Bluestone Development Wall - Collaboration with dKiser Design.Construct

My friend Doug, from dKiser design.construct, and I finished a collaborative project for Bluestone Development's new office this past weekend. Bluestone's new space is located at 13th & Webster, in the same location that was formerly the Empty Room. After finishing our ORGANISM installation, the fine folks of Bluestone asked us to create a unique installation for their newly added south wall to add some additional character and warmth to the space. Doug and I brainstormed some ideas and came up with a shared vision that would utilize lots of separate wooden panels of different sizes, shapes, depths and tones.

Doug took our vision forward and created a specific scale design. We applied 4 different stains to the pieces, plus the natural color of the ash plywood we used as the base for all the pieces. There are a few panels and shelves that stick out from the wall a little to give it some depth and additional texture too. We filled the screw holes with a variety of hardwood plugs of different lengths to add even more dimensionality as the lights in the space cast shadows over them. After cutting, sanding, staining, lacquering and installing over the course of the past few weeks, we're finally done.

Stop by Bluestone and give it a look sometime after the holidays, and be sure to check out Bluestone's hip downtown developments, including 22 Floors, the Rows at SOMA and Joslyn Lofts.

Epilogue to Empty Room

Doug, Matt and I brought ORGANISM - and with it, the Empty Room - to a close last Saturday night. It was an amazing, challenging, and ultimately, very fulfilling project. I had never done anything that approached an installation before, and came out with a new understanding of the collaboration, time commitment and work necessary to pull something like this off.

I entered the project apprehensive of how the various components would work together; after all, there's not much of an immediate connection between poetry and building. But after some initial trial and error, we reached a happy medium. In the end, I don't think it was so much a collaboration as it was an exercise in sharing. Matt hosted several successful poetry readings and slams in the early part of each week. Doug and I took advantage of whatever chunks of time (mostly weekends) we could to build the Organic Chair and recreate a venue in the space.

After we finished an initial simple structure we turned our focus to what we're calling Organic Chair #1, which was only unveiled at the closing.

One of our goals for the entire installation was to raise some resources for a nonprofit organization. Matt, who was recently named as its new Executive Director, decided on the Nebraska Writer's Association. Doug and I set our sights on the Kent Bellows Studio & Center for the Visual Arts. We realized we probably weren't going to have much luck finding a buyer for the Organic Chair installation. So we switched gears and began focusing on Organic Chair #1. Through our mostly unplanned building process, what started as a sort of kaleidoscopic tank slowly emerged as a curvy and somewhat more sophisticated stand-alone reaction to the installation. Though we didn't quite get the inside and outside finished, we hope to do so and sell it to benefit the Bellows Studio.

Thanks to everyone who was able to make it down to the space during November for a reading, slam, concert, or just to hang out. There's a list of related postings and links below about ORGANISM and the entire 6 months of the Empty Room.

Check out Andrew Marinkovich of Malone & Co's photo documentation of all the Empty Room projects.

Silicon Prairie News was gracious enough to do interviews and features about ORGANISM, 25 Days of Building, Clean Plate, 300 Square and the Empty Room concept itself.

For more ORGANISM pictures, etc., check out our Facebook page.

Amy Morin's (Beast Box) website: http://plaiderpillar.com/
Elle Lien's Clean Plate Website: http://clean-plate.com/
Mary Wees' 25 Days of Building Blog: http://25daysofbuilding.wordpress.com/
Jeff Hug's String Thing Website: http://emptyroomstringthing.com/

And a special thanks to 22 Floors, Bluestone Development, Secret Penguin & What Cheer for allowing such a unique thing to occur in Omaha!