ARTBLOX (continued)

This is the second installment of ARTBLOX I have made for the Mary Lou Zeek Gallery, in Salem (Oregon). There is no money involved and the people who buy them do so by buying a $10 token and dropping it into a reconfigured cigarette machine. I have had a lot of fun with this project and have pretty much taken it seriously as a way to make a social comment or a statement on art.

Mary Lou liked the first "Girls Who Smoke" ARTBLOX so much, I decided to make a second, but I switched out the back for another photo from the series by photographer Frieke Janssens of children smoking. I added a stoma to the girl on the front.

This one was designed as a statement on world population, which, truth be told,
came to me after thinking the dimensions of the block would lend themselves
to a visual of a can of sardines. The sides all have population factoids.

This one was actually inspired by a Lily Tomlin skit I saw her perform years ago.

This seemed like an obvious successor to the Art/Soup and features Andy Warhol's banana from the first Velvet Underground record and a photograph I took on W 11th Street, 

in Portland. I inadvertently positioned the photo upside down, but it is kind of hard 

to tell. If you happen to get it from the ARTBLOX machine, let me know and I'll 

replace it... or consider it a real collector's item, like that upside down biplane stamp. 

Botticelli is one of my favorite artists, and the Birth of Venus is one of my favorite 

of his paintings. This was actually a re-do, where I cut and reconfigured the painting up a little, to better conform to the dimensions of the block. 

"Ceci n'est pas une bloc de l'art"

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

Having fun with René Magritte.