Out of the Fire Into the Frying Pan

by John Billingham & Norman Colp, 1992

Rember the Zoetrope?

No?

Well, don't go away.

It was an early movie machine made of an open-topped drum with vertical slits along the perimeter. You dropped in a sequence of images, spun it, and when you looked through the slits, the image moved.

Turn the wheel briskly. Step to the right and view the images through the spinning edge of the wheel.

Out Of The Fire Into The Frying Pan is the product of a happy collaboration between two diverse skills, that of a conceptual artist, Norman Colp, and that of a craftsman artist, John Billingham.

Both are Americans living and working in New York City. Colp has been exhibited in outstanding galleries and has pieces in major American collections. Billingham, while living in Philadelphia prior to 1979, designed and made weather vanes as a business. Since then he has done professional model-making, design, and contracting, which included the sets for "Food", a dance performance at the New York studio of Merce Cunningham.