This month, and into the first week of June, I am doing a residency at Vermont Studio Center way up in Johnson, VT. That’s about two hours south of Montreal, and pretty much out in the country. It is rather beautiful. VSC hosts 50 artists every month of the year, making it the largest artist residency facility in the country. I have spent the last few days setting up my studio, getting settled in, meeting everyone, and even getting a little work done. I ran around a bit shooting photos on my trusty Yashica, and staged a video installation on the back of my studio building. I don’t really have a good title for it yet, so lets just call it Waterfall for now.

River soundtrack in the video is provided by the actual river, which is right behind where I shot this.

My studio is across the Gihon river from the mill building (photo at the top of this post), in the Barbara White studio building. Sharing the first floor with me are several printers and a photographer, and there are a slew of painters upstairs. If they let me, perhaps I can post some of their work later in the month.

Barbara White building.

VSC hosts writers as well as visual artists, and there is a pretty good mix of people working in different media so far. Tonight there will be artist slide talks, for those who want to share work, which I am really looking forward to.

My Studio

I will try to keep on a regular posting schedule while here, so check back for more in a few days!

I just finished editing my music video for State Shirt‘s song Let’s Get Bloody, which is on the recent album of the same name. Have I mentioned the album is stellar? Yes, its worth dragging out that ol’ word for. So anyway, I have been talking with Ethan of State Shirt for years about making a video for him, and we finally pulled it together and starting shooting stuff a couple of months ago. Due to the new job and all that its been sort of slow, working on it a weekend here, an evening there, but now its done. I shot most of it, and my fantastic wife Michele helped me out with a second camera for one of the shoots.
I had been wanting to do something with these statues… I drive past the vendor every day heading in to work.. so here we go! Also, its in HD, so hit that full screen button down there.

Join us for an artists talk about this exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception. Artists: Michele Jaquis, Heidi Kayser, Jeremy J. Quinn, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, Tom Wojciechowski.

The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.

See the exhibition announcement and press release

www.fortpointarts.org for more info

We would be so happy to see you at the opening on August 11 or the artist talk on Sept 24. Or stop in during gallery hours of course!

(Please note the change in the artist talk date from the printed postcard, which says Saturday Sept 15 )

You hold it in your mind all the time.
An exhibition of experimental work about physicality and perception.

August 11 – September 30, 2011

Michele Jaquis
Heidi Kayser
Jeremy J. Quinn
Sarah Rushford
Marguerite White
Tom Wojciechowski

Reception: Thursday August 11, 2011 5:00-8:00 pm
Artists Talk/Closing Reception: Saturday September 24 2:00pm

Art at 12
12 Farnsworth Sreet
Boston MA 02210
www.fortpointarts.org
617 423 1100

Art at 12 Gallery Hours
Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm, Sunday by chance

Art at 12 Gallery presents You hold it in your mind all the time, an exhibition of multidisciplinary work by Boston artists Heidi Kayser, Sarah Rushford, Marguerite White, and Tom Wojciechowski and Los Angeles artists Michele Jaquis and Jeremy J. Quinn. The show dates are August 11 – September 30, 2011, with an opening reception on August 11th and an artist talk and closing reception on September 24th. The exhibition includes projected and monitor based video, sculpture, drawing and photography that takes an experimental, scientific, or analytic approach to the investigation of the mysterious nature of somatic knowledge.

Informed by philosphy, narrative, and neurobiology, You hold it in your mind all the time expresses and questions the folded duality of the self; the notion that the body is our infinitely personal, private selfhood, and is also a physical object in the outside world. Art theorist Gabriele Brandstetter writes of this strange doubleness “The body is a being of two leaves; from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them.”

Heidi Kayser’s sculpture Spanning the Rift is a suspension bridge made of eyeglasses which, Kayser states,“addresses the internally confounding problem of time and helps extend perception by closing the distance between looking back and looking forward.”

Michele Jaquis’s Until I Can Speak my Mind is a short film that was inspired by a recurring dream that both the artist and her twin sister have had in which the artist is chewing bubble gum which she then spits it into her hand, only to find in the next shot that the gum is still there and is getting bigger.

Jeremy Quinn’s What Holds Us Together is a video projection that depicts the Brooklyn Bridge with its middle section conspicuously missing, while the view into Manhattan (the World Trade Center towers missing) remains intact. Traffic seems to pass into and out of a charged void that separates the two sides of the bridge in this commentary on emptiness and separation.

