Sid Carpenter:	Good afternoon everyone. Can I have your attention? My name is Sid Carpenter, and I'm in the art department and I have the honor this afternoon of introducing Brian Meunier. First I want to welcome all of his friends, his family, colleagues, and students to this event, which is another in a series of faculty lectures that highlight their activities over their sabbatical year. To introduce Brian, I will begin. When summoning associates who will conspire with him to make sculpture, Brian Meunier sends out a far reaching call. He's loud and all are welcome.
	Visit his studio and you will notice he consorts quite freely with pre-Colombian and west African [platters 00:00:51]. Especially those who engage in shamanistic and funereal rites. While there, you will bump into a few Middle Eastern airborne cows with human heads, alongside Chinese armored warriors and John J Audubon's Glossy Ibis. Brian has also called in an assortment of 19th century engravers who illustrate the imaginings of those some might consider not right in the head such as submariners on wheels, designers of sadistic apparatus, and those who tinker on the unworkable and the just plain bonkers.
	The occasional cavorting fox, camel, platypus, and puffer fish all wander unrestrained across the walls of his studio and one would assume in and out of Brian's head. Brian is an inventor, compulsively creating visual and physical improbabilities. Things that unnecessarily impose themselves on real space, all the while daring the rest of the world to protect and insure their tentative survival. From my perspective, the world is privileged by the opportunity to do so. Because of his most recent adventures, I can add monkey handler to his list of acquired skills, and I will allow Brian to explain that. Brian is also a successful bullet dodger, to which his present state of good health will attest. Yet another story he can fill you in on. He is a seasoned long distance road wrangler, driving multiple times to and from Mexico in a car loaded with sculpture and woodworking supplies.
	According to [Perky 00:02:38], his wife, Brian the artist seems to have come out of nowhere into a family that to this day has never willingly seen his work. As a child, he used the cellar walls of his house to draw and he gathered wood scraps to build his tree houses, the beginnings of a life long love of the woodworker's art. After receiving tenure at Swarthmore, his mother said he could now stop doing that artwork because now he had a job. Brian has now transitioned to the medium of clay and the shamans and mystics are gathered in force around him. He says clay allows him to do what he did as a woodworker, but with more spontaneity. I personally am amazed by what he's able to retrieve from every day experience, by his ability to transform the mundane into spectacular form and imagery.
	In his art, Brian has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for seeing, looking, and acting on all these varied provocations. Brian's is a contagious enthusiasm that spreads unchecked through his classes. If you doubt me, just go look in sculpture studio and you can only wonder at what was said to provoke that activity. Simply put, Brian is one of the most complete artists and successful teachers I have the pleasure to know. He began by receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he received a master of fine arts from Tyler School of Art. He has been awarded fellowships from the national endowment for the arts, and the Pennsylvania [Council 00:04:21] on the arts, and several faculty grants from Swarthmore. 
	He is the author of two published books for children illustrated by his wife Perky Edgerton titled, Pipiolo and the Roof Dogs, and the other Bravo Tavo. I urge you to go get those books. I'm quite sure Brian has many more stories for you this evening, so I won't continue, but I give you my colleague Brian Meunier.
Brian Meunier:	Thank you. Everybody can hear me through the mic right? That's fine? Thank you Sid, that was so sweet. As you know, as you can tell, Sid knows me. She's been working with me for many years and I really appreciate the personal elements of that introduction. Before I begin, I would just like to say that when I was a student, I was always by appalled by the artist lectures that I went to, most often. I know Logan mentioned this in his own lecture when he was here not too long ago. Often times they would just show a few of their greatest hits, as Logan put it, and they wouldn't talk about where they came from. Everyone evolves, and I know that, but they wouldn't address that.
	The second thing they wouldn't address, and I have no problem with this is they wouldn't address what their sources were as if they just came out of a void. Any intelligent artist, any researcher, any academic they need to place themselves in a historical context. For them to deny that in their talk just seems like utter stupidity to me, and I was always that naggy little student who was raising their hands and kept on asking them questions about their sources. Since the last time I gave a lecture was more than four years ago. The students who are here, some of my own and other students were not here, I'm going to briefly, very briefly go through just in about five slides all the work that I've done since I've been at Swarthmore.
	This is, not all of it actually, just a selective groupings of it. I tend to work in series. The lecture entitled is Serendip and other than the title that went out, I'm now thinking of it as further adventures living in the third dimension. A little more forward in the 3D. That goes without saying. I'm a sculptor. My metaphor is 3D, about the 3D world. If I were a comic, I would be a satirist because it's very close to the bone. It exists on the same plane. That goes without saying. With Serendip, it was the first name that was given to the island that we know now as Sri Lanka. It was given by Arab traders who were blown off course, and they were the first foreigners to discover this island. They called it Serendip because of its relationship to the word serendipitous. 
	Serendipitous is a very, or serendipity, Arab based word. I could not think of a better word to describe the degree in which when I was young, I had a certain talent. Some artists come up and you can recognize, "Wow, my child can really draw. They could really sculpt. They can sing. They can write poetry." You recognize specific talents and skills. I had nothing like that. All I had was the ability to be serendipitous, and that is the propensity to make advantageous, accidental discoveries. Another term for that is lateral thinking. Though I made exquisite tree houses, it is true, I was building them to keep myself elevated from the dinosaurs that were covering all the ground. 
	I lived in a world of fantasy. I lived in a world of daydreaming. It was only I who knew that I was deeply in lateral thought. I think it's an appropriate word, because I think that's my singular skill. That's it. I was able to capitalize on that one. With that, we'll begin here. What I was talking about ... Are the lights low enough? Okay. This is one of the first series that I completed, and it had some kind of consistency to it. I always work on series in between series, which never go anywhere, so I don't call them a series. A series for me is a group of sculptures that I have been able to define a problem, and resolve it up to a point where I no longer need to work on it. I only know that when I'm basically bored, because what happens is in the end of a series, I can imagine the piece before I make it, and then I become an illustrator of myself. There's no fun in that.
	What I like is the active discovery. Never, never down play the value of mistakes. Mistakes are the best things to make. It's the best thing to put yourself in a position to create, and you cannot learn without mistakes. A series ends, when I'm not making anymore mistakes. This series came out of an earlier series than that, came out of my exploration from undergraduate school when I was a biology, anthropology major with a minor in archeology. That was my intent at one point. Neither of which I could play straight in an orthodox way. When I discovered that, yes okay I should be an artist, even though I was thinking I would be originally and gave that up for economic reasons or thoughts of that. 
	Anyway, I decided I could explore all those things as an artist. Here, I was going to New Brunswick, Canada. I'm of Cajun descent, heritage, it's an ethnic minority in Canada. As an anthropologist, or thinking like an anthropologist, wanted to see if I could find a code. How do Acadians make things, and do the people in my hometown in Massachusetts, do they make those things similarly? I would go along the coast and look at all of these things. As I said, I'm breezing through these. Each sculpture takes about three months to make. A couple of years, usually eight to 10 sculptures, sometimes more. 
	The next series was based, I was at Swathmore at that point, and I had on a leave then living and traveling in Peru, and spent some time in the Amazon, in the head waters of the Amazon in Iquitos, Peru. Going out in the jungles, my wife and I took a jungle survival technique class, which was really memorable just going out there for a week with just a knife. I'm someone who needs a posturepedic mattress and all the comforts of home. It was pretty trying to be and monumental. I came back and started making pieces that eluded much more to organic forms. For instance, in this shot in the middle here, right here, that's called [squid 00:11:24] lower lumbar, I was having back problems. 
	[Cross-fasion 00:11:27], this piece which I have right here is pre-history. One of my favorite from this series of pieces. Pandora Reagan, this one and this one had to do with Reagan declaring the Russian, the USSR, the evil empire and the nuclear race that was going on at the time. It freaked me out, and the only way that I knew how to respond was these very toy-like sculptures. This is called Pandora. This is called the Vile, a vile of poison. This piece right here is 10 feet tall. That's why it couldn't be in the show here. Some of these pieces were very big. Keep in mind, this is at a time when I had a studio on the third floor of Beardsly, huge studio. Third floor of Beardsly, seeing elevator. There is no elevator. All of this had to be schlepped by moi, up those stairs. At the time in my youth, I just believed leverage would solve all problems, including future problems. Not true.
	Then what happened was, I started working in Mexico. My first visit in Mexico as a leave here, and I did have the need to get these things back. I started making these much more airy, more smaller, more linear forms. I took these all back in pieces and assembled them once I got back here, but they all related to some experience in Mexico. There were plant forms. There were animal forms, just the beginning of animal forms. Prior to that, in the previous piece, in squid for instance, the notion is that the content is nature based, but the style is a utilitarian style pre-industrial revolution. What I have always play in my work is the biologist and the anthropologist, or the archeologist. Those things have always been coming together in the work that I do.
	By the way, I've been told I have 45 minutes, and to make sure of it, I brought my own clock right here. I was going to wear it, but that's gone out of fashion. At any rate, I am looking at that every once in a while to make sure I am on track. The next series, I started anticipating things I would do later in clay. This piece right here called, Trumpeter, right here, Trumpeter and this piece in the marsh are very similar to some of the things I started doing in clay where I separated the natural form, the birds in this case and the utilitarian base or support or context in which they're being seen.
	Then I started doing what, for lack of a better term, I now describe as steam punk sculptures. That's a movement of Victorian sort of artifacts. In other words, I worked simply with copper and brass and glass, and started doing this series here. These were all based on two things, my love of Audubon and my intense study of his work and reading his biographies and so forth. At the same time being blown away by I think one of the best Victorian novels. I wouldn't have given it credit, but it was Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. I read Frankenstein, I was reading Audubon, that's what happened. They came together. Some of them have a little bit more of a lab like quality in here. By the way, one of the reasons why I work with birds and I work with animals, and insects, is the general notion that I'm just amazed by the fact that we are surrounded by the other.
	We build these empires and all around us are another strata of life going on. I can't imagine what these creatures think like, and that constantly puzzles me and I constantly think about it. The other reason I work with birds specifically is I had two very, very crushing blows in my life when I was younger, very traumatic. First, the discovery that there was no Santa Claus. Do you remember that? How that shrunk your world? More than that, my world was deeply damaged when I discovered that humans couldn't fly. I'm telling you right now, I'm in my 50s, I'm not over that trauma yet. It's a constant desire, so in a sense I really relate to, for instance Michelangelo. I know that's August [coming 00:15:51] to prepare yourself to, but I only relate to him in his bound slave series when he was so wanting to do sculpture and he was tied to these painting projects. He was getting older and more talented, he was around the hill and he did these slaves that are bound by their mass, by their physicality.
	These birds sculptures, or these animals attached to their utilitarian are my bound slaves. This is how I think of them. At that point, when I finished that series, I just kind of lost interest in my sculpture. The reason for that, I went through a hiatus, the reason for that is that working especially with found objects or with wood design, requires that you design it way in advance of making it. You have to plan it out in many, many steps, drawings. What I started finding again was that, like I feel at the end of a series, I always felt that I was just illustrating something that I had already seen done months before I actually finally on that day, put it all together. That was so dissatisfying, and I felt like I needed a break to just think about that.
	I was having issues, back issues, knee issues, hip issues, muscular skeletal issues all related to schlepping for years these sculptures up Beardsly's steps. They all came back to haunt me. I decided just to stop. That's when I took a few years hiatus, just writing. Writing children's books, as Sid mentioned, we published a few of those. They did not do well, ces la vi, but except for one of them did quite well in South Korea. I don't know why. I have no understanding as to why. During this period, I certainly kept looking at art. I kept going around to various venues, and what I realized was I almost always just look at ceramics. I was looking at all kinds of ancient ceramics. I was looking at pre-Colombian ceramics, upper left. I was looking at the Terracotta Warriors, and the kinds of color schemes that they got, which is the basis of how I work my color right now. I was looking at African pottery and their shamanistic practices that Sid mentioned. That is a heart. I believe a heart or a lung. Heart. Heart?
Speaker 3:	[inaudible 00:18:15]
Brian:	It looks so organ like. Yeah, okay. Then [Nowen 00:18:20] vessel in the MET. There's just a few pieces that are always my, I have to pay homage to when I got to the MET, and that is one of them. It's not the ones you'd expect, but they are little tiny ones here and there, and that's one of three pieces that I always have to see. What happened was, I had been anticipating this shift in my teaching. I thought about this in preparation for this lecture. When I first came here, I believed that an artist had to keep their professional life separate from their teaching life. I was so wrong. I was so wrong about that. When somewhere that shifted, and when I allowed myself to be influenced by what I teach and what I teach be influenced by what I do, I became the happiest camper at Swathmore.
	I just felt like it was a much more dynamic relationship, than keeping it separated. What happened here was I anticipated working in clay during that hiatus, by coming up with clay classes. I started teaching life modeling. Three things happened, three semesters in a row. One was, wow is this fun. I'd come along, and someone's working on a self portrait and I'd go, flick, flick, flick, wow this is fun. Second thought was, damn you're good at this. Because I'd been trained as a modeler as such. Then the third was, why aren't you having this much fun in your own studio? What I immediately did when that thought came up, is I went back to my studio and I completely redesigned my studio so that it could handle clay. 
	This is a remarkable body of work. There's 14 works here in all. Those were all made in one year, which is extraordinary. Because of that hiatus, it was almost like a bow being pulled back, really taut. When I let it go, it went, and I was in my studio day and night for 10 hours a day, and time would just fly by. It's not always that case, but that's what happened during this period. You've seen some of these. Now this next part, before I get to the Sri Lanka part, which I'm going to. I'm doing good time here, I'm doing good time. This next part, is set up like a cookbook in that, you turn the page and one side you have the ingredients. You read the ingredients, you read the instructions. I'm not going to give the instructions, but I will give the ingredients. 
	Then you look on the other page and you have a beautiful shot of the dish, but like a cookbook there is always this awareness that I have looking at a two dimensional projected light illusion of a three dimensional object. It's not the real thing. You're not looking at the real thing. Like that beautiful picture in the dish, you can imagine what it tastes and smells like, but there's no way to do that. Here, you can imagine what it feels like, but unless you actually experience it, because there is something about the sculptor or sculpture that transcends just the visual. It's visual of course, obviously, but it's a sense in the body, there is your relationship as a body to that thing as a body. How you move around and the distance you are away from it, governs what you're going to get from it.
	I'm always aware of that, but this was the beginning of the big leg. It's called, Large Lizard Leg, it's in the library right now. Originally, I was looking at this da Vinci drawing on the left hand side of a bear's foot, which did not strike me as a bear's foot at all, because I know enough anatomy that it looks entirely like a human foot, but someone just forgot to cut their toe nails for about 10 years. It's a freakish human foot, and I thought I would start with that. In fact, I did start with that, but then what it required is that I would have to in a sense flay the skin. I didn't want to go down that road in the form. Also, it's very flat footed and I wanted a little bit more movement to that. I have thousands of photographs that I've collected over the years and I was looking through them, and I found this model of a tyrannosaurus rex leg, and it's from a museum in Berlin. It's in the basement, because they discovered that it's not correct at all.
	I just found it had incredible presence as a photograph, and I decided to just make that. This is the very beginning of working in clay. I started making it, and things were going along swimmingly until I got to that top section, and I realized that unlike a stork-like say, which is very vertical, it attaches laterally onto the side of the torso, in a broad area. How do I finish that off? I tried covering it with clay, and then letting it harden, and then saw it so it would just be that saw mark. It's over, it's end, this is the end of the sculpture. I tried putting skin-like things around the periphery, but that started getting too gruesome. Then while I was doing this, my hips were aching, because I had recently had two hip replacements. I realized the only reason I'm doing this leg at all is because I've had two hip replacements. What I had was a little ball and socket.
	I made this little ball and socket, and miraculously something happened. Before that, it looked like a small tyrannosaurus rex leg. As soon as I did that mechanical part right there, it looked like a large Mattel Toy Story leg. It was magic, this little movement and decision has changed the entire scale of the sculpture. The next body of work I did, these are just going through the recipes for the sculptures, was this drawing that my daughter has of a toucan. I've always loved that toucan, because the bill is really oversized. I don't like correct drawings or illustrations of animals. I like the early 19th century wrong ones, where explorers came back to say, England, and they described to an artist what they had seen, and the artist drew it and they drew it incorrectly. I find that much, much more exciting, because it has more room for movement for me in terms of interpretation.
	I had a very mystical experience sitting in front of that door on that pyramid. On the top of that pyramid at 5:30 one morning, with a group of Mayans who were worshiping the pyramids. A toucan came by and sat on my knee, and just stared at me as the Mayans turned towards me, towards the pyramid, and started chanting. This toucan just stood there eyeballing me, on my knee. It was a remarkable, then the sun came up, the howler monkeys went crazy. It was like there was a convergence, harmonic convergence of the whole world coming together at that precise moment. It was one of those moments. Everybody has those moments. It was one of those, so I decided to make a monument of that. That is my toucan on a pyramidal-like structure. Thinking about ways that those ancient stones were rolled with big rolling devices, and that kind of thing.
	This is probably one of the ugliest of Audubon's birds, but one of my favorites because it's a vulture chick. What I loved about this was just the horrible head. The dragon-like, dinosaur-like head and legs, and this fluffy cute little body that you'd like to hug but you would never dare do so. Also I like the shape of it. It reminds me very much of a rugby ball. I created this sculpture and plying off that soft body, that round cute body, I wanted it standing on these spikes. At one point, the finished sculpture was ... Oop, I'm sorry. The finished sculpture was this right here, just at the bottom of the spikes. Later, I decided that it needed more, and had just come back from Japan and there are these beautiful ramparts to the Kyoto castle. That I really love the [angles 00:26:26] and the heft of them. That whole bottom is based on the drawings and photographs I took of that Kyoto castle.
	Moving right along. I think there's someone in this audience, who is trying to ... They have to do their ceramics and they're putting in a hard object, and they have to nurture the ceramics as it shrinks in order to not crack against that hard object. That's the thing I ran up against because this whole upper part was all hard and done, and the bottom part had to move relative to that upper part, which was really, really hefty and weighty. There was all this kind of engineering feats were going on, trying to make sure that that happened. The original piece that I made for this upcoming sculpture was this burner that was in the Mercer museum in Doylestown. Mercer museum used to be the holy grail for me. I was a member of the museum. I photographed everything in that collection, and I just love that. It's in Doylestown, if you have a chance to see it, it is really a wonder.
	I love that really extravagant burner. I made it. I made it literally like that. What happened was, I fired it, I finished it. It was beautiful. I thought I would go down a road of industrial pots. I was pushing it, and it fell over, and the whole upper part smashed. Ah, at that time I had started the other animal base pieces, and I remembered taking a photograph. As I said, I've taken thousands it seems like, and now I know why. I just discovered why, like last week. I take thousand photographs of details of paintings that I like. Not the whole painting, just details. Just details from some painting, and I remember it was so tiny, it was this herald within a big enormous battle scene. I liked the tongue. I did it because of the tongue on that stag. 
	Then I was thinking of Bavarian drinking steins. You know the ones, the big beer steins with the animal heads on them? That's the finished sculpture. This is after it had broken in the upper part. It had to be replaced, and so I replaced it. I still love the little tongue there. It was a debate whether I should put that tongue in there, or not, among myself. With all of myself in the studio, and I finally decided to do that. This beautiful lines of this ship, this Viking ship, this vessel right here. The model for the chameleon was that one that's in the foreground in the early 19th century print. This is the sculpture that I made. I was also thinking about the ship being a soft form, sort of like, I was thinking of a leather animal skin bag that's tied with loops, and tied here, tied here, tied up here. That kind of iconography that I had been playing with before the nautical ship thing came back as a form. I thought of the chameleon on this mast head. 
	Then I combined these two. We're doing okay. In this sculpture, called, what's it called? I can't remember. Blowfish? I think Blowfish, yeah, I think so. All right, but the previous image I show with these stripes here. The stripes, I was particularly interested in this parrot-like face, and this right here, and the fins in that order, but I wanted to add the spikes to it. That's how I did that. The rest of it, is a device by which to show something swimming. That's a tough thing to do. I could always hang these things, but then it denies the physicality of the sculpture, the weight and heft of the sculpture. 
	Elephant swimming. I had been in Japan. Japan is one of my favorite countries. I would be there in a heartbeat if it weren't so expensive. I didn't have a job and I had the where withal to do it. I just find it so exciting, this juxtaposition of ultra modern and ancient, and the way that it's integrated yet separate. It's just amazing. I was traveling through the usual sites now, at Kyoto. I was based in Osaka. No, I did not see any elephants swimming, which I was below the elephant, but I was interested in the notion of that kind of weighty thing that it can even swim. It's almost the same wonder I still have when I go over that flat bridge or 95 bridge down, and you see the planes landing. How can that big thing be in the air? It still is a wonder to me.
	This is based on a pagoda form right here. Then one of the things that really turned me on was the tradition of basket making in Japan. There's a museum in a series of museums, just outside of Osaka. I think it was some kind of [world's 00:31:22] fair at some point. It was a museum on Japanese craft, and that place blew me away. Once I discovered it, we just kept going back to it, again and again and again. This is my swimming elephant. It's called, Baby Swimming Elephant ... Baby Elephant Swimming. The pagoda like form, again, it's one of those situations where I completed the sculpture to this point right here, but this thing really bothered me because it reminded me of a Carvel ice cream cake. It's not at all where I wanted to go with this. Then later I built this basket, which I thought of as Japanese, but I compared it to the angle of the ramparts of the castle, the Kyoto castle. Actually I think it was the Osaka castle. It was the Osaka castle.
	I travel, I see things, I convert them. When I say I was thinking of these things, it's not like I run out and get these pictures, and then think about how I can put these three elements together. It's none of that. What I do, is I just remember some memory of an object that has lodged in my mind somewhere, and I don't remember it a vertical analytical way. I start working with my hands and my hands remember it first and then I recognize where it's coming from. Then I go back to the source. I saw this picture in National Geographic of this gazelle. I won't call it sexy, but I certainly will call it sensuous. I found a very sensuous form. Its meaty thighs right here, its dainty little tail right there. I love that white movement right there, juxtaposed with that black, that elongated neck. She's a beauty. What it reminded me of was the really erotic sensuous S-shaped dance movements of Indian dancers in sculpture. 
	I thought about that. It also reminded of this great, great piece. Early Persian, ancient Persian piece in the University museum, University of Pennsylvania called, Billy Goat Caught in Brambles. I've always loved that little piece. I created this piece right here, which I like a great deal. It's all about that sexy belly, but I was very aware in that I could use the notion of a belt in a transparent skirt form as the armature, as the engineering of it. [inaudible 00:33:57]. That's where that piece came from. Accidents happen a lot in these sculptures. I've broken off this arm twice, moving it on a rolling cart in my studio, hit a little pebble that's falling off the wall or something, and it cracked. I now tend to really, really over build my sculptures. Almost all of them are reinforced with steel and epoxy. Some are made of wood and epoxy, as well as ceramics, so that won't happen again. This one was one of those pieces.
	Galapagos tortoise and this bathysphere, I've had this bathysyphere picture with me ever since I was an undergraduate. I've always thought of it as being synonymous of with how I feel about myself. Sort of any human being, a slightly armored individual who's looking out at the world, bumbling through it. This would certainly be a bumpy ride. This is how I thought of it. I combined it with this, there's a certain redundancy of design here. I will tell you that this was an experiment in construction, and when I went to put this in the kiln, my hands ... I had counted on the width of my fingers to be able to drop it in the kiln, but I did not count on the width of my palm. Half way down, in the summer, I'm half way there, this thing is weighing 100 pounds and I'm stuck. I am really stuck. There is no way I can get it up, and I can't, so I just drop it. Now I know there's going to be breaks. It cracked, but I opened that kiln and I don't know if Sid knows about it. The fire company had to come because there was so much smoke, because I had made the internal part out of hardwood, which is a no no.
	Anyway, I opened the kiln, it was shattered in hundreds and hundreds of pieces. At first I was just going to shovel it in the trash, and just call it a day, but I had worked too hard on it. It reminded me, it challenged me. When I was doing archeology course, one of my jobs was to lay out all the pieces and start assembling them in a vessel. I thought, hey, I've been here before, I can do this. I got three tables, folding tables, laid out all the pieces. First day, three, four hours, I finally found the matching piece. I glued it together. Next day, I came in, found another matching piece, glued it together. It took about five months to pull this thing together, but I did. I'm quite proud of that fact. 
	When I saw these hornets on National Geographic, I could not figure out what they were doing. Talking about the others, you're really talking the insect world. What a world that we are surrounded by. Are they hugging? Are they dancing? It felt very art historical to me. I was running, I was, "Why does this feel like an art history image to me?" I realized, it's from this [Jiado's 00:36:55] greeting at the gate. This is what it reminded me of. That's that piece that's in the library right now. This was made during the last election cycle and I was thinking about all the power that be, the neoclassical sculptures, the ionic column in this case. The idea that the capitol building probably has cockroaches in it, or it probably has hornets in the eaves of the building. These things live around us, and without us, and they don't care about us, so I made this piece here.
	Moving right along. Owls. Owls in every culture are harbingers of one's death. It's always been that way. Athena had an owl as a messenger of the gods. The northwest coast Indians, if you see an owl, you're going to die very soon. Every culture has owls in that position. In ancient medieval Europe, it was a symbol of witchcraft or dangerous knowledge. The thing that intrigues me is I read a book called, Communion, by Whitley Strieber about alien abduction. The latest contemporary mythology about owls is this, after many, many people read that book and others like it, they became convinced that they may have been having alien abductions. They go to psychiatrists who convince them to go through hypnosis. Every one of them, every account, and then this is universal, and there encounter groups now for people, therapy groups in every major city. Moscow, every major city in the world. They all remember an owl at the window. 
