Rise Industries

A wrap-up of Sarah’s Time with Rise at ICI

Here are a few more photos and info about what Rise Industries was up to on Day 6-7 of the ICI Residency. Today, Friday, is the final install day for the exhibition, and Jeremy, Michele, Mike, and John are still at ICI, but I’ve returned to Boston, and already miss it!

These two photos above,  are from the filmstrip The Air About Us; a 1959 filmstrip for grammar school students, about a range of ideas relating to air and air pressure. The slides are beautifully photographed, oddly diagrammatic and some with the same awkward humor you see in those above. The filmstrip, which I watched without audio, has a wierd tonal contrast between pedagogy and poetry, science and spirituality.  It’s an experimental text and image work in itself.

I discovered what I thought was the empty filmstrip canister on my first day at ICI. A photo of the title on top of the canister  is featured in exhibition. But, because it’s such a short filmstrip, it was actually clinging so close to the sides of its canister that  I really thought the canister was empty. The last day I was there, I happened to open the canister again and realized the film had been there all along…

The Air About Us , the phrase alone  relates to the work we did during the residency. The air about us could be the representation of  distance using two dimensions; the uncanny quality of our 3d stereographic portraits. The air about us could be the cultural distance that travel photography can put between the subject and photographer. Or, it could be about misrepresentations of sizes and distances of continents in global projection maps.  It could also be about the contrast of closeness and distance we encounter in video chatting. Also, the air about us, is about us; Rise Industries. It’s about our personal relationships and histories and the roles we organically adopt within the collaborative, and challenges we face as we make art as a collaborative with members on opposite coasts and more than one continent. Working with Rise at ICI was a fantastic experience and I want to thank Rise and ICI, so very much!

Michele Jaquis, Jeremy Quinn, and Sarah Rushford in the ICI Lab

Me video chatting with Boris Margolin in Boston, showing him around ICI. Time clock and multi-time zone punch card piece at the right.

John Kim and Michele Jaquis discussing conversion techniques for Pacific Standard Time to Metric Standard Time.

meteor showers, etc.

Last night I stepped outside around 3AM to take a peak at the rare Leonids meteor shower.  Bundled up in warm clothes, I layed down timidly in the sktechy alley behind my apartment and gazed up at the overly light-poluted LA sky hoping for a few fireballs to provoke my imagination.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing shooting stars….but the term ‘meteor shower’ evokes images more like the famous 1833 coming of the Leonids, when the sky was literally ‘showered’ with falling stars such that people were roused in the middle of the night to come out and witness the end of the world unfolding before them!  Hype aside, that’s certainly not what I experienced last night.

I know this isn’t a direct comparison… but this gives me the same kind of feeling I got on a cold night when I was a little kid and my parents were roused to a frenzied search around the house to find that there was a, “draft coming in the front door!”  Me… not understanding the word ‘draft’, was sadly looking to the front door and all out the windows up and down the street for the giraffe… Imagine my disappointment!

Now I think I’ve got most of my words figured out at this point in my life, but in my quest for idealism I must ask why they call them ‘meteor showers’ when they know that aint right?  These more typical celestial events, that bring us outside to gaze at the sky for perhaps a glimpse of a small slice of happenings of the cosmos, should be called something more like ‘meteor slightly drippy faucets’.  Then they won’t keep getting my hopes up!

trying to phonetically translate my name into Chinese…

Family Circus/Nietzsche

100 men

Hannukkah Hey Ya!

Happy Hanukkah Yo!