Solo Show! Opening Friday!

I whipped up this handbill for it super fast. I'm rather pleased with the very subtle grey in the background.


Ah, I've never worked so hard for so little before. Come and be disappointed in me! I'll be the mousey looking character trying to blend into the wall.

Also, Super Fun Activity Challenge is having an additional reception the same night, so maybe I'll sneak away for a minute and see that. The Pravus show will be all black and white high contrast thinkiness, and the Trunk Space one will be brightly colored and all surface.

My friend wrote a piece about me in the recent Phoenix New Times.

A bevy of amazing pervy emails sprung up in response to it, with some commenting on how I appear so submissive and obedient in the photo, and others meekly commenting on how aggressive and forceful I look. Frankly, I think I just look a little strained and overwrought, but maybe that's just because I know that's how I felt.

Veggie Tails, by Steve Jansen
(for some reason, the link copies inaccurately. This is the weblink: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2008-04-17/news/vegan-erotica-s-camilla-taylor-wants-to-get-you-into-a-vegan-dildo-harness/
Copy and paste it to go to the page.)



So far, my currently hanging show,Super Fun Activity Challenge, has been a great success. We're already working on a call for entries for the next one, and we've now sold enough copies to cover the costs of putting it together, and will start making profit now. Yay! This is my first zine. All of the other books I've worked on have been really fancy very limited edition artist's books, so it's really fun to make something that I can sell for only $5.

My next show, Far Below, opens May 2nd at Pravus. Crap! Boobs! Crap! I'm working so fast and so much to get it all finished in time, but I'm exhausted already and I've got so much more to get done.

Last night was amazing! Not only was Super Fun Activity Challenge a great and wonderful success, but I then went home exhausted and had a sci-fi dream about terraforming Mars and inadvertently becoming immortal.



I had two entries in the book, and this is the finished product of one of them, "Make a Homeowners' Association":


Dancekitchen, obd, and Neumie have pieces in there too, along with my now super famous and successful friend Trent Call. Trent just had a two page feature in Juxtapoz, with full color and adoring interview. I was so jealous that it took me two whole days to congratulate him after seeing it. But, ever the opportunist, I invited Trent to come to APE and table with us in November, riding the wake of his success to sell comics and toys.



Do you want a Super Fun Activity Challenge? They are exceedingly easy to procure! All one need do is send me $5 for the book and $2 for the shipping, and I will send you a lovely copy, guaranteed to be chock-a-block with super fun. Message me for my paypal address. If you're in Phoenix, you can bypass the $2 shipping and stop by the Trunk Space, at 1506 NW Grand, and pick one up there for $5.

I've got another show opening on May 2nd at Pravus Gallery in Phoenix. It will be called either "The Ocean" or "The Deep." I haven't decided which, but I'd better decide soon as I'm making the cards tomorrow. All of the work for this show I'm making in the month prior to the opening. I've never done something so last minute before, so I'm both eager and terrified to see how I make out.

If you're in Super Fun Activity Challenge, you get one free copy, which I'll send along to you when I return your piece to you.

Painting the gallery walls lavender in preparation for my next show, Super Fun Activity Challenge. It will be, I promise, super fun.

Upcoming group show and anthology, edited and curated by David Bessent and I:



image by Nick Shivley

Trunk Space is located at 1506 NW Grand Avenue in Phoenix. David and I will also be taking the Super Fun Activity Challenge to APE in November.

Upcoming solo show:
City of Rooms, opening May 2nd at Pravus Gallery in Phoenix

Upcoming solo show:
From Below, opening June 6th at Deus ex Machina in Phoenix

AND!
Camilla Taylor hates Phoenix and wants to leave it forever mega sale of artwork and other stuff in June. Pictures shall be posted, along with appropriate paypal links. Most likely, I'll be selling most of this stuff for the amount of shipping.

I'd better sell loads of this stuff, because I certainly can't move it all to Long Beach at the end of June. That's right, friends. Long Beach. The decision has been made.

(Photographed on Sunset, right after I saw Rami Kashou which was seriously awesome)

Ahh, Long Beach. The word "seduction" was mentioned more than once by the faculty and current grad students I spoke with while I was there, and I must admit that it was not inappropriate. The presses. Oh! The presses they had there sent me into such flurries of anticipation. What large and unweildy useless things I could make with access to those presses.

The Los Angeles area is so green. It's positively vulgar the amount of herbivorous procreation that goes on there on an daily basis. Having grown up largely in the desert, I can identify most of the native and nonnative plants that grow here, but there, I'd no idea what most everything was. It sort of all blurred together into a giant green mass, smelling strongly of unidentified lilies. My decision on school is still officially unmade, though I'm still terrified of the winter at the other option. Like most major decisions, this one is being made by a spreadsheet.

Asphalt and Air did an email interview with me, and reading through it I sadly realize what poor editing skills I have. But I take solace knowing that I'm a visual arts major, and being able to spell with any degree of literacy is an achievement.

Emily B, a wonderful fiber artist, featured some of my work on her blog.

And Found Object did a little feature, too.

All of this blog-related exposure convinced some poor sap to buy this fellow, of which I, of course, could only take only take the worst of photos before mailing her off:


Figure modeling, that old standby of wellpaying and extraordinarily dull work that I find myself regularly swearing off of and then returning to whenever I'm at all hard up had produced these two paintings, or, more accuratley put, David Alvarado and James Buck produced these two paintings marginally related to me holding still for too long.

