In connection with the house tour, one of OFFCenter's main fundraising events -- the Little House Silent Auction -- will be held at the Summer and Dene gallery on Friday evening, May 2.
Here's the description of the Silent Auction from OFFCenter's website:
The Friday night before the Albuquirky House Tour, our "Little Houses" Silent Auction will astound you with the variety of creative approaches over 125 established and emerging artists have taken with the meaning of "home." Artists donating "Little Houses" for past auctions have included Frank McCulloch, Angus MacPherson, Stephanie Lerma, Melody Mock, Maria Moya and more! Come see who will donate a unique, quirky "Little House" this year for you to take home! Will be held at Sumner & Dene Creations in Art during Frank McCulloch’s opening reception for his solo exhibit on First Friday ARTSCrawl. For more info call OFFCenter at (505) 247-1172 or Sumner & Dene at (505) 842-1400.
Each year OFFCenter provides local artists with "blank" little houses made from wood scrap, and each artist decorates/embellishes a house to donate to the fundraising silent auction. (Artists are not limited to using the blank wood houses and create some amazing and wonderful houses!!)
For the past 5 years or so I have contributed a little house to the silent auction. (My creations from past years can be viewed in my March 27, 2013 blog post.)
This year, my little house started with the idea that I wanted to "side" the house with paper that features old wooden rules. In my ribbon stash I had some yellow cotton ribbon that looks like the tapes in the metal retractable measuring tapes -- I wanted to use this for the gutters on the house. And, for a not-so-subtle play on words, I ended up naming this piece "House Rules."
The attic window is created from tiny little bamboo sticks.
I thought maybe I'd roof the house with little wood shingles, but I so loved the button roof on my house from last year, and I have so darn many buttons, I decided to create another button roof.
The door on the house is a large rectangular bone link from a bracelet. The archway above the door is a broken earring that I found in my junk jewelry stash.
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Three of my co-workers at Papers! also created Little Houses for this year's auction. I asked each one of them to send me photos of their houses so I could include them in this blog post.
First is Madeleine Havas' black and white creation:
The black paper that Madeleine used to cover her wood form is a handmade paper with embedded strings. She cut windows into the paper using the lines created by the embedded strings as cutting lines. Behind the windows she inserted portions of a cotton paper from India that we employees at the store called "Paparazzi Paper" because it had images of faces that could be famous people. Madeleine said that she wanted the overall impression of the house to be "sinister."
Next is Janice Gabel's Little House:
Janice used one of the smaller forms provided by OffCenter -- the main part of the house is made from a length of a wood 2x2", whereas the two houses above were constructed from 4x4" forms. Janice is both a calligrapher and member of Albuquerque's book arts group Escribiente, and incorporated both of those talents into her Little House by adding an accordion style book with calligraphy to one side of the house.
Suzanne Marshall made two Little Houses this year:
The first house is a collaged "Skinny House" made on a flat base ( size-wise I would guess this piece is about 8-1/2" x 11"). Definitely a house that could fit into a skinny urban lot!
And Suzanne's second whimsical house was made using another of the small wood 2x2" bases and features a hoe foot and a side 4" fan.
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As a postscript to this blog post -- OffCenter just reported that both the House Tour and Little House Auction were huge successes and raised over $11,000 which will go directly toward supporting OffCenter's ongoing community arts programming.
