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- Bags
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- Latvian Delicatessen
- Linen Bedding
- Linen Home Textile
- Herbal Tea
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Antiallergical Tea, Dr.Pakalns
Product Code: HTDR001
Availability: In Stock
70 gr
Plants, which people have used historically, reduce allergic and hay fever symptoms - lacrimation, sneezing, sore throat, mouth and throat itching, mucosal edema, allergic rhinitis. Tea promotes allergen elimination from the body; it has antihistaminic and spasmolytic effect.
Tea intake should be started at least 1 month before seasonal allergies, and should be continued throughout the season, if to achieve optimum results.
Preparation: pour 1 cup (200 ml) of boiling water on 1 tablespoon of herb, bring to the boil, cover, allow to infuse for 20 minutes, filter. Take a 1/3 cup of tea 3 times daily before meals.
Ingredients: nettle (Urtica dioica L. ) leaf 21g, burdock [Arctium lappa L., A. minus (Hill) Bernh.] root 14g, sage (Salvia officinalis L.) leaf 10,5g, yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.) 10,5g, peppermint (Mentha x piperita L.) leaf 7g, matricaria (Matricaria recutita L.) flower 7g.
Produced in Latvia by Dr. Pakalns


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Posted by tinbarn on Mar 2, 2014 | 6 comments
While Errin will be taking some time off later this spring to have her baby, as part of the Tin Barn's "sympathetic mat-leave benefit plan", I've decided to spend a month and a half exploring some other, warmer parts of the world. I am always looking to escape the bitter chill of Canadian winters but mostly, I find a change of scenery the best way for me to feel re-inspired and thaw out the creative juices. We thought it might be fun if I occasionally checked in along the way and shared some of my journey on our blog. We hope you also find inspiration in the colours and sights of some of faraway places I'll be visiting.
First stop: Guanajuato, Mexico.
Guanajuato, a gorgeous city in the mountains of central Mexico, is the state capital and full of beautiful colonial architecture. It has a university, the population is diverse and street life is vibrant. There is almost nowhere you can walk that you are not either going up or down, and often VERY steeply.
Of course we spent a LOT time in places like this.
And food and drink was a big part of the agenda.
Samplings from the market… We definitely tried the nopales (cactus) but passed on the little dried fish.
It's no secret that we love animals at the Tin Barn, so hanging in this place where dogs are ever-present was a treat. While the issue of street animals can be troubling in many countries (including back home), here in Guanajuato, there seemed to be a concerted effort by shop owners, residents and a local non-profit organization to care for, spay/neuter and rescue animals in need. I just LOVE having these characters around!
This one, stole. my. heart. If she had not already been snapped up off the streets I may have been looking to buy her a ticket home and hire her on as the next Tin Barn SHOP DOG!
Mexico is all about COLOUR. …and mixing patterns with abandon. I've seen as many as 8 different tiles designs in one bathroom not to mention the colours on the walls. They are BOLD and I'm loving it!
SIDE TRIP: San Miguel de Allende. Now I see why so many people have ended up moving here. It is truly a beautiful city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and, some of the boutiques are pretty awesome. It was a very quick trip… now I wish we had booked more time here.
Gorgeous courtyards, cathedrals and …giant puppets!
And then, this spectacular old apothecary. Of course this is where that suave dog was hanging out.
And on our very last day we discovered what I dubbed Guanajuato's TWIN Barn Market! This was a sweet little shop mixed with a gorgeous restaurant. The owners weren't there at the time but I sensed a kindred spirit.
And then, all too soon we had to pack up and say adios.
Next stop: Bali, Indonesia. Which no doubt will offer up a completely different scene & experience.
I promise to write!
See you again at the end of March!
Hi Vicki and Stephen!
Love your blog! Keep it coming!
Safe travels.
Xo Andrea
Your pics and commentary are very cool. The photographs of the dogs are a very nice touch. Thank you. Have a blast in Bali!
I think you're going to be in Bali at the same time as my son! What a coincidence. Enjoy, and bring back some cool stuff for the Barn! *:) Auni
looks so lovely and sunny, hope you're having an amazing time exploring Vicki!
What an adventure!!! Beautiful shots, makes me wish I was on an exploration like that, for now, I'll just live vicariously through you. Thank-you so much for sharing! xo
Hi All,
Love you pics!
…. and the "Wanderlust" Theme – very german. Dankeschön!

subset: commoncrawl


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Entry requirements
A 2:1 degree or equivalent in politics, economics, history, international relations or similar discipline.
Months of entry
Course content
The MSc in International Political Economy (IPE) offers a multidisciplinary perspective on international economic and power relations, essential to understanding an increasingly globalised world.
The study of international political economy is the study of interactions between markets and politics; the influence of markets on politics and the influence of policy on markets. The core of IPE is international money and international finance, and there is a particular focus on the 2008 financial crisis, its causes and its consequences. Other central topics include international trade and investment, which looks at the drivers of market globalisation and factors which shape the flow of trade and investment, and the international political economy and the environment, specifically, what impedes a genuine agreement on climate change.
You may also be interested in the research stream of this programme, which is designed as a preparation for future research work. You do not need to decide whether you prefer the research stream or the non-research stream of this programme at the time that you apply – you can decide this when you submit your option choices in the Michaelmas term, normally in mid-October.
Qualification and course duration
Course contact details
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- firstname.lastname@example.com
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Your break in Aviemore is almost here!
To help you make the most of your stay, our great hotel guides are packed with all the information you need to know ahead of your stay. Whether you're staying as a couple or a family, download your free tailored guide, and start planning your break.
If there's anything we haven't thought of that you'd like to ask, just give us a call.
See you soon!
The Hilton Coylumbridge Team


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Throughout The Car Industry
Audi Gives a First Look at New E-Tron Crossover Concept
Audi will use the upcoming 2014 North American International Auto Show to showcase a new two-door sports crossover design. It appears to be more of a styling exercise than a production-car preview, but the car does have appeal and versatility, so the future will tell.
The new show car appears to be Audi's own answer to the growing trend in urban small crossover concepts designed to combine reliable street service with sporty off-road capabilities. The 13.78-ft shooting brake-style crossover slides between the A3 and A1 hatchbacks in terms of overall length, well smaller than existing Audi crossovers like the Q5. The lack of rear doors, along with the short overhangs and stocky build, keep size to a minimum.
Audi calls the unnamed show car "a car for all roads and tracks, for everyday driving and sporty recreational use." To convey that sporty-meets-rugged intention, Audi mixes Allroad styling with cues that it says will appear in future sports cars.
"Precise and clearly drawn lines as well as geometric surfaces are combined to create a sculptured, clear design form," Audi explains. "It is almost as if the outer skin of the two-door car has been modeled from a solid piece, from the Singleframe grille and striking side tornado line to the taut, coupé-like rear. The overhangs are short; the roof line is low and it ends in a strong C pillar."
The initial renderings give the image of a swept back body that's lifted on oversized 19-inch wheels. The short overhangs, sloped roof, and tailgate spoiler say something to the effect of "sports car with a set of off-road legs." Helping the latter is a high ground clearance and an aluminum underbody guard that protects the rear and front.
Audi has not revealed any details about the car's powertrain, but the "e-tron" signature on the side tells us to expect an electric or plug-in hybrid powertrain. It looks like a gas door on the hip, so we'll guess hybrid.
Because Audi describes the show car as a continuation of the evolution of design language first used on previous show and concept cars, we don't anticipate production plans. The automaker says that elements like the ribbed grille and air inlets are inspired by e-tron concepts while the dual headlights further the styling presented on the Sport Quattro, which debuted at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September.
NAIAS 2014 opens to the media on January 12.
