Wednesday, February 27, 2013

It's been a long, long, time...

Yes, I know...it's been over a month since I last posted. It's not that things haven't been busy and I've had nothing to write about! I will try my best to re-cap:

In my most recent post, I mentioned that Blake was loaning me his video camera to get some footage of my show at Curtis Memorial Library while it was still up. Well, he loaned me the camera, and I went over to the library one afternoon and interviewed myself. That was really weird. I know tons of people talk into cameras every day without having anyone else around, but it was new for me and it felt strange...particularly because I was in a public place talking to myself. Anyway, I set the camera up and started talking, and talking, and talking...and then I realized the camera wasn't on. I had turned it on, honestly, but the batteries I was using (which I thought were new) were evidently not very good, because the camera shut itself off. I must have been talking for a good fifteen or twenty minutes before I thought to check how things looked. Whoops. I tried it again with better batteries, and for the first time, I noticed the bright red light to indicate that the camera was indeed on. So, once again, I talked, and talked, and talked. I kept feeling like I wasn't wording things as well as I had the first time, but I pressed on. I brought the camera back to Blake a few days later, and it turns out, the footage was better than I thought. The following week, on the last day of the show, he met me at the library and interviewed me, which felt more professional than talking to myself. I haven't had a chance to see the footage from that day just yet, but I am curious. Speaking of the last day of the show, it took me roughly twenty minutes to take my work down. It took almost three and a half hours to hang it!

The Joy of Art show at the Topsham Public Library came down in the middle of the month, and my two-woman show with Hati Modr at the Brunswick Town Council Chambers will be coming down on Monday, March 4th, but I still have work on display at Jai Yoga. There are a couple of other shows I am thinking about applying to, so if I get in, you will hear all about it!

The other big news is that I've been chosen to be one of the presenters at the upcoming Pecha Kucha event at Frontier Gallery in Brunswick! It's on Tuesday, March 5th at 6 pm. I've been working hard on deciding what images I want to show, what order I want to show them in, what I want to say about those images, and how I want to say it. For those of you who aren't familiar with Pecha Kucha, here's a brief description: it's an evening of different people presenting their work. The work in question could be just about anything, really- art or architecture or a project they're passionate about. Each presenter shows twenty slides, and each slide is up for twenty seconds. It is a fast-moving evening and it's always interesting to see who is working on what and what they want to say about it. To prepare, I took a bunch of notes and I timed myself to make sure each of my individual statements was less than twenty seconds. A lot of crossing out, revising, and adding on needed to take place to get to the twenty second mark! This process involves a lot of me talking to myself, but since I was at home and alone while I was doing it, that was okay (as opposed to doing so into a camera in a public place). At any rate, I need to practice, practice, practice, so there will be a lot more talking to myself going on than usual over the next several days.

I think that's it for now. It's practice time!