The Space Between Hours


I have two shows of new video installations coming up in the next few weeks. The first is The Space Between Hours at Diego Rivera Gallery at San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco. The show will be up July 26-31, with an opening reception on Tuesday, July 28 from 5-7pm (artist talk at 4:30pm).

The show is with Emily Terhune Korson and Elizabeth Pedinotti. All of the work is autobiographical in some way, and explores our ability or inability to fully experience and remember moments in our lives. My piece Breakfast is the first public installation of an ongoing project to record one minute of my family's breakfast every day. The piece in the Diego Gallery includes five seconds of each day of the first seven months of this year, projected onto a mylar sheet hanging from the gallery's 50-foot ceiling.

I'm not sure how many other opportunities I'll have to show my work in the same gallery as a Diego Rivera mural.

Principals Toolkit Complete

I have just finished producing the DVD for CAYL Institute’s Principals Toolkit, to help school leaders design, implement, and supervise quality early childhood education. We made seven videos and four slideshows covering topics such as Relationships, Environment, Family & Community, District Advocacy, and Supervision.

I really learned a lot about what goes into a high quality education for young children – information that I can use both professionally and personally, as my older daughter enters kindergarten this fall and my younger daughter starts preschool.

The Toolkit will be released at CAYL’s National Principals Conference July 12-15, 2009.

24" Moss Planter

I’m taking a really fun installation class at San Francisco Art Institute this summer with Felipe Dulzaides.  We had an assignment to “activate a space” last week and I did a little installation in the woods (documentation above). Unfortunately it got a little panned in my critique, but I'm working on several more in-depth projects that may go over better.

SFAI Vernissage

I was in San Francisco last week for my classmates' MFA show at Fort Mason. It was quite a spectacle, with around 100 artists showing their wares in a huge waterfront warehouse space with ceilings that must have been at least 50 feet high.

JD Beltran wrote a good blog post about the show in the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the pieces I especially enjoyed was Brandon Truscott's orchestrate entropy (pictured above), in which he arrayed parts of a disassembled piano, retired household gadgets, and other detritus of civilization in a plinth formation with a white-shrouded baby doll suspended on an invisible thread from that high ceiling. It's one of those rare pieces that combines a great concept with a very strong technical execution.

MassArt Student Screening May 9

Next Saturday, May 9 at 7pm, students from my Intermediate Video: Style and Practice class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design will be showing their films. Despite having full-time jobs, families, or other commitments, these Continuing Ed students have taken on ambitious projects - so ambitious, actually, that most of them exceed what can be done in one semester's work. So we decided to invite a few friends and hold it as a work-in-progress screening. (The public is welcome if you don't mind films that are still in formation!)

There are intriguing intersections in my students' lives and the themes of their non-fiction films, namely: life-threatening accidents that cause major changes, and women in the second half of life finding new direction.  Plus one piece that defies these two categories: a revelatory "exit interview" of a young white woman finishing a year as a VISTA volunteer in a Chinatown cultural group.

A Media Archaeology of Boston

Tomorrow night at 7pm at the Harvard Film Archive there's going to be a dig into 100 years of cinema representation of Boston - from early silent panoramas of the new subway lines to government films, Hollywood blockbusters, 8mm art pieces, 1950s commercials, and YouTube clips.  I co-curated A Media Archaeology of Boston with Jesse Shapins and Olga Touloumi of Harvard's Graduate School of Design and Ernst Karel of the Film Study Center.  It's the opening event of Cambridge Talks, an annual symposium that brings together scholars in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning.  This year's symposium theme is "Mediated Space."