exhibition in tampere, finland

here is the piece Lyndon and I are showing: Marjatta

new video: marjatta

Lyndon Barrois Jr and I collaborated to make this video at Arteles, in Haukijärvi,, Finland:

screenshot of   Marjatta by Lyndon Barrois Jr + Addoley Dzegede

This video will be projected at the Hirvitalo Gallery at Center of Contemporary Art Pispala  in Tampere, Finland, at the end of the month as part of the World of Tango festival.

new year announcements

The holidays, lovely visitors, and various bureaucratic processes have kept me away from my blog and studio. In the hiatus, I have made things to eat and wear and use around the house, as I'm prone to do. But now I'm back!

Great news: Lyndon and I have both been accepted to an artist residency in Finland this upcoming summer. More info to come soon. We're both excited and glad to have something to look forward to...

photo by Stephanie Chambers

photo by Delilah Jones

Currently, I'm working on one of the two pieces I plan to submit for this year's Incognito at The Santa Monica Museum of Art. I have yet to have been able to attend the actual event, but who knows, maybe this year will be the one. Maybe not.

Of course, I've chosen a very tedious and time-consuming process to make this piece, but luckily, its size is limited to 8" x 10". I can't post images of it until after the event (because the whole point is for patrons "to trust their instincts in selecting the works, as each work is signed on the back and the artists’ identities are revealed only after purchase")

For now, take a look at the two I submitted in 2011:

paint samples and ink on illustration board

paint sample collage

Here's to a Happy 2013!

darn it! sock gallery

july 2012

july 2012

june 2012

june 2012

june 2012

june 2012

project: ice cream party

This project was a collaboration between addoley and lyndon in conjunction with graduate students from Washington University's Sam Fox School.

                       

We've noticed that ice cream seems to have a way of heightening emotion and bringing people together. Think to the familiar image of a woman who has just experienced painful rejection crying over a pint of ice cream, or to the other extreme, an image of children chasing an ice cream truck.

A cinnamon heath ice cream played a major role in getting addoley and lyndon together nearly eight years ago in Baltimore. So in this vein, an e-mail was sent requesting proposals for flavors. These flavors were curated down to six:

avocado lime

pink peppercorn honey

bourbon date

cucumber melon

lemongrass vanilla rum

chocolate irish car bomb

Flavors were chosen for their creativity and deliciousness potential - with practical concerns factoring in to weed out flavors involving expensive or meat-based ingredients. Over the course of a month, addoley and lyndon spent many days creating and tasting, inviting participants and other friends to an ice cream party in the afternoon on May 15, 2012. 

By creating homemade ice cream in flavors that were invented (and not commercially available), we sought to create a unique and enriching ice cream experience for our community of friends, which include lyndon's classmates and my coworkers.

side effects for some

you ate it, now rate it
participants rated each flavor on a scale of 1 to 5

my personal favorite

after everyone left, we made milkshakes.

darn it!

 a new project

my very first darn job - may 2012

I think a lot about waste. How I waste. What we waste. Wasted time and wasted money.

And then I had beautiful-but-holey socks that I didn't want to throw away...which led to this project.

Background:

For the past few years, I've primarily been wearing wool socks (specifically smartwool socks) because they are ridiculously comfortable, and when you walk a lot, you need comfortable socks. I like the idea of merino wool: its naturalness and renewability, its thermal and odor-resistant properties (I wear these socks many times before washing them!), its resistance to dirt, and the fact that it grows on sheep.

I first learned about the wonders of merino while living in New Zealand, where sheep are a pretty big deal. L worked in menswear in a department store, and Icebreaker (one of the NZ brands they sold) let each employee pick out any item from their catalog. He got an amazingly thin but warm hoodie that he still loves to wear five years later. It was an incredible to get that for free because, in case you didn't know, merino wool is pretty expensive - but definitely worth it.

It's interesting to think back to the (before mass production) past, when clothes were precious because there were laborious hand-processes required to make or have them made. To make wool socks, someone would have to shear a sheep, wash the wool, hand card it and spin it to make a yarn, dye it and then knit it. After all that, it would be insane to toss a pair of socks out because of a hole. 

