show under the best of circumstances with plenty of lead time.  North On 71 has been brought to fruition in under 120 days.  That kind of turn around is only possible with everyone involved moving in the same direction and a ton of hard work.

Right out of the gate Brant Weiland and Tia Calkins took ownership of painting and organizing the pedestals for the show.  It is an easy sentence to say, but just those two tasks took these two many, many hours over the course of several days to complete.  Painting.  Drying.  Sanding.  Painting. Drying.  Sanding.  Stacking.  Organizing.......

......really, I mean organizing......

........and painting........

......and organizing.........

And that was just here at our home base.  We also made several trips down to the venue to build walls,  hang sheet rock, mud, sand, and paint.

Veronica Watkins making sure the new temporary walls are up to snuff.

Bobby Tso and Melody Monroe assembled, organized, and touched up the pedestals (also no small task).

David Harris getting in on the mudding and sanding action too.

The walls are starting to take shape.

Brad Watkins taking a quick break from mudding the walls.

Mr. Mac McClanahan, the gracious owner of the exhibition space (The Art Statuary Building), and a fellow artists/potter/ceramicist using his forklift skills to move a BIG table out of the way.

Mac has been extremely helpful, generous, and good-natured about this whole process.  A thousand 'thank yous' don't begin to do the job of conveying our gratitude to him.

A panoramic shot of the space as it starts to take shape.

.....mmmmmmm, more mudding.......

With the space nearly ready, it is time to start placing work.

The work is almost set.  We hope to see you at North On 71!

North On 71: Artist Profile -Brant Weiland

One of the artists in North On 71 is Brant Weiland.  Brant knows a thing or two about clay.

His piece, Family Portrait is featured on the postcard for North On 71 (center image).

One of Brant's projects this past Fall utilized a couple hundred pounds of chain made out of un-fired clay (greenware).  He wanted to use the chain to form the shape of the United States (the lower 48 anyway) as a vehicle for examining/discussing borders, boundaries and limitations.

His hope was to set it up on the campus at Northwest Missouri State University and have people interact with this highly recognizable shape/symbol.  By interact, I mean trample on until it was powder and discuss the meaning of borders and eroding/changing boundaries.

So Brant created a big ole stencil of the United States and laid out the chain around its perimeter.

With everything in place on a Friday morning in October, we set out at Zero Dark Thirty and installed (Un)-Obstructed.

A few hours later, this is what (Un)-Obstructed looked like.  By the end of the day, it was basically a dusty outline.

You can check out a larger sampling of Brant's work by clicking on this LINK to his website.

A couple more shots of some of Brant's recent work.  The image directly below is Heavy from a recent show that Brant had The Chautauqua Visual Arts Institution.

This is an early iteration of Chain Piece #3.

Let's see what Brant is working on for North On 71....

...... a bigger, better, badder version of Chain Piece #3.......

Normally I like to finish a post with a cool image like the one above, but I snagged this image in almost Ninja/Paparazzi-like fashion of Brant first thing in the morning working on a bowl.....His look says it all.

Check out Brant Weiland's installation of Chain Piece #3, along with Heavy, and Family Portrait as part of North On 71.