Mountains Beyond Mountains

September 2, 2010, at 4:50 pm

Arcade Fire — Sprawl II (Moun­tains Bey­ond Mountains) — UNSTAGED — Live @ MSG — 1080 HD from Théan Slab­bert on Vimeo.

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pre­ten­tious things and just punch the clock
These days my life, I feel it has no pur­pose
But late at night the feel­ings swim to the surface

‘Cause on the sur­face the city lights shine
They’re call­ing at me, come and find your kind

School starts tomorrow.

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Read the fine print

August 30, 2010, at 11:03 pm

So I was look­ing for some money, earlier today, and I stumbled upon 25 for 25: the AOL Grant pro­gram. The Web­site reads:

“AOL is look­ing for 25 cre­at­ive thinkers. We are award­ing twenty-five, $25,000 grants to tomorrow’s ground break­ers and vis­ion­ar­ies — indi­vidu­als with a cre­at­ive spark to ignite. 25 for 25 is a call to journ­al­ists, artists and innov­at­ors who believe in the power of ideas.”

Pretty good so far. I believe in the power of ideas. I may not win, but hey, I’ll give it a shot. Can’t hurt to try, right?  Right?

Wrong!

Read the fine print:

  • By enter­ing, each applic­ant licenses all rights to the con­tent of his/her art­work or other work included within the sub­mis­sion pack­age and the expres­sion of ideas/concepts embod­ied therein in accord­ance with the Release detailed below.
  • The applic­ant uncon­di­tion­ally assigns and trans­fers to Spon­sor all rights, title, interest and claim, which it now has or may in the future have to the sub­mis­sion applic­a­tion and sub­mis­sion pack­age or any element(s) therein includ­ing, without lim­it­a­tion, the copy­right therein; provided that AOL shall only receive a license to the art­work or other work included within the sub­mis­sion pack­age in accord­ance with the above.
  • Spon­sor shall have the right to modify, use, assign or dis­pose of such sub­mis­sion applic­a­tions, includ­ing the art­work or other work included within the sub­mis­sion pack­age how­ever they see fit without approval of applic­ants or any third party.
  • Neither applic­ants nor win­ners shall receive any com­pens­a­tion or credit for use of sub­mis­sions, other than that dis­closed in rules.

and

  • You grant to the Spon­sor and its assign­ees the irre­voc­able, per­petual, world­wide, non-exclusive right and license to use, repro­duce, edit, mar­ket, store, dis­trib­ute, have dis­trib­uted, pub­licly and privately dis­play, com­mu­nic­ate, pub­licly and privately per­form, trans­mit, have trans­mit­ted, cre­ate deriv­at­ive works based upon, and pro­mote all ele­ments of the mater­i­als sub­mit­ted for entry into the Pro­gram includ­ing, but not lim­ited to, any ori­ginal art­work, writ­ings, pho­tos, recipes, audio and visual record­ings, as well as your image (includ­ing pho­to­graphs and video), bio­graphic inform­a­tion, and com­ments, (col­lect­ively, the “Sub­mis­sion”) in con­nec­tion with the Pro­gram and such other products or ser­vices as the Spon­sor may des­ig­nate in any medium now known or here­after devised for edit­or­ial, com­mer­cial, pro­mo­tional and/or any other purpose.
  • In addi­tion, the Spon­sor shall have the right to repro­duce and dis­trib­ute your Sub­mis­sion for pro­mo­tional pur­poses in broad­cast, print and or other media as the Spon­sor may determ­ine in their sole discretion.
  • You retain own­er­ship of all right, title, and interest in and to your Submission.
  • You agree that the Spon­sor owns all right, title, and interest in any com­pil­a­tion, col­lect­ive work, or other deriv­at­ive work cre­ated by the Spon­sor using or incor­por­at­ing your Submission.
  • You hereby grant to the Spon­sor the right to edit any of your Sub­mis­sion, in whole or in part.
  • In addi­tion, you hereby grant to the Spon­sor and its design­ees the right to use any edited Sub­mis­sion, or parts of a Sub­mis­sion, without your approval and waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Sub­mis­sion prior to or fol­low­ing pub­lic­a­tion and any right to com­pens­a­tion for the Submission.

