Miya Ando Stanoff is my favorite living minimalist artist. I have two of her pieces and I never get tired of them. The only type of "canvas" she ever uses are thin, steel panels which she works on using things like acid, sharp tools and blowtorches. It shouldn't be relevant I know, but I also love that she's literally the descendant of a sword maker. A recurring theme with me and my tastes is the concept of precision and that's a concept I get out of her works. She describes them as "quiet meditative environments" but I find them pleasingly bleak and dark myself.
Our daring friend “target girl” Tina was on the Conan O’Brian show last night getting a bunch of knives thrown at her.
We know her through our precision bullwhip mentor Robert Dante (she’s his on-stage partner and also personally helped me to finally master the ellusive overhand crack). But she also lets her friend The Great Throwdini throw knives at her sometimes and I think it’s cool that an act like that can get a national audience. Mr Throwdini holds the world record for the most knives successfully thrown in 60 seconds (102).
We met Throwdini at a party once and he had some awesome anecdotes of his past shows, like the time he threw an axe and it caught his glasses...he found them unharmed, dangling from the axe-stuck-in-the-board later. I hope we can get to hang out with him again sometime, hopefully after we've had more time to practice our own whipping skills with Robert & Tina. It's hard to practice in the winter indoors because it requires extremely high ceilings.
One thing I love about Tina is that she doesn’t just play the helpless damsel in distress role. She’s an expert precision bullwhip artist herself and in both Robert and Throwdini’s acts, she turns the table on the male and uses him (in this case Conan himself) as the target.
Brenda in her very first lesson (on her birthday) working on the basic circus crack with Robert.
Me, trying my best to master the overhand crack with Mr Dante looking on disapprovingly. (I finally got it with Tina's help)