Yesterday was Pi Day, and I'm certain you're already familiar with it. It's the sort of made up holiday that I find not nearly as insufferable as the others. On Pi Day, what does one do? Calculate the diameter of various circles, and see how far you can name off its various digits? Far less irritating than saying "Arrr" after every phrase. My friend Kevin's birthday was also yesterday, and never before had he realized that his birthday coincided with a made-up holiday. He's the one who bought the monkey, so I went to his party, even though I usually find most of his friends about as sufferable as Talk Like a Pirate day. We visited the monkey, hung from the porch rafters and bestrewn with ropes of LEDs. I'll admit, that despite my better self, I was worried about what would happen to this, my largest of all creations, once it was in Kevin's possession, and I was pleased with what he was doing with it. I cannot ask for anything better than being well lit and with no severe damaging.

All schools have written back, and I've not been rejected to a one. The letters of acceptance are hung like trophies from the print drying rack. From a school in the great Frozen North, a letter came describing the various grants and scholarships of merit that they had awarded me, the total of which was somewhat more than I had made last year. The amount stared up from the paper at me, beseechingly. A great wadge of institutionalized money, just waiting for a kind hearted person like myself to spend it. But I must remain strong! I steal myself against the sad saucer eyes of the Minneapolisian money, and decide to see if the school in Long Beach might see their way to giving me some sor of similar amount. Truth be told, I'm terrified of living somewhere as cold as Minneapolis. My personal insulation isn't much, and I don't know well I'd function at those temperatures. Next weekend the boy and I will travel to the coast to wheedle and coax, and perhaps there will then be an additional chunk of institutionalized money whose feelings I must consider.



A few Phoenicians, some Chicagoans, a distant Argentinian, a couple of Los Angelinos, an affianced San Franciscan, a homesick New Yorker, and a great variety of Saltines have or shortly will recieve a single disembodied tentacle. For the sake of my wallet, I restricted the list to only those whose company I have physically been in the presence of. I envision a small town's worth of people, having consternation clearly read on their faces as they empty package's contents to find that single tentacle. Because, my darlings, I love you, but in a way that is best expressed through the language of perverse fetishism.



If you were an attendee at my last solo show, ages in the distant past of last year's Autumn, you may have remembered these blank fawns that I made. They sold out within the first 45 minutes of the show, mostly because they were evidently the least disturbing and lowest priced of my extensive scion. But now, they can be had at the Frosty Darling Boutique in Salt Lake City, and The TrunkSpace in Phoenix. But if you aren't in either city and still want one, you can get it from my website just as soon as I find my way to updating the damn thing. And if you aren't one of the lucky few to be counted as among my most best beloved, then you can pretend you are by buying a tentacle from Synthetic Compound. Colors, it must be said, may vary.



Phoenix is host to particularly fine weather right now. I don't have any delusions about how long it will last, but I'm rather pleased that I get to see the city with a smattering of green over the dust and brown. It still isn't half as pretty as most places I've lived, but it's tolerable for now, and I'll be leaving in the next couple of months while it's still pretending that it's a habitable place.

A great pallet of Lorica arrived last month, and orders that had backed up for weeks and months were suddenly addressed. I've beening doing nothing but make belts for what seems like ages now. And now I'm nearly done, and I don't care with what you keep your pants aloft, so long as I've nothing to do with it.

Do it, people!

Sometimes, as I fall asleep I compose elegant sentences descirbing what I've done that day and what I will do the next. I use words like "rubicund," to make simple bruises or poor complexions seem more exceptional and wonderful than they are. Only rarely do I ever commit those lambent words to a physical form, and then I realize just what I hideous pedantic egoist I am.

Before hanging the Kite show a few days ago, Caleb and I had to take down the monkey from where he was hung from the ceiling of the Trunk Space, looming. I tied his arms to his spine, and tied his legs and tail together, so that what was intended to be carried aloft by seven people, could be transported by just the two of us. Someone finally bought the great puppet recently, for a rather paltry sum, that I find kingly knowing that I was shortly to cut the monkey down and throw him away, having run out of patience for finding storage spaces large enough to accomodate him around the house.



The Kite show was only marginally successful. When it rains in Phoenix, as it did last night during the opening reception, Phoenicians panic and approach the weather as though it were an transitive beast, uncertain where it may strike next. Their prior experience with light drizzles ending in only creating more muddy clay around the city they adamantly ignore, and stay locked up inside residences waiting for when the rain turns to something more insideous. Phoenicians have read far too much Hemingway. Nonetheless, nearly all of the artists did come, and the sprinkling of artists' girlfriends and boyfriends made it seem like a far more successful turnout than it actually was.

I made tetrahedron kites with reduction style woodcut wasps on them, and I steeled myself against an evening of listening to people comment on the "bees."



The next reception for the Kite show is on First Friday, March 7th. My next solo is at Deus Ex Machine in Phoenix, opening May 2nd.



I awoke this morning with a large bruise over my right eye (bruise not pictured above). The mysterious bruise is rubicund.

I co-curated this show, and a few of my pieces will be in it.

You should come if you're in town, and if you're not, you should feel bereft that you cannot attend.