satisfaga sí

http://veganyumyum.com/2007/05/mojito-cupcakes

Happy Thoughts

so, I was just reading the blog and comments and I have to say.  we rock.  just feeling all warm and sappy over here.  plus, I miss you guys, well at least those that I'm not seeing right now on a daily basis...they'd be tough to miss :)  anyway, love to the exquisites!

MrC back in Hot and Sticky and Loud NYC

Caitlin told me to "make a PERSONAL work that reflects your EMOTIONAL responses to being back in New York. Make your emotions visible to the viewer. It should be about present feelings, so no history lessons! it can be photographic, video, writing, sculpture, whatever."

Depending on your attention span, you can read the LONG or the SHORT statement:

LONG Statement:

Arriving back in NYC it seems like a completely different city than when i left. New York is hot, with damp hot air that sticks in my throat. I can't trot up the subway stairs like I could a month ago without losing my breath. My NYC insane schedule is gone (at least temporarily), and i have days off for the first time i can remember. I'm by myself... & after spending alot of time with alot people in sydney, being alone is weird. I don't know what to do with myself. I walk around the city and everything seems loud and shrill, especially the people... people look at me more than i remember.... My jetlag keeps me from sleeping and I have a constant low-grade headache that's always there, especially when I'm in the hot wet air outside. My exquisite friends are all scattered... my girlfriend Heather went off to alaska ... And just about all of my friends are out of the city. My best friend Ida is in india or somewhere. The few people I do know that are here I don't really want to see right away. About 2/3 of the people I work with are in europe. It's just me and the cat. But most of the time I'm not miserable or even unhappy, mostly just clueless about what to do each day. I'm extremely out of step, and I see what people mean when they talk about how loud and confrontational the city seems.

SHORT statement: The pictures are about feeling alone in the city, being out of step with it for the first time that I can remember, and choking on the hot summer air.


click a picture, see it big.

Mark's Assignment...

Looks like I'm first....yikes.

Ok Mark's assignment was this:

your project is about the way you relate to the city. Its just the two of you, no other human beings involved. (It can also be the way the city views meghan!) What is special about this relationship? You can use any medium you like, but there should be a combination of at least two. Have fun.

So a big part of my relationship to Sydney was finding the familiar. I also really started to understand how I get to know a city, which always involves emotional mapping. I usually start to connect physical space of a city with the emotional connections I make, through relationships and experiences. For New York, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) was a conduit for these emotional ties and experiences. I took the LIRR frequently to shows where I built a community of friends, and to visit Mookie (and maybe a few others...). My time spent on the LIRR became significant and was always spent in deep personal reflection.

While I was in Sydney, Mookie had to go to the hospital. For about 24 hours I was calling him, worried, wishing I was there with him. During this exact time I rode the City Rail for the first time and was shocked at how similar it was to the LIRR. Both double decker trains, the stations were the same, the seats, the tickets, the light, the noise, the announcements, the confusion... I took photos of the familiar in between frantic calls back home, trying to get through to Mookie. I had a strange experience feeling like I was on my way to him in the same physical space all while being a world away.

This was an exploration of the physical, emotional, and spacial similarities of the two trains. I mixed photos from both journeys, created a new map with both the LIRR and City Rail maps, and continued the ticket project from the LIRR where I wrote the lyrics to whatever song was the soundtrack for that journey on the ticket.







(you can click on any image for a larger view)

Word.

From an interview with the curators at ICP:

Wherever you travel around the world today, you find a thin layer of the kind of globalized consumer culture that we all know: Starbucks, Armani, Blackberry, Louis Vuitton, iPod. But if you take a moment to scratch that thin surface layer, you always discover rich, complicated local cultures that are continuing to develop according to their own dynamics. That's where the most interesting art and photography are coming from at present...

Sydney's version of the infamous Godfather horse head scene...

What an insane Biennale you Aussie's have.

Ho hum another bright blue spectacular sunny Sunday

What else does one do on another sunny day in emerald city? ferry to cockatoo island of course to see some mind blowing work from the Sydney Biennale and a gallery site to die for..(DIA Beacon ha! eat your heart out).