Rocketships and Robots

It’s ribbon time again! That is, award ribbons for the upcoming Fall 2015 Tempe Festival of the Arts.

The theory is simple: the festival organizers vote on a Featured Artist and pick one piece from that artist’s portfolio to become the festival poster/publicity image. Then I sit down with the organizers to riff on that design, for the sixteen category award ribbons and one Best of Show ribbon.

I know the awards will be made of layers of constructed fabrics (applique, painting, embroidery, beadwork, etc). I know their sizes (16″ x 4″, 20″ x 5″), and that a specific show label and category listing has to be included in the design.

Beyond that…well, things can get a little crazy. This season’s Featured Artist is the digital virtuoso Geoffrey Aaron Harris, and the promo artwork is his ‘Midnight Invasion‘.

Harris is inspired by his collection of antique tin toys.

For me, his work is an affectionate nod to all the hilariously-corny science fiction B-movies from the pre-Star Trek and pre-Star Wars days. Back when you saw the monofilament line and Scotch tape in the camera view, and you didn’t care. The screenplay might have been written by a master or a hack, and somehow it didn’t matter. The actors might be slumming Shakespeare players in between London productions, or deeply-sincere bit players just trying to make rent. Costumes? Props? Forry Ackerman saved basements of the things, and it goes for big bucks at auctions now. Classic stuff.

The Best of Show ribbon stars a flying robot inspired by ‘Invasion’.

For the Tempe Festival Fall ribbons, we eventually settled on mixed focal designs unified by a dark blue sky and stylized mountains/trees.

(A lot of the colors, shapes, and styles I also borrowed from the artwork of the cartoon ‘Adventure Time‘.)

Individual category ribbons feature stars, moons, rocket ships, and flying saucers inspired by those from Harris. Over a dozen different fabrics combine in applique to form the designs, and a scattering of glass beads adds detail and shimmer.

I take on these ribbon projects because each one is a new beast, and I learn new things from every round. This time, I figured out how to fix a big science-fiction tapestry project that has stumped me for a decade. (And now I want to do the Little Book of Rocketships.)