Governors Island 2010

Approaching the Brooklyn Maritime Building

A "Traditional" postcard view

St. Cornelius Church

Water Taxi Beach

Former Burger King (slated for demolition)

The LMCC Artist Residency on Governors Island was written about in the New York Times yesterday.  You can check out the article here.  They even included a short quote from yours truly!

(from http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/sep/25/post-office-posters-exhibition?picture=353444421)

Pioneers of Change Festival

Bison kintsugi, Studio Lotte Dekker

Last weekend I had the opportunity to work at Pioneers of Change, a unique design festival taking place on Governor's Island.
The event was dreamed up by Remy Ramakers, director of the design company Droog, and is one of the many NY400 events taking place this month. The festival merges together architecture, fashion, and design while showcasing a group of mostly Dutch artists. The festival emphasizes projects that discuss sustainability, reuse, and working collaboratively.

Pioneers of Change is being held in a group of yellow officer's quarters on Governor's Island that date back to the 19th century. The site itself is a perfect example of reuse, albeit with a twinge of understated irony. The whole setting makes me instantly recall family trips to tourist pioneer villages- the kind of places you find posted on brown signs along US highways. The difference here is that instead of having a pioneer village general store that sells "peasant" bread mix to tourists, the "100 Dollars or Less" store is temporarily set up to sell design books and various Dutch-designed Droog products.

I was able to spend extra time in 2 particular houses last weekend. One house holds the Tickle Salon, a project created by the partnership of Driessens & Verstappen. Any willing participant can lay on a mattress and allow a small robotic device, run by a 3-D rendering program that was written by the artists, to trace your skin for 15 minutes. As the session progresses, the robot is able to familiarize itself with the body. (pictures to come next week!)

Where the Tickle Salon space is meant to be a peaceful retreat, the Platform21 house is bustling with numerous repair projects. Platform21 encourages people to reuse objects instead of tossing them away, finding a new beauty in repair. On Sunday I learned how to patch plates with the artist Lotte Dekker. Dekker's work is inspired by the Kintsugi mending technique, popularized by a Japanese shogun in the 15th century. The end result creates a lovely seam and brings new life to broken objects that would have previously been deemed worthless.


The Pioneers of Change festival will be continuing through this weekend, from Friday, September 18 to Sunday, September 20th. More information can be found here: http://www.pioneersofchange.com/about.html
I'll be there on Friday and Sunday if you'd like to say hello!

It isn't everyday that you find a book by a well-known photographer just lounging around a Manhattan thrift store. (Joel Meyerowitz in this instance)
It also isn't normal for this book to end up being an out-of-print first edition. Especially when the book is priced at one dollar.

So maybe it makes sense when your equally thrifty purchase of the day, an in-season pint of blueberries, clashes with your thrift store find in a disastrous sort of way.

Berry juice, meet Meyerowitz.




At least they both share a vivid palette.

The SVA Photography Thesis Exhibition closes this Saturday, June 27th at 6pm!

Please stop by either today or tomorrow if you are in the neighborhood:

Visual Arts Gallery
601 West 26th Street, Suite 1502
Open Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday 10am-6pm

Also please check out a sampling of our work here:
http://mfaphoto.schoolofvisualarts.edu/thesis2009/index.php

Here is the latest version of my postcard rack.