	Now unfortunately, I told my daughter who's here in the audience, when she was really little about this. There was a hoot owl in the neighbor's yard, and it freaked her out for ... We had big, serious major sleep problems because of that. You got to be careful what you reveal. I find it very revealing that they would see this, what is referred to as a mask memory, the mask memory of an owl at the window. I had to do an owl, and I've done some previous owls. You saw a few of those in the earlier pieces I think, if you picked up on it. This is an owl over a casket form. Weird sculpture to make, because I had made this for the top section of the boat thing in the chameleon piece. I had made this for another piece that I destroyed the rest of it, and so on this day I took these two pieces, hook, glued them together. This is a one day piece. It was a one day piece, no matter how I cut it.
	I don't like it as much, because it doesn't have the gravitas to me. The ones that I suffer over and they succeed, are the ones that I feel most warmly about. Then the military complex in America. I was just thinking about a new, the bald eagle, liberty, hamstrung by the [inaudible 00:39:51]. Another icon, now this image presents a paradox to me. How could genie be inside the bottle, and looking at her bottle at the same time? This show really blew my mind as a child, but it blew my mind for other reasons. It was really sexy. I must have been thinking of genie when I made this next sculpture. I was thinking about Persian bottles, but no, I was thinking about that bottle because at a certain point, I was having trouble with the design. I went online and did you know that during the duration of I Love Genie, was that? No, I Dream of Genie show, there were seven bottles. They're all of different designs. Information you can live with.
	At any rate, I made this, and what I was trying to do was work with a smaller, almost [inaudible 00:40:50]. This is the work of Martin Johnston Heade. Why he was important at this point was with that last piece, I was attempting to work with a smaller bird, a dove. I also wanted to work with [sound 00:41:02] birds, which are much, much tinier. I couldn't figure out a way that I could make them monumental without being ridiculous. A large sound bird, or have them carry any weight without them looking like a little tchotchke on the table. I looked at his painting and I thought, maybe if we did a frame device I could work with a landscape association. This is the next series that I did. I started doing a whole series of landscapes that were bounded by the frame.
	This one on this side was the beginner. The Fleisher Art Memorial has a show called, the Postcard Show, and anyone can submit for a [thumbdrive 00:41:39] of a postcard piece of art. It had to be, what's a postcard? 4x6? I measured the frame, and I built this clay frame, 4x6, but they didn't mention anything about how far it could come out. I thought I would have fun with it. I loved it so much, and it was important enough to me, that I called them and said, "I've decided to keep the sculpture," next time around. Then I started a whole series based on that. I thought of this as cornucopias. The idea that you have a restrained format, and things bursting with life outside that format.
	Influences here that started coming back up was, the roughshod, fisherman shack. These are found, both of these in Louisiana, New Orleans, near New Orleans. The earlier photographs that I took of New Brunswick were all these kinds of structures that were thrown together. I love that. I love this architecture here with these long shuttered windows. I started working off of that. This is called, Bayou Song, and you can see that roughshod construction right here. It goes back to when I was working in wood. The reason I worked in pieces like that, is I had no money. I had to find and scrap for wood, and I found a junkyard that had bull dozed a mountain of those palettes that forklifts lift up. Free wood. I spent days and days collecting that wood, taking out the nails. That is still something I do with the ceramics.
	I work as ceramist, if I can be called that, like a woodworker. That's from the shingles. That's called, French Quarters Still Life. I did a little series of these. I went a little extruder crazy. For those of you who don't know, an extruder is this little tube where you put clay and you press it, and a little coil of clay comes out. This is a little extruder crazy. I just bought one. Baroque still life, home guard. Original it was mother goose, but I started thinking of this as a boa around a madame from a house of prostitution. This called, Madame. This is called, egret in a Field of Trooping Capheads. One day I'm driving, this is my Swarthmore piece, it has no sources except I could show pictures of Swarthmore, but no need here. I'm driving in, and I'm going over the speed bump in front of the Lang Center, and there's a whole circle of a tour around a cute little bunny. There's a lot of bunnies here, right? They're all tame.
	They're Quaker bunnies. I had my music on, and I was looking at them, and I look up and I see a redtail hawk coming down bent out of hell to get that rabbit. Sure enough, went right through the crowd, down the bullseye, grabbed that rabbit and flew off. I had 20 people, I had the music on, but it was ever most the scream. All of them. It was a precious moment. It was a really great moment. That's what I'm doing here. This is called, I originally I called it, Peaceable Kingdom, but that carries the weight of the original. Which by the way, [inaudible 00:44:55] one of them, it's called Wonderland. I was also thinking of Tim Burton's style of making his animated forms. I wanted this bunny in a slightly weird landscape, slightly menacing landscape. 
	Then this piece is called, Flying Fox and the Roost, which is of course is a fruit bat. Now this is weird, serendipity, I made this piece just before I left for Sri Lanka, where I would be surrounded by fruit bats. To the point where I'd come to really hate fruit bats. They smell bad. They fight all the time. They squabble the whole day long. We lived off of this lake, and this is called, The Lake, however the remarkable thing about Sri Lanka is there is not a one single natural lake. Every lake was hand made in ancient times. This one, is probably about a kilometer long, but there are some up to eight kilometers long. They were all dug out to trap the water for use and irrigation and the need for water. 
	This is in Kandy, and we lived just off this lake. Problem was, this is the problem, I had never, ever in my life lived in a noisier place. If you'll notice right here, see that little road right there? There's even space there. Now that road is the major forefront that goes around the lake and we're living over here, and it's bumper to bumper. People in Sri Lanka have no concept of weekends. There's no such thing. They work seven days a week. They have one day off, and that's the Poya day, the full moon day at the end of each month. What happens is, they get up at 5:00 am and all of a sudden, everyone ... You know this from India, if you've been to India too. Everyone honks a horn. The horns are being laid on, it's 5:00 am. 
	Our house, second mistake, was above two schools. There are two bands of toque macaques in the world, monkeys, and one of them was on my house. The other one was north in Sri Lanka. The reason for that, is they stole all the food from the children below us. What cars start honking at, at 5:00 in the morning, the toque macaques wake up, they jump down on the roof that's right outside all our bedrooms, corrugated steel, and they start banging the steel and throwing at each other. They're going nuts, right outside. A foot from our bedroom. That's about 5:30. When the kids come at 7:00, that's very noisy. They're all coming, the parents are dropping them off. There's two schools. Then there's a band across the street that starts playing at 8:00 am. It's the national band. They know one song. It's ABBA's, Dancing Queen, over and over, with the worst bass drummer you have ever heard.
	At any rate, they start up, which gives a signal to the two schools to have their bands start practicing. A flute band and a kazoo and tambor ... What are those called? Tambourine band. This sounds like a commercial, but thank god for my Bose noise canceling headphones. I spent five months, those things were almost never off my head. That's the context in which we lived. It looks very bucolic, but oh my god is it loud. Around the lake you have these flying foxes. They're everywhere, in certain designated trees. Then this grouping. This is weird. I would walk to go swimming along this road. I borrowed this pool from this hotel, and I would walk in the morning and go swimming. I can't tell you how many times I found these three guys on the same log, in this position.
	I tried to think about it, and I only came up with the theory that maybe they're the alpha of each of their species, and they're the only ones who get the good log. Why? It's really quite a mystery, so I took a picture of it. That's the monkeys around our house. toque macaques because of the kind of the little bad rig they have right now. This is looking right down out of our house. At our house, we originally came and we just had these bars, but the little ones could go through the bars and steal all of our food. They were so smart. One time they came through the door and band, and I saw this, so I ran out with my broomstick. By the way, every time we had to go outside, we had to go outside with a broomstick because the big ones are very vicious.
	Here's what I read about macaques. If you are the source of food, freely you give it to them, or they perceive you as the source of food, you are below them. You are subservient to them. They are not afraid of you. Because they had been getting ... This is the path to our house right here, and this one is reaching in, after we put, see the screen meshing here? We solved the problem, finally mid way through our time there, because we were just fighting these things. My daughter brought along a bunch of books, YA novels, about zombies and the apocalypse. I was reading these, because they're available, and I just started thinking I was living the book. These are zombies all around me. I came out one day with my camera in hand to photograph something else, and this guy was about to leap on me. His fangs are about an inch and a half long. That's why it's blurry, because I reached for the stick and took a shot at the same time.
	All right, and then you have the elephants. That bottom shot, you have the mahout here, the trainer of the elephant who lives with them all their lives right outside the Kandy temple. We encountered this elephant on one of our drives to a natural preserve, which is really dangerous. You get a single elephant on the road, you're supposed to stay very, very far away from it. This thing just popped out, crashed out in front of us. We were on our way to this huge tank here, which is eight kilometers, hand dug, eight kilometers wide. Let's see if this will work. Oh it does work. Let me just go back, this is actually a film and it's not working with this new computer. There were some problems with the system here, but what it shows is thousands and thousands of white egrets moving, entering stage right here, and moving towards the lake at night. They're returning from their daytime forage.
	There are thousands of them. This was a little film I had to demonstrate that. This thing right here, is a rare event called the century palm. It blooms, this fuzzy kind of bloom, once in a hundred years and then dies. We were told by the land lady, I guess she was trying to dissuade us from what we were hearing in terms of the sound, that we should rent this house because we have a rare event about to happen right there. I think we were sold on that, weren't we? All the thousands and thousands of egrets, every night I just sat on this little balcony, sipping my little arrak, which is called whiskey, little glass, horrible stuff. I would watch thousands of these move, and then 10 minutes would pass, and then the fruit bats would arise. 
	What happened is I figured out enough times watching this that, just before the birds started coming in, the fruit bats had already been aroused by the call of Buddhist prayers from the temple on the lake. The lake is all rigged up with speakers, so it's quite loud with the Buddhist prayers, and all the bats had left the trees allowing the birds to come in, and now they're in the air. First time I saw them, it was so freakish. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz, the monkey scene, the flying monkey scene. It's just exactly that. They have two foot wing spans. One night on the Poya day, which seems special there. The full moon seem much more special because everybody was waiting all month for a day off. We talked about it. 
	The moon was rising really big, and I was on a rise, and so it was below a branch and all the birds are coming in right side. Then one bird, first time I ever saw that, came in from the left and sat on that branch. Just sat on that branch as the moon rose, and I remember that moment thinking, just thinking about it. It seemed very poetic, and so I made this piece, Poya Moon, I'm thinking of calling it, but I made it [fishercade 00:53:26], so that's a piece. It's actually a little bit more gray than that, then it comes out here. Moving through the ... Eh, 10 minutes over Patricia, what can I say? 
	The crows are everywhere, and I wanted to do a piece about the sound of the crows. It's entitled, Caw Caw Caw. I remember the signifiers for the voice in Aztec codices. It reminded me of something, so I started looking through my images that I collect, and it looked very much like this Pestel, ancient Assyrian Pestel. Here's the piece. This is called, Caw Caw Caw. [inaudible 00:54:03]
	Imagine you're me, a fairly big guy, a little weighty. You're used to walking across this lawn barefoot. You've done it a hundred times. It's a well manicured lawn. This nasty invasive species called a giant African land snail comes walking along, and it points itself right in your direction, right in your path. You're walking barefoot at night, and it's dark, and you step on it. Imagine the attended feelings of the shell cracking and everything else thereafter to follow. It is a visceral experience. Felt bad for the snail, but I felt bad for myself. At any rate, it must have been in my mind when I made this next piece.
	It's four lamps. They're not as African snails as another type of snail, but the truth be told, I made these four to be four legs on this cut sculpture I had made, that I decided to abandon. For that reason the spiral on a snail is always on this side, never on that side, but I wanted the spirals visible from the two sides of the cart. I had them, I wanted to make them. Also, I was organizing the course I'm teaching right now it's called, The Everyday Things, which is around lamps. I just started thinking of lamp sculptures. I just started thinking in those terms. 
	This was one of the most exciting things that I have seen in Sri Lanka. The reason I actually went, one of the reasons, is this image on the bottom of the Buddha's legs with a painting of the lotus flowers on the bottom of the Buddha. This is a Buddhist cave what's called, Dambulla. I was so excited by that. What I was excited about was all this painting that was going on, on this very rough and shaped form. You would have in some case there attempt to create a perspectival grid pattern going back, but the cave walls are undulating, so they would have to adjust the painting so that perceptually from a distance it would look like a perceptual grid. You know what I'm saying?
	There was a lot of illusion going on in the painting of this. This resulted in a breakthrough. Well, here's a funny thing, for years I've been collecting images of patterns on ancient murals. Patterns, decorations, Japanese fabrics, all kinds of stuff like that, never knowing what I was going to do with them till I saw this. I came back and made this piece. This is an important piece for me. It's a section of the Dambulla decorations on the murals painted onto this flying bat, who is a flying fox, they call the flying dog, it's a fruit bat. I did that. It was a breakthrough because the idea of working and modeling carefully a form, and then camouflaging it, is a very odd one for me to do. It took a certain risk.
	When I came back from Sri Lanka, I was very, very confused. I was very confused as to what to make, because frankly the Sri Lankans had just gone through a 40 year war. It had been less than a year since it had ended, and I think the entire culture, and this is my perception, I felt that the entire culture was in a state of shock. A kind of state of ... They hadn't recovered from that, and all the attended terrorist activities that occurred daily in their lives. There was a freeze on the culture, and what was odd for me is I usually go places like Mexico or India, or Japan, and I can figure out a way to use either the image of flora or fauna or architecture through some codified method that was done in that culture. A style that was done in that culture.
	Here I really didn't have that. I came back and I was very confused. I thought, well I might as well just do my dog. This is my dog. She's lying down here posing, but what happened was, between this taking the shot, and starting the sculpture making her a fluffy dog, she's a chihuahua Pomeranian. This is her Pomeranian mode. She had gotten a haircut and then she turned it into a chihuahua. I brought her to my studio and cut her all down. I hated the sculpture. It seems like the worst sculpture I've ever made. I started thinking about ways I might camouflage it. I was thinking about dazzle camouflage. That's the name of this camouflage that was used in ships during WWII, dazzle, because it'd dazzle the eye and they would melt into the rhythm of the waves.
	This was a photograph I had from Mexico, decorating the tree. Then again, that Mayan pot. The sculpture I made, and I only have two more to go, then I move. Is probably the most over the top sculpture I've ever made. It reminds me of that commercial, you know you've seen that egg? That commercial, it's an anti-drug commercial, "This is your mind," then (crash) in the pan it's cooking, "This is your mind on drugs." Well this is your dog on drugs. This is it how it ended up. It has flickering flames. Those are actually flickering flames. When it flickers, it does throw off these strange shadows on top. It was really about my dog, Sleepy. It's called, Little Dog in REM State.
	Then I will end with this one. This is probably, this is a large base relief I did when I would walk along the lake every day, I would notice bird prints in the mud along the edge of the lake. Next day, a whole nother set of bird prints. I started getting bird books and trying to determine what kind of birds were there. They were always overlapping and it just became this interest of mine. I did this. This is about four and a half feet big. It's this big. It's quite big buy ceramic standards. 
	This is the last slide I'll show you, but it's also I think the beginning of the series, not really the end of the series at all, because I am very, very excited by the notion of creating these pictorial decoration on a sculpture that in itself is an illusion. A base relief is an illusion of a three dimensional thing. It's opening up a whole pictorial possibility I've never had as a sculptor, so I'll end with that.