Eakins & Dombrosky

Visit us

2009-09-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

Please visit our newest projects on our blogs at shannoneakins.com and marcdombrosky.com

2009-09-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

2009-09-16T19:38:00.000-07:00

2009-08-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

2009-08-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

Phantasm Chasm video stills

2009-05-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

Images are stills from a 775 image slide projection piece, designed as part of our installation at Fulcrum.

Phantasm Chasm at Fulcrum Gallery

2009-04-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Read Rosemary Ponnekanti's blog posting from The Tacoma News Tribune here

Read Alec Clayton's review from The Weekly Volcano here

Over Tide Flats, New Tacoma

2009-04-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Phantasm Chasm (behind the scenes)

2009-04-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Our lives should
be pure and white
Tablets whereon
God can write

Quoted from Henrik Ibsen, from an inscription under his bust in Wright Park, Tacoma, WA.

Phantasm Chasm

2009-03-12T20:15:00.000-07:00

take off in a coffin and get away forever

or lurk in some famous forests

without a shirt

(excerpted from Clark Coolidge, Far Out West. New York: Adventures in Poetry, 2001)

Phantasm Chasm uneasily unites some of the failed opportunities, tragic events, and myths in Tacoma’s past. Mirroring ways we navigate through town, the installation combines multiple, fractured, partial views of the City of Destiny. Alternating between visions of Henrik Ibsen, noxious weeds of concern, John Muhammad, and the birth of the railroad in New Tacoma, Phantasm Chasm points awkwardly towards a new frontier, but one that may be ephemerally, erratically transforming, breaking down. Ghosts arise.

Wayzgoose

2009-03-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

We were invited to King's Books Wayzgoose this year, and designed a set of embossed images, printed from Tacoma manhole and drain covers. We would like to thank everyone who assisted us with the loan of the covers, especially Urban Accessories (Bret and Jeff and their entire team) and the City of Tacoma (Amy McBride and everyone in the Street Maintenance Division). Special thanks to sweet pea, Jessica Spring, and Chris Sharp for offering their driving skills, Jennifer Adams for sharing time and resources with us, and everyone who helped us move wet OSB sheets and damp polarfleece. Wayzgoose forever.

Sweater Auction

2009-01-15T11:46:00.000-08:00

The sweaters from the installation at TAM have now been laundered and donated to Tacoma Goodwill and Tacoma Rescue Mission. Both agencies have shown a tremendous amount of support, and Goodwill will begin posting the sweaters on their ebay store here, starting January 14. We would also like to extend our thanks to the staff at Laundry Mart in Tacoma for their assistance in helping us launder a few hundred sweaters, all at once.

***

Describing atmosphere in his book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Andy writes,

There should be supermarkets that sell things and supermarkets that buy things back, and until that equalizes, there'll be more waste than there should be. Everybody would always have something to sell back, so everybody would have money, because everybody would have something to sell. We all have something, but most of what we have isn't salable, there's such a preference today for brand new things. People should be able to sell their old cans, their old chicken bones, their old shampoo bottles, their old magazines. We have to get more organized. People who tell you we're running out of things are just making the prices go up higher (145-46).

Snowflakes, after

2008-12-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Snowflakes

2008-12-06T16:49:00.000-08:00

We're struggling to find ways to thank everyone who has participated in making this project with us, and this post will probably become a repository, roll call, and trial version for any and all images of people making the snowflakes that we will be using next weekend. The top images are culled from the many snowflake-making parties that Jana Wennstrom (at the head of the table in the image third from the bottom) organized at TAM (Michelle Kinney is seated between Jana and Shannon).

The lower two images are from Thanksgiving at the Miller compound. Pictured is Olga (who seems to have an almost preternatural gift for snowflake making), Annie, Cindy, Steve, and Joe. Although Joe is pictured here working on his iphone, it should be noted that he did make some significant snowflake contributions, and is trying--at these moments--to find out some pressing (really, it felt pressing at the time) facts on Dan Fogelberg, at our behest.

And any mention of snowflake making cannot be made without sending out props to Jessica Bender who has made this all possible by working with Shannon every week. Check out her Etsy store link, cabinet713.

