We are so pleased that NPR’s “All Things Considered” has published a piece about one of our 2010 grant recipients, the Music Box. The Music Box is an interactive environment built from the remains of an 18th century derelict cottage in New Orleans. This imaginatively reconstructed, and ultimately livable “house”, has become a musical instrument to be played by visitors. Instrumentation will range from the rudimentary banging of wooden boards to more elaborate sounds mechanically triggered by opening doors or pulling levers. In addition to visitors, a range of local and national musicians, including a regional high school marching band, have been invited to play the house for the project’s Block Party series, which are free and open to all.

To read the NPR story, click HERE

Photo: Morgan Sasser/New Orleans Airlift via NPR

Blowfish Sushi is pleased to announce the first in a series of ongoing art exhibits curated by Christine Kristen aka LadyBee: Paintings by Lee Harvey Roswell. The opening will take place on Wednesday, February 15 from 6-9 at the restaurant, 2170 Bryant Street, San Francisco. 20% of the profits from this exhibit will be donated to the Black Rock Arts Foundation.

Lee Harvey Roswell is a self-taught artist from Freefall, New York, whose work is noted for its blend of angst and humor. Themes of death and entropy, tribulation and futility run amok in his distinctly surreal, sometimes slapstick, sometimes nightmarish world. The result is at once mocking and melancholic.

Lee draws his imagery from the rich sources of vaudeville, silent films, circus and mythology, and blends them in idiosyncratic, often autobiographical situations. He is not bound by conventional space; his characters wander through a skewed world where reality and fantasy collide.

In Lee’s words: “I’m interested in exactly this: creating narratives involving the fantastic images there to be culled forth from those fertile depths of the creative, neurotic-like mind. Concrete objects in mad motion, reflecting all the seductive, terrifying elements of existence. The inarguable forerunner of the senses is the eye. We are primarily an optically reliant species. So, as pictorial illusionists transforming nothing into artifacts of spiritual sustenance, I’m holding the potential painter up, not just as an admirable tradesman, but much, much more. He resides as a high-priest over that all-devouring human reality, a conducting channel through which nothing triumphantly becomes something.”

Lee now lives in San Francisco, and his work is shown, collected and published internationally.

painting: Lee Harvey Roswell

Bliss Dance, a photo by Joe Dsilva on Flickr.

Have you seen this fun complilation of Bliss Dance Photos? Thanks to Joe Dsilva for making us smile this morning.