Art4life

I thought I would let you in on the drawing process from my point of view. I have been experimenting with ways to document artistic process. This ‘.gif ‘ image cycles through several stages of a drawing I did using an effective new pastel product called PanPastel in combination with graphite.

where you least expect it. This beautiful reflection showed up in one of my photos. It was too lovely to ignore so I isolated it and did some manipulation. It feels to me like it should be called “Transfiguration”.

I have been cleaning, purging my household of ‘excessories‘; those items without a purpose that seem to build up around the place. They arrive in the arms of well meaning friends and kids who’s parents have told them to get rid of their junk. It would seem that junk carries an energy necessary to its survival. Some people unconsciously feel this energy and have a hard time letting go. As an alternative to chucking it out, they try to find a new home for it. This is an admirable thing to do considering how full our landfills are becoming, but my question is “where did the junk come from in the first place?” I think this is a complicated question with more than one answer.

While in the Anchorage, Alaska airport last summer, my daughter and I spent a lot of time watching planes land and take off from the cargo runways. We were shocked at the number of cargo planes from China. They stop at Anchorage to refuel before continuing on to their destinations. I was puzzled at first until I made a connection between all the labels on my items at home, “Made in China”. It is rare now to find items that are not made in China . It’s all about marketing. Lower production cost, lower retail cost. The lower price is so enticing that many times I have bought an item on impulse because the price was so good. I am working on breaking that habit, separating ‘needs’ from ‘wants’, after all, how much ’stuff’ do I really need?

The dad-guy has a history of helping me out with art projects and today I found a photo from a project long ago. Yes, those are grapes he is holding up to his ear. I needed a model, my concept was ‘heard it through the grapevine’ and he was the closest human being , so I grabbed him.

It was December, the power was out and I had work to do. Candles seemed to be the logical solution. We are so used to losing our power for hours at a time in the winter that we have adapted and carry on. But the dark days are almost over. The spring to summer season brings dramatic changes to our natural light and our need for artificial light reduces. By the time June comes it will be light out until 11 pm. This is a natural cycle, a closed cycle. For now it remains the same, season to season, year to year. Indigenous people have adapted, lived and worked within these seasons since time unmeasured. I was recently on a site that talked about using natural cycles in nature as a metaphor for design. For example, what if buildings could be designed to behave like trees? Would they then become more integrated into the earth’s cycle rather than an interruption to it. This is important if we want to guarantee the renewal of the seasons now, as they always have been. There is a lot of talk about carbon footprint and other effects of our lives of consumption on the eco-system. When I think about what I can do, I think about my role as a design educator. I can plant the seed of creative thought in those I teach. If I plant enough, some of them are bound to bloom.

The way in which we use the web is changing dramatically. Once a place to ‘go and get’ information, the web has become a base for self-generated, self-published content.  On March 20th, the College of New Caledonia where I teach is holding a form to discuss these changes and what we can expect from the web in the future. Web 2.0 and Beyond will have a panel of guests whose experience will bring a very different angle to web-based social networks. Kate McCabe, Eric Karjuloto, and Heather Smith will face off on a variety of topics. I am hoping they will discuss the very interesting notions taxonomies, specifically of folksonomy, defined by www.thewebworks.bc.ca as

“an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content …” for example, tags, tag clouds.

As more and more information is used and stored by more individuals, methods of finding and managing that information need to be developed. Additionally, users are wanting to access their stored information from more that one device, cell phones, and ipod’s being two examples of that. There are a lot of questions that come to mind about storing and retrieving huge amounts of information. The first one is

‘why‘ do humans feel compelled to do this?

How often is the stored information accessed by the collector? Or is the purpose to have others access the collection?

I’m sure you have all experienced or contributed to the passing on of jokes, photographs and urban legends through email. I am not fond of receiving information this way, especially since I did not solicite it in the first place, so my question again is why do people search for and send information to their online friends?

In a post from graphpaper.com , Christopher Fahey states:

“People are actually doing (free!) work for other people, adding metadata to information where the information’s “owner” could have done that work. The brilliant thing about folksonomies is that internet users have shown themselves time and time again to be remarkably willing to do their part to help the greater good, even if it means doing labor that happens to bring financial benefit to someone else.”

It is a curious thing, a compulsion, an attempt to advance one’s position in life. Interesting.

Here are some photos of the installation with the 1700 blocks I was talking about in my previous post. The zeros and ones are binary code. Each set of 8 numbers represents an ascii character or letter of the alphabet, which works into a phrase. If you are into code breaking, here is the binary that is on the piece:

Phrase One:

01110011 01100001 01110110

01101100 01100001 01110011 01100001 01110110

Phrase two:

01101011 01100001 01110110

01101100 01100001 01101011 01100001 01110110

You may have to ‘google’ the resulting phrase.

I finished my installation at the Two Rivers Gallery here in Prince George last week. The opening was Thursday night (Feb 28th). In all the installation took over 1700 wooden blocks, 3.5 inches square to complete a tower 6 feet wide and 8 feet tall. The Dad-guy, my son and I spend months making them. My daughter helped by counting. It was a family affair…or more like ‘forced family fun’; the Dad-guy commenting every night after work, “I don’t wanna cut anymore blocks.”

The opening went well with the curator commenting that the blocks seem to be attractive to kids. The gallery apparently had their first ‘kid’ episode that afternoon before the opening where some of the blocks were moved around by a person under the age of 18. Good thing I am not worried about viewer interaction. I think it helps validate the piece. I promise to post some shots of the work in the next 2 days. It has a message on it in binary code and I would like to see if anyone figures out what it is. I’ll let you in on that when I post the photos.

I really feel like I [suddenly] have a lot of time on my hands, so I am asking, ‘What’s next for Kim?’ I have my own ideas on that, but maybe you have a suggestion or opinion you want to share with me?

Change is always difficult for me, even if it means something exciting will enter my life. In my observations I have noticed that change comes in waves. Sometimes those waves are huge, sometimes several small, rolling waves crash my shores. I find myself standing, gazing out towards the sea, looking for the next wave. Even as it closes over me, I think, “please, not now, I do not want this to happen.” , but the only way passed it is through it. Someday all will be calm again. Until then I will let that cool water crash over me as I ride it out.

My Mom is in a fight for her life. She is in the good care of doctors and nurses at the hospital but her future is uncertain. She has been given some tough choices to make, none of them appealing, all of them potentially life-saving and life-threatening. She feels the weight of her decision. In a blur of contradictory advice from ‘experts’, she tries to think. This is her life they are talking about. As she sorts through the large amount of information that has come her way in a matter of days, everyone else waits for her decision barely daring to breath.