Ink Tea
When I saw this task, I was a little heart-broken. It was such a fantastic task, and I had just begun working in a gallery. I had this vision that required the involvement of many players, and, at the time, local players had burned out and signed off. But the vision wouldn't leave me, and I confessed it (either to Star5 or r0ckc4ndy), and was encouraged to try doing it anyway.

So, I contacted my friends here in town who happened to also be SF0 players, and made a proposal. I will buy the sculpting supplies, if you will come to my house and sculpt blindfoldedly. It should not have been such a surprise to have so many people respond favorably, and so there were two sessions of blindfolded sculpting, which was alluded to in my Seeing Beyond Sight completion last summer.

What was Celina doing blindfolded?

What, in fact were the whole table doing blindfolded?

What was out of focus in the foreground of this shot?


Well, now you know. (I will confess that most of the photographs are too horribly out of focus to make much sense, but some of them I managed to feel distance and approximate focus enough to be interesting. I also may have lost photos of the second sculpting session, as my computer died this summer.)


The intention was initially to have the exhibition in late July or early August, but well, things kept not working out- mostly, I've been too busy at work to do much of anything else, or the gallery wasn't open for our use. (Yes, we used an actual, pre-existing gallery for our opening.) But finally, with Glasnost coming to an end, I made it happen- my first attempt was too small a turnout, but the second managed to get *almost* all of the artists, and even a MN0er that I'd not yet met. I had a little help from some non SF0ers, whom I hope to recruit- we served hors d'oeuvres, and lead the gallery visitors around carefully. Now, I didn't have permission to use the gallery for these purposes, but I'd also never really been told I couldn't do something like this either. So for my job's sake, we're not mentioning where I work in this proof or elsewhere on the site.

It was pretty neat to be the curator of a show, even if that show only had a lifetime of an hour or so- and my year's worth of experience told me how things were done for an opening, including ridiculously strange hors d'oeuvres- pineapple chunks wrapped in mint leaves, ginger-flavored sandwich cookies, edamame pate with orange sprinkles and shitake mushrooms on rice crackers, and chocolate truffles. I wanted to serve cupcakes, because I thought the sight of seeing a number of people try to successfully eat cupcakes while blindfolded would be hilarious- frosting everywhere, but I hadn't the time to make them. My non SF0 friends really really helped me make this happen, were courteous guides, careful protectors of the work on the walls, and were victorious in the food-makings.



The art was surprising and beautiful to touch, and also to see. I was delighted to watch my friends approach the pieces with their hands, but react with their whole bodies, bending to sniff the clay, tilting their heads in focus. My favorite reaction was r0ckc4ndy's to a piece sculpted by Oliver X- "That's DIRTY! I like it."



Only a few of the sculptors couldn't make it to the opening, and all because they were in different states. All of the art was present, save for Spotlight Skullshine's sculpture, which had more than begun to rot, even though it still shone like gold. After the opening, most of the players chose to return to SEE the show (r0ckc4ndy decided she'd rather have the experience without seeing it.), and then were allowed to either take their sculptures with them, gift them to another player, or send them with me to be returned to the amorphous pool of creativity.

Sadly, taking video drained my camera's battery, and I missed some lovely moments, but was forced to take part more, rather than just observing. Videos are forthcoming, as may be commentary from others- my time was nearly as short as my stature.