The new 8E Quarterly Subscription Series!

For the past few months, I've been concentrating more on Eight Emperors, the art & design collection my husband Matt and I started, and creating prototypes for new products (hits and misses), than on my art studio work. For me, it is a slightly different thought process than trying to make installation and large scale sculpture work. Though I did just finish the new Roald Amundsen biography titled The Last Viking by Stephen Bown, which was riveting. So that has my mind beginning to churn with some new ideas.

What Matt and I are both really excited about is the new 8E Quarterly Subscription series we just launched! It's an idea we've thrown around for a while and were able to make real through Eight Emperors. It is the act of subscribing to, and in this case, curating, art & design into one's life 4 times a year instead of magazines.

The first piece for Spring, titled We are building, features a paper piece. Then the Summer is wood, the Fall is ceramic, the Winter is a collaboration between paper and wood, and then it rotates back to paper in 2014. So you can sign up anytime during the year and receive that quarter's piece. And similar to a magazine, where the content is new yet you know what type of magazine you are getting, the quarterly pieces are a surprise and created in the same vein as pieces in our regular collection.

The quarterly pieces are exclusive to those who sign up, and not available on our website until 4 months after they have launched and shipped and also at a premium rate. You can sign up on our collection's website wwww.eightemperors.com

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.

UICA show- PROVIDENCE- two weeks left!

The Modern Quilt Guild of Ann Arbor has been assisting me to sew 350 nautical flags for the UICA. It has been really amazing to see how fast these women sew, sew, sew! In the history of polar exploration (1800's & early 1900's) it was tradition for the various ladies guilds and women's christian organizations in the UK to make sledge flags and other sewn items for crewmembers to take with them. They created dolls to give the Inuit in the high north and handkerchiefs.

This show follows in the same vein. We have sewn 7 phrases from Shackleton's autobiography South, in particular the chapter where he and 2 others cross South Georgia Island. Phrases such as 'our minds were set on reaching the haunts of man' and 'pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things' and 'That was all of tangible things but in memories we were rich'. Shackleton and his men trekked for 36 hours straight, reaching the whaling station on the other side of the island. No one had ever breached the inner reaches of this mountainous island. Along with the flags, there will be 4 sound pieces evoking the various stages of this trek: hunger, resonance, fatigue and providence.

Kansas City Show Review

The Kansas City Star did a nice review of the Re:Search show, which is up now through January at the Paragraph/Project galleries via the Charlotte Street Foundation. If you happen to be around Kansas City, check out the show! I'm super pleased to be showing with two great artists, Erika Hanson and Hillary Wiedemann.

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/12/07/3304674/the-art-of-exploration-at-paragraph.html

What you see is 600 ft of 3-strand cotton rope that will be used in my new installation at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids MI. Their new gallery is beautiful, totally LEED certified with a fantastic blackbox theatre, film theatre, roof top garden and many gallery spaces in which to show work. I'll be showing in their Vertical Project Space= 50" high.

November show: Charlotte Street Foundation

My show in November is at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO called Re-Search. Curated by fiber/sculpture artist Erika Lynne Hansen, it features video artist Hillary Wiedemann, Erika Lynne Hansen and myself. I will be showing some older work, the It Is Never Tomorrow photographic series. The show revolves around artists who use historical research to motivate their artistic endeavors. The show will be up through December. The artist talks are on Saturday at noon.

http://www.charlottestreet.org/2011/10/re-search-three-projects-opening-on-1118-at-6pm-paragraph-project-space/

http://www.hillarywiedemann.com
http://www.elhanson.com/

Also, I will be showing at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids in January- mid March. Stay tuned for some images. Flags, lots of flags. And hopefully some ham radio.

The show is up! 'April 24' at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

After our last night on solid ground:

It is the movement of a goodbye,
(the severing of a mooring line, two ships together tied)
and the swell causes difficulty.
It is the great heave of the sea.

An island full of pausing,
(a white handkerchief, too much by five hundred weight)
as an oar, held out,
separates men from boats.

The final gift is brief words,
(in the event of our failures, towards northeast gaze)
anchored as mindful patterns,
while the tide returns again.

Soon clear of the breakers,
(sails set against grim heights, a line of figures dark)
all is blanketed by delay.
Look out, and linger.

