New Studio and October First Friday

On Monday October 2, I moved my studio to the beautiful Emporium Building downtown that houses the Arts and Culture Alliance and their galleries. It's an exquisite space in a refurbished old building with lots of brick and hardwood. I'm so happy to be in such a location with so many other artists and part of such a great community.

On the first Friday of every month, the Emporium Building is the central host to the city's First Friday art events, the big opening night for all the galleries that spills out into the streets. Hundreds of people come to these events, and on October 6th there were over 1000 guests – pretty amazing for a small university town like Knoxville, TN.

During the opening, I met lots of great people. Of particular note is one of my fellow artists with a studio in the same building, David Habercom. The work he had up for the event was from the series Under The Bridge – really important work in a place like Knoxville at this time. His work and our conversation about the ideas behind it resonated with my own work and thoughts I have about nostalgia and the difficulty of presence in any one place.

So, I moved in on Monday and by Friday was experiencing my first open studio in the new location. I showed a couple of works in progress from the series, Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am, and a related video I made while I was still living in Los Angeles, titled L.A. Trees #1: Palm and Sunset (paradise/apocalypse) and an artist's statement about the series. For an open studio exhibit in a space I'd only had possession of for a few days... it was enough.

Here are a couple of poorly lit pictures of my space that I took today: