Paintings that Move

spring planting is involving a lot of nurturing (for me, collaborators, and the viewer/participant), like a garden would. summer is all about relaxing, lying in a hammock... the process and the final piece should both provide that feeling.

colab

these pics feel so old! i guess it was about nine days ago we installed the show at the chashama chelsea space. i'll be gallery-sitting this saturday, february 21st, from 3pm to 6pm if you want to check out the show. 266 w 37th street, between 7th & 8th avenues.

it's a group show. colab meets once a month, we help each other with our writing, and founder/leader sarah schmerler helps us with our writing. writing about our art.

for this show, we worked together in pairs, writing about each others' art. the writing is displayed alongside the work. there's a lot to see and experience, hope you enjoy it.

pictures from installation day 8th february 2009:

sarah thinks:

the mid-installation shopping trip:

view from the sidewalk as we put it together:

sarah helps annette and joanne with their writing, cynthia writes on the wall beneath hanna's painting, hanna writes on the wall beneath cynthia's piece:

cynthia and joanne show where cynthia's thread will go:

james and i observe chris and shannon writing about each others' art:

sarah writes on the mirror:

annette writes on the wall beneath an earlier incarnation of joanne's piece:

group decision-making:

view of james'-and-my piece in an earlier incarnation:

something sarah wrote about james'-and-my piece "here today":

looking in from the outside:

same scene, different view:

has been very gratifying to be a part of this process. other things going on, more images to come soon.

this show keeps changing, hope you can make it saturday.

making spring planting

yesterday i got frustrated with how slow photoshop was behaving (the machine i was on, the resolution i was on). started taking pictures of the monitor instead, to crop and enlarge, using the macro feature on the camera. became like stop-motion animation. almost too smooth, thought it might look choppier. going to play more with that technique, really enjoyed it.

traffic cone appreciation

saturday was a lot of fun. just a few people joined for stages (only john and i completed the full walk) for the traffic cone observation and photography tour. haven't had time to add the new images into the piece yet, but if you come to the closing party this friday evening (which i just found out about a couple of hours ago at kendrick's crit), you'll see a changed piece (incorporating new photos, color photos, other people's photos).

here are the notes from my gallery talk:

"

rarely serve any discernable function

like paintings, primary function is to be looked at

like abstract art, they may be impenetrable. they may not be compelling to everyone.

color jumps out at you, demanding your attention

modern phenomenon

always changing

location in the world and eye-grabbing nature combine to form an extremely low-effort aesthetic experience (vs. going to a concert, for example)

things to look for:

- manufactured characteristics (what kind of cone is it?)

- wear and tear (what has happened to it?)

- location (where is it?)

- relationship to other cones (is it part of a community?)

together the aspects/attributes of traffic cones create visual poetry

for free

for everyone

public art which didn’t exist a hundred years ago

which is changing all the time

which may disappear

which can be documented

and appreciated almost effortlessly

"

also held up a piece of paper to show the difference between orange-projected-onto-orange and orange-projected-onto-white:

good news for further exploration and awareness-raising of traffic cone aesthetics. got letter a few days ago: "on behalf of the lower manhattan cultural council and new york city department of cultural affairs, it is our pleasure to notify you that your project, how to enjoy traffic cones, has been awarded a 2009 manhattan community arts fund grant. congratulations!"

which means that there will be warm-weather traffic cone viewing tours, among other things. and i really want to involve people in the project. excited.

invitation

if you're a practicing artist, or a lycoming college student, or you're really into gardening, maybe you'll enjoy doing something with somebody. i hope so.

http://www.eriksanner.com/spring_planting/spring_planting_web_invite_090128.pdf

http://www.facebook.com/groups/edit.php?success=1&customize=&gid=46811239070#/group.php?gid=47004564116

events

hope you can see this even if you're not a facebook user

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=52249461245&ref=mf

traffic cone orange

this was meant to be at least three posts, but blogging time has been, for whatever reasons, scarce over the past x amount of time. just spent a few days down in dc and will post about that soon, but here's what i wanted to share last week. or the gist of it anyway.

afraid i would offend people by not inviting them to the opening. was more afraid that given the size of the space (small) (super-nice but small) and the number of artists included in the show (eight) plus the number of curators (three) that given the extreme frigid weather (what was it, eight degrees fahrenheit or something like that? and windy, nasty) that the opening wasn't necessarily the best time to invite people to the show. planning on being there saturday, 31 january 2009, 1pm-5pm, so if you want to stop by then and see the work, please do.

ok the story. walked from my apartment up the street towards the gallery space (about fifty-five blocks). cold, windy, camera battery died around 82nd street. following day did same thing, even with spare battery result was same, so much colder and windier, think that affected the machine. anyway, the first traffic cone i encountered, i grabbed the color, so the camera would shoot everything in black-and-white except for whatever was similar in color tone to that orange traffic cone (my camera has this feature built into it). here's one of the pictures:

anyway, i was using a still camera, but thinking "video" and "journey" and "movement" and "time-lapse." ryan had approached me about this group show he was co-curating with ad nauseum lyceum, saying the genesis was basically exploring the physical act of seeing. i suggested a version of color study might fit, mentioned one or two other things, he also had some ideas - in the end this is quite similar to what i proposed to lmcc some time ago but never made it, was never shown. right, so the physical act of seeing - when i walk, i see traffic cones, for two reasons: 1) we all do, they're usually orange, because orange is the most "attractive" (eye-magnetting) single color for us (black-and-yellow stripes being the most noticable color combination) (i read this some time ago so maybe nowadays people think differently but anyway); and, 2) i'm always on the lookout for traffic cones which i don't want to go into right now because i want to go to bed.

ok anyway so as i'm walking i'm seeing traffic cones. and the best way (in my opinion) to look at traffic cones is to view them while walking. so there's the second "physically seeing" aspect, i'm walking, sure, but what i'm really doing is physically going to look at traffic cones. anyway, so i'm taking pictures of every traffic cone i see, between my place and the gallery. but i'm "filming" even though i'm using a still camera. i'm "filming" by taking pictures more frequently or less frequently, and by slowing down or speeding up while i'm walking. show all those stills one after the other quickly and you end up feeling like it's choppy video. speeds up when there are no cones visible (i'm walking faster and also taking pictures less frequently), slows down when cones appear (i'm slowing down and also taking more pictures).

my first time experimenting with that technique, so i did end up doing a little bit of editing, to get it closer to what i was imagining (rate of speeding up and slowing down). also, the first day i forgot to rotate the camera ninety degrees, so i took care of that.

up at the space, installed the projector:

which gave me this nice shape:

attached orange paper to the wall and cut it in the same shape, here you're seeing blue light projected from the video projector (no dvd playing) onto orange paper:

like i mentioned earlier, prior to the opening, i was thinking "if each of the artists and curators brings one friend with them and we all show up, that's twenty people. if there are more than twenty people in this space, somebody's going to want to go outside. it's bitterly, awfully cold out there. i'll invite people another time." happily, we had a steady stream of interested-seeming viewers, and the space never got depressingly-barren nor cramped and awkwardly full. you can see some orange light in the rear, that's leaking from my installation, it's in a small alcove in the back, opposite a piece by ryan.

here's a still (video to come) of my piece:

here's another still (video to come):

this is something that came up during the opening. katharine wanted to interact with the piece even though it's not an interactive piece (yet) (in its current configuration). or who knows what she wanted. anyway she was posing and i stepped back through ryan's hanging-curtain-photography piece, and took this picture. katharine said "looks like photoshop but that's not photoshop" (or something to that effect) so here it is - a real-life image, from last thursday evening, virtual life leaking into real life, as it will continue to do, i believe, at an ever-accelerating pace.

finally, the statement i wrote about the piece, for the exhibition. i might rewrite this. anyway hope you enjoy, and hope to see you on saturday, 31 january 2009.

- erik

traffic cone orange
erik sanner
2009
new media installation
dimensions variable

traffic cone orange

this piece is part of an ongoing exploration into our experience of color, integrating projected (e.g., emitted from a cellphone display) and reflective (e.g., paint) color. furthermore, i hope to inspire traffic cone appreciation (via observation) as a worthy aesthetic undertaking.

since i've been projecting colors onto colors (e.g., projecting red video footage of raspberries being eaten onto yellow pineapples), it occurred to me that it might be fun to come up with a new vocabulary for these color combinations, treating them as single colors instead of referring to them as hyphenated pairs (e.g,. red-on-yellow). by projecting orange traffic cones onto orange paper, i hope to create a kind of hyper-orange, which i am calling traffic cone orange.

my love affair with traffic cones began about fifteen years ago. anywhere i go, if traffic cones are present, i notice them, and frequently photograph them. i believe that traffic cones are close cousins of visual art, since like paintings their primary function is to be looked at. there are a host of unique qualities manufactured into traffic cones, depending on the time of creation and where they were produced. (for example, although we think of traffic cones as being orange, yellow cones are not uncommon in new york city.) the wear and tear meted out to traffic cones by time, weather, and more brutal encounters with heavy machinery or automobiles gives them all a distinct look, almost a personality. and the arrangement of cones in relation to their surroundings and each other is frequently baffling, occasionally sublime.

traffic cone orange incorporates images from two walks from my apartment to this gallery space, about fifty-six blocks up the street with no turns. i took many pictures in which everything is black-and-white except for anything approaching the same deep orange as the first traffic cone encountered on that walk. furthermore, i slowed down and took more pictures of the traffic cones than the rest of the view up the street. all of these pictures are shown in rapid succession as a video clip, which is projected onto orange paper. anytime a cone is visible, you will see orange-on-orange, or traffic cone orange.

proof of concept

in a way color study and miami blue already showed this. but i wanted to show ryan what i have in mind for thursday.

this is a picture:

this is that picture projected onto the chair cushion you see in the picture:

but what i'm making won't quite be as "pure" as this - but i love the traffic cones - so maybe it's "purer" in that it's more definable as "art" by being further removed from the reality of the thing - anyway it's a tiny space and it might be cold out but you're welcome to swing by thursday night. or email me, i might be able to meet up some other time.