Friday, July 24, 2009

State Fair Art -- Waiting for 2009

The Minnesota State Fair is just about a month away, so I thought I'd run some photos I took last year at the Fair's juried art show.

I'm not sure how many state fairs have an art show any more. (Let alone high-quality crop art!)

The word HONESTY made up of little tubes in a metal grid
Clever, clever, clever. Interactive, conceptual, and attractive. If you hadn't guessed, those are dollar bills rolled up and pushed into a wire grid to create the "pixels" of each letter.

Two conjoined sock monkeys, one leg stuck in a meat grinder, brown and white yarn coming out the business end of it
I loved this two-headed sock monkey (experiencing an unfortunate meeting with a meat grinder).

In December of last year at the No Coast Craft-o-Rama, I met the artist, Rebecca Yaker, and didn't even realize she had also created the meat grinder monkeys until just now when I looked back through my State Fair photos and recognized her signature style.

Large black and white image of an elderly woman's face, close up
There's a secret about this image. Looking at it from a distance, I thought, Oh, that's an interesting photograph, but I wasn't overly impressed. But when I got closer I realized it wasn't a photograph at all, but rather a super-realistic pencil drawing. Millions of tiny little lines. Ouch.

Looking forward to this year's show!

1 comment:

Becky said...

By the time I saw the "Honesty" work, several of the dollar bills had been pilfered - though not as many as you might imagine. Thanks for reminding me of this piece; I thought it was particularly clever, as well, especially given the very public format in which it was hanging.