Allow me to sum­mar­ize: you sub­mit, we own. A flimsy “You retain own­er­ship of all right, title, and interest in and to your Sub­mis­sion” is mean­ing­less if you’ve given away all con­trol of your art­work. Did I men­tion that this is for all entries? Not just the win­ners, every single entry is gov­erned by this policy. That’s not sup­port for the arts, its steal­ing from people who are too clue­less to read the fine print.

So, AOL, here’s an idea you can have for free: cut the crap and play fair.

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Greater New York

August 25, 2010, at 12:28 pm

I have the good for­tune of liv­ing 2 blocks from  MoMA PS.1, the Queens out­post of the Museum of Mod­ern Art. Look­ing for inspir­a­tion last week, I took myself on an art date to see their Sum­mer show, Greater New York.

Some crit­ics have panned the exhib­i­tion, but I think there were a enough gems to make it worth while. It seems  prac­tic­ally impossible to sum up five years of art in New York, and kind of fool­ish to try, so the cur­at­ors can be afforded a little understanding.

Tucked in a back corner on the third floor is Deana Lawson’s giant photo-mural. Lawson’s piece presents a nar­rat­ive made of appro­pri­ated images, a sort of ima­gined fam­ily album, but spread out edge to edge on a gal­lery wall. I enjoyed diving into indi­vidual pho­tos, and look­ing for the con­trasts and con­nec­tions between the people pictured.

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Promised Land

August 10, 2010, at 8:47 pm
the view of Manhattan from the end of my street in Queens

New York City. I made it here. Well, almost. I made it to Queens.

On my fifth night I had a fever dream. I dreamt that I was at Liberty Island, at night, to see the Statue of Liberty. I climbed up on a chair to get a bet­ter pho­to­graph, the chair tipped, and I was plunged into the cold, dark water. I wasn’t scared. It more mat­ter of fact, “oh,” I though, “I am sink­ing.” Even­tu­ally, I kicked my feet free from where they were stuck in the chair and swam toward the sur­face. It seemed an etern­ity. When I finally breached the sur­face my father and two men in wet­suits were in the water, look­ing for me. I remem­ber think­ing “next time you fall into the water, make sure to put your cam­era bag down first.”

On Sat­urday I took some amaz­ing cold-and-flu med­ic­a­tion and went on a bike ride. First I went down from Queens to Wil­li­ams­burg, crossed over the bridge and met my friends down­town (I have two, yay). Then we went up Park Avenue, which was closed from more-or-less the tip of Man­hat­tan to 72nd St. At 72nd we did a loop of Cent­ral park, and reversed the cir­cuit to go home. It was a great trip. Six lanes wide, silent of cars. It was one of the most joy­ous bike rides I’ve ever had.

On the radio they’ve been talk­ing about a pro­posed mosque near the site of the World Trade Cen­ter. It’s a big con­tro­versy, with play­ers from city, state, and fed­eral polit­ics pitch­ing their weight around. Objec­tions to this mosque, like objec­tions to other mosques, has been about park­ing, or traffic flow, or “sens­ib­il­it­ies” and other thinly veiled excuses for xenophobia.

On the topic, New York’s mayor, Micheal Bloomberg, gave a speech. It is a fant­astic speech, one that makes me proud to be a tem­por­ary New Yorker. He said:

“Our doors are open to every­one. Every­one with a dream and a will­ing­ness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immig­rants, and it’s sus­tained by immig­rants — by people from more than 100 dif­fer­ent coun­tries speak­ing more than 200 dif­fer­ent lan­guages and pro­fess­ing every faith. And whether your par­ents were born here or you came here yes­ter­day, you are a New Yorker.”

It’s worth read­ing the full text of Bloomberg’s speech. The incred­ible diversity of voices, stor­ies, exper­i­ences, and oppor­tun­it­ies in New York is a big part of why I came here. It made me really happy to watch this, and on my first day too.

Wel­come to New York. Now, I need to find a swim­ming pool around here.

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Bodies in Trouble: Lana Šlezić

July 16, 2010, at 11:28 pm

Malalai by Lana Slezic

This pro­file of Lana Šlezić is the second in a series of artist mini-biographies in the lead up to Bod­ies in Trouble, the sum­mer 2010 pho­to­graphy exhib­i­tion at Galerie SAW Gal­lery.

