The Spinybacked Orbweaver

I'm in Florida at the moment

State of America Prints Round 2 / Set 6

Available on PrintCollection.com

Our Florida Odyssey

We are on day 14 of our Florida odyssey we will arrive home on Sunday night. We have visited St. Augustine, Gainesville, Miami, Key West, the Everglades, and St. Petersburg. We seen a lot of relatives and a lot of art (in Miami). I have also done a fair amount of thrifting for books, I'll be back to regular blogging soon. Somewhat perversely, I'll be flying back to Florida the morning after we return to attend the opening of a show I'm in at the Norton Museum of art in Palm Beach. The show is called Now What? and it was curated from art in the Miami art fairs. The curators selected my 11 faux books from Black & White Gallery's booth at the Pulse fair. I was pleasantly surprised, they only took five artists' work from Pulse. I sold 8 books at the fair which was also a nice surprise, I wasn't sure how collectors would interact with them as art.

Driving through Everglades

Alligators in the Everglades on a cold day

Part of the outdoor Rainbow City installation by FriendsWithYou in Wynwood in Miami

Key West

Stingray in St. Petersburg

Family

I took some odd pictures of my cousins, while in Florida for Christmas.

In & Out of Buffalo & St. Petersburg

This was a long, weird week, particularly in terms of experiencing weather. I spent last Sunday riding my bike in near blizzard conditions, and shovelling snow, then Monday night I flew to St. Petersburg, Florida where my relatives gather for Christmas. The weather in St. Pete was in the 70s all week. When I returned to Buffalo last night (at Midnight) it was 60 degrees and almost all the snow was gone. This morning I was awakened by the house shaking from high winds. I always find this unnerving, I imagine the house moving and pulling away from the chimney. But then I remind my self that this structure has withstood this kind of treatment for 118 years, and that it's unlikely that this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. The high winds also caused a seiche event, I haven't checked but it looks like the lake level was up by about seven feet. I went to photograph the lake around 11 am and it was violently frothing, images below.

Our car after the driveway dig out Monday, December 22

Peace River, Florida, December 26

Grapefruits from my Grandparents' backyard tree, the enormous one weighs 2.5 pounds!

View of the lake from LaSalle Park. The lake was up by about six feet when this photo was taken.

Wave spray in a restaurant parking lot on Lakeshore Road, Hamburg.

Wind blown powerlines

View of Buffalo and Lackawanna from Hamburg Town Park

Hamburg Town Park

The Fairs

We got back from Miami yesterday afternoon. We had a good time and saw a tremendous amount of art. I skipped the Miami/Basel convention center (A.J. went), but we both attended NADA, both Aqua Fairs, Art Miami, Photo Miami, Scope, Art Asia and the Art Positions Containers on the beach. It all gets a bit repetitive after a while. Most people seem to feel the need to judge fairs as a whole, this one was good, that one was bad, yadda yadda. I have a hard time looking at the fairs that way, I basically just try to to remember individual artists that I like. I will, however, say that the containers were awful. The one exception was Martha Friedman's huge rubber bands in Wallspace's container (and I'm not just saying that because we are both in the Armand Bartos show, the giant rubber bands were cool). The whole thing seemed more low key than last year (Recessionista!), although I heard that Jay-Z and Shakira were among the celebrities spotted at the big fair, and that has to qualify as encouraging.

Some of the ephemera collected over the course of three days of intense art tourism

This is the dreamiest, weirdest iPhone photo I have taken so far, a cloud and its reflection on the Gulf of Mexico.

Low Rollers

View of Miami from the art shuttle as it crosses the MacArthur Causeway

The Aqua Hotel, home of the Aqua Art Fair. I had work here with Black & White Gallery. I've only been in the hotel during the art fair (each room is taken over by a gallery), but I'd really like to stay there under normal conditions sometime.

A.J.and a new friend at Aqua Wynwood.

me

This lucky guy snagged a hammock outside the NADA fair. It was a very pleasant scene in the NADA garden. While we were sitting there drinking beer, Brian Eno's Here He Comes from Before and After Science drifted out of the sound system.

Randomness from my Holga

I'd forgotten about this roll of film that I shot last Fall with my Holga camera. I just had it developed and the results are fairly unspectacular. The pictures were taken on a six week spider hunting road trip through the South. The picture of the MacDonald's sign reminds me of work by my Chicago friend Matt Siber. The bottom picture is of my grandmother and at least 2 other exposures.