what i saw in bakurocho and shinjuku

As the week came to an end, I took a list of the exhibitions that I wanted to see that were closing this weekend.  There are a few I may not get to, but I plotted my route on the train/subway and headed over to Bakurocho to see Lawrence Weiner's exhibition at Taro Nasu. During a conversation in the middle of my gallery hopping, I realised that I had not done a significant tour of galleries in this area for more than four, possibly five years.  In those intervening four or five years, the number of galleries has grown significantly and they are clustered close enough to each other for walking and eventually spending an entire day in the area.  Here is a map that I picked up of the still growing gallery scene in this area.

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I headed to Taro Nasu first and it seemed to be closer to the Bakurocho station than I remembered.  Lawrence Weiner is one of the first conceptual artists that I discovered during my time during graduate school and he is well known for his text-based installations such as this on from 2012.

The title of his exhibition is "Water and Some of Its Forms" and this is the main work as you walk down the stairs into the gallery space.

As you can see, he has combined English with Japanese for the installation.  To my recollection, this is first time that I have seen his work combine two languages so that their forms overlap.  In addition to this piece there was another larger wall piece, but what drew me were a series of more diagrammatic text based drawings.  One of which I snapped a photograph of below.

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I climbed back up the stairs and walked next door and went to check out gallery αM in the basement.  Founded in 1988, gallery αM has its roots in the Musashino Art University, but shuttered its first location in Kichijoji in 2002.  Since 2002, gallery αM has hosted exhibitions by over 25 invited curators, each of whom explores a theme through a series of solo exhibitions.  The exhibition I happened upon was Volume 6: Censure Karasawa curated by Yuri Mitsuda from the DIC Kawamura Memorial Museum.  The theme of his seven exhibition project is "Mirror Behind Hole - Photography Into Sculpture"  Here are a couple images of what I saw in the space.

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Karasawa's work is quite gorgeous.  The wood is meticulously cut into various forms and rather than leaving the form as such each piece is then cut open and then hollowed out.  He uses paraffin wax to fill in the hollowed space to give that space form.  He also uses the cross-sectioned wood forms and reconfigures them to emphasise the hollowed out space without the paraffin wax.  The theme of the project is quite interesting and I am interested in seeing what Volume 7 holds in store as well as revisiting previous volumes online.

From there I caught the elevator and headed up to the 4th floor to Kiyoyuki Kuwabara Accounting Gallery to see a small show by Shoji Ueda whom is one of my favourite Japanese photographers.  This gallery just opened at the end of January and is an accounting office and art gallery.  I wish I could tell you more about that, perhaps when I visit again.  In any case, there were 10 gorgeous prints from Ueda's White Wind photographic series along with the rare White Wind photo book.  The images for this series were take with the Vest Pocket Kodak which were also on display in the exhibition.  You can learn more about Ueda's amazing photography and numerous works in this Guardian article "Shōji Ueda: the most beautiful, surprising photobook of the year" from late 2015.  If you ever have a chance to see his color prints, run, don't walk and just bask in the soft light and sensuous colours!

From there, I realised I still had time before heading to Shinjuku and that Jinen Gallery was relatively close to where I was.  I wandered over there because I had been drawn to the exhibition postcard for Masahiro Imai's Historia Naturalis.  

There is definitely Joseph Cornell being channeled through this work.  The space at Jinen Gallery is usually split into two spaces for two person exhibitions, but Imai had the entire space to himself.  The front half of the space was devoted to work that made reference to Dylan Thomas biography, famous poem verse, 

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

and the motion picture Interstellar.  I do not know much about Dylan Thomas, but I have hear this verse often and even more interesting for my own process is that I have been meaning to rewatch Interstellar due to my revived interest in science fiction as well as my own processing of human mortality and beyond.  The materials that Imai uses for these boxed pieces stems from his vast collection of antiques which he had accumulated for years with giving thought to incorporating them into his artwork.  Historia Naturalis was the debut of these boxed pieces.  The coincidental convergence of the story of Historia Naturalis and my own interests jolted me life.  As I looked at the map of other galleries in the area, I had thoughts of venturing around, but ultimately decided this was a good note to end on.  I hopped back on the subway and headed to Shinjuku to attend the opening for the Narrative Abstract Art Vol. 6 group exhibition at the Art Complex Centre of Tokyo where Michelle Zacharias was debuting her dust paintings. Here a view of her work in the exhibition.