Photo Gallery (click a thumbnail to enlarge)
Posted In: Auto Shows, Concept Cars, Hybrid / Green
Tags: Audi, crossovers, new cars, SUVs, CUVs, 2014 Detroit Auto Show,
Robert | 8:13AM (Mon, Apr 21, 2014)
Thanks for these information i'm reading your articles without missing and i like this article.
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Essay on Michael Rakowitz and Information Theory
I wrote a short piece for THE SEEN interpreting Michael Rakowitz's practice--on view in the glorious Backstroke of the West survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art--through the lens of information theory.
This was a fun piece to write. It's mostly grounded in an essay called Fundamental Forms of Information by Marcia Bates, which I stumbled across and referenced briefly in my MFA thesis 10+ years ago. I peaked at it again this past fall when I was putting together a syllabus for a graduate theory seminar in the sculpture department at SAIC. My premise was that information theory provides a unique framework for analyzing production of objects, one that opens up different pathways than semiotic or formalist approaches, among others. Each of my students did a presentation applying the terms of the essay to some artist's project or body of work, and it was helpful to work through these ideas with them over the course of the semester. When we did a class visit to the Rakowitz show, it seems especially pertinent.
WARP Residency at The Weaving Mill
I had the opportunity to make work in the WARP Residency he month of September at the wonderful Weaving Mill. It's a real hidden gem in Chicago. Through a series of random events decades ago, Envision Arts Studio ended up with a trove of amazing industrial loom equipment in the back of there space. Emily Winter and Matti Sloan started The Weaving Mill a few years ago to take advantage of this infrastructure working on projects of their own, engage Envision's clients, and operate a residency giving artists access to space and materials (no weaving required).
I spent the month working on collaborative masks with Envision's clients, ending up with these portraits. These images in turn will be incorporated into my ongoing Phenotypes project, which uses a scanner collage process to produce images which are printed out in single edition archival pigment prints.
Documented Dialogues
Documented Dialogues is a project by Matt Mehlan through Chicago Artists Coalition that attempts to use non-traditional/contemporary formats to record conversations between people in the arts. I was excited to be part of the sixth iteration of this, in a conversation with Brett Swinney and Tselanie about our experience conceptualizing, organizing and running the POWER Project at Comfort Station this past June.
The original conversation happened over gmail, but here's a transcript below!
Matt Mehlan <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Aug 7
to Tselanie, jordan, Brett, David
OK let's just get it going on this email thread? That work? I can make the digi version... like:
What is this project and why are you doing it?????
Whoever wants to jump in jump on in..?
Matt Mehlan <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Aug 7
to Tselanie, jordan, Brett, David
Meh - that's the kind of question we're tryna avoid - lemme rephrase so yr not just repeating a press release...
Why now? What are the things you want to see happen inside of this project and in the city, etc?
jordan Martins
Aug 7
to me, Tselanie, Brett, David
This kind of came about initially from a general interest on the Comfort Station side to do a whole month dedicated to politically-engaged work, as well as really handing over the space to some outside group to dictate what that should look like. After the election, it obviously became more focused and one of the first people I reached out to talk about what could be organized was Brett since we'd worked together on smaller scale collaborations at Comfort Station in the past. He told me about the very recently formed ALCN and expressed interest in them being the main collaborator on the project.
We all definitely felt a sense of urgency in terms of needing to launch this month sooner than later--even sooner than the ideas and goals had been fully articulated. We also felt an urgency in terms of the quantity of activity and the variety of people that we pulled into it. We didn't want it to be just a well-organized set of intelligible programming events that were deployed at a manageable pace. We were explicitly talking about what it would look like to do a stupid amount of activity-- as many as 100 "blocks" of programming in 30 days--and what kinds of collaborative structures it takes to even imagine that. Part of this has to do with that feeling of urgency after the election and the need to organize people. But it also had to do with the specific characteristics of Comfort Station as a public space, on city property, that aims to be a porous space in terms of who is invited into the space and who is given the metaphorical keys/microphone. Our feeling was that it was a site that could afford a looser, more organic occupation by various publics, people, organizations, etc, and not just a stage on which to present pre-determined programming to an audience.