So look out, and wait.

To hear the sound component:
http://www.theaeck.com/projectsframe.html

Mary Thomas from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a preview of the biennial in last Wednesday newspaper:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11159/1152012-437.stm

Pittsburgh Biennial: June - October 2011

The Pittsburgh Biennial's website is now up and links all the artists + locations participating this year. I will be showing at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, curated by Adam Welch. The opening is June 10, and the other locations open at various points throughout the summer & fall. The PGH Center's show is up until October.

I will be creating a new installation including a new video + I am back at the piano creating a new sound piece for it.

http://biennial.pittsburgharts.org/

Right now my website is in maintenance. It will be back up by this weekend.

Cutting the painter

In Gretel Ehrlich’s book, A Match to the Heart, in which the author recounts and reflects upon being struck by lightning (for the second time), she brings up the Bardo Thodal, or Tibetan Book of the Dead. ‘I wander in the bardo state alone’ (Ehrlich, page 41). ‘Bar’ means between and ‘do’ means a landmark that stands between two things. As she explains it, when placed together, this word becomes ‘gap’, or, ‘the wandering state between life and death’, ‘confusion and enlightenment’, ‘the past just occurred and the future has not yet happened’, ‘a gray ocean with no reference points, no lighthouse’, and ‘uncertainty and groundlessness’.

Sir Ernest Shackleton and his 5 men cut the painter between the James Caird and the Stancomb Wills and from the remaining 22 men, waving from the shore of Elephant Island on April 24, 1916. The men stand between the grays of tall cliffs and a vast ocean. They stand in the pregnant pause, with the past 6 hours of exertion sent away with the gusting wind: the launch of the 22 foot James Caird into the water, the caddying of provisions and a ton of ballast into it, while resisting the unruly waves spitting them back into the tiny island.

The 22 men bellow three cheers as Shackleton + the five others dip into the trough of a wave and vanish. No reference points, no rescue boat, no lighthouse. Each man alone in their physical ache for England, for loves so distant, and for dry clothing. Only persistent, steady, horizon line.

The body as landmark. A body with groundlessness and steady tide.

Unbound: to hope till Hope creates

Unbound: to hope till Hope creates
EARLVILLE OPERA HOUSE, EARLVILLE NY

New sculpture, sound and photography based on two scenes from Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition
OPENING SATURDAY, FEB. 26: noon-3pm

FEBRUARY 26 THROUGH APRIL 2, 2011
_________________________________________________________________________________

“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.”
Excerpt from Prometheus Unbound, by Percy Byssche Shelly

The sound piece is arranged from British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams’ (1872-1958) Sinfonia Antarctica No. 7. The loudest sections, the crescendos and torrential occurrences, and the quietest solos, the rests and repetitions, have been lifted and rearranged to create a new piece filled with either moments of chaos or of orderliness. Moments where there is hesitation, un-surety and fear and moments of calm and reassurance and possible trust. The piece begins with a drum roll, which is Endurance’s entrance into the Antarctic ice pack, the beginning of its end. There are three temperamental segments that reference the crushing of the ship’s timbers and planks, and then its final death scene. The end is quiet and features a violin echoing back onto itself: the 6 men pulling away from Elephant Island in the James Caird in order to save the entire crew. The piece ends neither sadly nor exuding hope: it is more a feeling of distance and an internal voice of a man’s weary thoughts.

Jupiter finds meaning from the title of the exhibition and Percy Byssche Shelley’s play, Prometheus Unbound. It is the story of Prometheus’ captivity and subsequent release from Jupiter’s grips (Greek: Zeus). Jupiter, now overthrown, no longer determines Prometheus’ fate. There is no reconciliation between the god and human. There is no acceptance or forgiveness. Jupiter possesses no compass for compassion or remorse: it is the Antarctic in all its non-humanness.

http://www.earlvilleoperahouse.com

Reading fortunes

What does it mean to become unbound?

British Victorian society had a fascination with predicting futures, beckoning ghosts, and other unworldly and heavenly conjuring. There are documented reports and books discussing séances held to draw lost sailors and captains out from their watery tombs. Did these obsessions carry into the next era, as British explorers still became lost at the poles?

Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition (Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition) marked the end of this particular Age of Exploration. From Robert Falcon Scott's final death march to this Antarctic expedition, the era of grand voyages in the terms laid out by the technology of the day and nationalistic pride of white men journeying forth into the 'unknown' came to a known end. The gruesome reality of WW1 shook those British exploratory foundations to the bone.

The second photograph in my upcoming exhibition shows tea leaves left at the bottom of a teacup that is caught up in the undulation of a sea, tumultuous and hungry. When the fortune teller attempts to read the leaves, what message reveals itself? Is it hope or despair? Will this tiny boat be capsized and crushed or be released and infinite in its wandering? Unbound from Edwardian cast systems, unleashed from the ice, and able to set its sails and make it to land.

Stormy Seas: Classical compositions distilled to clashes and clangs

One of the sound pieces I am working on for my next show features symphonies inspired by the sea/antarctica/ships sinking. This includes Vaughn Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica and Bridge's The Sea: 4. Storm from the early 1900's. Extracting the clashes, blasting horns along with some quieter sections of bass lines and soprano soloists' fluttering voices, I am hoping that the outcome and mixing will mimic Shackleton's ship being crushed by the ice. Bangs! Crashes! And not necessarily in rhythm at times. The Endurance did not get crushed all at once, but rather over a series of days. It was caught on moving film using a kinematograph-camera by the expedition's documenter: F. Hurley, who had gone on previous Antarctic expeditions and was no slouch to danger.

The show will feature a few photographs as well: A cup, a flag, a cliff, a gray. I am trying to utilize some recent Pittsburgh snowy ledges and cliffs that I often see on my commute to work. And the blueness of the winter mornings cast certain shadows and colorations that cannot be captured at other times of the year.

New Year: New Show: And still lots of work in progress

Welcome 2011. Lots of articles, news, books to catch up on! Lots of work still in progress!

I woke up this morning to find that my show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts last April has been included into the Pittsburgh Post Gazette's Art & Cultures writer Mary Thomas's 'Best of 2010'. A nice thing to see first thing in the morning!

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11005/1115528-437.stm


On another note, I will be showing new work at the Earlville Opera House in Earlville NY from February 26- April 2. The show will feature Chapter 2 in the 5 part installation series I am creating based on Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition in the Antarctic. The work culls from two scenes: when 8 Emperor penguins mysteriously appeared as the ship, the Endurance, was sinking into the icy depths leaving the men finally truly abandoned. The penguins dirge-like calls were ones that the men had never heard before. The second scene is when Shackleton and his five chosen men set sail on their 800+ mile open-water journey, leaving the remainder of the crew to fend for themselves on Elephant Island. The drastic view from both the stranded and the journeying-forth is humming with energy: That moment when both are staring at the other, recognizing the other.

I see these two scenes as tipping points for hope + loss. Both scenes possess a deep intimacy with the possibility of forthcoming death. They radiate with the notion of a polar environment swallowing whole and leaving no trace. The moment when the human recognizes an intimacy with Emptiness. And I love how the Emperor penguins with their strange instincts play a part in that for the humans.

The Arctic Governance Project

This morning I came across a database of articles concerning the Arctic and policy amongst the various countries with Arctic ownership. It is set up by The Arctic Governance Project, which seeks to join the Arctic's local population, policy makers, and researchers in conversation and collaboration. The articles cover oil & gas policy, tourism, fishing and commerce rights, environmental impacts of industry, and governmental inter-relationships amongst the Arctic holding countries.

http://arcticgovernance.custompublish.com/finland-supports-norways-project-to-replace-russias-radioactive-rtg-lighthouses-in-the-gulf-of-finland.4683820-137746.html

Review in Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Art Critic Mary Thomas of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette featured my work in her review of the solo shows at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. It appeared in yesterday's Art & Entertainment section. What a great surprise! The shows close next Sunday, June 13th. The last artist talks are this Sunday, June 6 @ 1pm.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10153/1062323-437.stm

The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is located at the corner of Shady Ave. & 5th Ave. in Shady Side- Parking is available- The hours are 10-5pm Tuesday-Saturday, until 7pm on Thursdays, 12-5pm Sunday: phone 412-361-0873

The scripting of scenes

I have begun to write a play about Shackleton, Amundson and Scott. Currently it is just notes and ideas and imagery. The exciting stage! But over the next several months I will be reading/reviewing a few books about them- biographs, auto-Bs, historical accounts, etc, to get a framework for their characters, quirks and personality ticks. And also to get ideas for the sequencing. Of course being set in the Antarctic, there will be ice and ships, and definitely a hot air balloon scene as Shackleton was the first to experience an aerial view of Antarctica's wonders. I may throw in an Empirer penguin or two. And not to forget the giant albatross.



