meredith cutler :: arts marketing :: artist

Sunday inevitably draws hoards of hungry, bed-headed hipsters out of their pleasant, low-rent pads and into the blustery February streets. If you fall into the above category...congratulations! You've made it this far, and if you happen to be brunching in the Wickenden Street area, take a side-trip around the corner from Utrecht Art Supply to visit 5 Traverse Gallery.

The low-hi tech, community-minded collaborative, Tape Art, will be in residence at the laid-back alternative art space until February 15th, creating a constantly evolving aquarium-themed mural that they are simultaneously filming in stop-animation for a bona fide music video. If you are outside of the Providence area, or are too beaten down by winter to get out of the house, you can covertly monitor the whole process from afar via live webcam.

At the gallery, you can gape at the resident artists through the large front windows.  However, I suggest you get over yourself and step inside for a bit. Feel the crunch of your feet against the gravel curiously strewn on the tarp-covered floor. Ask James, Michael, or any of the resident Tape Artists about their video project, and catch a few frames of the rough edits. You may feel inspired to add to the collaborative aquarium mural in the back room.

Chances are, you, too will be caught on their webcam feed, so IM your hibernating friends and point them to the site. Smile, wave, and don't forget to grab some Swedish Fish on your way out.

Catch a fish at 5 Traverse Gallery, 5 Traverse Street, Providence, RI 02906. Tape Art will be in residence with Artaquarium until February 15th.

Recommended local dining: Brickway on Wickenden, The Blue Elephant

Fat Tuesday is one tradition that the folks in New Orleans maintain in order to show some love to February. It's long been my least favored month, having been host to a number of nasty breakups, bouts of illness, vitamin D deficiency, and icy spills. This year, I decided to give February the benefit of the doubt. In order to guarantee it a special place in my heart, my fella and I scheduled our wedding for February 2nd (sharing the calendar with the pagan holiday of Imbolc and the more widely known Groundhog Day). Wouldn't you know it, but the sun actually came out for the whole weekend! Punxutawny Phil's furry reaction? Less favorable than we'd prefer.

That said, expect a flurry of activity from me now that the daunting task list of my nuptuals has passed. As a compliment to my review contributions to the upcoming issues of Boston's Artscope Magazine, I will be covering art shows and events local to Providence right here on Studio Debris. Stay tuned, as I have a couple of tasty shows to tell you about right here in the queue.

If you have any suggestions for Providence arts coverage, feel free to send them along via my contact form.

* Special Note: if you want to be considered for full editorial coverage in Artscope, please provide press releases and show information at least 2 months in advance of the show's opening date. Submission does not guarantee coverage in either Studio Debris or Artscope Magazine.

Never one to underestimate the motivational power of a good deadline, I've been hard at work planning my upcoming wedding and still managed to cook up some tasty Crostini goodies for the City Sampler: Boston, to be released February 16th!

The good folks over at The Sampler have officially shifted shop from SF over to Boston, my native city. A shout-out to Alison, who is now heading up their operations (and possibly thinking it's about time for some warm weather and a good sail...). Stay tuned...Groundhog's Day approaches.

I love arriving at my studio after the holidays, only to discover that a demonic crew of maintenance men have trompled through with their elephant (under the auspices of installing a heater) and destroyed everything!

Nothing like scraping solder drippings off of your works in progress instead of actually making progress on them.

Anyway, I received a big box of make-up cookies from management, but the thing that finally made my day sweet was this amazing, 10 foot wide pastel portrait of Michael Jackson that the moving company in my building was shuffling into storage for a local radio magnate. Obviously I snapped this shot with my cell phone, in the dark, but I had to capture it for posterity - you don't see something like this twice in life:

Not that I'm a computer geek, but I've been spending an inordinate amount of time scrolling through PHP files, editing auto-generated HTML, and updating my database these last few months. It is a very strange kettle of fish, let me tell you...since I'm usually painting with my left hand as I type with my right...or cutting out gocco prints on vellum with my right foot as I type with my left...you can imagine it's a bit of a disaster in my studio.  I've decided to throw caution to the wind and just upload the g*d thing to my webhost already, and get back to the finer things in life, like playing with paper dolls...

If all goes well, you'll all be reading this instead of this, and we can all get to know each other a little bit better! Thanks to all of my browsers for bearing with me while I learned how to reinvent the wheel...and thanks to Drupal for being the vehicle (that enjoys driving very fast, with me behind the aforementioned wheel.)