–Kate Watson, …mightbegood

So the story goes like this. When my father, Jim Brown, who was the first in our family to go to college, took off for school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and during his time in college, gave away all of his childhood toys in an attempt to be an adult. He married my mom, Sara, in 1963, and they gave birth to me in Tulsa in September of 1968.

In 1972, at the age of 32, Dad went to a used book store sale at a local private school. It was there he found a book he had loved as a kid, called “Gene Autry and the Thief River Outlaws,” and he bought it for a dime. He was happy to reconnect with his past, and the idea of getting something so dear to him for so cheap a price was really appealing to him.

It was around this time that the Tulsa County Flea Market started about a mile from our home.

From that point on, my Dad was hooked, and Mom was an active accomplice. They filled our house with furniture, wall hangings, and porcelain product signs, the latter of which my dad was particuarly interested. In what was probably a monumental find for the both of them, they contacted and were given access to their childhood soda fountain, called the Crystal Palace in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I grew up around a lot of memorabilia from the Crystal Palace.

We would normally go back to my father’s hometown of Harrison, Arkansas every summer for at least a little while to visit my Great Grandmother Clara Belle Duckworth, who was still living there. Junk malls would be everywhere along the way, and the normally three and half hour trip would sometimes take eight. Initially, I was miserable waiting in the car while Mom, Dad and sister worked bargains. But then I got it: start collecting, and get out of the car and start looking around for bargains instead of staying in the car and sulking. Baseball Cards were my first love, and then antique dogs, and then stamps, and then Batman memoribilia, then vinyl LPs, then musical instruments, then antique postcards, and all through this time, action figures and figurines.

“Generations” is an antique mall in Tulsa where my father has a booth currently. Yep, I stole the name of the mall for my show, but the owners of the mall didn’t even name it themselves- it’s from the previous business, which was an antique furniture store. They merely covered parts of the outside sign with a banner that has new contact information, and kept the previous name in tact. Like the title, everything in this show is borrowed; the only thing I’ve done is rearrange it.

The Sports Center- My first big dream was to be a pitcher in the big leagues. This was obviously not to be. After a little league game that had me walking in seven runs as the pitcher, I learned that you can’t be anything you want to be in this world. I still had a glorious vicarious season in 1979 as a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who ended up being World Champs that year. Being in Tulsa, I didn’t really feel geographic affinity for any major league club, so I just went with who my older cousin liked.

Dog Sculpture- Like my Dad, I’m a big fan of dogs, especially when I was a kid. In one of those short-lived obsessions, between the ages of ten and twelve I collected completely worthless Dog figurines that I would arrange in type trays in my bedroom. Until recently, I kept them wrapped in yellowed newspapers dating back to the Iran Hostage Crisis. I always wondered why I never got rid of them. I guess it was because I was going to build this.

Action Figure Pyramid-With action figures, as well as a lot of the toys I had, the more beloved they were, the more obliterated they ended up being. Some of my favorite toys were played right out of existence. Here are all that remain.

American Flag- Sewed by a Great Aunt, but I don’t know who. Forty eight stars, so it must be before 1959.

Mad Magazine Paperbacks- These paperbacks were presented en masse by my father to my sister and I before we took a long road trip to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico sometime in the late seventies. I remember my father saying that it was an 800 mile trip, and for my sister and I, this was plenty of time to thoroughly loathe and despise each other. But on this trip, Dad gave us the paperbacks, and instead of the requisite yelling and screaming, we shared laughs. Stroke of genius.

Lunch Boxes- All used in elementary school. On the bottom of each one there are two parallel marks that are rubbed down to the metal. This is from the practice we as kids had of sliding our lunches down the long hall to the cafeteria to see who could get closest to the hand washing we would do before standing in line for lunch.

Cancelled Stamps- My Aunt Mary, who was my Grandmother Cranks’s sister, was a little kookie and even though she was a very dynamic personality in her youth, I only remember her as a perpetually miserable person with clinical hypochondria. I didn’t like to visit her unbelievably messy house in Muskogee, but when I did, she would give me a letter envelope filled with cancelled stamps she collected for me. I never had the heart to tell her that cancelled stamps weren’t worth anything. Here they are collected in a tribute mandala to Mary.

On the Table:

Navaho Blanket- bought by my parents while they were teaching on the Navaho Reservation North of Gallup, New Mexico, sometime between 1963-1967. I’d like to believe I was conceived on the reservation, but my Dad doesn’t agree with that assertion- more than likely, it happened in their small apartment in Gallup. The moved back to Oklahoma soon after my mom learned of her pregnancy.

Dictionary- owned by my Grandmother, Ruth Crank, a public school teacher who kept it in every classroom she taught, Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Candy Dish with Assorted Buttons, Safety Pins, and Sewing Needles- owned by my mother, Sara Brown when she died in 1999, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Electric Lantern- Used by my grandfather, James Alexander Brown, when he was a Conductor for the Midland Valley Railroad, 1970s, Muskogee, OK.

The show involved a three-cubicle installation, one large painting of 200 portraits, a grid of sixteen log book sketches I had drawn as I spoke to Houstonians on the phone, and recordings of some of the phone calls I had taken over the two month period.

Here’s the show statement:

As with everything, this show started small. There I sat , in Austin, summer of 2003, hunched over a cubicle at a dead-end call center job, drawing pictures of tombstones on Post-it Notes while I talked with people about cancer. I was miserable.

Then I took a call from a woman in Dallas. A Talker. A gum-smacking Talker who would not shut up. I’m a extremely patient listener, but this woman was driving me up the wall. I picked up a pen and drew a woman with a big mouth, then I drew another woman with a bigger mouth, then a bigger mouth. The more she talked, the more I drew, and the bigger her damn mouth became. It made me happy, like I was controlling the exchange somehow. We ended the call, and I had a drawing.

My next day off, I bought a sketchbook and a couple of black felt tip pens. I drew a grid of eight rectangles on the page, and whenever I had a chance during one of the 35 or more calls I took a day, I drew what I thought the caller looked like on the other side of the line and noted the city from which they called. When I finally quit my job six months later, I had two hundred and fifty portraits. The large painting here is the culmination of that sketchbook series.

At some point, I realized that talking to strangers wasn’t the reason I was miserable at my call center job. I was miserable because my job dictated what I had to talk about, and that meant not being myself. What if I removed all of the “jobbiness” of taking calls from the public and just interacted with strangers with my own rules? Nothing to sell, nothing to say, no agenda, no answers, no questions, no needs, and no rules. What would that feel like?

The Listening Post was born. For the last two months, I’ve advertised a toll free number with a variety of messages in the Houston Press and on Craigslist. I’ve gotten quite a few calls, and have drawn portraits of the callers and taken notes during our interactions. For about a month now, I have recorded our conversations (with their consent) and I’ve realized that The Listening Post isn’t just an intake process- it’s also a performance.

People like to think that they need an expert to figure things out for them. I do- that’s why I listen to Fresh Air and watch Judge Judy and pay for someone to do my taxes. But after having talked through a lot of problems with people these last two months, I think all we really need is to have someone listening.

If you need to talk, I want to listen. 1-877-EARS KNOW.

First of all, local poet and writer Dan Boehl did a great job giving a sense of scale, context, and the experience of the mural in this article published in …might be good. Check it out for additional background.

And local photographer Andy Mattern was kind enough to do a series of final portraits of the finished tableux.

Nathan Green, co-mountaineer, posted a bunch of the in-process photos on the Arthouse blog as well.

More soon on the Okay Mountain group show “It’s Gonna Be Reverything” at the Project Space of Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, Mo.

After the idea was hatched by Dave, Sterling Allen, Ryan Hennessee, and Justin Goldwater, Justin went about giving all of us drawing assignments, and incorporated our different drawing styles into elements unified by a central theme given to each tableau. Here are some inital photos of the work phase of the project, with more to come.

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video link

By Corrie MacLaggan
Monday, January 07, 2008

When Tim Brown worked at an Austin-based hot line for cancer patients around the country, he listened to callers’ deeply personal stories and worries about pain and healing. He gave them information about their type of cancer and connected them with support groups.

And then, because of the nature of the job, he never talked to them again.

In an attempt to create some continuity — and to break the monotony of the phone calls — he started sketching what he imagined the faraway callers might look like. Those sketches inspired a series of paintings he created in his East Austin studio.

“You’re only going on faith that it was making a difference,” said Brown, 39, who said his background in social work left him with a desire to follow up with people.

More than three years after leaving his job at the American Cancer Society’s National Cancer Information Center, Brown has used the images to produce 10 paintings, each with a grid of 20 faces. Near each face is the place the person called from: “Bristol, VA,” “Canyon City, CO,” “Grand Prairie, TX.” Or “Unknown.”

The cartoon-style portraits range from wrinkled to youthful, plump to rail-thin. There are brown faces, white faces and sickly green faces: “A veritable quilt of life and death in these United States,” Brown wrote in his blog.

The series, “Strong Senders,” takes its name from the idea that people can psychically send their energy; in this case, Brown said, so strongly that he picked it up on the other end of the phone line.

“I talked to all these people, and more importantly, listened to them,” Brown wrote. “They all made an impression on me. I, in turn, made an impression of them.”

Brown started working at the call center shortly after moving to Austin in 1999. His mother had just died of brain cancer.

His job title: cancer information specialist.

His task: using an American Cancer Society database of up-to-date information, answer callers’ questions about different kinds of cancer and treatments. Help people find wigs or medical equipment. Send brochures.

“A lot of times, people just wanted to talk,” Brown said. “I wasn’t just seeing the public faces of people. They were putting niceties to the side, expressing pain, joy.”