The 3 explorers and their stories offer enough inspiration for creating a epic tapestry of landscapes, forms and emotions, and a nonlinear journey of discovery and failure. A question is whether to begin with a death or a triumph? For their stories contain both.

Performance narrative- Sunday May 16 @1pm

My gallery talk at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts is Sunday, May 16 at 1pm. This is not going to be a regular gallery talk where I stand in front of my photographs and sculpture and discuss it. Rather, I will be performing writing I have done about the concepts in my work accompanied by an unfurling of images from my past work, current work, and documentation of the research I've completed at various archives. It is organized in 3 Acts: The Launch, Sorrow's Knot, and Soliloquy. After there will be a question/answer session where I may or may not continue to create fictions.

Concepts revolve around an aesthetics of disappearance, the play of history constructed from fictions, landscape as memoryscape, and all pertaining to the British encountering the Arctic in the 1800's: particularly the Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. I liken the talk to a visual narrative performance where I encourage the listener to come along with me on an arctic expedition.

Below are excerpts of what you may see+hear= image + text

______________________________________________________________________________________



"....Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth unravels a quest for the Unknown. Its story is both fiction and historical record. The John Franklin Expedition story lies in both realms as well. The people who constructed public memory are long since gone. The duration between Franklin's departure down the Thames River and subsequent disappearance was crucial in establishing the myth. Only two incomplete bodies were ever brought back to England for burial. A phantasm of pieces, not wholes. The objects returned to England lack their original functions: The objects failed. The trail of random artifacts found over the many decades fueled the debate over mysterious 'N.O.C's', or Not Otherwise Classified objects, that were useless to the forensics of a linear story. But, they lend themselves well to a Jules Vernian retelling...."



"...The North is a mouth, swallowing whole lambs. Ignoring Mercator, Cartesian, and.... I follow my fingers up the lines to see where I haven't been. Find hoarfrost and mirage, castles that pass in silence. Find ice and beacon pushing, pushing through sounds and bays. I follow my fingers' downward decent. Further on lay the Southern seas, gnashing teeth and the fury piled up in palpable mounds burn my fingers, weathered skin. Turn into history's wind. Face it open-chested like the bow of a ship. Face it lapping tongued like the seal gulping air. Face it whipped and flogged, beaten but still wobbling. My toes find stability and density. Yet they secretly move me farther and farther away. I gather wind and wail, placing them into my ears, till only threads from torn garments realize what's gone...."



Hope to see you there!

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
6300 5th Ave at the corner of 5th Ave. and Shady Ave. in Shady Side. Parking Lot and additional street parking available.

Please email me if you have any questions- Thea_a_eck@yahoo.com

Rendering the North: 1708 Gallery in Richmond VA

Tonight opens Rendering the North at the 1708 Gallery in Richmond Virginia. This has been a fantastic week and experience working with the gallery staff and setting up this show.



The show consists of the 15 photographs from the It Is Never Tomorrow series along with a new sculpture piece titled To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield which is from one of Shackleton's favorite poems by Tennyson.





Here begins the artist statement for this show. The beginning section is similar to my Pittsburgh show because they both included the It is Never Tomorrow photograph series.


"Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
Book of Job, the Bible

Rendering the North overlaps two British stories: the first, a high Arctic tragedy of a famed expedition’s disappearance, and the second, a southern Antarctic tale about the balance of fate. This work scours archived documentary, poetic inventions, and phantasms of personal imagination.



