The "Nine" Show Opening

Ya, ya, how did it go? It went well. Fairly well attended, not as packed as last year but not bad. As I've told many people: Sloane ate her weight in chips, friends came to cheer me on, people said nice things about my work, and Turner got me a corsage for the occasion.

     
One Lane/One Planet, Queensland Australia. 2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From my "Artist's Statement" for the show: I’m interested in language and words, and in particular Found Words – misspellings, graffiti, ironies in signage, language as backdrop for larger themes. One of the pieces in this show, the One Lane/One Planet work, is from this series and was shot at the side of the road in Queensland, Australia. We were visiting Crystal Waters, the noted permaculture eco-village northeast of Brisbane, an environmental and idealistic enclave surrounded by very conservative farming culture and remote countryside. One road lead to the community from the bush highway, and a resident had, with two well-placed letters, provided a note-perfect introduction to their overarching philosophy.

Initially this photo looks political, and in word content it does skew that way. However, the reason I included it in the show was actually due to my pleasure with the background after a very long process of work & tweaking in Photoshop. Not evident at this size, the trees and grass and hills in the background have been distorted and rendered very "painterly" after much effort. I think 'artists' always have other reasons for why they like their own work - this is mine for this piece.


  
A-frame Advice, Nakusp BC. 2005/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From the artist's statement: Another piece from my Found Words series featured in this exhibition is the “SMILE, SOMEBODY’S WATCHING” work. During the Vietnam War Canada took in many American draft dodgers, and communes sprung up along the remote valleys of British Columbia. One such group built an A-frame on land now owned by my mother outside of Nakusp. When we first began visiting this structure it was full of old clothing and kitchen utensils, Kahlil Gibran posters and letters detailing concerns that the FBI would somehow find and extradite them back to the US. This old bottlecap, bearing a cheerful phrase I remember from my own childhood, also echoes through the decades another message, the uneasy melody of paranoia and tension that affected the lives of these exiles.


    

L:  Motel Knowles, Saskatchewan. 2005/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic
R:  Roxy Theatre, Coleman AB. 2006/2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

From the artist's statement: I’m also interested in the neon signs still in evidence on the Canadian Prairie. Neon gas, brought into widespread use in signage during the 1920s, changed how we light the night, bringing amazing vivid colours and dancing shapes to the palette of our nighttime world. Even today, neon signs are compelling as a combination of practicality and nostalgia. But neon’s initial impact, especially on our rural Canadian landscape of wild space and distances, must have been magnificent beyond our imagining. There are two pieces from my Neon Signs series in this show, from Saskatchewan and Alberta.

     
Netcasters I and Netcasters II, Queensland Australia. 2008. Colourchrome print and acrylic

The Australia spiderweb 'diptych'. The green one should look greener and the blue one should look more teal-ey. Limits of the internet, etc.
...Only Melinda Topiko called me on the fact that this is not an actual diptych! (I would expect no less from you, Melinda!)

I didn't sell any work, but I didn't really expect to. There was a commission I had to factor into the pricing, and I'd decided to backmount my pieces to acrylic, which is an expensive process at the best of times. The prices were higher than the show's 'market' could bear, and in general people don't like to pay for photography, especially now in the digital age.

Mainly I was participating to nail down my Canada Council qualifications, which, for the Visual Arts category, seem to stipulate that you have to have a certain number of gallery shows. Never mind whether you make your living taking and publishing photographs, never mind the artistic merit of those publications, never mind the other work you may have done in other artistic fields... last year I didn't have three gallery shows on my cv and I was deemed ineligible for funding.

So, ok, whatever, fine. I've got the chops, and now I've got the gallery shows. Woot, hear me roar, august federal funding agencies!

Categories: Art school | Ash | Work work work

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"Nine" Show At Arthouse

Categories: Art school | Ash | Work work work

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Re: Frankincense & myrrh

I sat in on a silkscreen class today. The class materials list had, as mandatory-for-next-week, listed "frosted Mylar".

Does this not sound similarly weird as the presents the Three Kings brought? As in, when you were a kid. Like, did YOU know what frankincense and myrrh were prior to age 20?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

Categories: Ash | Art school

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