Snow Job

2008-12-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

As we are partnering with Tacoma Goodwill Industries, we will be updating this posting periodically with new images and information on the donation. Likely, I'll also have new postings at the top of the blog that will complement the images shown here.

Besides being one of my favorite songs on Ritual de lo Habitual, three days is roughly the amount of time that it took us to place and install these sweaters. Oddly, we haven't actually counted how many went onto the wave, but the wall label describes it as "more than 600". The third image here was taken last night, just before we stopped working for the evening. As it became darker, it was more and more difficult to read the interior spaces of the museum; we kept seeing fleeting glimpses of people walking on what seemed or felt like multiple levels all at once, reflected everywhere. Inside and outside overlapped. And it seemed like Leroy was always over our shoulder, circling around us.

Special thanks goes out to Jordan Tart at Pure Clothing for helping us in gathering all the sweaters used in this project. Pure is also where we go to buy our belts and most (or all, in my case) of our Rock-n-Roll t-shirts. Thanks Jordan, you are awesome.

Snow Job

2008-11-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

Tacoma Art Museum Snowbound here

Here's what we're thinking, the project (three components) is titled Snow Job,

1. Installation covering Richard Rhodes' untitled "stone wave" or, Stone Garden:

Second-hand sweaters, quilts, and blankets sourced from Tacoma will be placed over the 650 stones in the 1,650 square-foot enclosure, creating a dense collage (or quilt) of patterns and textures. Each of the stones measures approximately 24 inches square and will be individually covered with its own sweater or blanket, creating a temporary covering; softening the environment, providing a warm, comforting space in the heart of the museum. Assembled at random, the work is designed to address our community; how we share, take care of one another, and protect ourselves.

Rather than cutting or destroying the garments, we intend to fold the clothing articles to mimic the shape of the stones; temporarily altering their shapes to fit the pavers, without destroying their history or compromising the initial function of the clothing. In part, this work is designed to draw attention to not only the space, but to the materials being used and community in which they exist. We will purchase the majority of these items (some will be donated, some will be ours), financially supporting our community on one level, but what of the materials and their place in the world after this installation? What responsibilities (as artists) do we have to working in sustainable ways, supporting people in need, and how do we draw these tenuous connections? Virginia Woolf has written, "For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible…But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money, and the houses we live in". (Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pp. 41-42.)

At the conclusion of the installation, we propose to donate the garments to local shelters, in effect allowing the work to expand and reach (back) into the community. Pieces of this work will have had lives previous to this intervention, and we hope to give them lives afterwards.

2. Installation/performance in The Murray Family Event Space:

We propose to bring the snow inside, conceptualizing the Murray Family Event Space as an improvised Snow Globe. Utilizing recycled paper (ideally, we would be recycling the paper from Tacoma Art Museum as well as businesses and institutions that we are affiliated with currently), and working in conjunction with a donor-based project in the Open Art Studio (as well as additional snowflakes being added to the installation the day of the performance), we will be cutting and gluing individual paper snowflakes that will be initially sited in a corner of the Event Space, much like a snowdrift (we're from Ohio, and this image is very clear in both of our minds).

At scheduled times throughout the day, we propose to activate the snowflakes with electric-powered leaf blowers (doubling as "snow" blowers here), pushing the paper cutouts up and out, into another area in the room. Since moving to downtown Tacoma in 2004, we have been haunted by leaf blowers. We have seen countless mornings (6:00 am is the earliest incident that we recall specifically) broken by the grinding and whirring of the motorized blowers navigating along our sidewalks and gutters.

3. Welcome back Shreddy.

Tacoma is for Lovers

2008-11-13T11:39:00.000-08:00

Versus Verses

2008-11-08T21:05:00.000-08:00

This is a project we designed for King's Books Auction on November 12. The auction benefits Tacoma Public Schools, supporting the purchase of new textbooks. Information on the auction and participants is located here. As sweet pea (of King's Books) writes,

This re-envisioned book was originally A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The artists and the author battled it out to create this wicked piece. The title is etched onto the cover. The front endpage has a forest with liberated images from the book that can be placed at will. Throughout the book, illustrations are altered, enhanced, or stolen from their places. The new book will provide endless hours of entertainment.

as the Lucky Beaver rises

2008-09-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

Jennifur & Logan moving

2008-09-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

These images were all taken August 30, 2008. The phrases "Jennifur" and "Logan" were installed one on top of another (Jennifur was on top).

