Illuxcon 2025
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Illuxcon is a convention for artists and enthusiasts to show, share, and collectively appreciate imaginative realism art. I attended this show last year as a guest, but this year I went as an exhibitor.
Illuxcon is two exhibit opportunities combined. The first is the Main Show, which features 90ish artists exhibiting for five days in the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, Pennsylvania. Its vibe is more gallery-esque.
The second exhibit opportunity is the Evening Showcase, or just "the Showcase" for short, and this is where I was exhibiting my work. The Showcase is a two-night event that has the atmosphere of a convention dealer's room crossed with a cocktail party.
I had four of my quilts with me, and they took up my entire 10' x 10' booth space.
Dave Seeley, another exhibiting artist, took hundreds of photos of the Showcase artists. If you'd like to get a broader feel of what the Showcase is all about, take a look at the album he posted on Facebook.
Perception and "Errors"
Illuxcon also has programming: lectures and talks presented by various professionals on a wide variety of topics. One of the talks this year was given by Trompe L'Oeil artist and instructor Anthony Waichulis about finding your style. (Click here to read a blog post Anthony wrote on this topic.)
Something that really resonated with me in this lecture was that the context through which each person views art is influenced by their own experience. Anthony posed the question, "How do you know if there's an error?" Is this specific thing an error or mistake, or did the artist intend for it to look that way? And in truth, unless the artist is standing right next to you telling you, "This is the error, right here!", there's no way to know with 100% certainty.
But what a viewer could see as an error is going to be influenced by their personal experiences, knowledge, and history. And that's what really hit home for me, because people get "errors" when looking at my work all the time. By which I mean people looking at my work for the first time have no context in which to process what they're seeing, so they don't understand.
For better or worse, my art resides in an uncanny valley between quilts, prints, and paintings.
- My work is too flat and too realistic to be a quilt, but the textures kind of look like fabric and there are lots of [needle] holes.
- The color is incredibly saturated and the smaller pieces are sometimes matted for presentation, which all makes sense for a print. But they have a dimensional quality (thanks to the layers of fabric) that doesn't make sense.
- The fallback assumption is painting, because what else could it be? But the art isn't hung in a frame, it's filled with intricate texture detail, and all of the crisp edges between the colors are atypical for paintings.
Even visitors to quilt shows—events where they are expecting to see artwork made from fabric—will sometimes think my work is a quilted panel instead of fused raw-edge appliqué.
Listening to Anthony's presentation gave me a new perspective on what's going on when new people see my work for the first time, which I appreciate intellectually. As for an action item, I think the only thing I can do is add a sign that says, "No paint! Just fabric." Maybe something like this, hypothetically:
Changing Direction
For the first time ever, I exhibited at two fantasy art shows this year: Worldcon and Illuxcon. And at both venues, the number one request I received was, "Do you have any dragons?"
I've wanted to do a dragon quilt for a long time, but it's a scary challenge and I've wanted to make sure my skill and ability let me create something that lives up to my imagination. But I think I'm ready. So...I'm changing plans a bit.
My steampunk ideas are on hold, and I'm going to do some dragons! But, naturally, I'm not interested in doing a run-of-the-mill dragon. So the first dragon I make is going to be more like a feathered dinosaur. Here's what I've been sketching:
This scene is intended to fit into about 1 cubic foot of area in "real life", but the quilt is going to be almost 5ft across. That's going to give me plenty of space for detail. I'm excited!
