time of a different order of magnitude ...
Obviously, any hope I had of updating here on a regular basis proved fruitless.
Still, the last few months have been immensely productive on a number of levels, so it's really all good in the long run.
A number of things coming down the pipe:
- It looks as though the chapbook for the Archives of Absence project I am working on with Catherine Owen will be coming together (literally, physically!) in the next little while. Had a marvelous meeting with Catherine and our publisher, Trisia Eddy (the genius behind Red Nettle Press) back in May - and things are shaping up well. We've picked paper, figured out binding options, got the final layout sorted ... so now the birthing begins in earnest for Trisia! I am so very excited by this project, and can't wait to see the final result. I think it is going to be really beautiful as an object, and as a book. It is so rewarding to work with people from totally different areas of creative activity, and be able to share ideas and and create something larger than the sum of its parts.
- The second (and third) parts of Archives of Absence are coming together very well also. I have finished over 30 gel transfer works on board for the gallery-based portion of this work, and am slowly wrapping my head around the arcane workings of Final Cut Express to get the video portion of the beast together. Have some more photographic work to do when I get back to Edmonton, and reacquaint myself with the Berm in all its vacant oddness, and need to resolve, once and for all, the best way to deal with the collection of objects, and what the archive will itself look like. It's coming together, and I'm looking forward to finishing all the components and seeing it as a coherent whole.
- I have collected a vast array of wonderful bits in my time in Halifax: bones, bird wings, rusty metal things (many, many rusty things!), all of which will be returning to the Prairie with me all too soon. They will be fuel for the fire on the creation of a new body of work coming out of this year away.
- Plans are afoot and sample works have been created for a collaborative project with visual artist and art historian Kristen Hutchinson. This installation-based work is titled In Living Memory, and will deal with the way in which memory is presented publically - as memorialization - in graveyards, and what happens when there's no one left to remember those passages.
- I will be traveling to Toronto next week to plan, plot, scheme, and generally hammer out another collaborative project for exhibition with my friend David Young. This work (as yet unnamed) is going to be a process-based installation, exploring some ideas we have around parallel narratives and the conjunction of physical change, memory, and narrative processes ... the constant becoming of all these things. It will be exceedingly interesting for both of us, I think, to work through our ideas in relation to our different (but related) methods of working.
- Received some very happy news when I was back in Edmonton in May: my exhibition proposal for Profiles Gallery in St. Albert has been accepted for December 2011 - January 2012. SO ... I know I have a good bit to think about and plan (and execute!!) over the next couple of years.
- Had a piece accepted for the next Edmonton Timeraiser. A great opportunity, and a very worthy project!
- have been working on various grants, residency applications, exhibition proposals, and so on. Crossing fingers (and toes and anything else I can!) that some of these bear fruit.
Hmm ... I guess I understand why I haven't been keeping this updated regularly.
