friends
New Architecture found
06/19/08
The time has come to
conclude this blog. Over the past year, as we
traveled around the world, blogging became an
invaluable creative platform for me. And it was such
a pleasure to realize that friends, family and
strangers were enjoying my posts.
But now I am on the cusp of some new projects that will require my undivided attention. Over the next few months Johnny and I will be building out our new studio in Culver City, and simultaneously launching the new video design firm, Be Johnny. In addition to the studio there will be a new website, shows and maybe even a gallery in the future. Whatever we do, you are invited to join us. -Bree
But now I am on the cusp of some new projects that will require my undivided attention. Over the next few months Johnny and I will be building out our new studio in Culver City, and simultaneously launching the new video design firm, Be Johnny. In addition to the studio there will be a new website, shows and maybe even a gallery in the future. Whatever we do, you are invited to join us. -Bree
What's great for a snack & fits on your back?
06/16/08 Filed in: Ideas
About a year ago I was trying on clothes in a Manhattan H&M store. Suddenly the dressing room attendant started singing this LOG song at top volume. It was startling and funny, especially because LOG was written and directed by my cousin in-law, the cartoonist, Bob Camp. LOG was one of those fake commercials embedded within the Ren and Stimpy Show and it is such an infectious jingle, that you might catch your self humming it later today.
From the Brooklyn G Train to the Burnside Bridge
12/27/07 Filed in: Ideas
We have been laying low in a subleased apartment
(which includes a rental cat) in Clinton Hill,
Brooklyn. Since this is a neighborhood I do not know
very well and the rainy weather in New York is
preventing much exploration- we are using this time
to bone up on 'computer stuff'. I have done some
minor improvements to my blog, which include this new
title photo that Andrea Grover
took on one of our trips to the Buffalo Bayou in
Houston. Thanks Andrea! We finally installed
Leopard onto our computers and are starting to
work on a new NodeVideo website, in
preparation for our return from the world-wide
tour in June 08 and the conclusion of
Towards A New Architecture.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
In the midst of all this downloading and file sharing, we are having that perennial conversation about where we should move to next.
Head West Young Lass
Urban: Top of our list for years has been the glorious (although damp) city of Portland, Oregon. Although I struggle with anxiety about climate change (cool grey days) and the economics (will we be able to pay the bills as we launch out with NodeVideo without the safety net of my dayjob), I am excited by the scale of the city (biking/walkable neighborhoods) and the city-wide emphasis on sustainable, community-initated development. In the background Johnny keeps whispering "Ah, that sweet Oregon air", the phrase a man once uttered to us outside the PDX airport.
Desert: I love the dry air and blue sky of the West Coast desert. There are days I can think of nowhere more perfect than a little Adobe house in Joshua Tree, Los Angeles or Tucson. But is perfect weather really a reason to relocate somewhere? Nah, I mean we are not looking to retire.
Along these lines I am a daily reader of John Weeden's blog WeedenArtsWatch about life in Memphis, TN. I admire the excitement and commitment he feels for his hometown, even though we will not be heading South this time around.
How Hip is too Hip?
How much of the hype should you believe or ignore when considering a relocation? While working as curator at the Art Museum in Asheville, NC I was involved in a few projects that involved the local Chamber of Commerce. During this time the Chamber had a rebranding campaign going on and the city's new slogan was "Asheville, Any Way You Like it". Most of my friends and I agreed that this slogan sounded sexual, especially since Asheville has a rather risqué reputation throughout the Southern states. During this re-branding (sexing up) campaign there were at least 4 articles in the New York Times about this small city in the mountains of Western Carolina. Public Relations agencies know how to do their jobs when it comes to this stuff.
Before moving to Asheville, we lived in the belly of the beast, in that cusp of hipness, the border between Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I actually loved living here because it was easy to get into Manhattan one day on the L-train and really easy to feel far away the next, while riding your bike up and down Manhattan Ave- Brooklyn's little Poland. Greenpoint was the right scale neighborhood and the small food markets rocked. The only problem was the high cost of living but we found a clever and affortable solution, temporarily. We bought a 1969 camper on Ebay and drove it into Brooklyn from Michigan. The camper was parked inside the video studio (a former taxi garage) and VOILÁ we owned a small studio apartment close to the studio for the cost of one month's rent. After 6 months it started to get too cold for camper living in New York and we were getting tired of going down the block to shower at the YMCA. The decisive moment came when a woman I knew from the neighborhood was raped around the corner in broad daylight. It was time to end our experiment in urban homesteading and move down South, kicking off what would become our somewhat migratory lifestyle.
Before the little camper in Brooklyn, I lived for several years in Troy, New York. A city that seemed most proud of being the hometown of Uncle Sam, the guy in the big top hat who sold rotten meat the Army. But what attracted most of us to Troy was its proximity to New York (under 3 hours) and it was cheap. By cheap I mean $500 apartments in regal old brownstones or the 5,000 square foot loft along the Hudson River that we rented for $800 a month. Sure the loft was cold as hell in the winter but is obviously the biggest place that I will ever live. It was a 'land rich, cash poor' city, good for young artists who wanted to experiment without lots of commercial pressures and within a supportive small community. That said, Troy was defiantly a rundown post-industrial cities where you needed to make your own entertainment and espresso. So I almost choked recently when a guy in Houston told me that he considered Troy to be "the San Francisco of the the East". Who created that slogan? and could it possibly be true? Had the city changed that much since 2002 or was it all hype?
