Before I get too carried away with the Clemson trip... I better finish the Midwest SPE Conference

First up... Lucy Lippard Lecture. We were running late, Elise & I ran out of the car to unsuccessfully obtain our conferences badges, no sweater in a cold lecture hall or pen and paper. These are a couple notes I typed up on the i-phone but wish I had remembered more.

• "A place is a 1000 places."

• Find the Amanda Ross-Ho quote on the present.

• Photographs needing to be printed bigger parallels the American obesity epidemic.

• "What time is this place?"

• "Deep maps:" How the rings affect the center and how it ripples.



Lure of the Local was a favorite book of mine in graduate school thanks to Li Rader. She meant to leave this comment on the blog ages ago but emailed it instead: "Ok, it's time for you to add to your library 'The Lure of the Local' by Lucy Lippard (1997). I bought it in Tucson in '98 and I'm sure (though 13 years old ?!! Can it be?!) is absolutely something you would like to read (especially considering your last post re: Indiana, home, et centera - error intentional [duh]). I'm sure Dave Hickey would scoff at such a suggestion which is, all the more reason, to suggest it! LR in VT"

I bought Lure of the Local when I was traveling back and forth to New Zealand to maintain my residency in graduate school and re-evaluating it with my present thoughts on place and home is long overdue.

After the lecture, Nancy and I talked to Lucy, obtained her email address and at last, will legitimately begin more artist correspondence!

Nancy's email to Lucy from the Sleep Inn in Clemson, SC two nights ago:

Dear Lucy,

Thank you so much for coming to the SPE in Kalamazoo. It was an honor to hear you speak and to meet you at the end of your talk. Your work has influenced my life and I thought I would follow up on our brief encounter with this email. I thought you might be interested in seeing our latest collaborative project. Below is our artist statement and our website is www.earthworksnearyou.com.

Thank you very much for your consideration to this work. We would love to hear your insights if you find it interesting enough that it lingers in your thoughts.

With admiration and respect,
Nancy Douthey

In any case, Nancy and I have decided that our next goal with this project is a residency at C.L.U.I.


Amelia Morris, 5 MacMillan Gardens, What Was Left, 2010 from the Pin-Up Exhibition

Another highlight included our first joint portfolio reviews. We looked at sculptural/installation work by Matt (I wish I wrote down his last name) from Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska, Dominique from Adrian College, Adrian, Michigan and Mike Cook from Grand Rapids Community College. Mike had fascinating Gregory Crewdson/Phillip Lorca diCorcia-esque portraits using lights to recreate pandora's boxes transporting his subject's back to their workplaces. I failed to photograph anything that had to do with a portfolio review, an oversight that I would remedy at Clemson.

Our talk was a big old LET DOWN (the anti-dynamic duo) but we took a lot of notes on what we could improve upon and even attended a couple more lectures critiquing the overall delivery of the lecture itself as well as the content. It was a learning experience for both of us. The most positive aspect of the talk was meeting Travis Shaffer (we share a similar influence in Ed Ruscha - more coming soon on his photo zine, Rural Route Two), Nicole Croy from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Jamie Miles who teaches photography at Taylor University.

Without fail, every time I speak at an SPE conference, Lori Nix also lectures at the same time. I missed her talk but was able to catch up with her at the open portfolio walk-through. I have an inherent fear of the open portfolio walk-through but doing it with someone proved to be far easier. I'm really proud of my students who represented themselves so well that multiple strangers commented on it. When Nancy and I head to Atlanta for yet another talk, we will have this down (and I will provide more photo documentation!).

Midwest SPE "Bonus Features" (again the not so serious)

We began the trip up to Kalamazoo at the Kendallville Windmill Museum (as per Natalie and Richard's suggestion). We didn't have a lot of time to wander through the 56 windmills but got the gist of it from the entry way. The sound was incredible - straight out of the movie Giant, or so I kept thinking.



The key purchase is always a t-shirt upon any road trip and here Nancy sporting the "hot ticket item" featured frequently throughout the rest of the weekend.



Bell's Brewery and the Sweetwater Donut Mill were repeated experiences.



There were moments of seriousness as spontaneous portfolio reviews and "practice sessions" were constantly occurring. Here Nancy looks at Laura's thesis work before our dinner arrived.



My students Karla, Jessie, and Damon joined us later:



Jacinda and Nancy:



Drew & Amelia:



Elise, Nancy, and Laura:



Damon, Elise, Jon (who came even later), and Laura:



Donuts! Two nights in a row!!



The general reaction upon first walking in the door:



The Cloud (AKA nuclear bomb):





Drew practicing tongue calisthenics (or getting the cream off his nose):



Laura repeating Drew's photograph (no tongue):



Laura capturing the mustache cup for Karla:



Way too many donuts in the hotel room:



The Strutt was a fantastic music venue right next door to the hotel. A highlight featured this elevated chair with owl lamps that Amelia kindly photographed for me below:





On the way out of town we stopped at Ivanhoe's in Upland, Indiana ... not my best location to get food but this flying saucer of a fish fillet was worth the photograph.



After several conversations the entire weekend regarding Taylor University, Nancy, Elise, and I decided to take a tour. We were ultimately looking for the location that most resembled a dungeon and here it is:



It was, however, located next to this neat little lake on campus which resulted in a few more photographs...



Thanks Elise for taking this one!



Next up... getting down to business... AKA the actual conference.

Trying to be responsible and set an example (the horror!)

Whenever I attend any SPE event with Nancy, you can count on us being absent, checking out all the restaurants and museums, staying at a different hotel than the conference (always with a pool) rather than attending say... the actual conference (as witnessed by the above photograph and the one below at the Joule in Dallas, Texas SPE 2009). WELL!!! Since we are doing the Midwest Society for Photographic Education conference TOGETHER, I am trying to change my ways (and inadvertently Nancy's in the process - whoops sorry Nance).



