Barn's Burnt Down

The title of this piece comes from the haiku by the Edo period Japanese samurai and poet, Mizuta Masahide:

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

It is said that in Zen poetry, the moon represents awakened awareness in a Buddhist sense. I have been working with the idea of bewitchment as being a reversal of a spell, a spell breaking, a lifting of a veil. So I found this interesting upon discovering this.

I also like to question why we place animals in certain "good" or "bad" roles, such as the snake.

And mushrooms have always fascinated me. They arrive where there is death, but like the haiku they suggest a phoenix of sorts.

“Barn’s Burnt Down” is a piece that questions binaries and the judgement we place on the objects and interactions we come across: good, bad. But I also want this piece to serve a bit like a vanitas, not simply as a symbol of death or change, but the overarching invitation for the viewer to practice mindfulness and to search themselves for where they place a stranglehold on attempts of control.

“Barn’s Burnt Down” is currently on display at City Arts Factory’s show in the Magic Gallery, “AQUA Exhibit: Central Florida Artists”. This image shows the paper work for the price of the 24” x 36” artwork. I wanted to communicate two concepts by pricing the work in this unconventional way. First, I invite the viewer to question the capitalism of art. Here, I ask the potential buyer to spend something potentially much more valuable: time and self reflection. It is true that I have no way of knowing whether or not any potential buyer actually fulfills the second obligation of the transaction. But this brings up the second point I wish to make: control. We wish to exert control over so many aspects of our lives, especially our interactions between each other. Were I to ask simply for American currency for this piece I couldn’t control what the buyer did to earn that currency. Perhaps I disagreed with the means to that end. I wouldn’t know that, either.

Surely there will be viewers who take offense to my price tag. But those people will never be open to my work. When you try to speak to everyone you end up speaking to no one. As an artist I task myself with jolting viewers and causing them to question what they take for granted while bearing witness to the times in which I find myself surviving daily.

Helping with the template printed from Illustrator.

Due to the nature of the shapes (lots of floating negative space) I did these stencils in reverse order, laying the color down first, then the positive shape, and spraying the surrounding color. I also worked from the shape in the foreground to the shape in the background. Some stencils were cut by hand and others by my machine.

First shape, the fern, is down. I spray around it with gold to prep to lay the second shape down, the skeleton.

Now the skeleton shape is down and I spray areas at the bottom with green and at the top with yellow to prep for the second fern and moons.

Moon shapes are down, fern is down, now everything is covered with a dark blue spray and silver splatters.

Video of me removing everything.

I add the plant on the top shoulder the way I normally do my stencils, using a "negative space stencil", because it would have been too difficult to try to guess where to place it with out having the skeleton down yet.