under The Fruits Tree by Jeong Hwa CHOI.

Two colors used in the national flag.

mother and baby selfie

John Heinz NWR

Hey, if that's how the universe wants to thank me for turning in "Hybrid Ecologies and Relational Ontologies: Toward a Hopeful Environmentalism" a whole week before the presentation, I promise all my future conference papers are going to be on time! Four great egrets and a heron were waiting for me this morning.

Venus Return self portrait for my astrology series. The Venus return occurs once a year. Whereas the Mars Return is about a return to your natal masculine energy, Venus return is about a return to your natal feminine energy. Venus rules over love, art, pleasure, and money.

Venus is at home (in domicile) in two signs — Taurus, which is the “earthly Venusian energy” (what physically feels good and wanting it for the sake of it feeling good, material security & comforts) and Libra, “celestial Venusian energy” (what is aesthetic for the sake of aesthetics & what feels good from a philosophical/more mental & logical perspective). Taurus is a feminine sign (physical), Libra is a masculine sign (mental).

Taurus Venus is kinda like a big comfy fluffy blanket you keep in house to be comfy, and Libra Venus is like a painting that you want in your house to provide aesthetic pleasure. Currently Venus is in Libra, indicating the part of the year where there is a collective shift towards finding relational balance from a logical/philosphical perspective; the symbol for the sign of Libra is the scales, so when a planet is in Libra, it is searching for balance in the area of life that the planet represents.

Anecdote: Every time I’m about to have a Venus transit I’m like “ah, I'm so ready to embrace this fabulous artistic energy, channel it, make something great...” and then the day comes that it goes exact and I’m like “no one, not even myself, can make me do literally anything right now.” Lol. So this is kind of half-assed, but oh well.

Anecdote: I put some lipstick on for this and something about the smell of it sent me into a like...energetic flashback to being seven years old and having this tube of purple glitter gel which I would apply to my forehead before school for reasons unbeknownst to me, and teachers and students were like "why is your forehead glittering" and I was like "I put glitter on it" and they would be like "oh" and I was like "yes." Also at this time I had goldfish and one got knocked up and laid eggs and I was hyped about this but NONE OF THEM HATCHED, AND THEN THEY ATE ALL THE EGGS and now fish tanks give me mad anxiety.

Facebook ♦ Twitter ♦ Pinterest ♦ Instagram ♦ 500px ♦ Website

Little Cloud and three friends are spending the lazy days of summer hanging out in the Allen Lambert Galleria at Brookfield Place. Source: www.bfplto.com/events/349/into-the-clouds-installation/

FriendsWithYou is the fine art collaborative of Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, working collectively since 2002 with the sole purpose of spreading the positive message of Magic, Luck, and Friendship™. Known for immersive installations and interactive artworks, FriendsWithYou invites viewers of their work to reconnect with and reinterpret their lives through communal experiences. The artists work in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, large-scale experiential installations, live performances, and more recently, virtual reality and animation. Incorporating the healing arts, modern rituals, animism, and unified symbols, their works are meant to prompt a wide spectrum of untapped emotions, from playfulness to self-reflection, enabling both personal and shared experiences. FriendsWithYou’s mission is to cultivate moments of spiritual awareness and powerful, joyous interactions.

Forging their own brand of post-pop visual language a la Takashi Murakami, Arturo Herrera and Yayoi Kusama, FriendsWithYou takes a spiritual and serene approach to form and figure. Their reductive and simplified use of geometric abstraction always contains a whimsical touch. Taking Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics to heart and hand, the artists make art of the Post-Internet era. Alongside the body of works of Murakami, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, FriendsWithYou is a new breed of artist, actively generating culture beyond the traditional art boundaries and reshaping the current contemporary art scene. By blurring the dividing line between perceived “high” and low” art, as explained in Murakami’s Superflat essay, FriendsWithYou utilizes other mediums like design and limited edition products from a fine art perspective. Their most important artistic tactic to foster these interpersonal relationships is the use of play. By reinterpreting religious traditions, symbols, and spiritual practices, FriendsWithYou inverts solemn and serious ideas through the act of play to open up a connection to the divine. Many FriendsWithYou works reference toys because they are meant for play, a tool for unstructured free association and interaction. Their sculptures and paintings, inflatables, and objects are meant to trigger the buried, neglected urges and yearnings that a seasoned art viewer may not expect to have activated; playfulness, laughter and inquisitiveness, with an end result of feeling connected. Influenced by the simple happiness found in everyday life, FriendsWithYou’s work is designed to be accessible to all.

