Sean Samoheyl

Sean Samoheyl dolls from a Chop Suey Bizarre Market, maybe like December 2005. Never got around to posting these photos... I have so many photos on my flickr set, it's crazy.

Sean is one of the artists included in this Letters show I'm in right now, so is Warren Craghead.

I really liked these dolls Sean made.. they're carved from wood, very simple and crude. Some of the ones in the Chop Suey show were wrapped in yarn.. made me think of Judith Scott... but I'm pretty sure that Sean's pieces are wrapped in yarn made from the wool of sheep he has raised himself.

Some of them have movable parts... like that Picasso skullhead's skullhead rises, and monster feet guy's feet move.


Yes, I played with them.


Gonna crush you mutha! Picasso Skullhead looks on in horror.

I wanted to buy one but they were too expensive.

TOO BAD! They could have made friends with...

my Marius Valdes unwantables...

my Phoebe Washburn pebbles...

my super awesome Eric Hall home-made robot, bought at a previous Chop Suey Bizarre Market for an unbelievably low fifteen dollars (I have sadly never seen or heard of Eric Hall ever again)...

all of these tiny old little cute Japanese figures I got in Japan... this picture isn't good.

and more.

Dawn Latane

Dawn Latane is showing her dream houses at Chop Suey.


Cell Phone Tower House, 2006 - 125. These aren't really her dream houses, but houses she has imagined. Visionary McMansions. This one is at the top of a lopped-off mountain.

I like the watercolors with ink drawing and text, kind of like Blake.


Viagra Mansion, 2005 - 115. Follies.


Siamese Twins House, 2006 - 75.

Artist's Statement - "My images are of domestic buildings (mansions) and other urban sites in which enormous scale and various grand themes greatly outsize the human beings who inhabit or use them. I feel my pictures are in a tradition of poetic, visionary architecture though in the case of this particular body of work, megalomania and irreverence stampede through it at breathtaking speed. If anyone would like to make a workable plan from any of these doodles of mine, then be my guest; I’m curious what you’d come up with. This show is dedicated to all the people of America who literally want a ‘castle’ rather than a home: a building to overwhelm the rest of the neighborhood creating either intense envy or debilitating nausea."

Travis Conner

Travis Conner is showing at Chop Suey. I really like these, especially the more sinister spooky sci-fi ones, with spectral forces and demons flickering through slacker Richmond

That green light repeats the color of the green spray-paint in the photo directly above it. The hooded figure on the t-shirt below is an echo one reality removed of the specter in the first photo above, both of them are scary Jedi ghosts. The 7-11 flourescents are like light-sabers.

maybe I'll write more later.

door to chop suey

This is the door to Chop Suey Books, currently showing Michele Arthur. A yellow school bus drove by as I took this picture but didn't get in the shot. I waited for another one, but... no more.

Michele Arthur

I saw the Michele Arthur exhibition at Chop Suey today, and it was so strangely rewarding.


This piece is at the top of the stairs so it is one of the first things you see. The round piece is attached to a painted screen. You can't see it here, but there is a piece of thread that connects this piece to another circle-on-a-painted-screen piece (more like a morning-time one), with origami birds attached to the thread. Not sure yet how I feel about the thread and origami birds, but I like the individual screen pieces.


Most of the paintings were orange and black, or orange or black. This piece is called Moonless Mountain. Wendy White posted on Forrest Bess recently, and one of my reasons to visit Chop Suey was to try and find a Forrest Bess book - I didn't find one but my FB radar was up and my mind was very much in tune with these paintings. Here is a page of Forrest Bess paintings.

It cracked me up reading her labels, the prices were $33, $99, $111, $222, $333, $444, $555, $777, with one for $5,432.10 and another 3,000,000 rubles. It was all so random - perfect and funny for Richmond because nobody ever buys anything anyways. There was no painting for $666.

Some of these cell-phone photos are so bad. The wall around the one above is too white, and around the orange painting below so blue - but it was all the same color.


So simple, so little done here, but it is clearly finished. I wonder if it happened for her as easily as it looks like it came? I sometimes am able to make a painting just happen, but that usually surprises me. More often I'll make something that looks like it came a lot easier and quicker than it did.


Fingerprint windowpeople and one small antenna.


The black one has a smaller canvas glued to it, and an asteroid or shooting star. I think that asteroid is cut from a magazine or something, it isn't painted. There is a texture to the smaller glued-on canvas that I was associating with the moon and craters before I stood in the right light and saw that it was a handprint.