So back to my socks. They were expensive (relatively) and treasured, and I didn't want to waste. During a visit to Portland back in January, my mentor Erica Edwards of Quotable Content showed me a wool pair she had darned that had felted together nicely. My mom had talked about darning her underwear during hard times in her twenties, and though, thankfully, times are not too hard for me at the moment, I decided to follow in the footsteps of a tradition of repair and give my socks a longer life. 

I happened to have an orange ball of wool yarn. So I darned them.* And then I darned another pair, and soon enough I could wear those socks again without my toe poking out. I liked the contrast of the new yarn to the old, that it added to the visibility of my work...knowing and seeing that I had done that.

Proposal:

This is where you come in. Send me a worn or holey pair of socks that you love and I will repair them (for free), photograph them, and send them back to you. 

Near the top right of this page is an "E-mail: Click Here" button. E-mail me to get the address to send them to. Tell your friends and co-workers. Send them to this page if they want to know the background story. My only requests are that you only send one pair, and that I can choose whatever color of yarn that I darn well please.

Thank you!

click here to see the darn it sock gallery




*Darning is the name for the method of repairing holes or worn areas in knitting or fabric using a needle and a thread (of a similar material to the original garment).  

a year: as turning pages

We've just reached a turning point in my year, as May just slid around the corner into June.

It's been awhile since I've received any new submissions for the year project, and I'm just now getting around to scanning in the rest.

I expected that some people would visualize the time space of a year in the form of turning pages of a calendar, but so far only received one such submission by mail:

The submitter describes himself as:

• Innovative
• Creative
• Kind
• Humorous
• Extroverted
• Writer
• Intelligent
• Flawed
• Stubborn
• Young

In case you haven't seen the other pages for this project yet, here are links:


a year: as road/line
a year: as loop
a year: as circle
a year: peaks and valleys
and all the lovely outtakes

a year: the outtakes

As I wrote before, most people (so far) treated the theme in a more  metaphorical way than I was attempting to elicit. One reason for some of these responses, I believe, was my timing. I sent many of these cards and directions out just after the new year, which perhaps suggested that I was looking for some kind of recounting of the year that had just ended. Many people mentioned their mood or big challenges or changes that 2011 had brought. Some were filled with new love and happiness. Others with dark clouds of sorrow and loss.

She wrote: 

Still unsure of my path. Within a year had dealt with too much heart break, 

loss of many after an earthquake to my dear grandmother the link to my past. 

Lost, unsure.

In the directions for first few rounds of cards that were sent out, I failed to clarify that I am interested in a diagrammatic representation of how a year spatially lays itself out in thought. 

How do you lay out the upcoming months? 

How do you place yourself within a year at any given time in relation to the rest of the year?  

Of course a line, a loop, a hill or a circle are all metaphors for a year as well, but what these drawings do is demonstrate how each person spatially lays out that span of time in their mind, which was the aim of this project. 

A few people claimed that they do not actually "see" a year or any span of time at all, or that the image is not solid enough to document....that it sort of disappears the moment they try to capture it. Others told me that they are pretty sure they used to lay out a year a certain way, but it had become fuzzy after years of relying on digital calendars to plan out their days, months and years.  I find all of this to be of interest. 

 response from:
Editor, Brooklyn Resident, Single, DJ

As for the more symbolic and recapitulatory responses, I decided to have this page as a place to give them a chance to be displayed as well.  The nouns and adjectives each person used to describe themselves are captioned under their image.

Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to participate so far!

29, Designer, Partnered, Artist/Creator
Jared Zimmerman

she wrote:
Cambridge, Boston, johannesburg, Den Haag, Portland, Paris,
D.C., Warsaw, Berlin, Baltimore, Mechanicville, Maryland, Virginia, West Springfield

see more of her cut paper work

on the back, he wrote:

Visual Map of 2011 by Shannon Badiee

(Many Life Changes)

• Single/Partnered
• Female
• Age 32
• Non-Religious
• Very liberal political leanings
• I like esoteric leanings
• ENFP
• Hobo Queen at heart
• New/Now-Age
• Civil Servant

The thoughtful submission below arrived in a beautifully lined envelope. The year, here, is seen symbolically, with the old year and self shedding to make room for the new:

on the back, she wrote:

                 

                

D D B A

So faintly written that you can barely see it, came the word "hope" from New Zealand:

on the back, he wrote, "gotta try + hope!"

more optimism

male
citizen

he wrote:
son, N.O., Partyman, Brother