Tuesday, July 7, 2009

New art show - "I Wish I Could"



Here are some pictures of the show "I wish I could" that I did in conjunction with Stephanie Brachmann and installed the last week of June at the Emerson Space Case in NE Portland.



The previous month we went around and asked people from our community to anonymously finish the sentence "I wish I could..." and put it in the box. The pieces in the show incorporate every single answer we got.



Stephanie and I each did three linoleum cuts of different hands for the prints. She executed her master printing skills for this project and I exercised my much underused cursive skills for the lettering. I actually don't think I've written in cursive since middle school until last month, but now that I have a bunch of fancy pens and ink I'll have to put them to some good use. Maybe finally get around to writing that novel... Anyway, here are a few of my favorite pieces from the show.


















The show will be up until July 25th, 2009. The Emerson Space Case is located at the corner of NE Emerson and NE 30th in Portland, OR, 2 blocks north of Alberta.



Now, for some much needed rest.

5 comments:

Michelle Koury said...

awesome!

chelle marie said...

ilan, this is really rad. i like the simple one hand one the best for some reason.

Unknown said...

I need to bike by it again - I really like how it all looks together - you guys did a great piece.

Sally said...

I really like the idea. At first I thought you were going to draw their wishes or something, which could be neat also. I do like the simplicity of the hands, some of them are done quite beautifully. Im curious to know why you chose hands to represents these wishes? I suppose hands are a symbol for doing things..I made this silly sculpture of my hand with an eye wrapped around it... so I understand the fascination with hands. Anyway, nice piece. Im glad youre getting your work out there!

Ilan S. said...

Well Rosanna, the hands don't really represent the wishes. They represent the people making them. We tried to have some variation in the types of hands we produced so that anyone could identify with them. You can think about it in relation to hand prints being the first form of signatures, even subjects, in cave paintings. We toyed with the idea of representing each wish, but thought we wouldn't do them justice. I've always liked the interplay between words and images anyway.