Matt Mehlan <email@example.com>
Aug 7
to jordan, Tselanie, Brett, David
Are there techniques yr using to allow for occupation and porousness? How are these ideas coming into play? Or how are you seeing them play out (so far)?
Brett Swinney
Aug 7
to me, jordan, Tselanie, David
As Jordan mentioned, there was a sense of urgency after the November election. As people took to social media with various responses and coping strategies, I felt like I wanted to contribute to something that was not just a cynical response that would get lost in the wave of negativity taking over the web and the world at large. I was concerned about not only losing myself to that wave but also just losing all sensations of hope, which I felt was a larger defeat than the one that happened during the election. Hence why when Jordan reached out, it seemed like a matter a fate and responsibility to develop something to conjure hope rather than reinforce despair.
After the first couple meetings between Jordan and Mary from the Comfort station and Felicia Holman and myself (from the alcn), it became apparent that planning process was just as important as the final product. So we decided to open it up to the wider creative community and hold public meetings, as well use a facebook group, in an effort to make the whole process transparent and accountable to the community. The first public meeting was held at Elastic Arts and was attended by 25-30 people. We made sure to have a loose agenda to make use of everyone's time but also allow space for their voice too. There was also a concerted effort to make sure the core organizers could facilitate the conversation but not control the conversation. Which to be honest was scary because it could turn into an echo chamber for the loudest voices, and from time to time that was the case. But the other times were beautiful examples of communally generative administration. I remember after leaving that first meeting feeling very enthusiastic about the future and probably for the first time since we started the process, felt like we could pull it off. That sensation grew with each following meeting.
jordan Martins
Aug 7
to Brett, me, Tselanie, David
We ended up structuring this in kind of a "cascading" programming mechanism, loosely influenced in part by something I read about how the Sanders campaign organized volunteer events (obviously on a miniscule scale). The basic logic is to hand over a lot of responsibility AND curatorial agency to people at each level of the project. So Comfort Station really wanted the ALCN to be able to own a lot of the vision of what the programming would look like, and they in turn invited four programming leaders to be responsible for each of the four weeks-- the idea being that the programming leaders would recruit their own cohort to put together a plan and execute their week, also pulling from an open submission form. Given the timeframe and scale of the project, a lot of this ended up being loose and fast, but I do think this kind of structure allowed a broad proliferation of programming that Comfort Station alone could never have pulled off, and necessarily meant that the curatorial agency allows flowed to the person or group that was occupying the space.
Brett Swinney
Aug 7
to jordan, me, Tselanie, David
Agreed, the cascade programming mechanism allowed for agency to exist on multiple levels of execution from having it at the core (Jordan, Mary, Felicia, and myself) to the team leaders (Nina Yeboah, Tattiana Howard, Matt Robinson, and Tselanie Townsend), to the people that they decided to include within the cohort from planners to facilitators; everyone had the opportunity to contribute to the overall vision. This apparatus really allowed for an open dialogue that pushed the aspirations of the project forward. It also added an experimental component to the whole process. While there was an infrastructure that could support the technical aspects of the programming; AV needs, promotion/marketing, and general logistics. Having the conceptual parameters open to interpretation by the leaders and their teams created a wide range of programming that was able to attract a broader audience to the overall project. This was evident in the assortment of programs which included Spanish story time for children, an artists statement workshop, urban hikes, intersectional zine library, prevention education from Rape Victim Advocates, and much much more. Throughout the month, I would swing by to check in and instantly became immersed in a topic or activity that I would normally not have the ability to engage. Which why I think having a 'cascade programming mechanism' was essential in tackling the scale and scope of the programming. And I feel like the experiment was quite successful in the sense it was able to withstand the extent of the task of programming for a month while allowing for a wide variety of people, with various skills and experiences, to come together in a mutually beneficial collaboration.