The photographs encompass a wandering soliloquy in search of ghosts who remain caught in a bitter expanse and the struggle for communication: The hunt for the Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. Sent as the largest and most technically advanced of its time, the expedition sought to finalize the Northwest Passage to the Pacific as well as to obtain calculations around magnetic north pole. The story pauses on the silence of the entire 133-member crew by 1847, and gathers momentum as search and rescue expeditions began filling the Arctic seeking clues. Over 150 years seasonal freezing and thawing hid and uncovered objects and histories. And as a result, the threaded fingers of a map filled up with coastlines, new Inuit populations encountered, and inventions and communication methods appropriated or generated. The western shroud of the Arctic was rent from the globe.



"A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground."
Ernest Shackleton, South

The sculptures find their dwelling in the great Southern Ocean, whose waters churn easterly around a vast landmass and a steadfast crew’s movement across ice and biting water: The multiple chapters of Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance voyage of 1914.



The expedition sailed from England the day the War broke and returned at the height of its tragedies. Planning to transcribe their path across Antarctica’s breadth, they never set foot on its land. Instead they lost horse and home but never hope while striving to hold British soil again. The story involves a 800 mile open-water boat journey, latitude and longitude’s loss of land, sledges hauled by men, and all commanded by a man who saw balance in ranks and fate."



Materials/imagery included are a nautical flag tree form that spells out the sculpture's title, a two headed pony with various renditions of mercator map projections streaming from its feet, a suitcase with a working metronome attached, and a sinking wooden structure above a sledge carrying wax candles whose wicks form the leashes of 3 ceramic bells. All are suspended and balanced with each other on antique wooden pulleys using three-stranded cotton roping.



Thank you to 1708 Gallery staff Tatjana and Jolene for making this show easy-peasy, to the 1708 Gallery Board of Directors, as well as to interns Erica and Spencer for assisting me to install the sculpture.

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts: April 16-June13

Last night opened my solo show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The show features the "It Is Never Tomorrow' photograph series along with two new sculpture pieces, The slings and arrow of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of trouble and Ye mourners who in silent gloom. The show runs until June 13. My artist talk is Sunday, May 16 at 1pm. I would like to thank the Shady Oak Foundation, A Few Bad Apples Foundation, The Lovely Ladies Baking Team, and my Grandpa for making this show possible.

This sculpture piece gets its title from Shakespear's Hamlet and his famous soliloquy in Act 3, scene 1. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-'


The speakers are playing two compositions by Estonian composer Arvo Part- Te Deum and Silouans Song- at the same time.



The nautical flag is one used by British Captain McClintock's sledge team on their hunt for clues about the fate of the John Franklin Expedition of 1845. The biscuits are a version of hard tack.



This sculpture's title, Ye mourners who in silent gloom, comes from the phrase found on a package of funeral biscuits from England in the mid 1800's.


It became custom to hand out biscuit style cookies as a 'take home' gift from funerals during this time period. It is the phrase that is spelled out through the black nautical flags on the tree form.



The suitcase + globe form has both a humidity gage and temperature gage on either end of it.




And a few of the 'It Is Never Tomorrow' photographs already found on my website-






_______________________________________________________________________________________________
The following is my artist statement for this show.

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
Book of Job, the Bible

Inisiaqpunga and the waking scours archived documentary, poetic inventions, and phantasms of personal imagination. The installation reflects on a lonesome wandering, high in the Arctic, in search of ghosts and belongings left from the famed Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845. Sent as the largest and most technically advanced of its time, the British expedition sought to finalize the Northwest Passage to the Pacific as well as to obtain calculations around magnetic north pole. The story pauses on the deathly silence of the entire 133-member crew by 1847, and gathers momentum as search and rescue expeditions spilled into the Arctic seeking clues to their disappearance.

Just as the ice covers, it reveals

Over 150 years, seasonal freezing and thawing hid and uncovered objects and tragic histories surrounding the expedition’s fate. And as a result, the threaded fingers of a map filled up with intricate coastlines, Inuit populations encountered, and inventions and communication methods appropriated or generated. The western shroud over the Arctic was rent from the globe.

Not here, the white north has thy bones

In the Inuktitut language, inisiaqpunga describes the act of following a lone trail left by an occasional traveler. Inisiaqpunga and the waking seeks not to retell but rather to pursue the emotional voice, the soliloquy and lament, for a tragic narrative.