masshole...and proud of it

In all the thesis hubbub I nearly forgot to post a pic of my edible art. Here's the piece I did for Matthew Meta's show. It's titled Metaconsumption.


It's a plastic pen cup holder, actually, with a little plastic insert that allows you to put four photos inside. So I trimmed my screenprint into four pieces then filled the holder with the actual candies. Attempting to visually define "meta" is always fun. It seemed like the representation partly masking the real thing might work here. Anyway, the back-story is that when I first met Matthew two and a half years ago he only wore black, white, and gray. And for his first review board he had custom color M&Ms in black, white, and gray printed with his name that he handed out in some sort of game he played with his board members. Then suddenly this summer he started wearing color. Crazy color in crazy combinations with crazy socks and shoes. And I like M&Ms so I figured, why not make art with them? I don't think anyone ate the M&Ms during the opening or after, but a friend's take on that installation episode was that it would be cool if you were supposed to eat the candies because then you'd be consuming the art in both figurative and literal ways. I thought that was a pretty good idea...for a future project, perhaps.

Anyway, my thesis defense went really well (fifteen minutes of craft nit-picking, followed by 45 minutes or so of mostly positive and/or really constructive feedback), but sadly, I was feeling just under the weather enough on the afternoon of the gallery talk to not attend. I was really torn but told it was a very informal event so in the end I decided to stay home and nurse my cold.

Otherwise, I've been keeping myself busy just generally catching up and getting ready for the holidays. I've done very little shopping, baking, or card-writing so far, but I'm getting there. I did decide yesterday, however, that the remainder of my shopping efforts will be conducted online, as much as possible. I swung by the mall to buy one gift - in the middle of a weekday - and it was a total madhouse. I don't even want to imagine what it's like this weekend. Macy's, for example, lures you in with these one-day sales and previews to that and coupons on top of it, but there are so many catches and exclusions you can only actually save money on three items in the entire store! Electrics, for just one of about fifty examples, were excluded, so basically that ruled out anything with a plug. What is this, Amish country?! It's all part of their strategy to lure you in and once you get there, deal with parking, make your way past disorganized, dazed shoppers (make a list!), you're not going to want to leave empty-handed. But I refused to pay full price for the item I desired in light of their crafty ways. Instead, I took my business to Crate & Barrel. I paid the same amount, of course, but it was the principle of it all. At least C&B is fairly overt about their inflated prices.

Anyway, needless to say I have zero patience for holiday madness. I believe the technical term for what I suffer from is "compounded stress." At moments like that, I just want to steal away to Germany and spend my twelve days of Christmas eating curry wurst and drinking cocoa while strolling through the Christmas markets. The problem is that New Englanders are already pretty gruff with one another, even on a good day (they'd "already rather be bow-hunting," so to speak). So it gets downright inhumane in an elevated stress situation like holiday shopping. As if to enforce my point, during my drive home I noticed a huge truck in front of me with a bumper sticker that looked like a small, customized Massachusetts license plate that read, "MASSHOLE." Kinda like this one:


That's the spirit. Why do you feel inspired to advertise this stereotype proudly? Why?