Video of the discussion: Thirsty Thursday :: Prajakti Jayavant and Rebeccan Jantzen on Vimeo

This is the video animation I collaged for “Menagerie on 23rd Street.”  Click>>> stickers

This year’s holiday card features nineteen artworks by NIAD artists that I digitally collaged with bows and stars.

Available via NIAD Art Center’s on-line shop.  All  sales of the cards go directly to NIAD.

Short video of the exhibition. videoinstall:menagerie 

 About the Exhibition

Link to Thirsty Thursday discussion: 

Thirsty Thursday :: Prajakti Jayavant and Rebeccan Jantzen on Vimeo

Menagerie on 23^rd Street

The exhibition windows of NIAD on 23^rd street are wildly overstuffed this holiday season. Amongst a backdrop of drawings that are doodled and dotted, emerge a collection of creatures that are striped and spotted. This menagerie includes an assortment of tickles and roars from the furriest felines to amphibians galore.

At daybreak, dapper penguins appear, as mischievous musketeers, parading their way through showers of shapes. Marsupials, with pocketfuls of petunias, patiently postpone their leaping while snails slowly scribe a chalk hopscotch design.

By midday, squirrels engage in patterns of play by using their tails as paintbrushes to carry colors along. These flurries of bristled swoops create new routes for intense frolicking. A bubble blowing hippo joins a unicorn with a mane of spun yarn to prance upon these often sideways highways. A bunch of baby orangutans toss their bananas aside in delight of this unusual sight. They marvel at the spectrum of strands that shed from the unicorn as it shakes its shampooed tresses. The babies scamper to gather the emitted magical threads and weave them into friendship bracelets. They enthusiastically adorn the orange arms of one another with these ribboned rainbows tied tightly.

This menagerie is full of afternoon festivities. Acrobatic bats cloaked in knitted capes perform in an eco-friendly gymnasium made from geraniums. Limerick cracking lemurs entertain crowds of bejewelled beasts and besties. Canines, with smiles shaped like spirals, celebrate by slurping up melting birthday cake. Elephants rejoice by linking their trunks together in a garland formation. Chickens disco all day.

In the evening, frogs full of dessert quiet their burping. A moose with heart shaped eyes looks lovingly at a butterfly unfurling its trapezoid wings. Precocious pigs on pillows drift off to sleep, soothed by a llama’s cooing lullaby.

The menagerie on 23rd street is a boisterous community of laughing, lunching, brunching, chanting, and dancing creatures who admire one another’s distinctly different seasonal coats. This merry menagerie is an ensemble of the entire alphabet of animals enmeshed in raucous joy.

 About the Curator 

Prajakti Jayavant is an artist and educator whose students have ranged from ages three to one hundred and three. She has taught Fine Arts in elementary schools, special education, colleges, and convalescent hospitals. This year, Prajakti designed the holiday card. It includes eighteen original artworks by wonderful NIAD artists that are digitally collaged with bows and stars.

“Menagerie on 23^rd Street” features guest appearances by characters from her on-line exhibitions “Chameleon with a Kaleidoscope” along with Spike and Feathers from “Travelogue.”

Copyright © Prajakti Jayavant 2021

Check out my Instagram accounts:  @minabstractimal for studio only or @prajakti_jayavant for creative excursions on planet Praj.

FORM

It.

Abstraction Embodied.

Is.

A particular wholeness of essence fulfilled.

Every line an implication: every curve a value.

A touched transcription of meaning.

An assembling of ifs that become an of.

.AS.

Is: of: possibility.

Composed past the proximity of reference.

The essential activated.

Upon, around, within.

Ever expanding.

FUNCTION

A pause,altered.

Mirror. Content. Continuum.

Fluid in finality.

How to why.

I designed the limited edition trifold pamphlet for the exhibition “form.AS.function” at Pastine Projects. [Image 1: front cover; flat view. Image 2: interior; flat view.] Free print copies are available at the gallery.

Each artist wrote about the individual words of the show’s title. The selected text is my writing for the project.

I entitled the show: “Vignettes of Variants. Selections from Quarantine.” Talk and awards ceremony can be found at: linktr.ee/unrpxl . Watch some accidental film noir shadow play turn me into a tiger.

is the second on-line show that I selected featuring artists from NIAD. It is a collaboration between myself and ten year old NJ.

is an on-line exhibition that I organized featuring the wonderful artists of NIAD, an art center for adults with disabilities.

Thank you to Stephen Goldstine and Simone Garland for including me as the lucky number seventh guest on their father/ daughter podcast, ‘Stephen Goldstine Knows All.’ Stephen is a rare, San Franciscan treasure, (who really does know all,) pertaining to the art world through his personal experiences. The Bay Area is lucky to have him.