Have You Seen My Marbles?

I moved this weekend and don't have internet at home yet. (Actually, I can't even find my modem yet, but whatever.) Forgive my silences. A few tidbits:

--I had something published on Jargon Chicago last week. "Deep Dish Games." Ever wonder what the Olympics would be like if we turned them into full-on Chicago experiences? It would be Chicago-tastic.

--Chicago Improv Festival week wrapped up last night. K-Rock and I are very tired. I have not performed any stand up in the past two weeks. Naughty comedian!

--My friend Emily's little brother is running what sounds like a pretty cool art gallery here in Chicago these days, which is astonishing, since in my mind, Rowley is still about eleven years old. Here's a NewCity Chicago article about that.

--Have I ever mentioned Emily before? I don't think I have, although I certainly need to now. Emily Kennerk and I have been really close friends since we were about eleven or twelve, when we met on the swim team and enjoyed occasional pony-related forays through the farms on the edge of town. We suffered through middle school dances and high school speech class together, and commiserated on the unique challenges of being one of five or six kids. We both moved from our impossibly quaint little hometown to Chicago at the same time, to pursue our creative ambitions. We've been forgoing regular dental care and living a starving artist lifestyle, with its attendant worries, fears, and uncertainties for quite some time now. And I'm happy to say that may be coming to an end.

Emily is an amazing artist who won a nice grant in 2005, the same year some of her drawings were exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. Oh, and she just beat out Anish Kapoor, the "Cloud Gate" guy, for a project that will permanently put her public art project, Marbles, on display in a very cool new art space being carved out in downtown Indianapolis. Yeah, I'll say it again, Emily beat the guy who designed one of Chicago's most recognizable landmarks. Her Marbles project is “…a new landmark and a monument to the fun and eclectic nature of the growing Mass Ave cultural district,” according to Mindy Taylor Ross, Coordinator of the Cultural Trail’s public art programming and Director of Public Art for the Arts Council of Indianapolis.

She is also opening a major exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art on July 13, and I hope to catch a ride home with her to see her work, which is called "Suburban Nation" and, according to the IMA site, "...will include a series of four installations influenced by the American surburban landscape: High Density, Untitled: Porches, and Welcome Home will be installed in the Forefront galleries...The fourth installation, Boundaries, will be created on the museum's front lawn. An evocative earth work, the project will use traditional lawn striping techniques to reiterate the patterns of subdivision plots."