This, it sits.
In the background.
Like my grandfathers radio.
Or my fathers television.
To drown out the silence
of an otherwise empty room.
14.8.09
12.8.09
10.8.09
He beat me to it.
Although I doubt I couldve made it any more interesting that him. Chad States takes his models from Craigslist. His ad asked them what masculinity is.
8.8.09
7.8.09
5.8.09
3 things I'm actually working on in the shop.
1- The shop itself.
Ive been working on my studio space since the first hour I got back to Vancouver and I am only now really just getting going. I pulled up the flooring, prepped the raw concrete to be stained and sealed. I still need to build a wall and paint the walls and the ceiling. I have plans for a retractable wall so that I can shrink or enlarge the space accordingly and hide stuff for storage. But the deal is, I also needed to get a job to pay off my massive debt. So progress has been a tortoise pace. I plan to have the entire thing completed by August 15.
2- Thin man/Fat lady chair.
I am going back to my furniture making roots with a new piece. This one is more furniture than art. And yes, the third chair related piece in the last 9 months. I found a great 60's Canadian/Danish influenced armchair frame and I still have 2 massive cushions that I acquired from my days working at Bensen. I am mainly inspired by an image that has been in my head for a couple of months now.
Sitting on a park bench, a tall thin man embraces his short, fat wife who sits on his lap. I want him to be the thin wood sparse chair frame while she is the over sized cushion.
3- Nothing is abstract anymore.
In my last months in Toronto, I started to experiment with drippings of watered down acrylics on paper. I was then taking lyrics from songs and adding the lyrics on top of the abstraction. I was hoping that the juxtaposition would create organization aesthetically and in meaning. I have started working larger scale now on stretched cotton and watered down acrylic reductions. I have canvases that are 4ft x 8ft of stretched grey cotton and white vinyl.
3.8.09
31.7.09
Sobey Art Prize Shortlist (2 months late)
Graeme Patterson is one of the shortlist finalist for the 2009 Sobey Art Prize. He will represent the East Coast. Winner announced October 15. Other Finalists are; for the West Coast and Yukon, Luanne Martineau (who? but cool); for the Prairies and The North, Marcel Dzama (snore); for Ontario, Shary Boyle (!YAY!); and for Québec, David Altmejd (le sigh)
Time
Another idea that Ive been thinking a lot about is time. In the sense that time doesn't really move forward like how we customarily visualize time to behave. Time actually more accurately explodes. And not just for me or you, it explodes from every atom and when it begins to exist it explodes again. I wanted to really think about that idea, and in doing so I have been doing a lot of sitting and observing and recording the most seemingly mundane things. For 24 minutes on Wednesday I filmed a Smokie vendour setting up on English Bay for the fireworks festival. It wasn't until I got home and played back the video that I realized a story of the Smokie stand from the beginning set up and up to its first customer was all neatly encapsulated in that 24 minutes. And things existed around it; in the background and to the left and right of it, but it was the Smokie stand that still exists in my head. Time is constantly creating presence, it doesn't discriminate between pivotal historical events from the everyday mundane. Time only grows significance once we package it up and convert it into memories.
Im virtually here
I have been completely out of it for the last couple of months.
I moved back to Vancouver in the beginning of June and have been slowly renovating a space for myself in the back of my parent's backyard.
In a failed attempt at cutting out phone and internet for the month of July, new ideas have emerged. I was already thinking about the idea of using internet spaces like comment areas in blogs and using them as a place where stories unfold.
In this new work that Ive been toying around with, I plan on taking screen capture images of spaces in the internet that I have intervened in.
12.4.09
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