As promised, here is a post about the “The 7 Borders, Mapping Kentucky’s Regional Identity” exhibition at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville. My “Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog” has been a part of this show which opened on June 29 and runs through September 1. I’m honored to have been asked by KMAC and curator Joey Yates to participate especially since this is the first time my blogging activities have appeared in an art context. My display in the museum included a few small Styrofoam artifacts, a computer monitor on a table with chairs, a box for handwritten comments, and a label on the wall. Not quite your typical art offering. If, however, you think of the computer as a keyhole that you can peer through to a different reality…then you get transported to the world of the Artist at Exit 0 at the Falls of the Ohio State Park. At your fingertips are over 360 posts and more than 3500 images and my own peculiar blend of fact and fiction. Many of you who follow this blog have been nice enough to leave recent comments and I wonder if you realized that you were participating in this exhibition too? At the end of this post, I will add the comments that visitors left for me in the little box so that they can be a part of this exhibition record as well. For now, I would like to share some other images of the works that are (were) a part of this exhibition. 
Eighteen artists are participating in this exhibition. A few of the artists either currently live in Kentucky or are originally from here. The majority of the artists, however, live in the seven contiguous states that border the commonwealth, hence “The 7 Borders”. In the above image, works by Rashid Johnson are on the wall, while Brian McCutcheon’s whimsically modified cooking grill entitled “Trailer Queen II” rests on the floor. 
The exhibition is a survey of contemporary works produced in a geographical area that is often hard to define. At various times, Kentucky has been considered by Americans to be the frontier west, the Midwest, or the most northern of the southern states. The fact this region has been historically hard to place is attractive to me. For a professional artist, one downside is that the nearest art market of any size is in Chicago. Many of the artworks in “The 7 Borders” reference issues born of local conditions and landscapes and gain a certain power by not being made for strictly commercial reasons. The exhibit’s curator wrote: “Each of the artists represented is witness to varying views of the region focusing on personal history and collective experience.” In the gallery shot above are paintings by Claire Sherman, a photo series by Guy Mendes, and a unique chest of drawers that looks like a stacked firewood entitled “Facecord” by Mark Moskovitz. 
This mixed media work is entitled “The River” and the artist is Andrew Douglas Underwood who originally is from Louisville. Personally, I relate to Underwood’s piece because it weaves together metaphors and history relating to people’s long association with the Ohio River. This work effectively combines photography, embroidery, and found objects. 
Leticia Bajuyo’s “Pre-Fab(ulous) Environments” is an installation piece located on the museum’s second floor. Her multimedia piece with its blue Styrofoam installation house and suburban floor map complete with Happy Meal-styled folding cardboard houses reference contemporary suburban neighborhoods. 
This is an image of “Roan Mountain Matrix” by Denise Burge who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her large fabric and thread works quote traditional Appalachian quilting while alluding to changes occurring to the land and its people through contemporary processes like mountain top coal removal. 
Joel McDonald’s “Bog Taan” is a tour-de-force mixed media drawing on 26 sheets of watercolor paper. This is a large, obsessively detailed work that touches upon the artist’s social views as told through the context of his Germantown neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. McDonald has a deep understanding and appreciation for 20th Century illustration. You could look at this artwork for a long time and keep finding images within it.
To conclude this post, I would like to include the comments left by gallery visitors upon engaging my blog in the gallery. Some of the comments are by children who participated in summer camp programs organized by the museum.
BLOG COMMENTS
“Love this – so fun!
I once saw a duck taking a nap on a submerged & upside down shopping cart on the L-ville side of the OR (Ohio River)”
“The Joe Arbor set was sweet. Poignant. – you should do stop action animation.”
“Love the triker! and the deer-Styrobuck! and the spider-and Pip and the fish-”
“It’s beautiful, I love it! – famous artist”
“Looks like garbage to me!”
“Be cooler if it was metal”
“Some really remarkable & moving works! Really enjoyed 7 borders.” Lou Knowles…Forest Hills, New York
“I like it! Keep up the good work!”
“So Playful! What a blast. Thank you.”
“I like it!”
“Very interesting, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Love the blue nose man”
“dirty + whimsical like crawling through a broken greenhouse in the backyard + making toys as a child” Lilly Ettinger
“Love it!” “???” “Fabulous: fun, imaginative & thought provoking…Thank you” Mary from Wisconsin
“Quirky & original. Brought a smile to my face” K. Woodard (art teacher UK)
“I like the very last peice. I think personally it looks like here is a passage in between the trunk and the roots”
” I agree we did not make enough “to do” about the beginning of manned flight. I wouldn’t be here enjoying our work without a flight by plane. Also like your reminder to “follow your dreams” Kay Gorman (Maryland)
“Love them! Priddy Cool!”
“This is very suspicious and cool to see what people throw in the river”
“Ummmm!”
“Love the birds…they are alive.” Adrian (New Zealand)
“It looks like two snowman”
“I think this was awsome”
“Love the recycling, cute and clever. Loved to take the time to see the whole-plus the blog.- Just a passer-by, Aug. ’13”
“Fab Al – Love where you went with this – Always happy too see your dementia” Paul and Sandy Sasso………..these folks are old college friends of mine
“They look like Big, Dirty, Marshmallows”
“You are awesome”
THIS WAS THE LAST OF THE COMMENTS LEFT AT THE EXHIBITION. NEXT TIME…SEE YOU FROM THE RIVER!
Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog 
Riverblog as interactive art-environmental-education medium! Yay! It’s wonderful, Al!. Thank you the tour of the exhibition. I love that stacked wood drawers piece! And what is with the grill? Hmm? Could we please get some more intel on that modified grill piece, “Trailer Queen II”? Pretty please with styrofoam cherries on top. Your description of “Bog Taan” reminds me of a several pieces at a Chinese exhibition at the Kemper a while back–minute images that you saw more and more of each time you viewed the piece. Great works all around. OOO suburbia–scary in box mind world there! There’s one here where they color code the streets ending in cul de sacs for the schools the children will attend. No joke.
The comments are wonderful. They tell a story of people passing through, looking, engaging and interacting with this cyber-space tool, your art, and yeah, even ‘us’ here on the other end in blogland.
Very Cool!
Now I’m wondering how ALL of this would fit in with a discussion elsewhere on the world wide web about contemporary art. Well, it’s sort of discussion. Hmm. I I’ll go grab a link and you see what you think, Al.
Hi Eva…I hope you won’t mind if I designate you the number one fan of the riverblog! I truly appreciate your active and energetic mind. I will try to find out more about the grill piece for you. That particular artist (Brian McCutcheon) I believe is scheduled to give a small talk at the end of the exhibition. This was a fun show to be involved with and I wish I had taken better images to show you some of the other pieces in this exhibit. I just followed the link you provided in your second comment! Fascinating post which I would like to offer my thoughts on…after I talk it over first with my dog named Cory. We have albeit one sided conversations during our walks together about the role that art plays in our contemporary society and she provides nonverbal clues along the way for me to “interpret”!
Numero Uno? Hey, gee, Okay! I’m looking forward to the grill intell. Well, Cory talking/walking is very cool with moi. Mull as you please, Al. 🙂
Al, I’m ‘working/playing’ too hard this morning–not even through my first cup of tea–but, here’s the link to “Art and the Transformative Vision” –yeah–
https://disinfo.com/2013/08/art-and-the-transformative-vision/#comment-1004790173
There are comments–and then there are ‘comments’.
Some of us are ‘trying’ to play nice with other mindsets, but we just don’t seem to be bridging a certain gap. Hmmm. I wonder why?
–Oh, if this is too much distraction for your purposes, no problem, just delete and send it on it’s merry way. But do please chime in if you so desire.
Waves to everyone on that side of the rabbit hole and on this side ~~~~~~~~~~ :0
What a great exhibition – glimpses of place and how others have interpreted their relationships within that place or space. Contained. Thanks for sharing the comments left by others – most of them ‘got it’ understood the fragility and mystery within. I am about to follow link above sounds interesting.
Hi Veronica…glad you enjoyed this vicarious peek at some of the art life in my area. I just followed the link provided by 47whitebuffalo and found it to be worthwhile. I would be curious to hear your take on it. One of the interesting aspects about the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (which is under fairly new management) is that none of the work in their exhibitions is for sale. It’s nice to put the emphasis back upon what the artist’s intentions and motivations for making the art to begin with may have been rather than see the art as some end goal commodity that gets sanctioned by gate keepers.
Thank you for sharing the other exhibits in this show through this post, Al. Now, I could envision it much better!
You are doing fantastic and creative work. I think you DO make a difference. How can anyone walk away from your posts without thinking a little differently about our environment, not just yours?
Thanks for the awesome compliment Leslie. Other than being artists, I think you and I share a desire to teach so others can benefit from our observations and experiences. It’s all about leaving the world a better place.
Awwwwesomme……big smile (s) over here. A very big congratz to you, Al, and again, what a great idea to incorporate your blog into the exhibit- clever. :0)
Thanks…it seemed such a natural extension of what I do anyway.
Its really great that we can get a feel for the show from the other side of the world. Thanks for the run down. How did you feel about the process of having your blog exhibited inside a gallery?
I’m glad to have had the opportunity to try it and to have visitors willing to entertain the idea and participate through it. My blog has come to “represent” what I do as an artist as well as any particular artifact or series of artifacts could in a much more complete yet compact manner. There is a performance aspect to what I do that seems to communicate well through the blog. What I should have made was a take-away business card that had the blog’s url on it so those who prefer using the computer at home could remember it and look it up later. That card would have also been a nice souvenir of the moment. Originally, I had proposed a small installation on the wall behind the monitor to give more presence in the the gallery, but the curator wanted to see what happened as is. Can you imagine presenting your art in this way?