In response to her allergies and pervasive pollution, she has been collecting dust from various sources, filtering them and using the small dust particulates to create pigments which she uses to create her paintings which reference wind patterns which have a major impact on the severity of her allergies along with the pollution in the air.

Along with Michelle's work, the 29 other artists offered their individual takes on Narrative Abstract Art.  Here are a couple of other artists whose works I was drawn to.  

Chigira Shoko

kan.i.

Yuuki Hashino

From Yuuki Hashino's Tumblr

From Yuuki Hashino's Tumblr

Shohei Oyama - Click to see one of his works

Kojiro Itakura

From the Art Imagine website

From the Art Imagine website

Narrative Abstract Art Volume 6 concluded my gallery visits for the week.  There is a small chance, I will try and see one more show tomorrow as the theme is of great interest to me.  Otherwise, my next round of gallery visits will be next Friday.

what is it about science fiction and myself these days

The weather in Tokyo was forecast to be cloudy last night.  That along with the fact that I live in the middle of a metropolis pretty much ruled out seeing the lunar eclipse.  As I sat in my apartment partaking in my usual weeknight routine, I happened upon the news that the sky was clear and the lunar eclipse was visible.  Of course, my apartment window faced the opposite direction for optimal viewing from indoors.  I paused momentarily, but bundled up and headed out to see what I could see.  As it turns it, the lunar eclipse was taking place in front of my apartment with the moon nestled between two tall buildings.  If that was not a sign that I should be watching it, I did not know what it was.  I was outside about more than an hour before the start of the total eclipse and the about a quarter of the moon was covered.  Given that there was considerable time before the total eclipse, I headed back inside to warm up and grab a camera with a decent zoom.  About twenty minutes before the total eclipse, I headed back out, alternated between snapping pictures and staring at the pale yellow moon turn into a warm crimson balloon floating in the night sky.
 
As I was staring at the super blue blood moon, I began reflecting on my revived interest in science fiction and I woke up pre-dawn and my mind started racing about different interests, themes and ideas in science fiction that have been resonating with me as of late.

Trying to trace when this iteration of science fiction interest started, I would trace it all the way back to the fall of 2015 when I was in Strand Books and picked up Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe among other books.  And since then I have been working through that book in very sporadic spurts.  As I am currently in a peak of science fiction interest, I am certain to finish it in a week or so.  Some time after that, I went back and revisited all five seasons of Fringe over the next year or so.  That all seems to have laid the groundwork to send me back into science fiction.

But it was podcasts that did the trick.  I wrote about podcasts at the end of last year so I will not go into too much about podcasts.  For me, the podcasts touch on ideas in the paranormal, conspiracy, the unseen, and subcultures among others which really resonate with me at this point and time.  LeVar Burton Reads has been a major impetus in reviving my interest in science fiction.  His selection of science fiction and speculative fiction short stories has greatly expanded the universes which I could delve into beyond the classics and well-known authors. 

But science fiction also inspires and revives forgotten interests.  At some point during my residency at the Nakanojo Biennale, I managed to find the motivation to watch The Arrival which I had heard generally positive things about.  The only drawback was that it was slowly-paced which did not bode well for my limited attention span for movies.  However, no internet and no television where I was staying and burnt out on podcasts, I figured why not.  By the end of the movie, I was wishing that I had studied linguistics.  I also wanted to start studying linguistics and the underlying means of communication as humans and other terrestrial species and those beyond this planet.  Since that first time, I have watched The Arrival several times again and gotten lost in the concepts of linguistics and the structure of time.  

