It seems that an artist can’t return from three years overseas without being pulled—willingly—into a vortex of activity. Here are the upcoming appearances me and/or my work will be making in the next few weeks: Feb 28 Fine Craft Auction in Saskatoon, March 3 Artist Talk in Saskatoon, a Naturopath’s Office in Calgary (from now until further notice), and a black ops “art dealership” in Saskatoon.
Author Archives: Ed
Artist Talk in Saskatoon on March 3
On March 3, 2007 I will be giving a short, informal talk about my digital art practice. The talk is part of an ongoing series of artist talks at Paved Arts in Saskatoon, which are intended to address practices based on—or relying heavily on—digital technology and/or electronic media. I plan to talk about my art-making process and how I came to use the computer as an expressive tool. I will talk about the specific software I use—the vector-based imaging program Adobe Illustrator—and how it relates to a more general practice that includes painting, assemblage, and sculpture.
Two Paintings Missing in Storage
In an attempt to consolidate the surprisingly vast collection of my own personal artwork, I’ve been trying to account for each piece that I lent out on “storage” duty after we sold our house and moved abroad in the summer of 2003. I’ve managed to track down all but two pieces.
Update 9 March 2007: Both pieces are now accounted for.
A Tour of the Site Upgrades
A couple of weeks ago I promised that “next week” I’d be giving a tour of the changes to this site. Well, “next week” came and went—and then some—without much web-touristic joy. I suppose late is better than never. In any case here’s the gist of this post: I’ve changed the home page and added a few new sections: portfolio, texts, and info. I’ve also added site-wide navigation, and a site map. This may not seem like a lot, but hiding inside those two short sentences are over fifty pages of new content, and at least two hundred images. As always, you’re free to explore this new stuff on your own, or you can read further to find out more before you take the plunge.
Galleries in Calgary
I’m in Calgary this week, touring the city’s art galleries as part of two projects. One is the ongoing project of reacquainting myself with contemporary Canadian art. The second—and probably more important—project is to get a sense of which galleries are going to be a good fit for my work, prior to submitting my portfolio.
The Upgrades are Complete
I spent most of November and December slaving away in the deep recesses of my web server. Aside from a few cosmetic changes, there have been some fairly significant structural changes that—if I’ve made them properly—are unlikely to be noticed. I was pretty much done with the updates before Christmas, but deciced not to make an announcement because it’s generally such a busy time. I figure that people are more likely to be spending quality time with friends and family over the holiday season than sitting in front of computers. I’m going to save the tour of the new content until next week. In the meantime, feel free to snoop around and discover what’s new around here. And if you find any bugs, let me know in the comments.
Reconfiguring the Warp Core
I’ve been fiddling around with a bunch of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the site. I may have fiddled a bit too much where I shouldn’t have. What this means is:
- All of the image links in the blog are broken.
- Some of the other pages have moved, specifically: About and Contact. Others may also have strayed.
- Anything you may have bookmarked in the site may be nonfunctional.
- RSS Feeds may or may not be dead.
- The home page for the blog (http://edpas.net/) only displays the most recent post, and the navigation links at the bottom of the page don’t lead anywhere. If you want to browse earlier posts, I’d suggest you use the chronological archives listing from the sidebar.
- Error messages are less than useful.
But don’t touch that dial! I’m going to fix everything or else put it back to the way it was. For those of you curious about what’s happend, I’m not exactly sure. But I have strong a suspicion that it has to do with a conflict between some of my custom mod_rewrite rules and those of my blogging software. Regardless, I made a full site backup before I started changing things around. If I can’t sort things out, I’ll simply do a manual restore.
My apologies for any inconvenience or despair this unfortunate situation may have caused. All of this is in preparation for some significant new content that I’ll be posting in the next couple of weeks.
A Christmas List for Someone Who is Hard to Buy Gifts For
Every year around late November or early December I get requests from my extended family for a list of possible seasonal gift items for me. This isn’t unusual, nor is the fact that it is prompted by the fact that I am apparently hard to buy for. This year I actually made a list, but it turned into more of a blog post than a practical guide to navigating the shopping-centric part of the holiday season on my behalf.
Restoration and Upgrade
I’m going to overhaul this site over the coming weeks. I want to more appropriately reflect my planned change in focus from a photographically-centred journal about my life in Japan to a site that is primarily about my professional arts practice.
As a warm-up I decided to try to get the existing site into some semblance of order. To that end I’ve done a bunch of housekeeping, all of which was long overdue. The short version is that I’ve made some cosmetic changes, restored the missing posts from July 2005-July 2006, upgraded the backend software, and changed the web location of the journal. I’ve also committed myself for the foreseeable future to calling this a “journal” rather than a “blog.”
And even though I’m steering this journal in different direction, I’m planning to leave all of the old posts online.
Technical Difficulties: Disappearing Posts
Most of my recent posts have disappeared from my database. I have backups, but it’ll take some time to restore the blog to its former state. I’ll be restoring the missing posts as soon as I have time. Hopefully I can also restore the comments on those posts.
Regardless, I’ve been really busy with a couple of projects. My writing-about-my-art project is coming to a close. The manuscript is hovering at around 38,000 words including the footnotes. And I’ve started to work on the final edit of my Crossroads video, which I started in 2002.