all my fantasies have been realized

I'm done! Well, about 99.9% done as of 8:30 last night. By the time I got home, showered, had a bite to eat, and watched ANTM I was too tired to blog about my day and turns out I have plenty of time to catch up this morning.


I spent a little time yesterday morning working on my statement. With edits from Neal and one of my advisers, I'm feeling pretty good about it. Even with the late start, though, I ended up spending about ten hours in the gallery yesterday, getting there around 10:30 in the morning. I spent the first hour installing my contribution to another artist's show (which was annoyingly tedious, but my fault for buying a very complicated shelf system for it). Later in the day I was walking through his space and noticed that someone had eaten some of the M&Ms. Hello?! It's art - you're not supposed to touch it, let alone eat it! I'll have to top it off today before the opening, and I'll be sure to snap a couple photos while I'm at it.

Anyway, after that I got to work in my space, tweaked my measurements a bit, laid out my columns, started securing them to the floor. After I finished that part around 2 p.m. the rest of the work went pretty quickly. Setting up the centerpiece, so to speak, and the take-away cards was like putting the icing on the cake, or adding the cherry to the sundae, or however that expression goes.

But then time seemed to slow. Lighting took me a couple of hours, mostly because there was no one to move me around in the Genie lift, so I had to go up and down on my own about a million times. The first couple of wobbly rides on that thing were a little nerve-wracking but after two or three lights were positioned and aimed, I was kind of enjoying it. So I guess maybe doing the lighting was actually the icing on the cake...

For the last couple of hours I was there I installed and painted the shelf that will hold extra postcards and my statement, and applied my name lettering to the wall (maybe that was the cherry on the sundae...there are apparently many layers to this thesis trifle). I walked around and looked at my installation a lot during that time, while I waited for layers of paint to dry. I felt better by the end of the night, but initially, once it was all done and lit, I felt incredibly insecure about it, exposed. It's exciting to finally see something that's been in my head for the past few months, and I'm pretty happy with it overall, but there are moments when I worry that it's just downright chintzy. A little bit of chintz is part of the piece, but I don't want it to look like it was made by a class of kindergarteners. No offense to five-year-olds, but this is my thesis project, after all.

As for today, well, I've got that statement to polish off and print, and a binder of various information to add it to. There's this whole photo opportunity that will happen tonight in conjunction with the opening reception that I've yet to fully think through, so I guess I should work on that a bit. I have a couple of tentative outfits planned, but I might take a quick jaunt to the mall, just in case the perfect thesis show opening reception outfit is there, waiting for me to buy it. I might just have time for that yoga routine I fantasized about earlier in the week. And then it's off to the show this afternoon. The photo above is a teaser to tide you over until tomorrow (or the weekend, at the latest), when I'll post more photos of the installation and the opening reception. I'm already getting butterflies...