From there, I started off with Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem.  I spend a few weeks mulling whether to buy the e-book version or the audiobook version.  In the end I decided on the audiobook version.  Since starting The Three Body Problem, I have absorbed daily doses of The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and finally in the middle of Death’s End for the last two to three months.  In total, I will have lent my ears to the stories of Cixin Liu for over 60 hours.  The ideas that he presents about humanity, the future, the universe, and so much more are mind bending and revelatory to me.  Even after I give 60 hours over to this trilogy, I can easily see myself going back to the beginning and taking in the story a second time with more of focus on the science, theories, and ideas that he develops.  It also just blows my mind that this story in its details and imagination comes from one mind.  This is the kind of cosmology that I can only hope to achieve with my studio work.

I am already certain that my next audiobook will be Ready Player One which was inspired by the more mysterious, adventure-laden podcasts.  Tanis, Rabbits, The Black Tapes….

Being that I am always looking for ways to tie my writings back to my studio practice, I am a bit hard pressed to find a concrete connection to the genre of science fiction.  The reason I decided to write about science fiction is because I was staring at the super blue blood moon last night and thinking about my place, our place on this planet, in this galaxy, and in this universe.  As I have been writing this, I also have to ask myself why now?  I spent the beginning of last year reading a lot of serious nonfiction books/memoirs and perhaps I became tired.  So I began to look for escape.  In the moving image front, I looked to horror for a few months, but the feeling from those was primarily visceral..  The choices I was making in science fiction offered both visceral and cerebral.  My mind is constantly being challenged to think outside my comfortable ways of perception and understanding.  Those thoughts can be uncomfortable and frightening, but they also offer possibilities.  Ultimately, why I seem drawn to science fiction lately is a dynamic combination of escapism, speculation, and a personal identity crisis.  And perhaps, it is this combination that I should start to set about exploring in my studio practice.

epilogue

I had thoughts of prefacing this post by saying that this is definitely one of my more stream of consciousness posts.  I am trying to work things through in my writing both offline and online.  This post seemed to sit in the space between online and offline so I opted for the challenge of going online with this.  Maybe there are thoughts and ideas out there that can help to put more a shape onto to these thoughts.

incorporating what i see into what i make

During the course of my visit to the Bay Area, I had a chance to make several outings to museums and galleries in Oakland and San Francisco.  Through a number of exhibitions, I was inspired by a variety of techniques that I could incorporate into my studio practice.  Some of the techniques are familiar ones to me, but have taken on new possibilities in my Memory Walks or Daily Drawings.

Looking at making more complex and layered Memory Walks and Daily Drawings, the first source of inspiration was found in the new SFMOMA (well, relatively new) where I took in my first exhibition - Robert Rauschenberg's "Erasing the Lines".   In this exhibition, I saw his 34 transfer drawings corresponding to each canto of Dante's Inferno for the very first time.  

His use of transfer technique reminded me of this tried but true process.  And I see possibilities for incorporating everyday ephemera into my Memory Walks and possibly my Daily Drawings.  

On the First Friday of January, I headed out on a cold and rainy night to my first Oakland Art Murmur in several years.  The weather created a subdued environment which was a nice way to ease back into the event.  During the course of event, I came up a couple exhibitions which helped me reframe my studio practice.

The first was a three person exhibition "Moderna" at Slate Contemporary featuring Maya Kabat, Maura Segal, and Lola.

From the Artsy website

From the Artsy website

The combination of these three artists reminded me of why I was draw to art in the first place - it is visual candy and a treat for the eyes and mind.  That is what I saw when I saw my first Wassily Kandinsky and it was a nice reminder for me to think of my work in terms of the visual as well as the conceptual.

I headed next to Manna Gallery and discovered the beautiful mixed media works of Karen Gallagher Iverson that incorporated printmaking and encaustic techniques.