Sarah Rushford’s Quickening is an interactive installation. Viewers reach into a box that contains a green apple and a live video feed of their hand is mixed with a recorded video of another hand touching the apple. Viewers report feeling a strange a ghostly presence as the two images mix.

Marguerite White’s Cargo Cult is a shadow theatre constructed with cut paper and simple light
projections. This surreal narrative is a reflection on the power of visual memory and the subjective nature of physical perception.

Also included are large scale abstract landscape photographs by Tom Wojciechowski, in which familiar objects—a hand, a landscape, set up a perceptual conundrum and create a space that can’t or shouldn’t exist.

You hold it in your mind all the time illuminates a diversity of multidisciplinary contemporary art practice to suggest that what may seem to be private, even mysterious somatic experiences are actually shared perceptions that might be articulated.

Rise Industries forces aligned, (Might Morphin Power Risers are GO!), and I shot my consective days video in Boston and Jeremy and Michele shot theirs  in LA.  And that is what is shown below.

Two Nights- Los Angeles March 2011

Two days- Jamaica Plain Feb 28 2011,  4:11-4:21pm, March 1 2011, 4:11-4:21

We look from left to right for the inconsistencies in framing, as if trained to do so. And from this we get more information than what is contained in the frame, gestalt at work.  We get iformation about what has happened in the interim, some snow has melted, and the camera has moved. Isn’t it strange how the tire tracks are tracks in the snow in the left, and  negative tracks in the right?  Ghost like, the day in between speaks to us when we put time together this way.

In Los Angeles, there was no snow to be melted, and the two shots are so similar that it is as if the 24 hours in between has melted instead. The inconsistencies in light, weather, and the movement of the air are highlighted instead, and even the air seems choreographed to rustle thorough the left tress, and then the right trees, as if doing a job.

In both, the passage of those twenty minutes reveals the light changing as the day approaches dusk. In the right shot in LA, dusk comes on as an intense pink glow. And it seems appropriate that this wild act of light has been recorded, because it seems to be performing on the second day because it missed the opportunity on the first.

Sound in LA is much more interesting because it was recorded outside, in Boston the camera was inside the house . In LA it is hard to distinguish the source of the sound until you have a visual cue to link it to. If there is no visual cue the sound works as a mending agent across the gulf of the two days.

To me the work is evokative, mysterious. It’s as if  juxtaposing the two intervals opens a secret portal through which the very passage of time can communicate.

The Boston shots can be improved, would like to crop like LA shots (can’t do it in Final Cut Express) more to be done on this project. I’d like to see how it looks projected large or on large monitor. I’d like to try shooting with matching cameras. It is actually pretty complex if you watch all four shots at once. And at the beginning I actually intended to shoot a closeup as opposed to the more landscapey shots we did. I think we should try the closeup next. Another way I saw this was to have the right shot be live, and the left be 24 hours ago…..Mighty Morphin Power Risers, assemble! (wait I think that’s Voltron or something).

Mountain is an attempt to build a mountain using methods inspired by image mapping in 3d modeling software and Google Earth’s terrain view – composited video landscapes are projected onto a faceted construction, stretching the image out as it follows the shapes of the form. The video is in some places abstracted, distorted and pixilated, and in other places a clear representation of landscape.

Video shot at Kristi Engle Gallery during TBA, A Group Video Exhibition in 7 Parts.

My new video installation, Mountain, will be showing next week at Kristi Engle Gallery in Highland Park in Part 5 of her show TBD: A Group Video Exhibition in 7 Parts. Mountain is my attempt to build a mountain using methods inspired by image mapping in 3d modelling sofware and Google Earth’s terrain view – composited video landscapes are projected onto a faceted form, stretching the image out as it follows the shapes of the form. The video is in some places abstracted, distorted and pixelated, and in other places a clear representation of landscape.

The show will be open from the 23rd to the 29th (noon-6pm each day), with a reception on the 29th from 7-10pm. See here for a map.

The first four videos in my project “i dream in your language” will be included in Part 2 of TBA: A Group Video Show in 7 Parts at Kristi Engle Gallery, in Highland Park (North East LA). The opening is this Saturday Dec. 11, 7-10 pm, and the show is open everyday 12-6 pm through Dec. 18. View full schedule of this 7 part show here. For those of you out of town, you can watch the videos here.