Mark and I stumbled upon this jewel last year during a bike ride through Santa Monica. Lured inside by the strange items in the windows, we met the store owner, Jim Caswell, who was equally as curious and beautiful as the items in his shop. Go to the Historia website and you’ll discover that the store “specializes in art and objects from Latin America with an emphasis on nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexican devotional and folk art.” What you won’t find on the site are the fantastic stories Jim weaves around each object he collects. If you’re in the area, stop by. We guarantee you’ll find something weird and wonderful.
1322 Second Street, Suite 2 • Santa Monica, California 90401 (310) 394-3384
Ran around downtown and visited theArt in the Streets exhibit at the Geffen. Next door to the gallery Levis has set up a Film Workshop so we created some turntable animations . They have some cool workshops and nice list of guest speakers coming up. Rounded out the afternoon eating sushi in Little Tokyo while be entertained by “Heck Yeah Karaoke”.
Saw some interesting work from sculptor David Smith at LACMA, a neato cardboard exhibit by Ann Weber at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, and an entomology installation. All that wonderful art, but we must admit that the most fun was had playing in the BCAM freight elevator!
If you have a list of magical artist enclaves, you would have to include Trumansburg in upstate New York.
We had the pleasure of meeting Annie Campbell in Ithaca who introduced us to Sculptor, Bob Potts – new friends and both exceptional artists in Trumansberg, NY.
Here’s a video showing a work of Bob’s from 2006. The follow-up piece that he did recently was awarded best in show at the annual “Made in New York” show at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn. We hope to post a video of “Persuit II” soon.
Annie’s illustrations had us alternately laughing and in awe of the fantastic life stories that they portrayed.
Thanks to both Bob and Annie for opening up your respective studios to us. – M&W
As benevolent geocaching citizens, we took it upon ourselves to dry out the rain-soaked log sheet. This was out first Hollywood cache found with Wenny’s new GPS.
It’s amazing what crafty wonders are hidden and dormant within now-obsolete 1999 technology. Inside the head assembly of an old JVC VCR deck, was this beautiful coil-to-coil signal connection that enabled a signal to pass inductively from the spinning tape heads to the not-spinning chassis (pictured) as magnetic tape was read by sliding diagonally across the two rotating heads (mounted 180º apart).
Sony built the tape-head assembly, but it appears that the patent is owned (or was owned) by a U.S. company (does it still have a value?). Inside was also a 3-phase motor and a surface mounted optical sensor that counted single revolutions. I took it apart to cannibalize a few components (then got a little distracted with the possibilities of this thing).