my week in Thai food

Wow, what a week! If for no other reason, I've found over the past couple of years that I look forward to winter for the simple reason that people in Boston seem to act slightly less crazy in colder weather. Maybe it's because it's too cold to stay out in public for too long. As soon as it gets even mildly warm and muggy, it seems like the streets are just teeming with extra J-walkers, crazed drivers, construction detours...We've had a couple of bouts of Indian summer over the past few weeks and I have to say, there's very little I like about this trend. Anything over about 74 is too warm for me, both meteorologically and socially.

Otherwise, it's been a busy mix of freaking out about my thesis and attending visiting artist lectures. And a lot of Thai food. One of my side jobs this semester has been to coordinate the visiting artist program for the area I teach in. Every area does it a little differently, and in TIA (that stands for Text and Image Arts), we like to do all of our four or five talks in one week. That week ended today. We invited an up and coming new media scholar/future new media curator, a book artist, a copyright attorney and today had a really fantastic presentation about a few of artist John Craig Freeman's projects, from public art, to digital interactive media, and ending in Second Life. This was his thesis project. So much for my paper columns, glitter globes, and postcards.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Also this week we hosted the second of the four '4 Painters' visiting artists. Since there are only so many dining options near the Museum School, we tend to treat our guests to delicious Thai food at Brown Sugar, just across the park. Which meant that this particular week, when the visiting artists aligned just so, I got to enjoy, for free, three lunches (Pad Thai, Chicken Cashew Nuts, and Yellow Curry) and one dinner (Thai Fried Rice) at Brown Sugar. The one day when the TIA and Painting lectures conflicted, I had free pizza instead. And because it was such an intense week, my workout schedule was thrown completely off track...


I continue to freak out about my thesis, only partly because the publicity materials deadline was today (but mainly because I have less than 8 weeks to pull this thing off). It's really difficult to boil it down to 75, preferably very descriptive words, more about what the exhibition will include and less about the concept. Here's what I came up with, with some help from Neal and the gallery's outreach coordinator:

The subject of my installation Neither Here Nor There is the fragmentation, dislocation, and replication of the Parthenon, in an effort to investigate the idea of place and the relationship between an original and its copy. The installation incorporates architecture, print media, and the souvenir to represent the complex impressions left by my travels to London, Athens, and Nashville, Tennessee and to explore notions of authenticity, artifice, and desire.

Since I'm doing an installation that won't fully come together until the week before our opening reception, I don't have any documentation of the thesis project so far, so the surrogate image is from a spin-off, if you will, where I became interested in stereograms and the idea of creating the illusion of a three-dimensional image from two images of different versions of the same thing. It doesn't work the way a stereogram should work, of course, but it's still fun to cross your eyes and try to get the two Parthenons to line up and do...something...magical. Anyway, as for the thesis project itself, it's the "architecture" component that's keeping me up at night. I'm feeling pretty confident that the installation will involve gold glitter, though, so I'm looking forward to that.