WEN RODGERS

[David Stafford]

I received this today from Wen though I had to track the address down to identify them. It's really a suite of sweet pieces beginning with this…

…tender rendering of two farmers dancing as the mighty Sligo Creek meanders by in foreground. 

A sandpo sketch of Wen's Mind Refinery where puns are ground down into high tensile industrial products. Hello, Wen. And on the backside:

This says "Lost Simian Rower" Then underneath that: "This placemat was designed to protect surfaces from food debris. (while transfers of bad ideas are not a given,) surface destruction is still likely. Use with care. Hello. Note: High Horizon Hi Hello." Thank you, Wen. This piece has been gestating (See below) for some time. About a year. It was well worth the wait. Wen has also blogged this piece and their exposition may carry more water than mine.

Wen's Blog

Still, you can never have too many perspectives on something as elastic as art.

[David Stafford]

My thoughts weren't so elevated I'm afraid. We went to see Snowpiercer last night. It's the latest film from Joon-Ho Bong and I recommend it highly though it is violent. (Girlfriend hated it.) Based on a French graphic novel, it's equal parts preposterous, silly, thought-provoking and cinematic in the way that Mad Max was, viscera-grabbing excitement mixed with up-to-the minute metaphorical allusions to our own lopsided economic order. As brainfood it probably lacks high nutritional value but I recommend it nonetheless. Something in the film, I'm not sure what exactly, prompted me to think about the way we deal with things (or don't deal with them), leaving parts of the human puzzle for the "cleaners" to work out. (Cleaner: reference to Harvey Keitel's role in Pulp Fiction). Mental illness, for example. In this part of the world the Albuquerque police department has killed almost twenty people over the past couple of years (we made the NYT), many of them mentally ill. Of course, it's grotesque and the department has been rightly blamed for the deaths but really, this is, it seems to me, how we have set up the system to function. In other words, we have cut the mentally ill loose and left them for the "cleaners" to cope with. To be clear, I am not attacking deinstitutionalization, nor am I defending the police, I'm just reporting on what I see to be the case: our preferred method as a society for dealing with mental illness is to have the police take care of them or more bluntly to have them killed.

[WA Rodgers]

There's a great article on creativity, intelligence, and insanity in the Atlantic:http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/06/secrets-of-the-... ...I vote for all three, but I think that it's a pretty tough life to cart around too much insanity, especially for the cannibalistic/homicidal.

[David Stafford]

Hmmm,,, I was just thinking about the criminally insane last night.

[WA Rodgers]

      Oh, how apt!

[David Stafford]

I'm not really familiar with it but it was the largest river in your vicinity so I went with it for the sake of realismo...

[WA Rodgers]

Hi, David. I got it, and it rocks!  Thanks - I am intrigued by the Anacostia River connection.... Really, anything could surface there....

[David Stafford]

wen,

I work this way as well...what happens with me is: the unfinished piece slithers away and hides under piles of paper where it gestates, morphs and comes to fruition. (Random cleaning can sometimes I expedite the gestation process.) When the piece finally emerges it flies away to its intended home. Thanks again. I just sent out a Murder Mystery to you this morning. Estimated Gestation Period: 24 Hours.

[WA Rodgers]

Excellent - it made it!

I cracked open my stash of (received) mail art and found that I had a boatload of (mostly unfinished) work with intended recipients in mind.  The bits I sent to you came as a response to working through my old(er) pieces and seeing the sandpaper sheet that I'd originally laid out to make something for you.

[Carmela Rizzuto]

Highly creative work re: idea creation. 

[DKeys]

nice!!!!  Wendy sends wonderful and quirky mail art!