Here is that little one viewed from an angle.

Michelle Arthur at Chop Suey closes March 5th

Michael Lease

Michael Lease, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Michael Lease is showing at Chop Suey with a selection of digital prints blown up from birthday snapshots. Michael solicited friends and acquaintances for the photos, also asking to be put in contact with each contributor's mother, from whom he then requested written thoughts and birthday remembrances. Michael's correspondence with both the contributors and their mothers is all displayed in a binder, easily matched up with the photos on the walls.

Most of the photos are from the 70's and 80's, it's fun to look back at the Pac-Man pajamas and feathered hair. One kid is having his party at McDonald's with a McDonald's cake (do they still do that?) and a photo from the Bicentennial Year of 1976 features a cake covered with little paper American flags. A seven-year-old princess from 1985 is wearing a Happy Birthday tiara and leaning over a tablecloth of hearts to blow out her star-covered rainbow cake.

I've seen the exhibition twice; the first time was at the opening and it felt like a party, surrounded by all the photos of children and cakes and balloons - celebratory. The second time I was alone in the quiet gallery space and my encounter was much different, almost mournful. Most of the photos are of the moment, the moment of blowing out the birthday candles, the moment of wish-making and the exhalation of breath. It's a magic combination I hadn't considered before. Some of these little faces look so serious and intent on blowing out those candles and getting that wish, like they almost understand and are maybe even considering the worth of this acknowledgment of mortality. The all-white borders of the prints and white frames contributed to the more ethereal, elegiac feelings I had on my second visit.

Michael's last projects I saw, a photo-narrative remembrance of people from his life he has lost contact with, and his own fake obituary published in the Washington Post, had the same melancholy combination of the celebratory and mournful.

RELATED: I'm two! Three! Four! My mom's cakes look pretty simple but they are made from scratch and DELICIOUS. Maybe carrot cake or spice cake. I want to go baaack.

Eric Hall

This is the little robot I bought more than a year ago from a guy named Eric Hall at Chop Suey's Bizarre Market.

It's reminiscent of a Star Wars action-figure, silver, about five inches tall, with fully articulated joints. Eric had about eight different robots, male and female, that he had cobbled together from other tiny plastic toys, putty, silver paint, and I don't know what else. Looking at the robot now it's hard to figure out what the individual pieces originally were. Eric said he was making these robots as a hobby, and when I asked for contact info he wrote "toy guy" in parenthesis after his name, so I'm not sure if he considers them art. It cost $15.00.

I haven't seen him since. Has anybody else seen Eric Hall, the toy guy?

The next Bizarre Market is October 22nd.

Paul Goode

Distant Pull
Originally uploaded by powlagua.

Paul Goode is showing drawings at Chop Suey, not sure until when, but I know he will have stuff in the ADA 12x12 bins when this show comes down. The Chop Suey show is filled with mostly small ink drawings and the room kind of felt like a selection of possible tattoos. I think the designs are created intuitively but I got a lot of cultural references out of them like Asian dragons, South American mazes, and Native American designs. Some of them start to look like something, like the forest-floor skull I see in the piece pictured above (you really need to click on the photo to see it bigger and better). See more examples here.

Paul has a blog and often writes about Richmond arts and culture. Check it out!

Chop Suey!

Chop Suey Books will be hosting another Bizarre Market on October 30th. Chop Suey is a Richmond used-bookstore/gallery, with bargains galore. I recently bought the 1973 Whitney Biennial catalogue there, for something like $4.00. The 1973 Biennial was the first, and a lot's changed since then! A real surprise for me was seeing that recently retired VCU sculpture professor Lester Van Winkle had been included.

The Bizarre Market is a street market on the block behind Chop Suey, with people selling all kinds of stuff, including art. Last time I went I got one of Nicholas Kuszyk's cool t-shirts and a very strange little robot made by a guy named Eric Hall. It's reminiscent of a Star Wars action-figure, silver, about five inches tall, with articulated joints. Eric had about eight of these robots, male and female, that he had cobbled together from other plastic toys, putty, and I don't know what else. Looking at the robot now it's hard to figure out what the individual pieces are. Eric said he was making these robots as a hobby, and when I asked for contact info he wrote "toy guy" in parenthesis after his name, so I'm not even sure if he considers them art. Don't know if he'll be at the upcoming market, but that's the kind of stuff you can expect to find. I've got his phone number if anyone wants it. Oh yeah, the price. It was only $15.00!

This time the market is being held to help benefit Art 180, a group working to provide art related programs to Richmond youth.