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You are here: Home / Archives for Fire Hydrant Art

Introducing the Heavy Metal Hydrant Suite: Limited Edition Industrial Prints from Iskra

September 18, 2018 by Iskra Leave a Comment

My hydrant iskra collection
Meet Iowa No.4, My personal Fire hydrant

It is time to come clean about fire hydrants: I love them. In a world teetering between fire and flood, with catastrophe pending on every front, I do love a piece of heavy metal I cannot lift. I have my own brilliant yellow hydrant in front of my house, and it makes me happy every time I come home and see it there, surrounded by equally yellow dandelions. I feel safe. Put together with flawless arrangements of bolts and screwplates and circles and cones and handed down through hundreds of years from men with rough hands and wrenches, the hydrant is unarguably TRUE. Hydrants are valiant, like German Shepherds, and they have no existential doubts, although I do think they are vain. It’s a quiet form of dandyism, but think they enjoy the ornaments essential to their functioning – the lovely multicolored chains and hats and bits of metal that festoon from arm to arm.

Now, ulp, I have one inside my house. How do you say no in the middle of a birthday party when someone says We Have A Present for You, it’s on a truck, how about this corner? Well, you say yes! It’s the Autumnal blazing happiness yellow of sunflowers and pear apples and drowsy honeybees. It’s pettable, and clean, and it comes with its own little tag indicating that it is #4. Its presence in my house makes me realize the Heavy Metal Hydrant Suite can’t wait any longer to meet the world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Digital Collage, Fire Hydrant Art, Prints Tagged With: Digital Maneuvers, fire hydrant art, heavy metal hydrant suite, hydrant museum, industrial prints, SAM Gallery

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Instagram post 2198113025205017025_1682569995 “The Brighter Day.” No.2 in this very small edition of 3 has just found a home in a collection through @museolangley (Thankyou!). Only one is left, available through first link in bio. I have been reading Pam Houston’s latest book #DeepCreek, and there is a passage in it about writing that is exactly how this piece was created. It’s a long excerpt, but worth it:
“ I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical — and that for me often means the natural world — the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories. As I move through my day, I wait to feel something I call a glimmer, a vibration, a little charge of resonance that says, “Hey writer, look over here.” I feel it deep in my chest, this buzzing that lets me know the thing I am seeing/hearing/smelling on the outside is going to help me lock some part of a story I have on the inside. I keep an on going record of these glimmers, writing down not my interpretation of them, not my imagined connection to them, not an emotional contextualization of them, but just the thing itself. . . . When I have some time to write, I read through the glimmer files on my computer and try to find a handful that seem like they will stick together, that when placed in proximity with one another will create a kind of electricity.” I recommend her book, by the way, good winter reading while being indoors next to a fire.
Instagram post 2196819254605750083_1682569995 I am honored to be part of @arcade_nw ‘s latest issue of Arcade Magazine! The theme is “Liminal Space” which is pretty much the house I live in. Available at @petermillerbooks and many other bookstores. Check out their page to see what’s going on in Seattle architecture and design thinking.
Instagram post 2196168705874965274_1682569995 Industrial Rorschach: If the on-site psychologist was to open his briefcase and show you this card and ask you what it meant you would say:

1) Textural Carpet made by Berber weavers sampling Cy Twombly and S&P histogram.  2) Pandora’s Box  3) The third movement of Brahms’ Concerto for Late Stage Capitalism.  4) A mostly neutrally colored Square containing Grief which remains obstinately blue and unprintable (out of gamut) as are most intense emotions
Instagram post 2194492950900180841_1682569995 A large travel piece, 24x36, for the discriminating trucking company that sees the beauty in grime. I can’t seem to get over trucks. I remember shouting out to them on road trips when I was 6. My mother had married a new man who was a gambler, and they would drive all night to Las Vegas. For me, day dreaming in the back seat, the trucks made it all worthwhile.
Instagram post 2193017376281226308_1682569995 The Travelers Suite of 8 new prints is in my shop today, first link in bio. Postcards from the edge, between stillness and motion. This one is called “The Journey Through.” 16x12” image on a 22x17 sheet of German Etching rag paper.
Instagram post 2191258353097851975_1682569995 Please Come Back Before I Forget You. (Coast Starlight Journey)

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