old trivia
Clare Yow is an independent visual artist working in a library in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
She is a fan of nightbirding and shutter depression,
heartthrobs, blueprints, and changes of scenery.
-
Jim Wong-Chu’s “Equal Opportunity”
I have been looking for this poem everywhere in the last few years. I first read it as a student and then a couple years ago while the boy I was tutoring (Jerry) did some homework, I thumbed through his textbook and came across it again. I recall telling myself that I’d remember the author and would look him up after the tutoring session, but never did, and the poem has resonated in memory every so often. I finally found it in a teacher’s lesson plan.
—
in early canada
when railways were highwayseach stop brought new opportunities
there was a rule
the chinese could only ride
the last two cars
of the trainsthat is
until a train derailed
killing all those
in front(the chinese erected an altar and thanked buddha)
a new rule was made
the Chinese must ride
the front two cars
of the trainsthat is
until another accident
claimed everyone
in the back(the chinese erected an altar and thanked buddha)
after much debate
common sense prevailedthe chinese are now allowed
to sit anywhere
on any train -
A Moth in Spring (teaser)
-
A Moth in Spring, directed by Yu Gu
“Mixing narrative, experimental and actuality footage, director Yu Gu explores themes of exile, art and family in her personal documentary ‘A Moth In Spring’. While attempting to produce a film in China inspired by the departure of her father, Gu Xiong, from China during the 1989 Student Democracy Movement, a young filmmaker’s life and work quickly begin to parallel her fathers’ trials and feelings of alienation when the film is shut down by China’s National Security Bureau and she is ordered to leave the country. A MOTH IN SPRING is a rare and intimate look at the challenges to artistic freedom in China. Yu discovers that the desire for freedom of speech is a force that unites three generations of her family, spanning China and North America.”
The film will be screening at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC in Vancouver on May 17, 2011, 10am. Yu’s father, Gu Xiong, will be speaking following the screening. He was my thesis advisor throughout my MFA and we had lunch together yesterday. It’d been months since I last saw him so it was lovely to catch up. It is strangely nice how the advice he imparts can sometimes parallel what my father has said, or I imagine, would say.
-
Robert Hengeveld’s Pickled Tense at the Harbourfront Centre two weeks ago
-
Above: Candice Breitz’s Factum Tang, 2010 as seen at 8Q for the Singapore Biennale
Below: Stills from Breitz’s Factum Tang at The Power Plant which commissioned her Factum series and hosted her works in 2009
To my surprise I was able to see documentation of Breitz’s work in Toronto this week after seeing it a few weeks prior in Singapore! Small world, after all.
-
Viewing Nedko Solakov’s installation in the stairwell of the control tower at Old Kallang Airport on a rainy day at a Singapore Biennale site, with a Biennale billboard featuring Candice Breitz’s triplets from her video piece (Factum Tang, 2010) at another site in the distance.
Solakov’s fear of flying is the impetus for the work in the exhibition - he invited Singaporean artist and filmmaker Liao Jiekai to his home in Sofia, Bulgaria to discuss installation of the work before Liao returned to create the piece in this stairwell. “The ‘work of art’ in this instance is the actual training, the knowledge and experience of the artist’s touch – the mental and physical ways Solakov inhabits, and works with, space.”*
*Text from Biennale website
-
Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Sweating Sweethearts, Salt Works Series, Bolivia, 2004
-
Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Polar Bear, Igloolik, Canada, 2007
-
"He’s playing the guitar now, it looks like he’s playing the guitar, it looks as if he’s always played the guitar, that’s what my message was."
Richard Prince in his testimony
“to Manhattan federal court judge, Deborah Batts who ruled against Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery in a copyright lawsuit brought by French photographer Patrick Cariou, who claimed that the prominent appropriation artist had unlawfully used his photographs in a series of paintings and other works. Batts evidently didn’t agree with Prince’s explanation that he had transformed the photos by giving the Rastafarians musical instruments.”
Cariou’s image on left, Prince’s on right -
Brendan & Gaelan’s Save-the-Date (via gaelancormier)
My friend Gaelan is getting married! She shared a fantastic Save-the-Date video with us all on her newest venture, Uschi & Kay. And what a lovely date to get married on too.
-
Earthquake in Japan - Alan Taylor - In Focus - The Atlantic
“Cars and airplanes swept by a tsunami are pictured among debris at Sendai Airport, northeastern Japan March 11, 2011. There were several strong aftershocks and a warning of a 10-meter tsunami following the quake, which also caused buildings to shake violently in the capital Tokyo.” (REUTERS/KYODO)
-
Installation shots for Sydney Vermont, Here today, gone today exhibition at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
-
-
Alec Soth’s, From Here to There (288 pages, Walker Art Center, 2010), finally made it’s way to my house after I ordered it over a month ago. The book strangely cost one hundred and one cents and shipping was three times that amount. The book is an exhibition catalogue of his work and its publication coincided with an exhibition at the Walker Art Center, as well as the creation of a Flickr pool by Soth himself. I’m looking forward to sitting down with the book some time.
(Also, an interesting blog post - from a while ago - on one of Soth’s iconic images being ‘appropriated’ for a book cover)
