The Youth

I am very pleased to announce that I have found a new location for my Jewelry line, Popular Usage, in Berlin. After reading about the opening of Wasted German Youth on my favorite blog, I then went in myself to see if they had any interest in displaying some AWESOME jewelry. They were excited about the project and offered to display them in the store for the summer and see what the response is. You can find Wasted German Youth at Memhard Strasse 1 next to Alexander Platz.

I look forward to working with the good people at Wasted German Youth and further possibilities for collaboration. Special thanks to Paul Snowden for taking such an interest in my work. Here’s cool man Paul, man of Berlin design mystery, pictured below.

Knight Performance

As Times get tough here in Berlin one has to take whatever job comes their way. Last weekend, as a part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, I was asked to play a part in a performance by the Italian artist Pietro Roccasalva at Johnen Gallery.

When I asked if the gallery still needed people for the performance (at which point I had no idea what I would have to do) they said, “Yeah, it involves painting using a spray gun.”  Sounded simple enough, “How tall are you?” There was a follow up call to double check my height. When I got there I was taken to the room where the performance was going to be, and looked down on the floor to see full sized plastic knight armor laid out. “What’s that for?”, I asked. I looked back at the gallery director to see a finger pointing at me.

Laugh track.

So I tried the suit on. Felt good, felt real good. Then I had to try it out with the spray gun. “You’re really good with that! Could you go a little slower?” Little did they know that I had experience with a spray gun. The last detail was that I had to spray another knight while he was spray painting me.

Roll the tape.

Notice how there is no armor covering the butt.

If I were to then do paintings of these photos, would that be considered self-referential? I’m the one on the left, by the way.

There were two performances. One on Friday night, and the other on the following Saturday afternoon. The performance took, from head to toe, one hour to complete. These photos were taken, as always, by Nick Simpson on the Saturday performance. Hopefully I can get some photos from the opening. That was only the first gallery I went to that night.