"I'm So Glad It Happened"

...was the title of a collaborative art exhibit that was put together on May 29 in a place called Cedar Grove. All I can say, without really looking it up on a map, was time in the car driving past Hillsboro,  about a half an hour in some direction from Carrboro, NC which is where a few friends met up to go.  Since I can't figure out how the hell to get the cursor to go down below the photos to say what's what here, I'll have to describe a few of the photos this way...(gotta say I hate the way this blog works...it's not user friendly to me.)   Well, anyway, the guy at the table below is artist Ken Rumble. I've never met him. 

This installation was found by following a pathway lined with a single row of shoes on either side leading to a large white wall constructed in a field with a door in the center. When you opened the door, this was  the scene.....The artist made no contact with the viewer; it made me think of the recent experience of seeing Marina Abramovic  a few weeks ago at MoMA, in NYC where she spent, was it 5 weeks, in residence 8 hours a day sitting in a chair across a table from whomever wanted to sit with her in a performance called "The Artist is Present."  In that scenario, there was continual eye contact, or face to face contact between artist and each individual viewer. I'm not attempting to link these two pieces or Rumble's intention here, it's just that these two events happened to coincide in my sphere of traipsing around in the world of art lately.  By the way, most of the shoes along the pathway were painted on, some had words and phrases on them. Many of the shoes in the pile seemed to also be decorated in the same way.

                                     Ken Rumble
                                                                                                   

Chance Murray, painter and musician. His paintings are fresh, bold, raw and what's truly amazing to me is that he just turned 20!

Chance's Grandmother

Photographs © Ellen Giamportone All rights reserved.