It is a power­ful image, the pho­to­graph of Lt.-Col. Malali Kakar, then the highest rank­ing woman in the Afghan police force, res­ol­utely point­ing a hand­gun. Surely it is the con­trast the burqa and the gun, power-objects often seen together but rarely com­bined, that makes this pho­to­graph so strong. If only it  were merely that. In 2008, a few years after this pho­to­graph was taken, Kakar was assas­sin­ated. The image of a woman, not only wield­ing a weapon but lead­ing men, is a power­ful sym­bol. Too power­ful for some.

Cana­dian pho­to­grapher Lana Šlezić went to Afgh­anistan in 2004 on a six-week assign­ment and stayed for two years. Her work doc­u­ment­ing the lives of Afghan women is col­lec­ted in the highly aclaimed book For­saken, pub­lished in 2007. Šlezić explains more about her work in an inter­view on PRI’s The World:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaS­cript enabled in your browser.

Inter­view avail­able from the PRI archive here.

Bod­ies in Trouble includes the por­trait of Malali Kakar by Lana Šlezić. Although there are many strong pho­to­graphs in the exhib­i­tion, this is one of my per­sonal favorites. Bodies in Trouble opens Thursday July 22nd, 2010 at SAW Gal­lery in Ottawa.

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Bodies in Trouble: Maya Deren

July 16, 2010, at 1:17 am

Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon

This pro­file of Maya Deren is the first of a series of artist mini-biographies in the lead up to Bod­ies in Trouble, the sum­mer 2010 pho­to­graphy exhib­i­tion at Galerie SAW Gal­lery.

Maya Deren was an Amer­ican avant-garde film maker. The Museum of Mod­ern Art describes Deren’s Meshes of the After­noon (1943) as “one of the most influ­en­tial works in Amer­ican exper­i­mental cinema. Indeed, ripples of Deren’s influ­ence can be seen through­out West­ern visual cul­ture, such as the mirror-face specters in Jan­elle Monae’s Tightrope (which I wrote about here). I watched Deren’s films in first year cinema stud­ies, as I am sure many have. It’s worth revisiting.

“A non-narrative work, it has been iden­ti­fied as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a prot­ag­on­ist appears in a dream­like state, and where the cam­era con­veys his or her sub­ject­ive focus. The cent­ral fig­ure in Meshes of the After­noon, played by Deren, is attuned to her uncon­scious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into real­ity. Sym­bolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur through­out the film; events are open-ended and inter­rup­ted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feel­ing which a human being exper­i­ences about an incid­ent, rather than to record the incid­ent accurately.”

from the MoMA entry for Meshes of the After­noon.

Bod­ies in Trouble includes a never-before-seen restored pho­to­graphic panel (circa 1954) by Maya Deren. Bod­ies in Trouble opens Thursday July 22nd, 2010 at SAW Gal­lery in Ottawa.

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A Robin

July 11, 2010, at 1:24 pm

I was sit­ting in my back­yard, answer­ing email and enjoy­ing the sun, when a female robin swooped onto the little patch of grass in front of me. Every time she ate an ant she hopped closer. I sat com­pletely motion­less, fixed by her gaze. She hopped closer still and I had the dis­tinct feel­ing of being watched, of some for­eign intel­lect siz­ing me up. Then as simply as she came she flew away. Off to eat bugs some­where else, I sup­pose. Maybe she is meet­ing the male robin I have seen perched on my fence.

It is the sum­mer, and it is beautiful.

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Bodies in Trouble exhibit at SAW Gallery

July 8, 2010, at 6:04 pm

Hélène Lefebvre

I am happy to announce the inclu­sion of four pho­to­graphs from Play­ing House in the upcom­ing inter­na­tional group show Bod­ies in Trouble at SAW Gal­lery in Ott­awa, Ontario. Here is a descrip­tion of the exhib­i­tion by SAW Gal­lery, details follow:

An exhib­i­tion fea­tur­ing pho­to­journ­al­istic works and doc­u­ment­a­tion of per­form­ance art span­ning over 50 years, Bod­ies in Trouble takes an inspir­ing look at the human plight to sur­vive and to fight for free­dom. Shar­ing many aes­thetic and con­cep­tual con­cerns, pho­to­journ­al­istic work and per­form­ance doc­u­ment­a­tion are often labeled as rem­nants of past events; in this exhib­i­tion, they are unabashedly presen­ted as visual art. With sub­ject­ive, poetic and at times sub­vers­ive prac­tices, the ten pho­to­graph­ers and per­formers invited from Canada, Spain, France, the United States and the UK bring hope and light in a world that can be extremely dark. Bod­ies in Trouble includes such his­tor­ical works as Leap into the Void (1960) by Yves Klein, the Pulitzer-Prize– win­ning The Kiss of Life (1968) by Rocco Mor­abito and a never-before-seen restored pho­to­graphic panel (circa 1954) by acclaimed film­maker Maya Deren. Many of the pho­to­graphs presen­ted in the exhib­i­tion will be shown in Canada for the first time.

The cur­ator, Stefan St-Laurent, has put together a pro­voc­at­ive and haunt­ing exhib­i­tion. I am thrilled to exhibit with this group of pho­to­graph­ers, including:

Maya Deren (New York, USA)
Cristina Gar­cía Rodero (Mad­rid, Spain)
Yves Klein (Paris, France)
Rocco Mor­abito (Miami, USA)
Greta Pratt (Nor­folk, VA, USA)
Lana Šlezić (Toronto)
Paul M. Smith (Lon­don, UK)
Jana Ster­bak (Mon­tréal)
and Alex Webb (New York, USA)

Over the next two weeks I will high­light the work of some of the artists in the show and take a closer look at my own pho­tos. In the mean­time, here are the details for the opening:

Bod­ies in Trouble Exhib­i­tion Opening

Thursday, July 22, 8PM — 2AM

Galerie SAW Galery
67, rue Nich­olas Street, Ott­awa ON, Canada K1N 7B9
galeriesawgallery.com

Music with  DJ BEAR wit­ness (Ottawa)

Cash bar

Updates and dis­cus­sion at the Face­book page: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=134897893198482&ref=ts

There will also be a talk in Septem­ber dur­ing Fest­ival X. I will post more inform­a­tion at that time.

Ontario Arts Council

Inclu­sion of pho­to­graphs from Play­ing House in Bod­ies in Trouble at Galerie SAW Gal­lery was made pos­sible by an exhib­i­tion assist­ance grant from the Ontario Arts Council.

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The land of fruit and honeys

June 28, 2010, at 11:47 pm

Things I have learned from going to Miami:

Miami is great. It is the most super­fi­cial, do-nothing city in the US, at least parts that I have vis­ited. It’s awe­some. There is abso­lutely noth­ing to care about in the least. All there is to do is sit on the sand and drink insanely large rum-based drinks. The city lives up to its Sodom repu­ta­tion, how­ever, watch­ing people have sex on the beach is way more bor­ing than you’d assume.

My sus­pi­cion is that Miami isn’t really an Amer­ican city at all. It’s actu­ally a cari­bean city dressed up in fab­ulous Art Deco. I have this vaguely famil­iar feel­ing, the tempo is a dis­tant reminder of the fren­etic energy of Peru. It’s a hot city, except the sex­i­ness is com­mod­i­fied and con­cen­trated into shop­ping dis­tricts in a typ­ic­ally Amer­ican way. Maybe it is an Amer­ican city after all.

Everything that Will Smith said is true:

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Just a little more horrible

June 23, 2010, at 10:35 pm

I’m head­ing to New York (by way of Flor­ida) tomor­row to search for an apart­ment. The thought of it fills me with fear, ver­ging on ter­ror. The vacancy rate is less that 1%, and com­pet­i­tion is fierce. Find­ing the right hous­ing with right mix of vari­ables is pretty per­plex­ing. There’s cost, of course, and then there’s prox­im­ity to work and amen­it­ies, safety, space, and char­ac­ter of the area. Throw in brokers, scams, slums, and sub­lets and you’ve got a real mess. Let’s hope my exper­i­ence is a little bet­ter than Henry Miller’s.

I’ve thought long and hard about apart­ments. Given a cer­tain price ceil­ing, the most import­ant thing about a place to live, for me, is people. Just a little more hor­rible, and then some real adventure.

UPDATE: found one!

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