white sage studio

3.22.2010

dankendanken

images from ashley's felt class at the field house!

3.20.2010

notes on being a SAM volunteer

I am a SAM volunteer now [started on Tuesday] and suggest it to anyone who wants to spread creativity, culture, and beauty in our fair city. I will be keeping museum information at White Sage to sign up, be informed, or donate - in addition to updating my experiences and thoughts here:

The most amazing [and unexpected] thing about being stationed at the Neukom Vivarium is that I get to learn about local plants! Come by and I will tell you more, but this is the first moss I have learned how to identify...ever.

Oregon Beaked Moss: Eurynchium oreganum

This moss is found in mats and is green to yellowish-green in colour. The stems are from 6 to 30 cm long but occasionally up to 45cm, the branches are regularly pinnate (a ‘herring bone’ pattern of branching) and between 1.3 and 2.5 cm in length. The main stems are generally not divided, although sometimes they have one large division. The broadly heart-shaped and sharply pointed leaves have distinctly toothed edges. The leaves are slightly pleated. The stem leaves have margins that extend below the line where they are attached at right angles. The operculum is pointed downwards and the beak curves upward. The stalk of the sporangium is 2 to 2.5 cm long, and the capsule is reddish brown.

A little more about the Vivarium:

"Neukom Vivarium is a hybrid work of sculpture, architecture, environmental education and horticulture that connects art and science. Sited at the corner of Elliott Avenue and Broad Street, it features a sixty-foot-long "nurse log" in an eighty-foot-long custom-designed greenhouse. Set on a slab under the glass roof of the greenhouse, the log has been removed from the forest ecosystem and now inhabits an art system. Its ongoing decay and renewal represent nature as a complex system of cycles and processes. Visitors observe life forms within the log using microscopes and magnifying glasses supplied in a cabinet designed by the artist. Illustrations of potential log inhabitants-bacteria, fungi, lichen, plants, and insects-decorate blue and white tiles that function as a field guide, assisting visitors' identification of "specimens." Neukom Vivarium is the artist's first permanent public art work in the United States."

3.19.2010

IMPROMPTU! picnic news

There will be NO PICNIC this Sunday because Ashley Halvey is showcasing “Age-Old Wet Felting Techniques" at the Filed House down the street. Her line of sustainable, all-natural, traditionally produced felted rugs is called Danken. She will be back having picnics with me the following Sunday

Since this is the case …you MUST come by and visit me THIS Sunday, as I will be very lonely and sad without her.

Menu and images from March 7^th picnic:

NASH FARMS miner's lettuce/chickweed (satin flower)/arugula and scallion tossed with Regina Olive Oil with TALL GRASS baguette, GOLDEN GLEN CREAMERY butter and BOISTFORT VALLEY radish

3.18.2010

artist bio: Jeffery Babbidge

platinum archival print $400
by Jeffery Babbidge
5" x 5"

Babbidge is currently a student at the Divers Institute of Technology to become a commercial diver. He received his BFA from the Oregon College of Art & Craft in 2007 - he has been specializing in 19th century processes, and well skilled uses of film capture photography however, for over a decade. Influences on his work are endurance athletics, adventuring, and exploring - this can be seen in the "super-saturated-investigative-nature" [as I call them] photographs on display at White Sage Studio until April 8th.

The process:
Platinum printing is a 19th century “printing out” process - meaning it is contact print only. It dates back to the 5th of June 1853 with William Wilis being credited with its invention. Platinum by it's self is very cool and grainy, so a 50/50 mix with Palladium to warm the image is used. The “cocktail” is 50% metal salts and 50% sensitizer's - the sensitizer is used to control the contrast of the image. This cocktail is very sensitive to other metals, so the paper has to be of good quality and very clean. Coating can be done with a glass rod or brush – printing out is like baking a cookie, in that a “printing out” frame is used so that one can check on the image between hits of UV light.

Babbidge prefers this technique for many reasons; one being its organic nature throughout process and in final product itself. He is known to make these on a bright sunny day out in a field [when he has a tent near by to work the chemistry inside of before and after exposure]. The images themselves are archival, and will not fade if properly cared for [meaning just don't ruff it up too much].

monocle loves ballard [so do we]

monocle

i am officially obsessed with cody arcangel

cory arcangel is currently exhibiting at MoCA, The Sharper Image. If you are the designer type, you will cringe when you visit the MoCA website... arcangel infected the site with comic sans... the worst font EVER.