Pecha Kucha

A few weeks ago, I made a presentation about Small Pond Arts at Kingston Arts Council's Pecha Kucha. Pecha Kucha Night originated in Tokyo, Japan, as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. Drawing its name from the Japanese term for the sound of "chit chat", it rests on a presentation format that is based on a simple idea: 20 images X 20 seconds. Artists show 20 of their images, for 20 seconds each. It's a format that makes presentations concise, and keeps things moving at a rapid pace.

It was an evening of presentations devoted to theatre, and I felt a little like the odd one out as the other 6 presenters hailed from more traditional theatre backgrounds; but everyone was very friendly and responsive to my presentation. It was a lot of fun and the fast pace really kept things snappy. A tip of my hat to all the artists featured in my presentation, including those I (doh!) didn't name: Trevor who puppeteered Punch, and musicians néGar, Kori, Shawn, Graydon and Lara.

You can watch my presentation below.

BONUS DRINKING GAME: Take a drink every time I say "Um." You will be loaded by the halfway mark.

Second Spring

This month we are celebrating the first anniversary of Small Pond Arts, and our second spring on the farm. When I look back on the past year, it is with surreal amazement that I take stock of all that we’ve accomplished. There is a confidence that comes with embarking on year two; there is a little less guesswork, a little less re-inventing the wheel.

I’m not going to lie, our first winter here was LONG, even though we went away for five weeks! Our 150-year old farmhouse is (not surprisingly) poorly insulated and drafty, and I wore a toque 24/7 from November through April. I missed the constant flow of friends and visitors, and had to mentally adjust to the solitude that comes with living in a seasonal community in the off-season. Of course this solitude has its benefits. Milé and I have both been incredibly productive, and have had the time to focus on our artistic pursuits. We seem to live a life of extremes; with the dawning of May we bid adieu to free time and embrace the madness of the busy season. There’s already been a steady stream of visitors, and the constantly-needing-to-be-cut grass reminds me that there won’t be much rest now until the fall when the cooler temperatures return.

Spring at Small Pond is nothing short of glorious. The flowers are coming up, the frogs are singing, the birds are building their nests, the rhubarb is daily doubling in size. It’s easy to be optimistic.

Although we’ve been hard at work over the past weeks, this spring the pace is a little less frenzied. Between the frequent rain showers, I’ve been spending a lot of time outside. I’ve continued hauling junk out of the woods, and have been arranging rocks and fallen logs to help give shape the Clearing and the Artists’ Trail.

I uncovered this cool stone wall, which turned out to be under several feet of dirt at the base of the old barn floor:

A few weeks ago some gale-force winds tore through the County, toppling our rather large and substantial outhouse.

The first step in raising an outhouse is acknowledging that it is tipped over.

This occasion called for an impromptu “outhouse raising party” – and we had plenty of friends show up to help us get the outhouse back in place.

Here we celebrate our achievement.  Can you spot the puppet?

Over the winter months I’ve been reading a lot about food, and our pitifully dysfunctional modern food system. On July 24 we’re giving artists and community members the opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings about food with Cornography, an afternoon of art featuring more than 40 participants.

Milé is also on the cusp of launching a food-related art show, Field to Canvas, a series of portraits of local farmers. I’ve been watching him paint these portraits for more than four months now, and they really are a homage to the people who grow our food. With fresh, organic, REAL food on our minds, this spring we doubled the size of our garden. We just finished building the fence around it, and the first veggies went in yesterday, with LOTS more to come.



Milé rototills the garden

In June we’ll be building an outdoor cob bake oven, inspired by my time with Bread & Puppet Theater and four years of working in Dufferin Grove Park with Clay & Paper Theatre. Not only are bake ovens a great symbol of community, this project is also helping us move toward sustainability by allowing us to bake without using electricity.

In August, the shadow puppets will return to Small Pond, with three performances of Doubt Seed and our new show, The History of Shadows. I can’t wait to have my amazing crew of collaborators back here at the farm so we can do it all over again!

We’ve got lots of residents booking their summer stays with us. I love meeting new people, and can’t wait to welcome this year’s resident artists (the first of the season arrive today!). There are still plenty of spots left, but if you are thinking of a residency this summer, you should think about contacting us sooner than later.

We have come so far, yet in many ways we are still at the beginning. We have so many things we want to accomplish and improve upon, and there are so many surprises around the corner. Who will we meet? What crazy projects will we dream up? If I had a crystal ball, I would throw it into the woods. I prefer to be surprised.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who has helped us make Small Pond the dream come true! Friends and family, you have been capital-a Amazing, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Come visit us soon so we can show our appreciation in person!

PS - 'Like' our new page on Facebook by June 1, 2011, and you'll get a chance to win a one week artist residency with us!  Just click HERE

Panoramic

A picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you need more than one photo to adequately describe a place, and if you don't have a wide angle lens you may just have to shoot several photos and patch them together to get a panorama.

(click on these pictures to see much larger versions of them)

Now, you can do this like David Hockney with actual physical prints, or you can use software if you're shooting digital photos (or scanning your prints). There are several programs that can do this for you, but I used Photoshop to stitch my digital pics (Photoshop itself has a feature that merges similar areas in a group of photos to give you a panorama, but I wanted to do this myself). Incidentally, I climbed our TV aerial to get the high angle in the above image of our outbuildings and silo.

The technique I used for these was simply panning the camera from left to right (or vice versa), and stopping to take a shot at regular intervals, making sure the pictures overlap a bit. In the above shot (front yard, house, outbuildings, silo, The Hesperus, and the rest of the front yard), I went from left to right, catching Krista as she returns from picking up the mail (she's on the far left, almost exactly between the white posts that will soon display our Small Pond sign and the red cap of our well).

I caught Krista again in the above shot of our clearing in the woods. For this, I tucked myself into a "corner" of the clearing and shot from left to right. I thought about standing in the centre and trying to get a 360-degree panorama, but I didn't think that would convey the beauty of this area, so I just went with this simple shot.

Below are panoramic pictures of our rooms for residencies. Again, a panorama helps get a better sense of a place --in this case, cozy rooms-- and helps to avoid the sense of smallness and claustrophobia that a single photo normally creates. Now, the rooms may look a little distorted, but you get the idea.

Speaking of distortion, here is a montage of the source photos I used to make two panoramas of the Blue Room:

With a lot of distortion and digital torture, I managed to force the above pictures into the coherent panoramas below:

Of course, if you look very closely, you can figure out where the seams are, usually due to colour variation.

But that's not the point.

The painting on the side of the garage in the first photo (hello jimmy), and the long vertical paintings in both the Gold Room (General Mayhem) and the Yellow Room (I don't fit this shoe) are by Alberta artist Dean Stanton.
The painting of the urn in the Gold Room is by Mae Dalby, Krista's great aunt.