Photos from Stereobscura one day only event by Geremy Lague and the YAAG creative space

The weather was perfect for Geremy's three hour performance/presentation of his duel lens camera obscura today. There was a constant trickle of people, which was good, although never a line up (not unexpected for a new space and a Monday morning). Some high points were seeing Geremy's mother, discussing the history of these devices with Patrick Close, watching Ned dance in orange overalls, and finally feeling the heat of summer, here at the YAAG Gallery. Here are some images:

15 hours of ...

 

 We checked out of the hotel and went for brunch at Diane Bessai's fantastic (and large) condo.

Fred Bessai and Diane Bessai

Carl had to get to the airport. Frank, Tom and John Bessai were all there. We got to talk more than we did at the other parties; less people, more about family

. Frank, Tom, and John Bessai

 

Diane has one of Margaret's watercolour snowman pieces from her 2001 show. We don't see it often. John bought it for her for her 70th birthday. 

 

I thought we were going to leave town but we decided at the last minute to drive downtown and find the new Art Gallery of Alberta building (with no address but for some vague description from teenagers at a coffee shop on Whyte who don't drive and hadn't been there). Somehow we managed to find it and saw a very good Warhol show. It had four of his toupees and a lot of his early drawings. It also had a number of films showing that I'd not seen including "Kitchen Party".

Warhol silver cloud pillows at AGA

We arrived in Saskatoon around 8:30 and saw Mike Grzesina's new condo. It is a very good place. William had a swim in his pool. We drove home to Regina, arriving late.

Game day

William played with his cousins all day, running around with George visiting and so on, while Margaret worked and I brought my niece Nicole to Paul's to connect up with Mike and Thomas and play some games. I can't actually remember the names of the two games. One was set in a haunted house and the other was about disease control around the globe ("Outbreak" and "Pandemic" I think it was called). The haunted house game was very cool. You play it cooperatively at first, exploring the insides of a haunted house to see where everything is (the floor tiles are randomly chosen as you open doors) but when certain random events occur, one player becomes the villain and the rules all change. In on session I played an 8 year old girl who opened a gate to another dimension and summon in a Lovecraft-type elder god.

Apples and pie but not apple pie.

Day began with the George's girls waking up and me jumping out of bed to feed them, but not myself. I zoomed off to get some blood work done to test my tri-glycerides again (remember my liver tests six months ago). I've kept with my near-pop-free diet for 4.5 months so we'll see how that worked. My new hard drive finished formatting at about 8 am, about 10 hours. At work I met with Janine (who couldn't make it Tuesday). Gave her a copy of Marian McMahon's article "Nursing History" which may be important to Janine's thesis project which involves studying her family history using photographs as her guide. Email was down all day at the university, making it a calmer environment. Met with Eric for a while and primarily talked about a superhero idea we initiated yesterday. It's based on an idea he pitched years ago to Incredible Story Studio and was accepted but then never made for reasons unknown. Of course our version will be a bit more twisted, but he's been doing the most work on it. Went home early, stopping at Safeway. Why do people try to back up into diagonal parking spots? They constrict the lane as they do it, then when they leave (supposedly easier) they are facing the wrong way down the row so are idiots twice with that one action. Is it that hard to back out of a spot? At home I moved all the dvds into my new shelf. Finally back in order (alphabetized by director except box sets and animation/superhero). I picked all the apples from our tree in time for my parents, Margaret's parents, George and the girls back from the farm, and Paul and Mike to arrive for desert. Margaret made pies. After everyone left, I processed all the apples and made apple sauce.

292

I had a meeting of the Quality End of Life research group in Saskatoon today. William had the day off of school so we all drove up there together. We got into town early enough to head to the Mendal Art Gallery where Chrystene thought that Rachelle Viader Knowles's new show would be open. However, it was not and the opening wasn't until eight. The security guard said that Rachelle was there so I sent my card back and she had us in to see the progress. She was having a bit of trouble with interference over the connectors between the dvd players and the monitors (which were surprisingly low tech old tvs rather than slick new sets like her last show). I'm cure they got it all sorted out, although it's not the stress you need 9 hours before an opening. Margaret and William connected up with Mike and also went to Lee Valley Tools (got the rechargeable hand warmers and the lamp switch I wanted) and to Toys R' Us (where William got the Speed Racer Lego he wanted). The meeting went fine, although Margaret got caught in traffic and was over an hour late picking me back up so I got to some heavy worrying. We ate at Fudruckers where many very fat people seemed to be enjoying their meals, and then hit McNally Robinson book story where I bought a Popeye collection of early comics (hard cover). We drove back again tonight (2 + hours each way, making me a bit tired now). We brought this new plastic lap table for William in the car so he could draw and Margaret gave him his new sketch pad and suggested that he draw a picture of Mike. He drew his picture on a Kleenex. Here it is, notice the whiskers:

217

Had breakfast with Mike and Paul at their parent's house. As always, the conversation turned to Lego. It seems that they built Lego as kids as well, so I suggested looking for the sets. Unlike my mom who wanted me to take all the stuff that was mine out of the house shortly after I moved out, Mike and Paul's mom seems happy to store their stuff, cleverly hidden so not even they can find it. So with her help, they uncovered three Lego sets from 1977. Paul is probably building them right now.I watched Cody Banks 2 with William, it was uninspired, then worked on my Carle Steel video (another Warhol styled "Modern"film). I put 4 frames of Warhol's "Empire" in as the background. I don't know how to get stuff off of Youtube, so I simply used the print screen command to grab whole screens of the image as it was in pause on Youtube, the copied them into photoshop, cropped them, then imported them into After Effects and created a loop of them. As I promised her, I have made her thinner (by about 1/3).