A Grand Opening and Other Things
Deadline for BIRD(S), In Conversation, a Grand Opening, some Monsters, and more...
I like to think of Toucan as a vessel for metaphor, this mashup of gallery, gift shop, custom framing shop, and art studio. This urban container of beauty and meaning in our community. A service. An oasis. A newsletter too. Whatever it is, here are updates on a show, a conversation, a grand opening. An essay. The practical concerns are up front, as you know, the more esoteric the further you choose (or choose not) to venture. (Here there be monsters, as the old maps used to say.)
The deadline for Toucan’s invitational BIRD(S) art and design show is coming up at the end of the month. We’ve extended the deadline for entries by a few days to encompass one more weekend for the procrastinating artists among us (which, of course, might be one of the essential characteristics of the artist, that procrastination).
The deadline for entry is now on or before Monday, June 3.
We’re taking entries online of art, birdhouses, and the design of conceptual birdhouses, all guided by the theme of “bird,” singular or plural.
Complete information and an entry form at: birds.toucanarts.com.
Selected entries will be included in a show to coincide with our Grand Opening on Saturday, June 22.
IN CONVERSATION
We’re bringing back our In Conversation at Toucan series, an in-person gathering at Toucan whereby I engage in conversation with local and area artists, designers, entrepreneurs, administrators, creatives of all kinds. I always include some questions from the audience, as well. It’s pretty low-key on purpose and we hope you’ll join us.
The next engagement is Thursday, May 30 at 7 p.m. at Toucan, when I will be in conversation with Jessica Ruhle, the Executive Director of the Yellowstone Art Museum. We’ll talk about art and place and being. How we navigate and attempt to contribute to the cultural life of a community. What it all means. You know, that kind of thing. Like I always say, it’s a conversation, not an interrogation.
GRAND OPENING
With our landscaping in and everything complete at our new location, we have scheduled a Grand Opening, which will be Saturday, June 22 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. We’ll open our BIRD(S) invitational show, we’ll have some outdoor artist and organization tents, we’ll have a couple of food trucks on site, some live music, some in-person artmaking.
Also that day, Summerfair will be happening at the MetraPark Expo Center and the Billings Industrial Revitalization District and Billings Parks and Recreation will be hosting a grand re-opening of North Park to show off improvements there. It’s a triangulation of community and cultural activities in our east-of-downtown neighborhood to kick off summer. We hope you will plan to come see us!
SOMETHING NEW
We have new products by Traci Jo Designs. Traci stopped by Toucan with some of her Everyday Stash Bags. She’s been at this awhile; her work represents that experience and is exquisitely crafted as a result. The spirit of her endeavor is embodied in her branding: “Made for your enjoyment.” Worth a look next time you’re in.
CRÔNICAS
The will to live fully in the shared conventions of our place and time requires a certain diligence, a get-out-of-bed fortitude that is heightened the more particular the engagement with this collective cultivation, our human culture. In many ways our path through life is defined, delineated, bound by the nature of this cultural grappling. For some, the ease of little resistance, mass media, popular culture, while for others, the need to be challenged, to be confronted with less discernible truths and the resultant struggle to discern them.
The Irish essayist, Brian Dillon, writes in his book Essayism1,
I was convinced that criticism (and perhaps writing in general) should consist of a sensitive but dauntless search for the most productive or provocative metaphors in the material to hand. And I still think that this is what writing is, still feel that an account of the world that fails to draw from it all its figural potential is therefore incomplete.
This is the space in which all art exists, galaxies of metaphor traversed by citizen astronauts, our spacesuits and spaceships of interest, intention, and knowledge providing us with an atmosphere in which to breath and interpret these celestial waypoints at the same time we connect each to another to map together a meaningful existence.
For some these cultural planets are close and accessible, Taylor Swift and the NFL (which somehow entered each others orbits recently, catalyzing a pop culture supernova, yet to collapse into a black hole...and a song) common in the night sky, bright enough to burn in the daylight, too. While for others the planets might not even be planets, a mote of dust (as Carl Sagan has written) in the darkness, the contemporary playwright Will Eno, perhaps, or the photographer, Jill Greenberg, artists large in the field of view of the particular travelers close enough to absorb their light, but invisible to the naked eye of those more culturally earthbound, the distance of the plain and practical.
This distance tends to be compressed and expanded due to the complexity of the inherent metaphor(s) for which whatever the art (culture’s artifacts) is a vehicle, this medium of exchange: the path from mind to metaphor to mind via the book, the play, the painting, the song. Which is to say that the more metaphorical the offering, the greater the distance to the real thing, whether it be represented, or in the most extreme case, nonexistent, and more or less accessible by its nature. Let’s look at this:
Allison’s artwork here invokes, perhaps, an image of the northern plains, a tumbleweed blowing in the wind. But those circling lines aren’t a tumbleweed at all, they’re just lines. If their configuration reminds you of a tumbleweed, that’s appropriate, and good for you. They might mean something else to someone else, though. And I know for a fact that those lines don’t represent a real tumbleweed in real life at all. Allison’s work renders a landscape of the mind, her mind, to be interpreted at will. Your will. But in this particular rendering, the work strikes something of a middle ground. A lot of people can see a tumbleweed in this case. But there are people who would like this to look more real. It’s too abstract, they would say. It doesn’t look like the high plains that they know. And there might be others for whom the image is too representative. They would prefer a metaphor for existence that is black and scratchy and nothing else. Life is meaningless. Or absurd. Who cares about tumbleweeds?
A cultural existence is defined by the metaphors with which we choose to engage and, ultimately, the course we chart between them, from planet to dust mote and everything in between. Allison and I recently wandered to the west to eat and buy books in Livingston and Bozeman. We had brunch at Campione in Livingston, a restaurant the New York Times called a “frontier trattoria” and one of the 50 places in the United States that they, the New York Times, were most excited about in 2023. Then Blackbird Kitchen in Bozeman for dinner, Plonk for drinks and desert (my current favorite on their drinks menu is something called a Mexican Sweater: jalapeño tequila, apricot liqueur, fresh lime, grapefruit, Korean chile flakes), Cat Eye Café for breakfast. If food is life, by which I mean a metaphor for such, then the metaphor is made richer by drawing a bigger circle around Billings.
Browsing at the Country Bookshelf on Main Street, I came across Monsters by Claire Dederer. I had read her essay in the Paris Review on which this book expands. That essay: “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” The epigraph in the front of the book is a quote from the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispecter: “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” From there I found myself confronted by Knife by Salman Rushdie, his account of his own confrontation with a monster, the subtitle of which: “Meditations After an Attempted Murder.” Later, and down the street, as we picked around Vargo’s Jazz City and Books (the full name of this place suggesting a portal to Greenwich Village or something), I found the Tennessee Williams play, Sweet Bird of Youth. A line uttered by the character, Alexandra Del Lago, a faded movie star traveling incognito as the divinely named, Princess Kosmonopolis: “When monster meets monster, one monster has to give way, and it will never be me.” Before we left, I added Selected Crônicas by, well, Clarice Lispector to my treasure trove. The crônica is described as a literary genre unique to the Brazilian press that is not restricted by any formal conventions. Stories, essays, aphorisms, conversations, memories. Anything is acceptable and publishable, as the pieces collected in this book were in the Saturday edition of the Brazilian newspaper, Jornal do Brasil. (Needless to say, the idea of these kinds of short written pieces appealed to me.)
Food, drink, books, knives, monsters, Tennessee Williams, Clarice Lispector. The art of living is facilitated by the connections we make, the threaded together metaphors (and leave it to Big Tech in the form of Meta to ruin the metaphor of threads) that provide a lifeline, a way to escape (or enhance, depending on your perspective) the prosaic reality of our (not so) endless days. For some of us, it is in the less common that we find this refuge: the figurative, the abstract, the conjectural...the artistic.
There have been some truly literary manifestations of the cinematic arts, and much of it has occurred in the recent era of streaming serial storytelling. A recent rewatch of the first season of HBO’s True Detective confirmed an exemplar of the form. Created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, I will leave to his haunted and philosophically-musing character, Rustin Cohle, as inhabited in a critically-acclaimed performance by Matthew McConaughey, sitting there, cutting an ashtray from a Lone Star can in a fluorescent-flickering interrogation room, these penultimate words:
To realize that all your life—that all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it.
Or maybe it’s all a metaphor. And all we can do is keep connecting this to that—searching, yearning, being, in those connections—art upon art upon art—until we reach whenever the end, however the monster, and whatever the resolution.
THE FRIENDLY KIND
The monsters Claire Dederer grapples with in her book, men like Picasso and Polanski, are difficult to reconcile in the swirl of art and life, a fuzzy border, but let’s finish with a monster of a different sort, a different kind of fuzzy, exasperated of course, but happily so...
I continue to maintain that one of the greatest creative achievements of the 20th Century was the creation of the Muppets by Jim Henson. To make and sustain a comprehensive, self-contained world populated by puppet characters—facilitated by innovative and expert puppetry—all to be consumed (connected) by kids and adults alike via the popular mediums of television and the movies, remains an almost improbable accomplishment. Jim Henson died unexpectedly of a bacterial infection in 1990 when he was younger than I am today. One of my creative heroes, I think of him every year on the day that he died, May 16, which happens to be my birthday, and which happens to be today. Rest in peace, Jim.
And, for the record, Grover is my favorite monster.
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