Upcoming Event: Contain It!

So coming up this Friday I will be doing a live a/v performance at the Contain It Installation Festival in Dunedin. I’ll be installing this week and performing on Friday in a two hour live set featuring the drumming of Zak Hemsteger and Ryann Slauson. I’ll be recording the performance and it will be shown in the space on Saturday. Did I mention that the entire performance will be in a POD? Yes.. you are now excited. I hope to see you there if you are around the are.

Greed is Good.

A collaborative exhibition as part of [ fladry + jones ] dealing with corporate greed, corruption, and the coming collapse of America as we know it.

At the center of the exhibit was the speech from the 1997 film Wall Street. The speech was slowed down to about 50% of what it was originally recorded at. In doing this, it was hoped that the listener would get a sense of fatness from the speaker, commenting in an undefined way on the greediness that exist in corporations. The far wall of the exhibition space was covered in offest prints of $2 bills. These two-dollar bills were absent of text, heavily stylized and the face of President Thomas Jefferson seemingly scratched out; the color of the bill was red instead of green and yellow instead of white. The $2 bill was chosen because of its uncommon existence as common currency. There was also a stack of these posters sitting on the floor when you enter the space, as viewers were allowed to take home a piece of this currency.

Fifty one dollar bills were placed on the walls of the exhibition space and were marked with a corporation name and the dollar amount of a fine or settlement that the company was forced to pay because of unethical business practices. A PowerPoint presentation of companies’ names and fine amounts were also shown in the space. Lastly, a video of Bernie Madoff being escorted to a police car in handcuffs accompanies the Greed is Good speech. Madoff being the poster child for corporate greed, helped to put a face to the exhibition. [September 2009]

Greed is Good. {post-op}

So the show has gone up and down this week.. a quick turnaround is the name of the game. Here are a few photos from the reception.. Barry and I will be doing a performance in Tampa on October 8th and then again on October 23rd in Mobile Alabama at SECAC.. then where will F+J be? I’m not sure.. either are you.

Feel free to visit the site and download all the collateral from the show and remix, redit, and reinvent. I’ll be adding to fladryplusjones.com and this weekend I’ll be sending out posters to those of you who sent your address to us via the Twitter account twitter.com/fladryplusjones.

Special thanks to all who helped get this show in order, without you I would have been sitting around with a box of posters on the ground. Also thanks to Chris Otten for the photos.

The Artist

This public art project consisted of two rear-video-projections onto a storefront window of hands rolling cigars. The history of Tampa is long and varied, and includes the civil war, Spanish American war, and English colonial rule. One of the most defining moments in Tampa’s history however was the cigar industry. With the fire of 1886 in Key West, Tampa’s population almost doubled as the cigar industry took off. Rolling cigars by the “tablatures” (tobacco rollers) was not simply a manual job. The “toreadors” who rolled the finished cigars, especially, thought of themselves as “more of an artist than a worker.” This public art-work harks back to this honorable trade. Showing a manual task on this scale, and repeated, highlights the means of production. In contemporary culture, manual labor is not respected as much as white-collar labor. Tablatures were artists, respected and educated. A larger than life projection of the hands honors this manual trade and expresses the strength and tactility of the task of rolling cigars. This installation was made possible by the Lights on Tampa – Satellites event.

This was a collaborative project with Anat Pollack. The installation was located at The Towers of Channelside in downtown Tampa, Florida. [January 2009]

The Daily Devotion

The Daily Devotion, is a series of 30 videos, one for each day of the month, which contain a central figure that seemed to be engaging an audience. The figures are blurred so the viewer could not tell who was on screen and the audio distorted in a way that you could not understand any of the words they were saying. Human beings are always looking for someone to give us direction and answers – whether it be a religious figure, a parent, a politician or a motivational speaker. We look upon someone else for guidance, but don’t always make the correct choice. [November 2008]