Her works were a gorgeous combination of contemporary and traditional techniques.  Again, the layered aspect of her works opened up possibilities for my two projects.  

During my visit to Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch neighbourhood of San Francisco, layers and collage caught my eyes at Jack Fischer Gallery.  My visit coincided with a group exhibition which included the collages by John Hundt.

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The other was a text-based collage by Kevin B. Chen.

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See these pieces again reminded me of my previous foray into collages which I was making on a semi-daily basis more than six years ago.  The one is from February 2012.

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The possibilities are quite intriguing to take what I have learned over the last six years and revisit this technique with my two projects.

And finally, my visit to Themes and Projects to see the work of Seiko Tachibana opened up ways to use repeated elements with printmaking.  

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From the Themes and Projects website:
"For our winter exhibition, Themes+Projects gallery presents “Fractal” new paintings by Seiko Tachibana. The concept that many small pieces come together to make up a larger whole has been a central theme in Seiko’s artwork.  In previous series, she has created works, in which elements functioned like organic building blocks: atoms form a molecule, molecules form a compound, compounds form a cell, cells form an organism, and so on. The marks, lines, shapes, colors, and textures that are the basic language of Seiko’s work form a kind of network structure, a system of interconnected nodes that seem energized by their interaction within the network. In the interdependence, the synergy, and the flow of meaning and significance within these networks, there is subtle and profound beauty."

It is precisely this use of elements that serve as building blocks as well as mark making and shape as language that I have always been drawn to.  Matthew Ritchie, Mark Lombardi, Julie Mehretu are amongst those and adding Seiko Tachibana to this list.

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For those of you who have been following my blog binge fest, I would also add Hiroshi Suzuki's systemic use of dots as another process that I can incorporate into my projects.

So in the end there is layering, collage, elements, networks, transfers, and visuality which can be incorporated into my studio practice.  There has probably been enough time pontificating this week and about time to "make"!

what it looks like down the road

Towards the end of 2017, I had been spending a good deal of time looking for new opportunities whether they be in the form of exhibitions, publications, and/or residencies.  I applied to a handful of group exhibition calls in the United States and made my biennial application to the Shiseido Art Egg.  I also submitted artist residency applications to the Albers Foundation and the Studios at Mass MOCA.  Whenever I think of doing an artist residency, MacDowell, Djerassi, and the Headlands always pop into my mind.  Unfortunately, I missed the 2018 deadlines for those residencies, but they are now on my radar for 2019.

The shape that 2018 was going to take was still unclear as December came to an end.  The end of the year brought a bit of clarity into my plans.  I decided to focus my administrative efforts on submitting applications for artist residencies with the goal of spending a month this coming fall somewhere to develop my work and dive more deeply into the studio process.  I still have an eye out for exhibition opportunities within Japan and also in the United States and elsewhere.  For those exhibition opportunities, I decided to submit works that were already created in 2016 and 2017 rather than submitting ideas for new and not yet realized works. 

During my visit to the Bay Area, I had a chance to visit the Minnesota Street Project which is becoming a mainstay on my itinerary when I visit the Bay Area.  After wandering through 1275 Minnesota and seeing some great work, which I will come back to in another post, we were told about Building B of the Minnesota Streets Project which was just across the street.  As I wandered over there, I noticed Building A which was a large structure housing artist studios.  Making my way past Building A, I took in the impressive and diverse collection of the McEvoy Foundation. 

