Hideout Interview

A little profile of me was just posted on Rosalyn Faustino's newly-relaunched blog, The Hideout. Check it out here. Thanks Roz!

City of Craft at Canzine 2010

I spent last Sunday at Canzine hanging out with Jen A. at the City of Craft table, spreading the craft gospel. The table featured an awesome DIY make-your-own-button station, which I assisted with as a bonafide button-making pro. Jen and I pooled our extensive collections of Japanese and found papers as button fodder, which proved irresistible to passers-by. Here are some pictures of Jen and I looking like a couple of sexy librarians (!), as well as some documentation of pins made by Canzine-goers.

Photos by Jo Prescott. Thanks, Jo!

Skin Studies

I made these over the last few nights.

Printing Errors at Akau

I attended the opening for the great little exhibition Printed Errors at Akau Gallery at the beginning of the month, and have been meaning to post about it here for a while. Here is the text from the press release:

As we all know, to err is human. Or, as a character in Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” says, in retrospect, “mistakes were made”.

In this exhibition, Barbara Balfour has invited thirteen artists who have worked in various forms of print media to respond to the notion of Printing Errors. They include: Janice Carbert, Shannon Gerard, Libby Hague, Micah Lexier, Patrick Mahon, Eric Mathew, Ken Nicol, Lauren Nurse, Dan Olsen, Derek Sullivan, Jeannie Thib, Daryl Vocat, and Joy Walker.

Once one moves beyond the detection of error – the dismay and disappointment of one’s own error or the Schadenfreude of detecting someone else’s – what can be done with it? Above all, can printing errors be interesting?

As someone with a real interest in print media (a little known fact about me is I started a print major at OCAD almost 10 years ago which I subsequently ran kicking and screaming away from, though I've never lost my visceral connection to the process of printing), this was a really fun show to soak up and think about. It was also neat to play spot the error with each piece! I especially enjoyed the work of Ken Nicol (who did the cue card piece pictured above that was not in the show) and Jeannie Thib, and it was nice to see some fellow artists from the DIY art/craft community included as well, Shannon Gerard and Daryl Vocat.

Printing Errors is a part of the international print symposium, Printopolis, sponsored by Open Studio. For more on it, check out this website.

Geometry of Circles

Amazing Geometry of Circles animation, with soundtrack by Philip Glass from Sesame Street, 1979. I'm not sure why the picture quality gets crummy after the second half, so for more, be sure to conduct your own search of GoC on Youtube. The following information is snipped from Muppetwiki:

"Geometry of Circles" is a series of unnumbered animation pieces created for Sesame Street in 1979 with music by Philip Glass.

The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass's music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the "Dance" numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.