It finally stopped raining long enough for Scott Massey to take some great photographs of the lights. Here’s one of his photos for the brochure.
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At 8am on Tuesday morning, we met the city crew at the Rona parking lot at Kingsway and Dumfries and began installation of my six globes on Kingsway. The lights are up on eighteen foot tapered pole three one block west and three one block east Knight Street. Everything went very smoothly and we were done by noon.
The colours are programmed to change every two hours from a random set of six colours over a thirty minute transition. Here’s a night view of the installation at Clark.
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It’s a beautiful day today in Chicago. I’ve been at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Graduate Student recruiting event for the afternoon. When we finished at 4pm, we went across the road to the new wing at the Art Institute and then over to Millenium Park to see the Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. What an amazing sculpture. There are hundreds of people all around it taking pictures of themselves and their friends.
We got here around 5pm just as the lights were coming on and the day was fading. An outstanding example of how public art can be a destination point within a city- clearly a highlight.
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Sometimes it feels like there’s too much going on all at once. Over the past two days we had two excellent visiting artists’ talks. Last night Mona Hatoum give a comprehensive, thoughtful talk on her work from over the past thirty years starting with a provocative video of her walking slowly through the streets of Brixton barefoot dragging a pair of Doc Martin boots tied to her ankles behind her.
She’s here in Vancouver for an exhibition of her Collected Works at Bob Rennie’s new Wing Sang Building Gallery which opens Saturday. Seeing one of her early video works was a good segue into an overview of her sculptures from the mid nineties focussing on the material aspects of her practice. She was very direct about the importance of maintaining a studio practice and was also very generous with questions from the audience, answering each one with thoughtful consideration.
Today at lunch, the Canadian illustrator Seth, also gave an amazing talk- with great illustrations and self-depricating humour, while appearing shy, he was very witty and charming. He read a series of auto-biographical vignettes each punctuated by a desk clerk’s bell. He is in town for the Writers Festival which is featuring his new book George Sprott 1894 – 1975. Seth was also very generous in answering questions with care and thought.
I was lucky to have been able to attend both these talks. I’m again reminded what an amazing place an art schools is, and how generous many public figures can be to students in this context. What a rare opportunity and generous gift it is to be able to hear artists talk about their ideas in a small room filled with strangers.
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We’re making great progress on my Kingsway Luminaires project. We now have the first resin cast globe and the others are in production. If all stays on schedule we should have the other five by the end of this week. It’s taken a few months longer than planned, but well worth the wait given the quality of the final globes.
Here’s a photo of the wooden objects used to make the mold, and here’s the first prototype which we’ve been using to test our colours:
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I’m in Regina for the CAFAD Conference at the University of Regina. I was lucky to be able to catch Maria Hupfield and Merritt Johnson’s performance Double Self Double at the opening of the My Evil Twin exhibition curated by Timothy Long at the Mackenzie Art Gallery tonight.
As viewers we entered a space with two large white canvas bags on the floor. It soon became aparent through movement and then soft whistling that Maria and Merritt were inside. As the whistling calls between them grew in volume and frequency, they each eventually emerged and performed a series of stylized poses with folding wooden rulers, then went back into the bags (to change outfits), emerged again and repeated these actions, then to finally reemerge wearing what looked like some kind of home-made Tae Kwon Do outfits and began the second part of the performance. Again a series of ritualized and stylized movements got increasingly active and frantic and culminated with a cooperative move to help one another get a trophy from the top of a high wall.
The performance ended by them dragging their now inside out bags with colourfully embroidered interiors through the gallery and nailing them up onto the wall. It was a very emotionally cathartic and physically intense performance. I felt exhausted when it was over.
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We went to the Zero Garbage Potluck Dinner at the Roundhouse. As part of their Dig In – Environmental Art weekend, everyone brought a potluck dish, plate and cutlery. The food was great. Dinner was followed by talk by Waterpod artist/collaborators Derek and Mira Hunter. They were joined by Mary Mattingly via Skype.
It is hard not to be amazed by Waterpod. It is a 3000-square-foot barge which is an experiment in community living which has been open to the public as it was docked in five boroughs of New York for the past three months. This is the last weekend Waterpod is open to the public and it is docked at the World’s Fair Marina in Queens on the East River.
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Cathy Busby and Garry Neill Kennedy’s exhibition Bejing Vancouver – opened at Centre A yesterday.
Busby’s project was a square installation of four large images on a scale large outdoor banners chosen from her archive of images from her time in Bejing around the time of their Olympic Games. My favorite was an enormous enlargement of two ceramic jars of picked preserves. She also produced a book Your Choice with images of supermarket packaging along with oversized vinyl banners based on these images.
Kennedy’s wall painting: I Don’t Want to Pay the Full Price, chosen from an ideomatic translation in a tourist phrase book, continues his larger project of full height wall paintings using Superstar Shadow, that he has been making since the early 1990s. He gave an excellent talk for the Contemporary Art Society at Emily Carr University on Thursday, which provided the audience with a taste of his dry humour with a susinct summary of and ideosyncratic art practice over the past forty years.
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