First up.... Nancy and I will be reviewing portfolios as a team (first thing I signed her up for that I didn't ask in advance) Friday, 1st October from 3-4 PM.

Secondly.... I may have signed us both up to have our photographs reviewed. I have a secret desire to have Thomas Allen look at the cakes and of course, we are going to do everything we can to track down (notice I did not say stalk) Lucy Lippard to look at the Earthworks project.

Thirdly.... I definitely signed us up for the portfolio walk-through... generally the most horrific event for me personally but Nancy seems to do really well with it. In Dallas, she stood next to me and pretended she took the photographs of the guy who was sharing the table with me when he walked off for 30 minutes. She managed to score him a show in his absence. I somehow maintained a straight face while listening to her explain her concept for the photographs she was looking at for the very first time (incidentally they were all of men's faces who looked like they were rugged mountain climbers).

Finally... we have a presentation to prepare. We will be speaking at the crack of 11 AM on Saturday (well Nancy as the morning person will be and I as the night owl will be trying to forumlate sentences at that hour).

In preparation for all of this, I spent the afternoon making some cards (business card size for the earthworks). I even used Nancy's signature pink for the website address.



3x5 cards for the fake cakes:



I edited the earthworks project down to 21 rather than 50 (sorry the photo is blurry):



I finished matting mini versions of the fake cakes (since I had some extra board, why not be super professional). Let's hope no one notices the banged up quality of the earthworks prints - they even have holes in the top corners! I will be making a new set for Atlanta because it looks like we are doing this all over again in March but with a larger audience.



...and finally... all the "IOU" cake photos are printed. If you see your name on this list, I'll be shipping them off to you after I return from Clemson in mid October.



In the meantime, I'm running around like mad trying to get everything done before Nancy arrives Wednesday.

Philadelphia Primarily/Society for Photographic Education Conference Secondarily

[Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donné]

I stopped in Philly for the first time on my way to Houston. I love this city! On the agenda (aside from the conference): Philadelphia Museum of Art (Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even/The Large Glass and Étant Donné), the Mutter Museum, and the Fabric Workshop. Surprises that occurred along the way: Rocky Balboa’s statue and the run up the main staircase of the museum for Alexis (thanks to Nancy I was able to do this in public and call it performance art – video coming after Alexis emails it to me), Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, Bruce Nauman’s Days and Giorni sound pieces, an Oscar Munoz exhibition, Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious (one of my favorites thanks to discovering his work at FotoFest ten years ago). The Fabric Workshop and the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibition were a bit of a let down because I was expecting bigger and better things but I did manage to pick up a fuzzy blue piece of wool that resembled cotton candy for Nancy from the floor.


[Detail of The Large Glass]


[Alexis sitting in Nauman's Days]


[Nauman's Giorni]


[Oscar Munoz drew these obituary portraits of drug dealers in charcoal and videotaped them washing down the drain]




The Mutter was incredible in that only have to see once because everything is seared into my brain forever kind of way. Highlights: the giant skeleton next to the dwarf skeleton, Chang and Eng - the original Siamese twins' body cast and their preserved conjoined livers, and that 8’4” colon that held two and a half buckets of feces and weighed 41 pounds once removed from a 21 year old dead man, tanned human skin, and most important the flat files! I heard about the latter from Gayle Wimmer in graduate school and admit to wanting to go to the Mutter just to see 2000 + objects that were removed from various throats without surgery and catalogued in drawers. This was the only photograph I was able to sneak and the Perfect Attendance button was my favorite (left row, second from bottom).



Other highlights in Philly include the Reading Terminal Market which was right across the street from the conference hotel. It was an ideal location as we were able to eat all meals of the day here. Lots of cheese in this city: cream cheese, cheese steaks, cheesecake, etc. Funny how I am traveling from the second fattest city in the nation to the first one after one another.









Sunday, Alexis and I took the train to NYC – her first visit. The Whitney Biennial was PACKED because the Armory Show and Pulse were also taking place. Highlights from the exhibition include: Storm Tharp’s drawings though they were shown in the worst room possible (next to a very intrusive video that did not make you want to stay and contemplate his work at all), the Bruce High Quality Foundation video installation, I Like America and America Likes Me on the windshield of an old ambulance, David Adamo’s stripped down canes that resembled spindly insect legs, Kate Gilmore’s video of destroying the walls in her attempt to climb out of a room built inside of the gallery, and James Casebere’s large photographs of a miniature suburb. Overall, it was good to see but I wasn’t blown away with anything compared to the day before at the PMA and Mutter Museum.

What little I saw of the conference was also a success. Ball State had a lot of student representation at the portfolio reviews (here is Karla showing her photographs to Alexis with Jon in the background and Monica and Shannon - sorry I didn't catch you Molly, Ashley, and Laura).





I got to meet some great people (who wear cool tee-shirts as in this photograph of Ian van Coller at happy hour at our Modernist hotel… Loew’s).






[View from Room 2510 with the Delaware River and New Jersey in the background]

And on a miscellaneous note... One of my favorite buildings... the Philadelphia Institute of Art on Chestnut.



… and then I flew to Houston where I was greeted with a platter of delectable rug samples.



Monday was “settle in” day because I arrived late in the afternoon starving and tired. After lemongrass tofu at Mo Mong, Nancy and I made a list of what we had to accomplish Tuesday beginning with the DVD, a velvet and embroidered case for the Michael Jackson’s banner, and finding wood for pedestals for some of the larger objects that will reside on a table at Texas Gallery.

The announcements were Fed-Exed to me in Philadelphia and they LOOK GREAT!!! Very exciting!



(Better photograph coming soon) and more and more and more to come….