Artomatic

Hello to everyone who has gotten here because of my Artomatic exhibit.  The pictures in the exhibit are photos that I took on a trip to Egypt in October, 2011.  If you scroll down through this blog, you’ll see several entries describing that trip, including the pictures that are up in the exhibit.  In several cases, there’s descriptions of how and where those pictures were taken.  Please feel free to leave a comment on any of these.  Or if you want to reach me, drop me an email at jdzik@aol.com.

And here’s my wife Julie’s page.  She has the wall across from mine.

http://gallerydz.com/

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, hello to all of my regular readers.  Artomatic is a huge and very cool art event in the Washington area that has run for several years now.  You can find details here: http://artomatic.org/.

Artomatic is always held in a large empty building somewhere in the Washington area.  This year it’s in an 11 story building in Crystal City, Virginia.  Anyone who wishes, for a nominal fee and a total of fifteen hours of volunteer labor, can get a stretch of wall or a small room to display art.  The show runs for a little over a month, tens of thousands of people visit, and over a thousand artists have work on display.

It’s a terrific event.  Because anyone can exhibit, the quality and type of art varies widely.  Along one wall you might find some terrific landscape paintings, while the next room contains a large abstract sculpture made of welded iron and neon lights, and the next wall over can have someone’s finger paintings or a conceptual piece that invites passersby to use sharpies to draw on a collaborative mural.  It’s tons of fun – kind of like a giant science fair of art.

Julie participated in the last one, held in 2009.  This year, she persuaded me to join and exhibit some of my photos.  I did an exhibit of 14 of my favorite pictures from Egypt called “Faces of Egypt,” using photos that have appeared in this blog, focusing on photos that show the faces of Egyptians that we encountered.  I painted the wall with a pyramid motif, hung the photos over my makeshift mural, and set up some lights to brighten it up.  I’ll post a picture of the installation sometime soon.

If you should find yourself in the DC area in the next month, I strongly recommend a visit to Artomatic.  It’s lots of fun for both adults and kids.  They even have several performing artists, though since the performers are all random sign-ups the quality there is widely varying also.

And if you do go, then by all means stop by and see my exhibit.  It’s on the fourth floor – go into the office space across the corridor from the men’s room, wander around a bit, and look for the pyramid and you’ll find me.  Julie’s work is hanging right across the hall, so you can get two Dzikiewicz’s for the price of one.  We’re planning on being there on Meet the Artist night on June 2, but if you’re there and we’re not, leave a note in my notebook near the exhibit.  I’ll try to take some photos of my favorite things at Artomatic to post here later on.