In searching for our city of the future we are weighing many new options, grown up options, of what makes for a great place to live. I am trying to avoid places that reference Richard Florida's ubiquitous book The Rise of the Creative Class and wish that I could consult with Jane Jacobs, the activist who championed community-based city planning and wrote the personally influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In the midst of making Pro-Con lists and daydreaming about the future, I find myself returning to Chas Bowie's fantastic article "The H-Word Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Word "Hipster" especially today after seeing this snarky picture-post on the Portland Public Art blog.
Update: Frank Rose just sent me this link about the various attempts to rebrand the image of Houston. In the year 1915 the city leaders of Houston created the slogan "Houston: Where seventeen railroads meet the sea" in an effort to rebrand the city as the railroad center of the Southwest. Imagine that.
Launch of An Atlas of Radical Cartography
12/03/07 Filed in: Ideas
I am so excited about this project/publication!
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Matt McCormick at the Aurora Picture Show
12/01/07 Filed in: Art
Last night You Are Here was kicked off
with Matt McCormick's performance Future So
Bright: Live. Todays events begin at 1:00
with Nato Thompson's talk about Experimental
Geography, followed by a talk by Rich Pell
from the Institute for Applied Autonomy. There
will be a coffee break around 3:00 that will be
followed by Matt Coolidge from CLUI with his
talk Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast
Region. See you at The
Aurora!
Good luck to Your Daily Awesome
11/22/07 Filed in: Ideas
I was sad to read that the blog Your Daily
Awesome has come to an end, as it is one
of my daily favorites. But I love that YDA's last
post was this clip "A History of Texas" from David
Byrne's movie True Stories. This movie
was my quirky introduction to living in Texas and
I knew that I had to buy the dvd when we moved to
Houston. Numerous times I have quoted moments from
True Stories to someone in passing and it
is comforting to know there are others out there
who recognize the odd brilliance of this film!
Good luck to you Mr.YDA & thanks for all the
great bits this year.
Mark Dion on art21
10/31/07 Filed in: Art
Mark Dion's segment in the Ecology episode of Art21 Season 4 will air Nov 11, check your local PBS station for the time.
Other new episodes organized around the themes Romance, Protest and Paradox will air on Oct 28, Nov 4 & 18
Txt Me L8r is coming to an end
08/14/07 Filed in: Art
This crowdsourced exhibition is coming to its grand finale on August 24 at the Houston Center for Photography. If you cannot attend the opening/ closing party, you can look at the photos throughout the month on the flickr site
Txt Me L8r
07/28/07 Filed in: Rambling
Hello from Berkley, CA! The weather here is cool and overcast and I could smell the ocean as I stepped off the bus.
During the month of August, I will be participating in the exhibition Txt Me L8r, hosted by the Houston Center for Photography and curated by Andrea Grover of the Aurora Picture Show. This exhibition explores the potential for distributed creativity through the use of cell phone technology- in a geographically dispersed collaboration. Throughout the month we receive text message photography assignments, which we are to respond to by shooting an image with our cell phone cameras (mine sucks) and then upload the pic to a photo-sharing site (flickr site). The results of this crowd- sourced project will be projected in the Houston Center for Photography during August.
Above is the result from the warm-up assignment: "What does Sleep Look Like?" Which was taken aboard our tour bus.
Back to the Bayou
06/28/07 Filed in: Rambling
Andrea Grover & I went back to the Buffalo Bayou to do some location scouting. Andrea took this sweet photo of me and the Houston Skyline and we found the Houston Biodiesel plant. Check out their cool sign!
tracking transience
05/24/07 Filed in: Art
Recently artist Hasan Elahi came by for brunch. We sat around talking about life in Houston, mutual friends, art projects and silly YouTube videos. It was all very normal until he pulled out his camera to photograph our meal "for the FBI."
Hasan’s project Trackingtransience uses modern technologies to document every aspect of his life. The project is a reaction to the FBI accusation that he was a possible terrorist in 2002. He subsequently spent 6 months under FBI surveillance, including 9 polygraph tests. Now we are able to track Hasan’s movements via his ATM transactions and flight patterns which appear on this website. His hacked cell phone registers his location and with the help of GPS shows us an aerial map with his location pin-pointed. His meals and restroom breaks are documented with photographs. All this self-induced voyeurism helps us to imagine what life without privacy looks like. In his recent interview on the radio program Studio360 Hasan says: “if we do not take control of our own information, and define ourselves, other people will define ourselves for us.”
harry smith in the UK
05/17/07 Filed in: Art
My
friend Robert Blackson is doing some really
interesting curating over at the Reg Vardy Gallery at
the University of Sunderland, where he recently
opened the exhibition Harry Smith: Hobbies and
films in collaboration
with alt.gallery’s Harry Smith Anthology
Remixed.
Harry
Smith was first brought
to Rob’s attention by the writer
David Levi
Strauss.
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle