the first few months after leaving uni………

i have not blogged fro ages. in my head it is the immortal excuse of “being too busy” but i know that really, it has more to do with confusion and befuddlement and not knowing how to make sense of all that is going on. since i last wrote, many exciting things have happened – officially selected for the barcelona film festival, given a lecture to the fine art students on video art, found and lost 2 premises for UNIT 11 – the studio group we are starting up, been to an AIR event in portsmouth, bagged myself a free ticket to frieze next week, ………the list seems endless. what i have not done is make any new work for the crit group at artsway which i am going to this afternoon. problematic. soooo i will have to wing it and use my creative torpor as a discussion topic in itself and see if any of the other artists have any strategies they can share. will update ………….

massive quandries abound.

1. do we go for it with signing the lease on a space WITH NO HEATING. do we do an all inclusive rental for artists using the space to accommodate the heating costs. do we supply gas heaters in the price? who is “we”? how would we buy the heaters? i feel like the voice of doom in the whole equation. i need a sense of how to measure the pros and cons against each other.

2. you give of yourself for free, with a glad heart and then are made to feel like an inconvenience. how does that work? thankfully, i see that others have problems and issues greater than my own.

3. still have not made new work. have crit meeting in 10 days’ time. hmmmmmmm

so i am curating a show in the screening room at the Bargate Monument Gallery in Southampton. It opened on saturday and will be there for 6 weeks. it comprises three consecutive 2 week periods, each showing a 30 – 40 minute sequence of art video, under the broad titles of beginning, middle and end.

http://www.aspacearts.org.uk/

it has been a HUGE learning experience for me, highlighting just how many aspects there are to such a process: practical, technical, political, personal, critical … the list goes on.

from a personal point of view, it has been really interesting being at the other end of the process. usually it is me putting my dvd in an envelope and posting it off. one of the things that i find difficult is the ones where you hear nothing at all. i realise now that it is massively time consuming to collate all the email addresses and send “no thank you”‘s, so i may be a little more forgiving. having said that, i did “no thank you” all the work that i did not use so i also know it to be possible to do so …..

the technicalities of moving image work – especially when collecting a group show – are a nightmare. everyone uses different formats, software, picture aspect ratio etc, and how to put them together has to be considered in advance in order to get the best outcome. i am trying to glean all i can from david at city-eye in an attempt to learn for future opportunities, and for ease of showing and formatting my own work. we are still trying to navigate the media player (instead of a dvd player) and the best way to achieve a 16:9 ratio for the flat screen, given that much work is in 4:3

then there is the marketing. this whole process was done very quickly and we failed to get the word out sufficiently before opening. it is a frustration but is all to do with who is available for such things and the shoe string upon which these things are put together. we do have beautiful A5 flyers thanks to dan at aspace. they are wending their way into the nooks and crannies inhabited by the southampton art community as i write.

so, our opening. we piggybacked on to elizabeth eamer’s opening at the gallery on sat sept 11th (a thought provoking and interesting collection of work, well worth a visit btw). my plan was to circulate and up the awareness of the screenings. several things became apparent 1. i am not a circulate kind of a person. i had no courage to go and talk to people. i regret how crap i was – i was too self conscious about my choices and my responsibility to the viewer – what if they all thought it was rubbish? could i justify my decisions critically? who exactly does sit for half an hour and watch an eclectic mix of video? 2. there was no signage in the gallery indicating that the screening room was showing an exhibition. if the door was closed, you could not tell. 3. the laminated info sheets about the films and the artists could not be read in the dark space so were of no use in there.

some of these issues i can address more easily than others …

now, i have to prepare for the change to middle, in which i have included some work about which i am enthusiastic, but my other watchers feel less excited by ….. time for a heated debate.

so much to think about, and so much upon which to improve. excellent. this is what i like.

i think

ps – do people comment or press “like” on vimeo? unravel has been watched 97 times without a single comment or like. wierd.

i just read a document from canada that sets out minimum fee scales for showing artists’ work

http://www.carcc.ca/documents/PDFeng.pdf

i wonder how culture could be changed to somehow introduce this concept here. any ideas?

it is september. somehow, with children at school and the last three years spent in education, this heralds a new start. time to clear out the frivolities of summer and prepare for the new year. so i will. need to find some appropriate premises – cheap, central, light – so that we can have a work space. i have one at home but the distraction of domestic drudgery proves too alluring. i hear tell of some clean spaces coming up through aspace for those of us whose practice does not make a mess. but i think i might miss being in the chaos of the dirty space – will think about that, maybe go have a gander…..

my last piece of work was about losing my mum. i am struggling to feel quite as strongly about anything and i think that is putting a wedge between me and doing. the fear is that there is nothing to compare so how can i make? more about the same? current issue of extreme personal response to teenage actions of my boy seems a little raw, but may yield interesting work? feels wrong trawling for subject – previously work has kind of emerged from my immediate surrounds without the contrivance of selection but my impatience is profound. between making final selections for screening programme over the next few days, i will just edit some sketchy footage together and see what comes………….