Eastbank Esplanade Installation

2008-09-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

Combined Sewer Overflow

2008-08-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

As Shannon busily sews the word PIPE in 2' x 2' flags, we've been researching about the Big Pipe Project in Portland. Some background on the project (thanks to the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services) is here

and information on the reason for the pipe (along with some fantastic images) is here, Combined Sewer Overflow

Ford Building

2008-08-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

Round and round

2008-08-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

Last night, we laundered all of the clothing (16.2 lbs.) that we purchased from the Goodwill Outlet earlier in the day. I met the owner of the laundromat while we were waiting, and we discussed the gentrification of Alberta, the resale on Speed Queen dryers, and the commute to/from Tacoma. At the same time we were doing the wash, we had dinner at Mash Tun, where we saw chalkboard graffiti in the restroom (the one on the right-hand side, as you enter the restaurant) that read "I want U Jennifur". We had been designing two sets of signal flags to be hung together; the combination of the two sets would intone a *relationship* of sorts, referencing the sex industry, or fur trade. The flags will slap into one another as they wave in the breeze. With the graffiti discovery, we've revised our original design for the sets and now have created two sets of flags which will act as protagonists-- Jennifur & Logan.

Jenni(fur) & Log(an); The Jennifur set is pieced together from intimates, velveteen fabrics, lace, and silk blouses, Logan is assembled from dress shirts, flannels (with pockets intact), and polo shirts. Images will follow

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

2008-08-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

Potential sites?

2008-08-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

images, top to bottom (moving geographically from south to north):

1, 2: Salmon Street Plaza, overlook north of Festival Plaza. Propose attaching flags from edge of overlook platform to shopping cart, wooden door, or other detritus washed up under platform

3: Near Belmont Street signage, propose attaching flags (flags attached to one another on cables) from cleat to log protruding from water, just offshore.

4: Overlook just south of Morrison Bridge. Propose attaching flags from railing overhead, either hanging down like banners, or attached to nearby trees.

5: Cantilever Walk, just north of Morrison Bridge. Propose attaching flags underneath platform to wooden posts, as shown.

additional sites north of Cantilever Walk may also be proposed.

Project description:

Stop Carrying Out Your Intentions and Wait For My Signals is a project designed to chronicle Portland's maritime history, utilizing the coded language of marine signal flags. These hand-sewn nautical flags are assembled from second-hand clothing collected throughout the Pacific Northwest; garments are chosen that may amplify the content of the message. The recycled articles offer their own history, bringing a community forward. As an example, Go Tusko is pieced together from sheer blouses and fabrics, evoking the memory of Tusko the Magnificent, a ten-ton, twelve-foot costumed elephant that (in reponse to a low-flying airplane piloted by Tex Rankin) rampaged Lotus Isle in 1930, destroying buildings across the waterfront amusement park. Complementing this vision is our cheering Go, supporting his efforts, and simultaneously pointing towards the vibrant urban growth of Portland in subsequent years.

A deep interest in investigating the signal flags is questioning how they have been compromised in terms of their content-- when we initially went out to decipher flags on the waterway near our home, we were saddened to find that the letters didn't add up; nonsense, babel. What does this intone for our work? As (now) students of the language used for centuries to safely traverse foreign waters, what does it mean that the language has been (if not lost, then) transferred to something...else? Does it look better? What is the purpose of a visual language without a translation? We are outsiders to Portland, visitors who have surveyed your history and focused on images that resonate with us, however briefly or oddly. These flags are hung strategically along the Eastbank Esplanade, like graffiti, occurring at multiple sites. Walking the waterway becomes an aspect of this project, discovering flags and unveiling histories along the way. Meanings are suggested in fragmentary, partial ways, emerging erratically and transitionally.

Like a flag waving in the wind.

now

2008-08-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

now is a ship

which captain am
sails out of sleep

steering for dream

from e.e. cummings, 73 poems, new york: harcourt brace jovanovich,inc., 1962.

Tusko

2008-08-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

Get the full story here

Shanghai

2008-08-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to AmericanHeritage.com for this article

Willamette

2008-08-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Polychlorinated biphenyl
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon Dioxin

Top image from the Oregon DEQ, their website is here, with information about progress on improving the water quality in the Willamette

Link to Willamette Riverkeeper here

As they note on their website, some of the current problems (including habitat modification and pollution) facing the river include the following:

The Willamette is on the Clean Water Act 303 (d) list for violations of water quality standards.

The Willamette currently violates temperature, bacteria, and mercury standards.
A large section of the river, some 40-miles known as the Newberg Pool, is home to resident fish (those that don't migrate such as the northern pikeminnow) that exhibit high percentages of skeletal deformities. For example, in some samples in this area over 50% of the juvenile fish were deformed. This section of the river, as well as others, contains PCBs, dioxin, and PAH among others.
A six-mile stretch of the river in Portland is now a federally designated Superfund site. This site is highly polluted with all manner of toxic pollution, heavy metals, and other substances. It is now going through a cleanup process that will likely push a decade to complete.
Spring Chinook and steelhead, the Willamette's native salmonids, are listed as threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act.
Other species such as lamprey eel and white sturgeon have been found to contain significant concentrations of man made chemicals in their tissues.
There is a fish consumption advisory for people that eat ANY species of resident fish. This is pretty much any fish other than salmon, lamprey, and sturgeon.
New studies are underway that are looking into additional impacts from toxic and other pollution on the Willamette River and the species that inhabit it.

Lucky Beaver

2008-08-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

More information on the Beaver(s) here.

As the website notes, "With the United States firmly involved in World War II, local radio station KXL sold over $300,000 in war bonds in 1943 to fund the building of a bomber for the war that would be dubbed "The Lucky Beaver." Concealed in this is part of what we are interested in addressing with this project; "Lucky Beaver" moves uneasily around the logging history of the region, the sex industry, a baseball team, and a bomber, all at once.
Like a flag waving in the wind.

Pettygrove Wins!

2008-08-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Francis Pettygrove is in the center of this photo. His hand may possibly be covering the coin used to decide the name of Portland, as his hands appear arranged in the classic *heads or tails?* stance... More information on Pettygrove is here. And, just for the record, the toss was best two out of three.

Lovejoy from Boston

2008-08-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Asa Lawrence Lovejoy (1808- 1882) was one of the founders of Portland, and in 1845, in one of my favorite coin tosses in history, lost the naming rights to Portland to Francis Pettygrove (Lovejoy was going for *Boston*, his hometown, Pettygrove hailed from Portland, Maine). The whole story is here. Lovejoy is buried in Portland at Lone Fir Cemetery, and the epitaph on his tombstone reads,

He endured the adventures of the plains and mountains, and here—beside the Willamette chose and wisely developed the site of the greatest city of the Columbia valley, afterward holding many offices of public trust, and passing with the esteem of all.

Scratching the Surface

2008-07-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

For this project titled Stop Carrying Out Your Intentions and Wait For My Signals, we're considering the blog as a distant cousin to the ship's log. Our intention is to update entries related to our work in Portland, our research into the maritime history of the region, and how this may all fit together; an archive of what goes (went, eventually) into this experience. Taking our cue from the protagonist in Herman Melville's White Jacket or, The World in a Man-of-War,

It was nothing more than a white duck frock, or rather shirt; which, laying on deck, I folded double at the bosom, and by then making a continuation of the slit there, opened it lengthwise-- much as you would cut a leaf in the last new novel. The gash being made, a metamorphosis took place, transcending any related by Ovid. For, presto! the shirt was a coat!

The image above is a prototype. All of the signage for that work and the pieces that will appear in Portland can be deciphered here.

Something we keep thinking about is how this project (and our time in Portland) in some ways mirrors our life on the Thea Foss waterway in Tacoma. Photograph above is of the Murray Morgan Bridge, now closed to vehicular traffic (this image was taken March 18, 2007). Murray Morgan was a bridge tender there, where he penned his work, Skid Road. Thanks to History Link for this essay, and thanks to The News Tribune and Tacoma Public Library for archiving his obituary here, and more importantly, a collection of his essays here.

The House Bill commemorating Morgan's achievement utilizes language in a manner similar to Melville. Is language maritime? Maritime language? Son of a son of a sailor?

A deep interest in investigating the signal flags is how they have been compromised in terms of their content-- when we went out to decipher the flags (above), we were saddened to find that the letters didn't add up; nonsense. What does this intone for our proposal? As (now) students of the language used for centuries to safely traverse foreign waters, what does it mean that the language has been (if not lost, then) transferred to something..else? Does it look better? What is the purpose of a visual language without a translation?

The images above were photographed at Tacoma's Tall Ships festival on the Thea Foss Waterway, for an upcoming project at galleryHomeland as part of the program Scratching the Surface.

Shreddy

2008-07-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

Designed for an exhibition on office products, we shredded our personal documents and affixed them to the facsimile of a full-size grizzly bear rug. Our intention was to highlight the sensitivity of both the documents and endangered species.

Installation view, Gallery Madera, Tacoma, WA, 2007.

Re: Re: Agent

2008-07-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

For "Re: Re: Agent", we proposed a project that would comment on the scope and nature of the initiative while using the archives of the project to build itself. In the work, nearly all of the business cards (roughly four thousand) collected during the initiative were employed. The cards effectively become their own map, overlapping layers of type, photographs, and personal information.

The structure of the work is geographically accurate, with each panel corresponding to a different time zone (reading from west to east, or left to right, across the wall). Business cards are placed strategically, replicating the travel routes of all the participating independent agents who made their way to centrally located cities in order to meet with executives and representatives from the Seattle office. The underlying network of sewn cards replicates major roadways across the county and provides a support structure (and point of reference) for the project during its development.

Each strip of paper is created by sewing together (by hand) business cards from the agents that visited those corresponding cities (wherever possible), and then shredding the cards into equal strips. Each strip included here translates to a single agent, and as the meetings occurred in major cities, clusters of strips represent meeting areas.

Working with a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analyst, we were able to generate a physical model of the initiative, translating thousands of cardholders into points of reference. From this map, we were able to see the form that this work would take, although the rich texture, dense palette, and collision of type, image, and paper stock continues to be surprising and challenging to us.

Through the course of this project, we began to feel as though we were traveling with the agents—navigating new cities, meeting more people than we can remember, and sharing the fatigue of travel. We spent an entire day in Texas--our Texas, a Texas that covered roughly two square feet on our studio floor, and saw hundreds of strips of paper sewn, shredded, and bonded together. We see the design of this work as a proposition; an opportunity to discuss the activity of the Re:Agent initiative while considering its implications in your new space, its place in the collection, and our own experiences mapped onto the Re: Agent initiative.

Installation views, Safeco Insurance, Seattle, WA, 2007.

Bio

2008-06-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

Exploring the layered nature of a place is the focus of our collaborative projects. Gravitating towards environments and objects that are typically overlooked, trampled and forgotten, our works utilize fragmented, hybridized forms; incorporating found, recycled, and (when necessary) fabricated materials in installations, audio, digital media, photography, video, and objects that respond to their location or origins. Shredded business cards, paper targets, personal documents, repurposed sweaters, hand-blown glass, assault rifles, electric leaf blowers, sawdust, railroad spikes, and work gloves from our streets have all participated in this open exchange.

Sadly (for us), our joint efforts are interested in the slow, laborious nature of handcrafted work and the dialogue that accompanies it; we choose processes that are methodical and intricate—we begin by researching behavior, demographics, local history, and maps—searching for in-roads, points of contact. We’ll embroider, sew, leatherwork, solder, blow glass, arrange, and catalogue objects. The history of a place, a project, the community, and the ways that people move through their spaces are all open questions in our practice.

Image: Sonny and Rico in Miami, c. 1983