Matt Mehlan <firstname.lastname@example.com>
Aug 8
to Brett, jordan, Tselanie, David
How does this kind of programming procedure relate to ALCN - can U speak to what ALCN is and how it started? - and how you see this experimentation and extended/extending (in terms of inclusion in organizing) personnel, fitting into ALCN's vision of being "recognized as tastemakers on the cutting edge of cultural production" with/within "Chicago's marginalized art world(s)"?
I guess what I'm getting at is - the "cascade programming mechanism" here, or other processes that bring many voices into a project via programs & programming, can be hard to describe to a world expecting singular visions and/or trad structural/organizational/marketing-speak... SO how has the programming thus far explained itself (to you, to others) or how would you describe it as achieving ALCN's stated goals (which I scoped from yr FB page)?
Brett Swinney
Aug 8
to me, jordan, Tselanie, David
So the ALCN was in response to my experiences getting a master in arts administration at SAIC. During that period of time, I was always able to connect with my peers on a personal level yet when it came to working within the institution there appeared barriers that shaped my experiences working in the arts. Barriers like coded language, microaggressions, and other manners of control that lead to me feeling isolated and invisible when it came to working within the art world. While I don't think it was deliberate or personal, rather a product of systemic ignorance, it became clear to me that I needed to make a deliberate effort to address it. So I reached out to a few other people, who I shared my concerns with, and we decided to meet up over drinks and share our experiences with the hope to find solidarity and share insights on how to survive working in the arts. Admittedly it was a powerfully cathartic experience and after a few more informal gatherings it became apparent that the group should become a network with the intention of building capacity and creating opportunities for production.
There were a lot of discussions on what would serve as the foundation for the ALCN, which values needed to be present at every juncture. Aside from providing a safe place for art leaders of color to share their ideas, insights, and inspirations; I felt it was essential that the promotion of 'agency' had to be integrated within the core nature of the ALCN. When considering the barriers that myself, and other like me, faced within the arts and how that resulted in an overall sense of isolation then they only way to counteract that effect was to promote the value of 'agency'. That everyone should have a voice with the ALCN, both during conversations over drinks to planning sessions for future projects.
So when you apply that how the POWER project was produced, we decided to build that into the process. After Jordan, Mary, Felicia and myself worked out what the structure was, then I recruited team leaders to plan each week. We gave them the basic idea of the theme, what resources they had available, and what we hoped to accomplish. The people who were selected as the team leaders came from various backgrounds and skill levels and approached the project differently. It was a very exciting experience to have an idea, and then give it over to someone to interpret and know that whatever they came up with would expand the conversation by nature of their own personal agency. As a producer/organizer I know how I would approach the development of programs, so to see how other producers approach that process, based on similar concepts, was quite thrilling. And ultimately was aligned with the values of the ALCN of promoting agency, building capacity, and creating opportunities for production for creatives of color.
Matt Mehlan <email@example.com>
Aug 9
to Brett, jordan, Tselanie, David
Man! Institutional VIBES are real. Can U talk a little about what those barriers are/were AND/OR how they manifested? I've been thinking personally about "professionalism" and it's relationship to power and corporate management thinking and potential for things like lack of transparency and, as you mention, the coding of language - how these things are often used as power moves - and if you aren't familiar, like you didn't grow up or we're not a part of a certain kind of social or educational or "professional" culture... it can be alienating at best, and surely potentially discriminatory & exploitative at worst... I'm curious how you and the other key players in the ALCN have experienced what you are speaking to. Can you talk more specifically?
In the end maybe we're talking about an "art world" that has a very particular economic premise at its core, all the way on up from galleries to the major institutions - how does a space like Comfort Station, the POWER Project, a network like ALCN - confront that, in hoping to effect change in Chicago's art scene - or do they?
Is this a different culture of producing or organizing (art), that you are searching for? Does this culture have the same economic system or set of values?
Jordan - does Comfort Station sell the art it curates? Im curious about how we all navigate inclusion and aesthetics and community vs neighborhood etc etc...
Matt Mehlan <email@example.com>
Aug 10
to Tselanie
Tselanie! Can you talk about what you programmed? What kinds of events? What response was like? Who came and who didn't but you wish they had?
Brett Swinney
Aug 10
to Tselanie, jordan, me, David
Totally Tselanie, you should jump in and write about your experiences planning and programming.
Brett Swinney
Aug 10
to me, jordan, David, Tselanie
Ok, I had my rant pants on when I was writing this, so let me know if there needs to be any clarification, and feel free to edit out any crazy over the top talk. I'll be on email all day to about 7pm
Well, I've been working in the arts in some capacity for the last 20 years and when I was working as an artist, there was always 'By any means necessary' approach to getting things done. This was generally in response to either a lack of skills or a lack of resources but there was that drive to see things to completion. As I started to work more in producing/organizing that mentality was useful in pulling off the some of my earlier projects. Being able to produce things with no budget and generally, a group of volunteers with limited availability meant that I had to get creative when it came to planning and execution. At some point, I felt it was necessary to develop new skills and broaden my network which lead to me apply to graduate school at SAAIC for art administration. As I mentioned before it was a truly transformative experience and upon completion, I was able to jump into some exciting projects and work with some amazing people.
However, while I was there I became fascinated with the concept of 'professionalism' in arts. On the surface, it seemed to be an important service that was offered to artists to help sustain their creative practice, which is important when it comes to planning and proposing, budgeting, promotion, etc . . . Though in other regards it appeared to be used as a litmus in determining what was art and what was a craft, hobby, outsider, etc . . So under the guise of professionalism, if you don't talk / write in a specific way or associate with other professional aspects then more often than not your options are limited. And if professionalism in the arts is deemed by participating in academia in the arts then that creates another barrier to finding sustainability in the arts. Given the high price and commitment to attending school, it's difficult for some people to rationalize to take that step. While I knew I could not afford to go to grad school, I decided to take on the financial burden because I was in a place that could take on the risk. However, there are many people not in that place, which results with them being left on the margins. Sure there are opportunities out there for artists / admins without degrees but the way the system is set up, those are few and far between. And to add another layer is considering the admissions policies of academic institutions when it comes to diversity, then that creates an environment where if you can't afford the price and you can't afford the time commitment, and because of whatever factor you're not the 'type' of person they are looking for, then honestly you're SOL. So going back to the idea of professionalism in the arts serving as a gatekeeper to what is fine art? It becomes apparent that you need thumb print than just a key.
Which brings me back to the ALCN and the Power Project, the ALCN is all about access and agency. It's about bringing art leaders of color getting together in an effort to provide support but also to broaden the aspects of 'professionalism in the arts' to be more inclusive to people from different backgrounds. Granted people that are apart of the ALCN have degrees, have attended residencies, and work for art organizations but unfortunately, that isn't enough. But with collaborations like the POWER project, the ALCN is able to provide that structure of support to people that are part of the network and provide them the platform to develop their practice and widen their impact. From the beginning of the planning process, Jordan and I talked about how for the month of June we wanted to transform the Comfort Station into an 'empowerment hub' where people can drop in and gain skills, share insights, and expand their community. And by it being any empowerment hub, we intended to democratize the process of production which allowed for the inclusion of people from the 'professional arts' background and people who developed their practice outside of the institution in order to present something for the people and by the people. And since the beginning that was the case for everyone involved including the core team, team leaders, program facilitators, and the greater community. And don't get me wrong, there were things that were challenging about the experience, but we learned our lessons and we are better because of that. Nonetheless, The POWER project is an acronym for Preparation, Organization, Wonderment, Empowerment, and Resistance, and whether you consider yourself a leader or not those concepts are essential for surviving this day and age. If you're audacious enough to consider yourself an artist then I believe those concepts are important to building and sustaining a creative community. And thanks to the opportunity provided by the Comfort Station, and all of the hard work of the team leaders and program facilitators, we are continuing to broaden our community and consolidating our power.
