MFA Thesis show

Here they are!







Elevated wooden tables with two porcelain spoons on each


Double black sail with map-net and fan that makes it shiver






You can see better quality images of the actual photographs on my website- theaeck.com under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' series in the photography section.

MFA thesis art show

Saturday night was my MFA thesis art show at the Riverside Off Center in Ypsilanti, MI. The space was great to work in, save the green walls, and is a historic building. A lot of my family and friends came in from Pittsburgh and Boston to celebrate with me! Not many faculty/staff from the School of Art &Design came but that was to be expected. It was great to have the work seen by others since I had a lot of fun making making it! The weekend was a complete whirlwind and Matt and I stuffed six comrades into our tiny apartment. Good times...


Me and the Mayor of Ypsi!


My graduate dean on the left and my favorite professor, Anne Mondro, in the middle


My best friends from out of town


The fam





I will post photos of the artwork later this week. I still need to document it. If you want to see some of the photos I used check out my website in the photography section under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow Series'. The sculpture piece aren't there but most of the photos are. (www.theaeck.com)

It Is Never Tomorrow

It has been a long time since I have written. Wow! Since October! A lot has occurred since then. I have been invited to show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA in their 'Polar Visions' show as it is tentatively called. The show opens in July and will be up for a year in the Art & Nature gallery of the museum. The show focuses on artists working with contemporary issues about the Arctic. I am creating a set of 4 new photographs for them in the same vain as my 'Elsewhere Series', using the toys, fabrics, and strange angles to approach the Arctic's environmental concerns.

On Saturday night was my MFA Thesis art opening at the Riverside Off Center gallery, which is owned by the Riverside Arts Center in Ypsilanti, MI. The show, 'It Is Never Tomorrow', consists of 13 photographs and two sculpture pieces. I received a Rackham Graduate Student Research Award to financially make the work! There are 20 photographs in this series and you can see some of them on my website under the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' photography section. I will post photos in the next few days from the opening night. It will be open until March 29, Tuesdays 12-4pm, Thurs-Sat 12-4pm.

Also, I have been awarded one of the American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowships for Fall 2008-2009! I am very excited and will probably head out to Denmark in mid August and stay until December. I wrote this grant with the same premise as I wrote my Fulbright Grant: Arctic representation in Danish Archives, using the Arctic Institute and Danish Polar Center in Copenhagen to create a series of drawings and photographs based on the archives and research. I am still waiting to hear back from the Fulbright Commission as to whether I have been selected. I won't find out until end of April! Stupid waiting. At least I made it through the first round.

Signal and Sign

Nautical flags represent letters of the alphabet as well as 'signals' such as coming into port, carrying hazardous cargo, etc. I'm working on a series of paintings using these flags. I have a set of quotes from people and a second set that are a conversation between two lovers.


'Like wooden socks' - quote from Gijs Bakker of Droog design who was in Ann Arbor last Wed/Thursday giving a lecture. This quote was in response to an absurd question asked after his lecture about car design.


'Had we lived' - quote that begins Robert Falcon Scott's final diary entry on his journey back to basecamp after not being the first to the South Pole. I am working on a few sculptures featuring parts of his final statement, which was later morse code sent to England and broadcast all over the country.


'He forgot'


'She stands'

These paintings are going to be turned into actual flags strung across a space. I am still deciding whether they will be inside or outside- what type of landscape I want them to have.

Here are a few new drawings that i have been working on and are up in two shows right now. The drawings are done with resin and inks and are a response to the Greenlandic photographs I saw this summer.

Raise your flag

I have exactly 5 days left before I hand in my grant to travel to Copenhagen next year. It has drastically changed as I though it would. No longer concentratin on Knud Rasmussen, I will be working with the entire Arctic Institute's collection along with the Danish Polar Center's photographic collection and hopefully the Danish National Museum's ethnographical collections. The Arctic Institute is very excited about my project and have been absolutely wonderful. I am also going to apply for an American-Scandanavian Foundation grant as well but that isn't due until October...thank god...

