To All Our Future Flames
To All Our Future Flames will be the final show at Gigantic Gallery as the gallery currently exists. The first strike was a change in building management. The second was an increased rent and additional fees. And the third was an opportunity to open a new, collaborative space in a better location designed to serve multiple purposes. So we’re out.
Credit for the show idea and curation belongs to Jason Edward Davis. We were sitting in the gallery drinking beers, which is our Friday tradition, when he suggested doing a show of work on matchboxes. We hadn’t done that before, and I’m a huge fan of tiny art, and I was dreading the idea of orchestrating another group show right after the second Cartes de visite, so we went with it.
The title came to me in the shower.
And the flyer came to me in a frustrated rush the day before the opening. Jason suggested I make a couple pieces for the show, so I spent much of the month working on those rather than being responsible, desiging a striking flyer and blasting the local alt weeklies with a punny press release. If nobody sends me a preview image of the show, I usually go to The Noun Project for SVGs and try to design something symbolically, hopefully, representative. But they now require an account before downloading. So as I was waiting for the confirmation email, which took forever, I started looking for similar iconography in the fonts on my machine. There’s a curvy heart in the Webdings set. So I took that, flipped it, skewed it, doubled down and colored the parts. Voila:
And I made two pieces for the show. The first is called The King James in Fire & Flames. Here’s a screenshot:
And here’s a screenshot of the script I wrote to make it:
The script is just a bit of Ruby that will run through the King James Bible line by line, collating each verse, then scanning each verse for the terms you give it (I gave it fire and flame). If the verse contains at least one of your terms, it will wrap the verse and term in HTML (p and span tags) and print it out. You can then pipe the output to a file and write a little stylesheet in CSS to make the output easier to read. You can also give it secondary (“deuterocanonical”) terms, which are wrapped only in verses that contain primary terms. Hence the blue Lords and Gods.
So I printed the output (on six 11” x 17” sheets, 10pt type, no linebreaks) and the source code, rolled and stuffed it in the largest matchbox I could find. Nobody bought it. So it goes.
I also wrote 42 love haiku. Each haiku is in a tiny file of its own on my web server, and each match in the box has one URL written on it. So you go to the URL and get a lovely little love haiku:
So you go to that URL and get your lovely little love haiku. And by the time you read it, the server has already erased the file containing that haiku. Like matches, each URL is single-use. Because love, like a match, flares up and burns out fast. Ha ha! Ha.
This is one of the error messages:
And this is a pretty accurate summary of how the night progressed:
