poetry in motion

Hey Beautiful People!

Two art events to report on today, before I rack up two more by the day's end. No rest for bloggers! Nah....it's partly because of two big events in town this week: The annual gathering of the American Association of Woodturners, and the Platform International Animation Festival. That should give you an insight into how diverse my art tastes are, if you haven't figured it out already.

As my longtime readers will recall, I spent summer of 2006 doing a residency at the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia. Now it didn't convert me into a wood turner, per se, but I made many friends and gained some newfound appreciation for the sport with all the visits to various studios, collector homes, and observing my talented co-residents. Where are those talented co-residents this weekend, I ask? Sadly, they are all nestled in their various parts of the world. Marilyn Campbell has a new website you might enjoy looking at, and at the picture at the beginning of this blog posting will let you in on what our resident scholar Dennis Carr has been up to in the past year. Va va voom!

So last night I went to the "Turning Green" opening at Oregon College of Art and Craft. It was a massive show, curated by John Jordan, Bill Mohr, and Heidi Schwegler. It was nice to see some old faces, but I hope to see more tonight at John Jordan's lecture. Here's a few pieces that caught my eye in particular:

A pair of beautiful little Douglas Fir bowls by Bill Luce


I love Mark Gardner's work, an ITE resident from a few years back. He told me that the residency spurred this whole body of work when I met in Baltimore a few years ago. Click here to see more of his work.

And here's a detail of my favorite piece in the show, by another former ITE'r, Alain Mailland. It's a turned heather root, if you can believe that. I know I'm not showing you the entire piece, and it's a technically interesting piece between the turned and carved elements, but it's most amazing to me that a heather root would have a six inch diameter. They must grow 'em big in France! Good thing, because this is the loveliest piece of his I've ever seen, and I know that I saw many of his pieces in collector homes last summer.

A little bit later, my dear friend Nancy Breaux and I went down to see a free event that's part of the Platform International Animation Festival. The promise was to have a bunch of animations projected onto buildings all around the Pearl District, so you could walk around and see them. Unfortunately it had been pouring rain on and off all day. So Nancy and I changed our plans to simply have dinner, but when the weather seemed to clear a little at 9, we headed down. Good thing - it was fantastic. We saw an incredible installation by our hometown animator heroine Rose Bond, who found a corner building with about six windows on each side where she projected animated scenes as if they were taking place in the building. It was accompanied by a fine soundtrack as well.

We also saw this cool outdoor project that involved audience participation. People were filmed making patterns with colored glow sticks for a period of around 10 seconds, and then the image was frozen on the screen so you could see what people had been drawing. Do you ever do that with sparklers, dear readers? I always loved to write something and then see the effects burned temporarily in my retinas. This was a way to do it digitally, and it was really wonderful the way it was exciting for both the participants and the audience.

Inside PNCA's main building was a whole bunch of different stuff, but I was obsessed with these zoetrope pieces. I do not know who the artist is, despite my best efforts to find out, so I am sorry I can't give credit where credit is due. But these were just amazing.

So a zoetrope is a really old gizmo that has a bunch of images on a wheel, and when you spin the wheel, you see them in motion. It's the earliest form of projecting an image. I remember my dad made a simple but very cool one when I was a kid that I loved. If you're still confused, click here and read the Wikipedia definition of the history of Zoetropes.

These zoetropes took it into the digital age - we were first greeted by three large screens showing various animations. When you went to the backside, you could see that they were actually these beautiful handmade discs, using found images. (I know these pictures are small on the blog, but click on any of the pictures if you want to see them larger.)

I loved that you could enjoy the discs alone, then see them in action, and then see the final result. I took this little movie so you can get an idea of how it worked.

Okay I'm off to another Platform event this afternoon. Blog you later!