March 1st, 2011

This morning I moved into the art gallery.  I called upon my friend Chris Hill to give me a hand.  Chris is the guy I always call upon for help because he is usually up for it.  He’s the guy that helped me install hardwood floors when I moved into my house.  He’s the guy that helped me build a shed in my backyard when we needed the space.  He’s actually scheduled to build a shed for our friend Mike in the near future.  Not only is Chris the most helpful guy I know he also has a preternatural knack for design.

I was concerned with the art of laying all my pictures out on the walls.  I had a lot of pictures of random sizes to get up and I wanted the layout of the show to feel clean and linear while also being all over the place and a little random.  I wanted Chris to be there to help validate that what we were creating was looking good.

You should check out Chris’s blog.  He has a bunch of creative endeavors including a really hilarious podcast called “The Electric Ape Power Hour” which records in my studio and stars our pals Steve Green and Matt  McCollum.  I thoroughly recommend listening to them.  They are hilarious and amazing databanks of knowledge regarding films, television, comics, the weird and the supernatural.  On top of that Chris manages multiple blogs about artists that interest him and whatever else he deems “cool enough”.

Anyways, in true to form Charlie Visnic we spent most of the morning driving around picking up crap from various arts and crafts, office supply and hardware stores.  We finally started putting things on the wall around 4pm.

I told Chris that this art show felt like the end of the first “Lord of the Rings” film.  It’s that feeling where you realize “this is going to be a long journey”.  It was midnight and we only had about 30 days up on the wall.  I tried not to calculate that into minutes per picture because it didn’t bode well.  The big delay was in part to the process.  We had to cut every picture before hanging them and if they were larger sizes we had to spray mount them to foam-core, cut them out with a utility knife and then put them on the wall.

We used gaffers tape to mount everything because the walls were made of textured concrete and there were too many pictures to use any other means of mounting.  My thumb turned black from all the repetition of pulling, tearing, looping and pressing.

We worked all night.  Neither of us got a wink of sleep.  We took some pictures of the sunrise.  By morning we had about 60 days up on the wall.  Scary.