To Know the Spiders Folding Invitation

The folding mailers I designed for the show have gone out. I really like designing this kind of ephemera. If you want one sent to you, email me: julian@montagueprojects.com

Thinking About Car Design

The guy who is printing my show is a classic car aficionado, as a result, I have been talking about cars a lot over the last several days. I know nothing about cars, I can't even drive stick, but I do appreciate them from a design standpoint. So, in an act of utter procrastination I just spent the last hour or so, doing Google image searches for cars that I think are cool.

Comparative Anatomy

Images from A Comparative View of the Human and Animal Frame by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, published in 1860. Plates can be viewed at the University of Wisconsin Library website here. Found through BibliOdyssey.

Bankrupt Offices

Cool pictures of bankrupt offices by photographer Phillip Toledano here. Via Boing Boing.

Hyping up the Spiders

These are a few of my spider photos from the past year, they're a byproduct of my To Know the Spiders project.

Reconsidering Hall and Oates

The LA Times has a nice piece about an alleged Hall & Oates revival, or what is really the slowly emerging critical acceptance of their work. I realized that I actually liked H&O after watching a VH1 Behind the Music about them several years ago. Their songs hold up far better than contemporaries like Phil Collins or Toto. And of course the historical revisionism of Yacht Rock has made me think about them in a new way.

Check out this arty non-performance of "She's Gone."

A Dramatic Afternoon on New York State's West Coast

The sky was dramatic this afternoon, I took a bike ride down to the lake front to take pictures.

Cutting Edge Bird Feeder Designs

Check out the cutting edge bird feeder designs at Notcot.org. Our bird feeder cost $6 and seems to work pretty well, but someday I would love to be able to upgrade to one of these.

Rainy Lehrman

This piece by Rainy Lehrman is one of my favorites from the Socrates show. She made it by compacting layers of sawdust. It is strong enough to walk on but it will degrade over the summer, although I'm not sure what that will be like. I look forward to seeing the piece again in a few weeks.

Getting it Together

I'm over half way done making the 36 banners I will have in the show.

A scene from the studio.

I need to cut roughly 150 Helvetica characters out of black felt.

The TKTS specimen notebook

Sorry the posting has slowed down a bit. I'm in the final stages of getting To Know the Spiders together and it seems to be taking up all of my mental space. I'm on schedule but I still have a couple of crucial decisions to make and quite a bit of cutting and ironing to do.

Miwa Koizumi

I recently met Brooklyn-based Japanese artist Miwa Koizumi while we were both installing our pieces at Socrates Sculpture Center. I've since become a great admirer of her work, check out her content rich website. The pieces she made at the park, like the ones above, are fantastic re-workings of plastic bottles.

This hasty installation shot I took at Socrates does not do the justice to the piece. There are three drums in all.

Countdown to the Spiders

Now that Socrates is done, all of my energies are focused on preparing for my next show, To Know the Spiders, (June 5-July 12, Black & White Gallery, Chelsea). I just designed the invitation mailer which I think is going to be pretty cool. I have a lot to get done in the next three weeks.

Here is the gallery's press release text:

Investigations into overlooked realms of daily life, continues to be at the heart of Montague's art practice. In his highly acclaimed The Stray Shopping Cart Identification System project exhibited in the fall of 2006 at Black & White Gallery, Montague's method was to build a system of classification around a mundane object. In To Know the Spiders, Montague mounts a visual exploration of seemingly mundane animals – the spiders that occupy the peripheries of human architectural space. His process begins with the collection and killing of a spider. He then studies its face under a microscope and from the resulting drawings creates a portrait of the spider in the form of a fabric banner. The banner is then placed and photographed in the exact spot of collection. The banner illuminates the presence of a silent witness and sometime symbiotic partner while also serving as a memorial to the spider that had to die for that understanding to be gained.

Re-capping 12 days at Socrates Sculpture Park

The park had 3 tents that fit over my pieces, towards the end it allowed us to work through the night in the rain and wind.

This is me in the outfit I wore every single minute of everyday I was working on this project. And due to the fact that we were still putting trim on the pieces as the opening was starting, it is also the outfit I wore to the opening.

This is me drilling air holes (for the plants) in half inch Plexiglas at 3 in the morning

This is my friend Michael Baumann, I hired him to help me build the pieces. If I had not had him with me I would have been totally screwed. Micheal is an artist, DJ, contractor, handyman and a bunch of other things, he knows what he is doing when it comes to building (I don't). He stuck with the project until the very end, working way more hours than I could afford to pay him. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

This is Michael and myself at the after party in Green Point, we had both been up for two days and were deliriously tired. Michael was actually an hour or so late to the bar because he fell asleep in his car (not while it was moving). My lips were badly cracked from being outside in the wind for days, and the sudden appearance of the sun at the opening had given me a sunburn.

Hipsters chillaxin as the opening winds down.

These are Michael's dogs (actually the one on the right is Patricia's dog). They were on the work site with us everyday.