neon noon night day

We watched Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland yesterday in 3-D. The 3-D was nicely done, but the movie itself is all art, no heart; a big hole rather than a bright whole; eye candy, so best not keep your mind handy.

This is the first Tim Burton movie I’ve not enjoyed. Failed movies drain my psyche rather than invigorate my spirit.

The problem with 3-D is the glasses are dark and greatly dim the color and experience. We saw Avatar in 2-D after we watched it in 3-D just to compare, and the color loss is vast.

On a much brighter note, one more spiritually joyful, I spent a day down at the Butler Institute of Art with found-neon artist Jeff Chiplis helping install his upcoming solo show Neon Works in the 21st Century. (I’ll blog the date of the show once I again find out)

I interspersed helping Jeff with walking around the museum seeing the usual so-so art art museums seem to love mixed in with a selection of visually and mentally interesting pieces. I’ve seen so much art in my 46 years in the art world that the run-of-the-mill stuff just bores me at this point and it takes something a little extra to thrill me these days. Plus just like any other art, 99% of what one sees or reads or hears or tastes is throw-away while less than 1% zings the mind the eyes the heart. This is especially true of poetry readings where even my 1% quality estimate might be optimistic. (I mourn the loss of poetry in current poetry — most “poets” write and read their diary entries or daily descriptions of their mundanity and lists of their gripes and whines.)

Here are a few shots of Jeff Chiplis’ solo art show in the making. I’ll try to get down to the opening to shoot the whole show. Jeff is one of my 13 guest artists I’ve put up on AgentOfChaos.com. You can see a slew of his previous work at www.agentofchaos.com/chiplis/index.html. I’ll be adding dozens of fotos of the show to his AoC site.

As you can see, a Chiplis found neon show is a joyous explosion of color and form. One’s spirits rise just walking into the room.

* Disclosure – some of these are very odd shots of his work and give you absolutely no idea what the piece/s look like, but they do make for dramatic shots . . . this shows more how I look at shows rather than what shows look like.