Website redesign + Eight Emperors Launch

My website has sat languishing by itself for the past year while I just ignored it, too exhausted by many other activities. I finally started a redesign this weekend and just finished it! Same domain, new layout, and hopefully a little cleaner. Please check it out! www.theaeck.com

My husband and I have also launched a new collaborative art & design website: Eight Emperors. A place where we can sell smaller works of art (and a platform in which to play!). Our approach is making objects that can fit in the hand yet reside in the mind, within one's quiet mental space. We see the collection as art that you give as a gift, passed from one set of hands to another, instead of gifting something that is store-bought.

Our blog is www.8emperors.blogpost.com and we have all the twitter, facebook, pinterest to accompany it.

UICA Video blog on YouTube

The UICA's video blog just posted the interview they did with me at the beginning of January concerning the 'Providence' installation. I was recovering from the flu and so sick! They did an awesome job at editing and making me seem somewhat coherent!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnVXrBi9b14&feature=youtu.be

Providence: Part 4 in the Shackleton Series

Providence opened on Friday at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. Their new building is beautiful, all green/LEED certified. The nautical flags spelled out 6 phrases from Sir Ernest Shackleton's autobiography South: 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech', 'we met an old man who started as if he had seen the devil', ' we had pierced the veneer of outside things', 'our minds were set upon reaching the haunts of man', 'that was all of tangible things but in memories we were rich', 'pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigues seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things'.

And the 4 piano compositions were inspired by those phrases: A call to exigency, a call to reckoning, a call for mourning and a call for Providence. I will post the sound pieces on my website soon.