Upon my return to Tokyo and updating my list of call for entries, I came across the Little Paper Planes Residency in San Francisco.  My last recollection of Litter Paper Planes was in late 2008 when I visited their brick and mortar shop in the Mission and learned that they were closing their shop shortly.  As it turns out, LPP continued on and has thrived in those years in between with another brick and mortar shop in the Mission and organizers of the LPP residency.  This residency is based in the studios of Building A of the Minnesota Street Projects and the deadline was in mid-January.  I had a few days to put together the application and sent it in as soon as it was finished.  With these handful of applications submitted, I am going to wait and see if any of these three residencies will take me for the fall of 2018.  I would gladly head over to the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation or the LPP+ residency should they find me a suitable match.  The Albers Foundation would give me a chance to return to my painting roots as like most painters, Josef Albers was instrumental in my early development as a painter.  Artsy.net has comprehensive profile of Josef Albers with over 350 works available to peruse.  Anni Albers also has an extensive profile with 75 works at Artsy.

The Studios at Mass MOCA is an interesting one as it would give me an opportunity to be explore Mass MOCA during my residency.  The only thing that gives me hesitation is the cost which is $650 / week.  Beyond the cost of roundtrip airfare which I am expecting to cover, this adds up to a substantial additional cost.  If I were to take that opportunity, I would probably have to look at crowdfunding as a way help subsidize that residency.

Should I not find a suitable match among these three, I am prepared to submit another round of residency applications which are due roughly around the beginning of March.  These include Millay Colony and UCross for 2018 and Djerassi for 2019 among others. 

Outside of that, I am looking to submit a series of my Daily Drawings for some publications as I think they would translate well onto print and online publications.  I have submitted a series of my Daily Drawings to group exhibition calls, but I also have a sense that they made not make it through the rigors of jurying.  Three submissions from the fall and winter 2017 of the Daily Drawings has helped to further improve my resiliency for rejection and also has me taking stock about the viability of these drawings as single works.

The Open Sessions Call from the Drawing Center is probably the one call that I am most excited about putting together.  The Drawing Center in New York City is one of my most favorite art institutions of all time.  The exhibitions that they organize are regularly a source of inspiration for my studio practice.  The Open Sessions started in 2014 or 2015 and are a series of workshops and events centered around new practices in drawing.  The new call is for 2018 through 2020 and I am excited to develop a proposal that either focuses on my Memory Walks Project or my Daily Drawings.  If I am appropriately inspired, I would love to propose something that integrates both projects.

In terms of concrete plans, Art Byte Critique book artists will be sending some of their zines and books to St. Helens, England for the St. Helens World Book Day exhibition at the beginning of March. 

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I will be sending the works that I created for the Tokyo Art Book Fair 2017 and maybe a few more editions of the 2016 Memory Walks Books.  I am also working to organize a slideshow presentation to introduce Art Byte Critique, the artists and their works during the exhibition.

There are two other projects in the planning phase for 2018 and 2019.  The first is a potential pop-up event with two different spaces and artists that I have worked with and gotten to know over that last two years.  We are hoping to have an announcement at the beginning of April.   The second project is a longer term project that would span until the summer of 2019 with a small museum in the Kanto area.  I had a preliminary discussion where I introduced my works and concepts last weekend.  This would not be a traditional exhibition, but rather a more interactive, community-based project with workshops and events being an important component of this project.  After finishing my collaboration with Artfull Action this past fall, I think this project would offer some new challenges for my studio practice as well as for the way I think about the value of art.  I hope to have more definitive information to share about both these projects over the next couple of months.

snow and all its associations

Since returning from my winter holiday in the United States, a combination of illness, jet lag, and the fertile void have made the first month of 2018 sputter in fits and starts.  On Monday, somewhere between four to eight inches of snow fell upon Tokyo.  Traversing through the city in the midst of the snow on Monday night and then on the subsequent days navigating walkways spotted with mounds and films of ice made me realise that snow and all its consequences sums up my experience of the New Year until now.  It is messy, inconsistent, slippery, otherworldly, and beautiful at the same time.

I have been trying to find my footing in the studio as the year starts.  There have been an array of tentative and undetermined plans which were up in the air through most of this month.  As we tumble into the last weekend of January, I can say that I see things a bit clearer and more concrete, but I expect the starts and fits to continue with varying intensity much like the remnants of the snow and ice continue to dot the city landscape.

Rather than spending time in the studio, I have been focused on getting applications out for residencies in the hopes of carving out four weeks of time in the fall to do studio work.  More on that in another post, soon, I hope.  I have also spent the first part of this year catching up on my museum and gallery hopping.  

Rather than give a step by step synopsis of my wanderings, the snow and its associated light seems like an appropriate theme to talk about some of the exhibitions that have struck me over the last few weeks.

After returning from the United States, on the first weekend back, I headed over to Gallery Aoneko (Blue Cat) to pick up the piece that I purchased from Ryoko Sugizaki during the course of her solo exhibition there.  At the same time, I would be able to see the "New + Sな新年展" which was a group exhibition of small works by 50 artists.  There were three artists that I gravitated towards, but the one I will mention here related to snow is Hiroshi Suzuki.  He uses systems to create beautifully executed abstract paintings.  For the exhibition, he presented "√2" which was a grid of white dots of various diameters corresponding to the digits 0 - 9.  He then arranged these dots in the sequence of the the irrational number √2 - 1.41..........

You can see a representative piece of his work below from his postcard announcement for an exhibition last year at Gallery Hinoki

This past Wednesday, I spent the day hopping from gallery to gallery to catch shows that would be closing this weekend.  I made the rounds from Komagome to Okachimachi to Ginza to Unoki over the course the afternoon and managed to see of the exhibitions I wanted to see and a few extra ones.

I headed over to 3331 Arts Chiyoda to see Takashi Nakajima's exhibition "Days and Subtleties" at Gallery Out of Place Tokio.  Being Wednesday, I assumed all galleries would be open, but as I stepped on the 2nd floor of 3331 Arts Chiyoda, I saw that the entrance to the gallery was closed.  As I knelt down to check the exhibition signboard, I realised that they were closed on Wednesday.  As luck would have it, the gallery director, Mr. Nomura, was stepping out of the gallery and he must have seen me staring at the signboard.  He asked which exhibition I wanted to see and I told him that it was Takashi Nakajima's exhibition.  He told me that it was closed today, BUT he could open the gallery up for me to see the exhibition.  I expressed my appreciation and entered the space.  In the exhibition announcement, Nakajima writes

"To capture the ephemeral nature of daily life, I explore the possibility of stretch film through my work.  Very thin but tough and elastic...I'm expressing myself through this unique medium to slightly magnify small "hooks" we would find in everyday."

From Takashi Nakajima's Instagram account @_nakachance_

From Takashi Nakajima's Instagram account @_nakachance_

He created an installation in which the stretch film is pulled in columns from the floor to various heights on the gallery walls and then ties the end of stretch film to a small hook embedded in the wall.  This gives each strand of stretch film an elongated triangular shape.  They are anchored between a series of beams installed on the floor to create layers of these shapes.  Seeing these forms lining the gallery, I could not help thing of Superman's Fortress of Solitude as well as frozen stalagmites.  If you get a chance, stop by the exhibition which runs through Sunday, January 28th.

Upon entering Mitsuhito Wada's "Eternal Existence" at Gallery Camellia, I was reminded of early morning or late evening sunlight reflecting off of snow.

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For this exhibition, Mitsuhito Wada utilised video cameras, projectors, and mirrors to create two luminous spaces in the gallery.  The first room is a icy blue hue.  As you enter the field of vision of the camera, you are then projected onto the walls of the gallery.  Add to that the opposing mirrors when lend an infinity effect to the your actual reflection and then the projections of your reflection.  

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In the second room which is a sun drenched yellow, he utilises a video camera and two projectors to create projections of the space, objects and persons that also go on ad infinitum except each subsequent projection is inverted.

I spent a good amount of time in the space to try and capture the effect by still image and video.  I ended up with this.

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Spending a good amount of time scrolling through my Instagram feed, I noticed an increasing number of images from Fujiko and Ukichiro Nakaya's "Greenland" exhibition at Maison Hermes. The space has been tailored to creating a fog installation within the space and many of the pictures looked quite otherworldly.  I headed over to Maison Hermes to see the exhibition with a bit of fear that it would be quite crowded.  As it turns out, my fears were unfounded and entered a relatively uncrowded space.  The fog installation is activated every half hour at 15 and 45 past.  During the intervals, you can wander around the space and learn more about the work of Ukichiro Nakaya who is credited with being the first to manufacture artificial snowflakes.  His daughter Fujiko Nakaya created her first fog installation in 1970 for the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka and has been making fog installations around the world since then.  I have had a long standing fascination with the Arctic, Antarctic, Iceland, Greenland, Alaska...You get the point.  There is an abundance of documentation of both their work throughout the space and I spent time before and after the fog installation taking in the documentation and dreaming again of someday doing the Arctic Circle Residency.  Here are a series of photographs during the course the fog installation.

So in the end, the last full week of January circles around through snow, light, and fog.  A sign perhaps that it is the time to begin experimenting with these elements in my drawings.

recent works

you can view additional images from selected exhibitions at https://arthurjhuang.work/exhibitions/

ron mueck's mass at the ngv triennial in melbourne, australia

Over the weekend, I came across an image of Ron Mueck's new installation "Mass" which is part of the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne, Australia.  It struck me very viscerally with the same intensity and fascination as seeing Patricia Piccinini's work, although there is a very different emotional lingering.  Both being Australian sculptors, I may have to explore the contemporary Australian sculpture scene more deeply.

You can find more images from the installation at Colossal.

As I have found myself engrossed in horror, the supernatural, the unexplainable and, speculative fiction this year, there is a particular resonance to this installation for me.  To reinforce this resonance, my current devouring of Cixin Liu's trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, has conferred even more timeliness for me.  

The NGV Triennale runs through April 18, 2018, so there is still time for me to book a flight to Melbourne and make my first trip to Australia.

yearcompass 2017/2018

The end of the year has always been a challenging time for me and many others that I know.  I always get crushed under the weight of expectations for the year that has passed and the year ahead.

New Year's resolutions are always made and invariably broken.  So last year, I was introduced to a new approach to reflecting upon the year that has gone by and thinking about the year to come.  It takes the form of the YearCompass.  

For me, the YearCompass is a twenty-page workbook that allows you to reflect upon various aspects of your life without the weight of expectations and thinking of each year as a single definable time period.  There is a sense of continuity as you work through the pages of the workbook.  Once it is complete, you can give yourself a sense of closure on the present year and also know that you have given thought to the upcoming year without a list of things that you need to check off.

After completing my YearCompass for 2016/2017, I carry it with me so that I can look at it anytime I feel the need to locate myself.  In putting together the YearCompass, I also find that it motivates me to take more regular periods of reflecting on where I am.

You can find the YearCompass PDF at www.yearcompass.com

application season

With the end of the year fast approaching, I have been spending the last month or so sending out various applications for exhibitions, residencies and grants.  At the moment I have sent off five applications and received one rejection.  I am expecting to hear back about the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant this week which provides grants of $5000 and $1000 to three and five artists respectively.  In addition to that I have submitted exhibition application for Shiseido Art Egg and Site:Brooklyn - Black and White which I expect to hear back from in January.  I also submitted my first artist residency application to the Albers Foundation which I also expect to hear back from in January/February.  

The application process has always been an exercise in procrastination for me.  There is the revision of your curriculum vitae and artist statement.  I have updated versions of both, however I do my best to tailor the length and content of the C.V. and the artist statement which requires thought and consideration rather than the speedy cut and paste.  In addition to that, I have to go through my image archive of works and decide on the best image for each work in my portfolio.  I have been doing this on the fly and this makes the process rather tedious as I have to search through my photo library to find the desired image.  With these last few applications, I finally have a collection of images that I am happy to use for submissions.  The details of each work such as title, size, medium, and year is also another source of administrative work that I am not particularly excited to tackle.  Pricing is also another hurdle.  

On the plus side, working on various applications helps me to define my current studio practice by reflecting on the progression of my work over the last two years.  It also allows me to better characterise my studio practice in words and ideas as well as helping to refine my thoughts about my progress as well as where I would like to move towards in the future.  

There are a number of applications that I definitely plan to tackle before the end of year which includes the Studios at MASS MOCA artist residency, the SVA MFA Art Practice Artist in Residence, and the Working Artist Grant.  There are another handful of applications which I am leaning towards submitting, but have not fully committed to such as the Setouchi Triennale 2019 Open Call, the LACMA Art and Technology Lab Call for Projects, the Open Call for Emerging Curators at Hong Kong's Para Site, and the 6th Tokyo International Mini-Print Triennale at Tama Art University.

As with all applications, I hope there is good news at the end of the process, but I also take comfort in the knowledge that each application that is prepared and submitted provides an opportunity to put my studio practice into sharper and sharper focus.

2017 the year of the podcast

Over the course of this year, I have devoured hours and hours of podcasts.  My attention span has been less than ideal for reading novels.  Short stories and starting a lot of different books seem to be norm as far as reading goes.  I have also used audiobooks to circumvent holding a book only to wake up to my drool wrinkling the pages or being rudely snapped awake by the book landing in my face at the start of slumber.  Reading is not a multi-tastable activity which is a good thing and a bad thing for me.  I enjoy getting caught up in a story, but I am not a person who can get completely lost in a book.  I am constantly aware of the page number, the time of night, etc.  Audiobooks offer the opportunity for multi-tasking, but the challenge lies in the stretches of time where I get distracted and realised that I have let pages and pages of narrative pass in and out of my ears without registering the content.

The last couple years have been filled with lots of studio work and I needed something besides music to keep me going.  Music works well enough, but I also seem to gravitate to the well-worn music which does not distract me from the tasks at hand.  With a new album or artist, I feel compelled to put more attention towards listening as a way to satiate my curiosity.

The first podcast I started listening to was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and the episodes are epic in length for the podcast world - usually clocking in at 4 - 5 hours per episode.  2 hours is the shortest that I've seen for his podcasts.  This was two or three years ago and when I listened to all the episodes available, I stopped listening to podcasts until early this year.  

The first podcast that I listened to was Crimetown which was about former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci whom was in office during my graduate school years at RISD.  After that I started exploring the world of podcast and rapidly worked my way through a number of different podcast horror stories and mysteries including Homecoming, Darkest Night, Tanis, The Black Tapes, Rabbits, Archive 81, The NoSleep Podcast, Alice Isn't Dead, Welcome to Nightvale, Lore among others.  

From there I expanded my interests to include a wide range of topics.  Here are some of my current favourites - LeVar Burton Reads, Ear Hustle, SFMOMA's Raw Material, I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, Song Exploder, Heaven's Gate, The Nod, and Uncivil.  Rather than tell you about each of the podcasts, I encourage to click on the links and take a listen.

I also managed to plow through 30 or so podcast episodes recommended by Hyperallergic which also expanded my podcast universe and I have begun picking and choosing from a new selection of podcasts.

You can find their first list of 20 art and culture podcast episodes from 2016 here.

They also published a second list with an additional 11 art and culture podcast episodes this past September which you can find here.

I think that podcasts serve multiple purposes for me.  The topics and length of the podcast help me were to fit a particular podcast into my day.

For one, you can listen to short episodes ranging from 15 - 30 minutes for all those times in between or at the gym.  I also enjoy learning little tidbits of information during these shorter podcasts.  The longer podcasts give me a chance to dive a bit deeper into topics and work well in the studio as it gives me a good sixty minutes of focus time.  The serial podcasts are great for giving me something to look forward to as well as invest more in the story or the knowledge.