I am back to teaching classes and the new school semester. Yesterday I gave a brief presentation of my work to my group of 22 senior students along with my fellow grad student Sara Blakely who works in graphic design and animation. She does amazing work and I wonder how she is surviving this grad program?

I think I prefer the summer. It is already chilly in Ann Arbor but at least the skies are still blue instead of Michigan grey. But the tree outside my house decided to get naked: it dropped almost all of its leaves in the past few days. This has me quite sad. There is no Fall color, even though Michiganders keep telling me there is... Nothing can compete with the rolling hills of the northeast or even Pennsylvania.

I am working on a series of sculptures that are using weather balloons as their buoyancy and the sky as their canvas. I am quite excited. They are dealing with such things as Scott & Amundsen's rush to the SOuth Pole, the lowering of ponies onto the Arctic landscape, and pulling one's igloo behind them wherever they may go.

The Bjork concert in Detroit on Tuesday night was another inspirational moment. Though i was a bit disappointed by her stage design. She had a few small monitors that showed her dj's hands the entire time BUT she did have an all woman 20 piece horn section. And no costume changes? I was a little sad but her voice and choice of songs made up for it.

ignore the figure in the corner, they're just the anthropologist

I am in the midst of writing a grant that will hopefully allow me to go back to Copenhagen and make work using the Arctic Institute's archives. Mainly the Knud Rasmussen collection from his Thule missions. The one I am most invested in is the Fifth Thule mission which set Rasmussen across the Arctic, from his Greenland base of Thule to the Russian coast. First he spent a year with Peter Freuchen, Therkel Mathiassen, Kaj Birket-Smith, Helge Bangsted, Jacob Olsen to excavate ruins and talk with the people who lived around Baffinland and Danish island. His intention behind the mission was to record a people in a state of transition and to engage the idea of the original migration of the Eskimo. What is interesting if you pull back the lens, is that western Europe was also on the verge of up upheaval and transition. His expedition, whose official title was 'The Fifth Thule Expedition- Danish Ethnographical Expedition to Arctic North America' was from 1921-24, very critical years in Europe. He visited, accompanied by Anarulunguaq and her husband Iggianguaq, every small ethnic group scattered across this vast landscape collecting artifacts, stories, and advice. Word spread: at times, before he had even made it to the next group, the news of his endeavors had already reached new ears. He mingled with medicine men and anyone who would offer him their stories, even the women and wives.

My interest in this has to do with cross-disciplines and telling stories from afar, something that both artists and anthropologists know a lot about. In my previous writing, I liken the work of myself as artist to that of an anthropologist or historian but with more allowances for the blending of facts and fictions. Something that I didn't touch upon was the idea of situational knowledge and how new genres of anthropology are not afraid of the using the 'I'. Artists have never shyed away from neither the personal nor the 'i' when making artwork. But this has been tougher for anthropology, a discipline rooted in the sciences, which often demands a certain tenor of academic voice in order for it to be legitamate. This is even despite the fact that the anthropology is affecting the history of the subject matter they are studying while trying to ignore the fact that they are standing in the same room.

As one of my professors, Dr. Ruth Behar, approaches it, there is room for the vulnerable observer in the same landscape. How can we approach personal accounts, diaries, fiction books set in specific time periods and particular places and not pull knowledge about people and why they do the things they do from these 'other' sources? The arts thrive off of this: From Genteleschi's master painting of Old Testament stories to Shirin Neshat's photographs of women and islam. The polar archives at the Institute will hopefully allow me to do just this: situate myself in the Copenhagen landscape as a vulnerable observer of a collection that has fallen asleep deep in the archives. All it needs is a little coaxing to re-energize it from its 80 year sleep.

