Theoretically, if you had a blog, a great post idea would be “All The Lies I’ve Told To Get Out Of Doing Shit, Personally and Professionally” but of course, you couldn’t post it because then the people you’d lied to in order to evade
1. working
2. doing a favor
3. hanging out with them
or
4. payment
would of course READ this theoretical blog and recognize the very specific lies you’ve told them about
1. that mysterious day-long stomach flu
2. your infrequent but crippling back injuries
3. how your landlord needs you back at the house because the ceiling is leaking
or
4. pesky bank fraud
and then you’d be in whole HEAPFULS of trouble.
Good thing you don’t have a blog to post that awesome story about your VAULT of successful, crafty and BRILLIANT LIES.
(this post is dedicated to kate for reasons of she knows very well why.)
I very rarely make reference to my job or the artwork it puts me in contact with, mostly because 1. I’m a jaded bitch about photography and 2. I don’t want people thinking I’m actually important and thus trying to pitch their introspectively naked self-portraits at me.
But there’s a pretty amazing show about to open this weekend, here in New York City, the kind of show that will even surprise the most jaded of all of us. Gregory Colbert, who has the best job in the world, is a photographer who’s been working for twelve years on the same project – photographing animals and their interactions with humans. Elephants in tibet, jungle cats in Namibia, hell, he even free-dove with sperm whales and the results are amazing.
What’s more, Ashes and Snow, the resulting exhibition, is going to be housed on Pier 54 in Chelsea, in a Nomadic Museum designed by Shigeru Ban. The building itself, which will dismantle at the end of the run and be rebuilt from local materials at the next location, is going to be beautiful, almost a temple, and the artwork is printed on these stunning enormous Japanese hand-crafted papers, and then simply suspended from the ceiling inside the structure.
Now, a lot of this is what my father would dismiss as touchy-feely hippy-dippy stuff, and he’d be partly right. Colbert expends a lot of energy going on about the symbolism of it all, of the humanity and the conceptuality and other words that make working in the photography business a little exhausting at times (hello they’re just photographs).
But for all that, it’s going to be a unique installation, in an interesting setting, with some truly superb and gorgeous photographs. For those of you who’re sick of the usual white-walled glass-framed gallery scene, this is a show worth catching. And for those of you living elsewhere, well, you never know. The Nomadic Museum might be coming your way. Because New York shouldn’t hog all this pretension!
I joke. But I’ll be at the press opening tomorrow morning, and I’ll be dragging Stuart next week. Seriously – go check it out.
