(Two of the most excellent things about Fiskars Village, Finland.) Well, an art blog is supposed to turn into a "travelogue" when you're on sabbatical, right? Yeah, I guess so.
The view from my window about two and a half weeks ago, after our first snow.
Hobbitty grass in the woods.
Pink granite and pale fluffy mosses on a nature trail just up from the residency house.
More delicate fluffy mosses and lichen-covered trees.
Life indoors is pretty good here too.Here's me and the other Fiskars artist resident, Laura Baruel Poulsen, at the new Fiskars chocolate shop. The cake, which is mind-blowing, did not last long enough to make it into the picture.
The fact is, Facebook kind of killed the blog. With Facebook I can haphazardly throw up a few pictures and comments and get an immediate response from my friends, whereas with the blog I have to edit and organize pictures and thoughts... too ambitious for me these days! But a few people have emailed suggesting I make a new blog post, so I will.
This is day 25 in Finland. Where I'm currently staying, in Fiskars, it's very pretty. It looks a lot like Vermont, with the addition of Aspen trees.
Nighttime view of the Fiskars Copper Smithy building.
Fallen leaves on a walk in Fiskars Village late this afternoon.
A rather Tolkienesque house encountered on the same walk.
Cool joinery at difficult angles.
I've made two trips so far into Helsinki, the first time by train (to purchase a colour printer to use here) and the second time by car, with my Danish neighbour/co-resident. The first trip cost me 48 euros ($72) in travel, even though it's only 100 km! The second trip we spent 33 euros for a day of parking. So, anyway, trips to Helsinki will need to be limited.
Two cool tin toys in a shop in Helsinki, depicting intense, serious Finnish skiing children.
Jugendstil building in Helsinki
About a week and a half ago I took the bus to Ekenäs, the town where I'm scheduled to do another residency in 2010. This is primarily a Swedish-speaking town, and not very far from Fiskars. The town is adorable, and I met the two current artists-in residence, a German sculptor and a Danish installation artist and painter, and hung out with them a bit. The residence house is huge and eccentric, a very old building on the parklike campus of a university of applied sciences. So, here are some pictures of Ekenas.
Novia University campus, location of the next residency house in Ekenas.
So, it's time to finally post some information about my upcoming residencies in Finland. I will be doing the residency at Onoma Fiskars from October 1st through December 31st, then going to Ekenas, Finland for the period from January 1 to March 31st. Here is the link to the Artists Residency Program at Onoma Fiskars. Onoma Fiskars has a beautiful new website that just went up the other day. The picture below is from their website-- I hadn't yet seen an image of this gorgeous exhibition space.
I also found a series of images of the many buildings that comprise the Fiskars complex, that I hadn't seen before. I have attached a few of these images, which come from the Fiskars Village website. I am deeply saddened to learn that the Belgian Chocolatier In Residence will leave for the winter exactly three days before I arrive...
Wow, my first blog entry in months! So, I guess the semester is finally pretty much done for me, and I can attend to things like this blog again. I spent a fair bit of last week installing a ten-year-old piece, Toy (Collapsing Elephant) as part of a show called Remote/Control at Works Gallery here in San Jose. The show was curated by Jason Challas and Sheila Malone, and is part of SubZero, which is in turn part of the bi-annual phenomenon called Zer01. It was kind of fun to be installing this piece, even though it's an older one, just because installing art is such a welcome change from the bureaucratic parts of my job. And the other artists were there, assembling things and troubleshooting them, and it was nice to be in this environment again. By shipping pieces out east as soon as I'm done making them, I've been missing out on the sense of community that arises during the installation of a show.
Works Gallery counted two thousand visitors during the opening reception of this show. The reception lasted seven hours--from 6PM to 1AM, which was enough time for the little elephant toy inside my piece to be broken once, after the first three hours of being played with. My friend Mike Lowell, a recent Photography graduate, happened to be there when somebody managed to break the elephant (his head was laying sadly beside him, and people just kept on playing with the joystick!) Mike kindly helped me remove the massive box that hides all the mechanical parts of the piece, and then he videotaped me replacing the elephant. Here's his video on Vimeo.com-- it's pretty funny (although I'd rather not have to hear my voice recorded!) And here are some pictures of people playing with the piece again, after the new elephant went in. I had forgotten to charge my own camera battery, so I only got a few pictures.
One very cool piece in the show was Monterey-based engineer Tom Rebold's robotic walking chair, "Chairisma." Here's the video of the chair at the Works show opening. I like how the cute little chair poses a constant threat to the inordinately large vase that orients it.
Someone recently forwarded a link to a section of the BBC documentary, "The Genius of Photography," to my sister, Kylie Wright. Kylie had forgotten about the filming, which took place back when she was pregnant with her son, Raphael. In the clip, Kylie and Gregory Crewdson discuss some of the convoluted processes of digital photo manipulation. Watch video clip. Kylie and Gregory appear in the second half of this clip.
I had to go ahead and nab this photo off John Pollard's blog (he's the director of ADA Gallery.) I could not let this go. It's David Byrne, of course, with John, in front of my work at Scope Miami in 2006. Too cool.
I only wish I could bump David Byrne over a foot and a half to the right so I could see how well the kidney wallpaper complements his complexion.
I'll be showing the two tire-tread pieces in the faculty show at the Thompson Gallery (SJSU Art Building) that opens on Tuesday. There's a gallery walk-through/ talk by the artists from 5-6, then the reception from 6-8. There will be openings for all of the student galleries also.
The view from my window about two and a half weeks ago, after our first snow.
Hobbitty grass in the woods.
Pink granite and pale fluffy mosses on a nature trail just up from the residency house.
More delicate fluffy mosses and lichen-covered trees.
Life indoors is pretty good here too.Here's me and the other Fiskars artist resident, Laura Baruel Poulsen, at the new Fiskars chocolate shop. The cake, which is mind-blowing, did not last long enough to make it into the picture.
