Last day in Portsmouth and Images from Preview night

It is the last day of my three month residency and I'm on my way to Heathrow leaving for Sweden later today. The sculptures were shipped on Wednesday and I am crossing my fingers that they will arrive in Sweden on time since already on Monday I am going down to Lund to mount the installation at Gallri Pictura in Lund, stay tuned for more on that later.

I had a fantastic residency and extremely happy with how the whole project developed especially considering the residency was only for three months and I am looking forward to  streaming the live video back to Aspex Gallery on the 9th of December. 

Portrait by Katayoun Dowlatshahi

In the meantime here are some images from the Preview at GASP. Images of the actual  installation will follow soon.

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Image by Gillian Hawkins

Exhibition Opening Day

At the moment we are broadcasting the video stream from the installation here at GASP to Hanare Project in Kyoto, Japan where it is almost 9 in the evening check it out on their blog here.

Image of the projected stream in Kyoto

The preview here at GASP (Gallery at Art Space Portsmouth) is tonight from 6.30 - 8.30
and more information can be found at ASP web site here.

The Day Before the Exhibition Opens

Tomorrow Friday November 19th is the preview of my exhibition " The Logic of Basho < Here's Looking at You Kid > " and already at 11 am we are starting to broadcast with Hanare Projects in Japan. As always time seems to run faster as the opening of exhibitions gets closer and today was no exception.

Me fine tuning the sculptures

Neil Hardcastle cutting out his tattoo design logo

Photographer Malcolm Wells observing  

Tattoo Design for the Exhibition

One of the things I noticed when I did the body-castings for the sculptures was that it seemed that every person from Portsmouth had one or more tattoos. This spurred discussions regarding the history of tattoos in Portsmouth and I found out that there will even be a Tattoo Convention here this spring. Even though I decided not to go as far as Katayoun suggested: that I should actually tattoo my sculptures I instead opted to incorporate a tattoo design element into the enclosure part of the installation. 

The tattoo, that is designed by Neil Hardcastle of  warehaus studio  specifically for my art project, contains the title of the exhibition and will replace the Adam and Eve Dürer silkscreen I used on the Pentagon for the " In My Secret Life - Det Stora Vidunderliga ".

Tattoo design by Neil Hardcastle www.warehausstudio.com

Troutbeck Fundraising Dinner in London

This past Sunday my Italian, but now UK based friends Cristiana and Francesco hosted the first of a series of micro-fundraising dinners that aspire to democratize the arts grant process by creating opportunities for artists and supporters of culture to meet face-to-face in the intimate context of dinner. 

Cristiana Bottigella & Francesco Stoccchi "Troutbeck Dinner Project" Founders

"Often artists need a minimal amount of funding that allows them to get a project started and put a process into action. The Troutbeck Dinner Project aims to help assist projects at this crucial stage by providing a framework where artists can share their ideas and raise funds for their work."

Beth Shiner in red left and Jason Waite seated right presenting their project "Trip to Iraq"

This dinner was in support of the "Trip to Iraq" project that Beth Shiner and Jason Waite, two recent Goldsmiths graduates who are planning on meeting artists, art students and assess the potential for future collaboration in Iraq.

More about the "Troutbeck Dinner Project"

Update on the Streaming Project

Simultaneously to my development of the assembling of the body castings into full figure sculptures, Art Space's Mike Blackman and I have been continuing working on the live video streaming component of the project . The program that Mike has created is using a new technology within Flash 10 that allows peer to peer broadcasting with relatively small means. The idea is to broadcast live video from three webcams that are being inter-cut dictated by a soundtrack that I created. 

This Thursday we test broadcasted to Hanare Projects which is the gallery space in Kyoto, Japan that will live stream the footage from Gasp here in Portsmouth on the opening day of the exhibition. We were quite pleased with the results but realized it still needed quite some tweaking when it comes to resolution vs fps. 

" An important message about the arts by artist David Shrigley "