cypres, turbulence, franchise, gordart

Left, there’s a picture of Claire Metais, communication officer from cypres. No, not Cypress, but cypres – Centre Interculturel de Pratiques Recherches et Echanges Transdisciplinaires; or, the Intercultural Centre for Practise, Research and Interdisciplinary Exchanges, which is based in Marseille, France.

Claire met with Franci Cronje and I to discuss similar interests, and see what could be done as far as exchanges, ongoing collaborations, and educational/artistic projects between France and South Africa.

At right, is, of course, Marcus Neustetter (we love him! Needless to say, Claire also had a very productive meeting with him while here, too. Da Man that he is). After catching up a bit (he had a great trip to ISEA and I was very jealous), we discussed our turbulence commission, which has seemed to morph into something much more interesting than originally planned: a kind of mock wiki of popular sites, made up of repainted logos-as-signs – it’ll begin by re-commissioning some signmakers downtown to paint famous tech logos for us, then allow others to upload their own versions into our database driven getAwaySites….

Afterwards, we talked about our next gallery show, getaway2, that is likely going to be sometime in March, at Franchise. It seems like our next duo exhibition will be much more collaborative than the first, and rather than beginning with digital work that we then texturize, we may be sending some experimental work from the physical world through ‘the crucible of The Digital,’ only to take it out again on the other side. What does that mean? Think scanner sculptures and printer installations that mimic or re-present Flesh, and you may have an idea.

Finally, I hit the gordart yesterday (gallery in Melville), and there was some very beautiful, if formalistic, work on show. For some reason, I managed to forget all about blogging when I was there, so I didn’t take any pictures or write down any names (bad nathaniel), but I’d recommend going if for no other reason than the cleverness of the glass-blown work and the most beautiful framing I’ve seen in a long time – of some fungi, no less (have to see it to believe it).