Month: June 2006

Received my first rejection letter today, along with my slides and CD. No big surprise there, really. I expect more than a few of these in my life — I once tried to publish short stories, and have many a rejection letter from that little escapade.

Still, at least they returned my slides. I invested a lot of time to get those made, and I was a little worried they weren’t going to come back. CDs, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen (or thereabouts), so I really would rather submit stuff on CD.
I suppose the quality of paintings can be faked easily in digital media. You can retouch digital images to your heart’s content, but slides are harder to do. All the same, my slides were crappy, so if you compare the slides against the digital photos, my work lies somewhere in-between the retouched digital images and the poor-quality slides.

Luis Jimenez, a Latin American sculptor whose work adorns public places across the U.S., has died after being crushed by his own sculpture.
Part of the sculpture fell and pinned the 65-year-old artist against a steel support while it was being moved with a hoist at Jimenez’s studio in Hondo, New Mexico, according to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s office.
His 1969 work Man on Fire was a sculpture of a man in flames that drew its inspiration both from Buddhist monks in South Vietnam who immolated themselves and the Mexican story of Cuahtemoc, set afire by Spanish conquerors.
That work was displayed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. His work has also been seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is on display in public sites at the University of New Mexico and Albuquerque’s Martineztown.
His 1996 sculpture Fiesta Dancers, in front of the El Paso’s Fine Arts Centre, is a colourful fibreglass work that depicts fiesta dancers. Several Jimenez sculptures are civic landmarks in his hometown.
CBC Arts: New Mexico artist crushed by own sculpture

They just came in, and are now leaning against the side of the house. They’re about 90″ wide, where the studio opening is about 101″, so I’ll need to build some new framing to accomodate them. It’s a 3-section door unit, with one fixed door, one pinned door, and one regular door. They’ve all got slide-up screen openings, so I can get air movement within the studio (which it really needs).
Over the next week or so, I’ll be installing them and removing the previous fold-up garage door. I’m not sure what to do with the old door, but I think the RE-Store or Habitat for Humanity can use it.

More than 500 Canadian art professionals have formed a new coalition to call on the government to take a balanced approach to copyright reform. Appropriation Art: A Coalition of Arts Professionals, includes arts organizations from Alberta, BC, Quebec, Ontario, and Saskatchewan along with hundreds of artists from across Canada. The remarkable list features the President of Carfac Ontario and winners of numerous art awards including eight Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
The group identifies three issues in their letter to Ministers Oda and Bernier: fair access, certainty of access for creative purposes through a fair use provision, and no support for anti-circumvention legislation. There is something very exciting happening here: musicians, privacy groups, students, and now artists are standing together against anti-circumvention legislation and for balanced copyright. These are voices that until now have been missing from the copyright reform debate. With their active involvement, they have affirmed that the DMCA-like provisions have little to do with support for creators or creativity. Rather, they are provisions designed to support a small cadre of largely foreign-backed industry groups without representing the real needs of Canada’s own artistic and cultural communities. It is time for the government to listen to its own artists, who are forcefully speaking in their own name.
Michael Geist – Hundreds of Canadian Artists Call for Balanced Copyright