implicit art

It’s my daughter’s first birthday today, so my sister and aunt and uncle are visiting us here in Dublin. What a lovely day!

Birthdays are delicious.

Some people don’t make a big deal of birthdays. Others love them. For me, it and Thanksgiving are the two best (and non-secular!) holidays. Thanksgiving gives us space to be thankful and appreciate all the wonderful things in our lives - it also happens to have personal meaning for me, ever since coming home from the hospital after a terrible car accident when I was 17, just in time for Thanksgiving. Birthdays, on the other hand, are like personal Thanksgivings. They are a chance to be thankful for the relationship you have with one special person - it is a day for those you love and who love you to celebrate your life, your being, you. I feel ever so lucky to spend this time with my daughter, to delight in her playing and development with my wife and family.

Happy Birthday my little angel.

More on Sid’s blog…

Paddy interviews two more of our iCommons Artists in Residence:

Joy Garnett and Jaka Železnikar.

Nice.

Lots of CC stars answer some basic but important questions: a documentary of the iSummit in Brazil last year! via iCommons and dotSUB, by Rehad Desai from Uhuru Productions and under CC Attribution Share Alike.

        ^{Night Journey (installation at  KZNSA)}

 The Premises Gallery at The Johannesburg Civic Theatre presents

Colleen Alborough @ the premises

26 May – 9 June
Opening Saturday 26 May 5-7pm
An exhibition including the interactive video installation, Night Journey.

Each day we retreat to our bed, to the place that is so private, so familiar, so intimate. It lures us with its promise of comfort, protection, and restoration. In our beds we can escape the endless traffic, incessant noise and smothering fog, into the oblivion of sleep, transported to other worlds beyond the borders of ordinary perception. Night Journey explores and interrogates the epic journeys we embark on when the night shuts out our visible reality and gives free rein to our hopes, fantasies, dreams, fears and nightmares.

“I work in a variety of mediums, focusing on multimedia installations. I am very interested in creating experiential installations, that encourage the viewer to explore and interact with the work in order to complete the narrative of the installation. My art making process frequently involves ritualistic, labour intensive methods of production, such as felt-making. I use these methods to construct environments that attempt to embody some form of psychic reality.

The Night Journey interactive installation is accompanied by the artist’s limited edition book Before the Time (2007). This concertina book reveals the exploration of a solitary journey along a melancholic yet painterly stretch of road. The images search into the distance, trying to see beyond the isolation and apparent silence of the passing veld. The work attempts to capture traces of life in the land that momentarily reflect within our field of vision whilst on such journeys.

The Premises at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre

Loveday Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa
www.onair.co.za/thepremises
thepremises@onair.co.za

Gallery Hours -
Tuesday - Saturday
10h00 - 17h00

More on Colleen.

Gearing up for an Artist Residency in Croatia, before and at (as an exhibition) the iCommons Summit ‘07. Artists / art bloggers include: myself, Paddy Johnson , Joy Garnett, Ana Husman, Kathryn Smith, MTAA, Jaka Železnikar. There will be simultaneous exhibitions, live feeds, and interactions in Second Life, so we’ve got a front page feature in the Metaverse Messenger this week. Direct download of the magazine here (PDF, just under 6MBs).

Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery (aka galleryICA - for Innovative Contemporary Artists) launches its website this week, and its first show (featuring me and Paul La Rocque) on 31 May:

We open at 6.30 pm but the party goes on for as long as you wish, downstairs in the Pink Elephant. The women of the chorus of Opera Cork will be there to sing and you can network among some of Cork’s business and art loving community.

More on that show when I have it, but you can get the gallery info and images via the links above. They specialize in artists engaging with technology, and are starting with editioned prints as a focus for this and the next show. Also affiliated with this new space, and showing in the early Fall (Dublin time) is Scott Kildall, aka the Great Escape (from Second Front, the SL performance group). If you don’t know his work, highly recommended (and many thanks to Sasha Harris-Cronin for the e-introduction!).

As a practicing contemporary artist, I admittedly know less about my painterly peers than I should - and I should also be more embarrassed to admit it than I actually am. This post at AFC is an extremely thoughtful review of a current Dana Schutz show, which not only gives a wonderful entry-point to the work (if not several), but also yet again reminds me how smart Paddy Johnson is.