My grant will probably culminate just as the International Polar Year is winding down in 2009. This is ok but it has me realizing how long a timeline it is for grant writing, from when you submit it to when you find out yea or nay. Going into my thesis year, i'm sure I will have many other committments to diverge my attention. There is a key, the artist-as-researcher, that I was introduced to by the determined professor Jennifer Pepper the very first semester of my undergraduate career. I hope to smuggle it into the classroom setting this year when I team teach the senior undergrads. As Clifford Geertz said, "You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you".

The Ann Arbor Arts Festival is in its final 1 1/2 hours. After 4 days of Val Cushing ceramic vessel look alikes, easter colored pastel landscapes, home address painted tiles, ribbon and streamer crowns, and arm thick glass 'things' all on hyper-drive, I have to say that bottled water is probably in the lead in terms of 'Art & Crafts vs. ________'. If I had sold bottled water for 75cents instead of $1 (at all the consession stands), I would have pulled the rug out from under the stock market and the local boyscout troop. Next year...

Besides being almost taken out on my bike by a craft-blinded pedestrian, I fully support the festival. Seeing so many people walking! All day! and not just from their car to the grocery store or the car to their house or around their house on the way to their fridge. Walking and looking like they enjoyed it. People actually took advantage of the Ann Arbor bus system, who did an excellent job of shipping them in and out of the downtown area from the various outer areas. For many children, it may have been the first time they rode a bus. New experiences, exercise, and people trying to sell the outcome of one of their most primal human instincts that is always surpressed in the U.S. past the age of 8: the act of creating and making. Despite not being thrilled about much of the work I saw, I respect and am humbled at the shear magnitude of booth after booth of people (unknowingly?) beating our American educational system, government, and mainstream society telling them not to 'make' but to 'buy'. Though many were buying, it sure beats framed art from Ikea.

After being back for two weeks from my trip, I am still going through my photographs: numbering, naming, categorizing, copying, printing, drawing, cataloguing. My computer is my archive and I am the archivist still configuring how to dictate the information I have been given. By city? By date? By formal gestures of line, perspective, pattern? Alphabetical by person or place? By theoretical meaning? By dichotomies? By social significance? The arrangement seems to move everytime I go into a folder and see the visuals I took. How quickly I forgot what I had collected!

And magnetic north is moving. The photograph of the map presented is from the Fram Museum, Oslo showing the progression of when Captain John Ross (1831) first took the magnetic calculations then Amundsen (1904) and all the way up until 2006's calculations. It is projected that soon the north will be closer to Russia, the northeast passage, then to Canadian waters. I wonder how that will effect Russian vs. U.S. relations?

Matt, my partner, is curating a show in Ann Arbor titled 'Studio in the Lab' in September. Investigating the intersections within the arts and the sciences, I hope to submit some work involving the images and writing from my research trip. How a visual artist reimagines and represents history/ anthropology/ politics/ cultural studies offers many chances and allowances for bending and of course reinvestigating the academic and social rules. I think of Chris Olfili's massive (and glittery) paintings, Kara Walker's installations of power structures during the American Civil War, Zhang Huan's facial 'Family Tree', Coco Fusco performance with Guillermo Gomez-Pena in the cage as modern day savages, or Song Dong's gestural 'Stamping the Water' performance/photograph piece. These isolate fragments of cultural understandings and translates them. The artists ask questions without needing to preliminarily bend to a hypothesis. They aren't concerned with answers. Through curiosity, they ask what might occur.

I hope to approach my photographs in this way. Gleaning from anthropology, history, intuitive formal gestures: the other 'sciences'. To hover the images while offering the viewer clues as to where the points may end up.

Turn Left, right here...

It seems like I have directed you to some wrong websites:

www.dpc.dk
for the Danish Polar Center

and

www.arktiskebilleder.dk/
for the Arctic photo archive

go to the right side of the page under the word 'fritekstsøgning' and do the following searches if you are interested:
Christian Bendex Thostrup
Søren Hansen
Tegninger (this means drawings)
Morten Pedersen Porsild
Danmark Ekspeditionen
Thule Ekspeditionen
Knud Rasmussen