Throughout the last fourteen years, FriendsWithYou has gained international recognition as pioneers in the field of experiential art. FriendsWithYou installations are fully immersive experiences that draw audiences into a magical world where the line between imagination and reality is blurred. What started as hand-sewn toy sculptures have grown into much larger than life projects and national and international exhibitions. FriendsWithYou’s work has been exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Basel in Miami Beach; Dallas Contemporary; Galerie Perrotin, Miami; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The High Line, New York; The Indianapolis Museum of Art; Marine Projects, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, and most recently at the Oakland Museum of California.

FriendsWithYou works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, The Goldman Family Collection, Montblanc Collection, amongst others.

FriendsWithYou released their Rizzoli published monograph We Are FriendsWIthYou in May 2014. The book spans their career thus far, and features contributions by musician, producer and longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams; director, filmmaker, and spiritual guru Alejandro Jodorowsky; and Dallas Contemporary executive director Peter Dorshenko.

FriendsWithYou actively works to spread the message of connectivity around the world, with a simple mission to become Friends-With-You.

Source: friendswithyou.com/info/

at the Hangang River Resort

Art in Books, The Book Market of National Theater of Korea

and their shadows in a flat fountain

not in my back yard

behind two chairs

ascending their own path

for skills, motivations, and, above all, emergency

in the impressionistic morning path

endless starting lines

Excerpt from artgalleryofburlington.com

Holding Space is an exhibition of over 1000 ceramic components exploring our multi-faceted relationship with space – both physically and philosophically. Hung from the ceiling, suspended on the wall and standing tall – raw, abstracted forms interact within the installation as an interface between our human and spatial experiences; the relationship between the lived and the abstract or conceptual. Holding Space uses multi-component sculptures to prompt visual explorations of Space as Emptiness; Space as a Conduit for communication; and Space as held Containment.

Excerpt from samanthadickie.com:

Holding Space

A solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Perry Gallery in Ontario, Canada, 2019/2020. The creation of this project was supported by a Visual Arts Grant from the BC Arts Council.

Space is where we live.

We cannot move without space. We cannot breathe without space.

We entangle ourselves with space and the space reshapes us.

Space is what we fill. Space is what we hold. Space is what we leave behind.

We are merged with the spaces around, between and inside of us.

My belief that our humanness is essentially rooted in relational dynamics provides the impetus behind using scale and multiples to create large-scale, multi-component groupings and immersive installations. As this attention to the relational is central to my work, dualities serve as a fulcrum for my practice and allow me to explore particular dyads such as subject/object, seen/unseen, individual/collective, viewer/viewed. Holding Space uses abstraction and expressionism to explore our multi-faceted relationship with space, both physically and philosophically.

This project considers notions of space with 3 assemblages:

STILL POINT

Space as Emptiness. This emptiness can either be experienced as a void, as nothingness, or it can be experienced as unbounded potential; the seed where everything that is new begins. Held in the palm of your hand or inhabiting everything that surrounds, this space holds energy, simultaneously minute and infinite. 1000+ porcelain components define the surface area of 7-foot diameter sphere, dissected in half. Each small component is hung individually with filament from the ceiling, creating a reflective and light buoyancy as the piece undulates in response to movement in the room.

not others

in the Hantangang River of UNESCO Global Geopark, Cheorwon, Korea.