He heard a lot about people’s difficulties with health insurance.

“You had to absorb a lot of anger,” he said. “I’m amazed people can do it as long as they do.”

Kevin Babb, strategic director of the National Cancer Information Center, said it doesn’t surprise him that Brown turned to art.

“I think people have to de-stress,” said Babb, who arrived at the call center after Brown left. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with it.”

The call center has moved into spacious new quarters with a relaxation room, where representatives can watch a virtual crackling fire on a flat-screen TV or thumb through a National Geographic magazine after a stressful call.

In his four years at the call center, Brown estimates, he spoke with 30,000 people.

There was no time limit for the calls.

During long calls, he doodled. In 2003, Brown — who has a bachelor’s degree in painting — brought a sketchbook to work.

Some callers were easy to visualize. One portrait, “Unknown,” has spiky reddish hair and a black tank top. The man had called from his job at a convenience store wanting help quitting smoking. While talking to Brown, he was selling cigarettes.

“He was crazy,” Brown said. “He said: ‘I’m celebrating, man. I just woke up a year ago from a coma.’ It was his waking-up-from-a-coma birthday.”

Brown drew some symbolic portraits. A caller who threw a temper tantrum got an erupting volcano for a face.

By the time Brown left the job six months later, he had sketched 250 portraits.

Later, he traced 20 at a time onto a single sheet of paper, then painted the background and faces with gouache, an opaque watercolor. Finally, like a cartoonist, he inked in the faces.

Brown, who helps run the Okay Mountain gallery, also works part-time for a nonprofit organization that backs access to public transportation for people with disabilities.

In the afternoons, he works in his studio, where he’s planning to spend much of 2008 on a final “Strong Senders” piece: a giant painting with 200 faces. He’s also working on a book he expects to publish next year about the faces and the stories behind them.

He took a call from a Mickey Mantle once, as well as an Elizabeth Taylor and two Lois Lanes.

There was also a caller named Tim Brown.

The show at Green Papaya Art Space space in Teacher’s Village, Quezon City opened last Wednesday to a great crowd from the Filipino Arts scene. I was really stoked to show at Green Papaya because it is another artist run gallery half way across the world, and it wasn’t surprising to find that these weirdos on the art scene are just like my homies back in Austin: humble, hospitible, and interested in contemporary art from a global perspective– I have to say, however, that Green Papaya is ahead of Okay Mountain in presenting TransMedia art to the unsuspecting art public of Manila.

The Artists are:

Heyd Fontenot and I barely knew each other before the trip began, but I just knew that he would be a great traveling companion– all of these thoughts have been confirmed since we’ve arrived. He just completed a whopping eighteen large paintings at his residency in Newfoundland, and brought at least four of them for the show here. His sultry portraits of friends in the Austin scene are equal parts portraiture, abstraction, and design.
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Louie Cordero’s, stuff, to me, is perfectly Filipino: dense, colorful, and beautifully grotesque– he is a butt-kicker to be sure, showing at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, Giant Robot in Los Angeles, and being one of the 13 young contemporary artists who were honored by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. As I start to blog, you might keep an eye on the list of these thirteen, because many of these artists form a tight knit clan that forms part of the contemporary scene in Manila.
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Mariano Ching is another of these thirteen, and before I came over I had no idea what his stuff would look like because of his minimal web presence. But what he brought was awesomely original and surprising– I knew when he brought his stuff in that we would have a BIG show with many looks and lots of ideas floating around. I need to get better photos of his smaller works, but below is one of the paintings he exhibited.
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I had brought an installation in a duffle bag with me (weight 26.7 pounds, according to the Amtrak scale) and nine small pieces– I had a ridiculous amount of work to do when i got here, so my first week was spent painting at Louie’s studio finishing paintings and hanging out with he and local rock/ art icon Romeo Lee

That’s all I have for the time being– gotta go tourist for awhile in the city– check back soon.

The L_M_N_L will be opening it’s doors on Saturday, July 28th to do an evening of improv music– check it out starting at 7pm– if you haven’t gotten a chance to check out the show, this is probably going to be the last chance you’ll get– it has a little of everything– collab paintings, sculpture, video, collage, a staircase on wheels, and most importantly, a re-ordering and recontextualizing of the space as it used to exist. This picture depicts the beginnings of a larger installation that I hope to complete later this year when I show in Manila. Click on the picture, and it will take you to the Gallery of other images showing this weekend, that is if we don’t sell them off the wall first.

AN EVENING OF IMPROVISATIONAL MUSIC WITH BROET AND GUESTS WITH VIDEO PROJECTIONS BY VIRTUAL LIFE MEDIA

Saturday, July 28th 8pm at the L_M_N_L art space
305b East 5th Street (east of San Jacinto)

For more on Broet, visit myspace.com/lesserbroet