Tselanie Townsend
Aug 10
to Brett, jordan, me, David
Will do! Can't write until this evening tho because work is always bonkers.
Sent from my thingamajig
Matt Mehlan <email@example.com>
Aug 11
to Tselanie, Brett, jordan, David
OK - I'ma let this wait - I had to get the e-blast out this AM and it was too difficult to rush an edit for the site.
If Tselanie and Jordan are able to chime in a bit this weekend / next week, that'd be wonderful. I'll get something going and send your way in the meantime.
Thanks everyone!
Tselanie Townsend
Aug 13
to me, Brett, jordan, David
Matt asked:
Tselanie! Can you talk about what you programmed? What kinds of events? What response was like? Who came and who didn't but you wish they had?
Thanks Matt,
I'll try to keep this brief. I would like to preface my answer by letting you know that I have no experience with programming or curating. My background is as a musician who works for an architecture firm and moonlights for a couple of non-profits doing graphic design and organizing logistics.
I put together a programming team composed of
Sarah Dodson who is the founder of MAKE Literary Magazine and the Lit and Luz Festival
Fred Sasaki, an artist and curator who works at the Poetry Foundation
Alyssa Martinez, an artist and musician who works with At Pluto.
We decided to focus our week of programming on the Logan Square community, the Hispanic community, people with young children and child caregivers. We decided to create "rock blocks" of programming with programming geared towards children and parents in the am and everything else in the pm.
A few examples of the programming we put together:
Poet Daniel Borzutzky and translator Rachel Galvin read children books in Spanish and English
RVA (Rape Victims Advocates moderated a discussion with children ages 5-12 about consent
Video artist Selina Trepp created an animation entitled Animations to Keep Us Strong and Sane which was projected on the outside wall of the building
Author Gerardo Cárdenas conducted a lecture on historical and contemporary Mexican Literature
Lou Bank of the non-profit S.A.C.R.E.D. let a tutorial on mezcal
Lakshmi Ramgopal composed a sound installation called Maalai with an interactive shrine using images of her and her mother and traditional Hindu imagery
Sam Lewis brought his marionettes for a puppet show for kids and adults
aaaaaaaaaand so much more....
Attendance during the morning programming wasn't high but the response was great! I wish I had more time for marketing - it would have been great to get more neighborhood folks and children during the day.
The evening programming was well attended - there was a lot of interest in the lectures.
I was fortunate enough for my week of programming to coincide with the Logan Square Arts Festival so we had a lot of foot traffic from the festival for the weekend programming, which was great exposure for the events.
jordan Martins
Aug 13
to me, Tselanie, Brett, David
thanks for keeping this going Matt, here's some more thoughts in response to the above...
re: "does Comfort Station sell the art it curates? Im curious about how we all navigate inclusion and aesthetics and community vs neighborhood etc etc..."
we don't exclude sales as part of our exhibition programming, but it's not a factor in who shows or what they show (all exhibitions are programmed through an open submission process). But I also think complicating the "economic premise" at the core of the art world takes more than just questioning what objects get sold, where, and to whom. Part of it for us, again, is our identity as a public space that centers around free events. But I think it needs to go beyond that too. One big thing in the background of this project is Chicago's original sin, segregation, and thinking about how that extends to the art world. Segregation isn't just a product of racist thoughts, it has been mobilized by public policy and economic machinations of banks and corporations. And as Brett speaks to, it permeates the art world as well, as much as we want to conceive of the art world as a space of liberation. Part of why we wanted to partner with the ALCN is because there are very few black people in Logan Square. So if we only respond to our local demographics, we are further galvanizing the patterns of segregation that exist across the city. Inviting/asking an organization of black arts leaders to lead a month of programming in our space isn't just about "offering" this as an opportunity to them or "giving them agency", it's asking for a favor to help us de-colonize this piece of property in the middle of a gentrifying neighborhood on the northside of Chicago. Or at the very least it's a gesture toward that possibility.
One thought I've been wrestling with, and have spoken about with Brett and Felicia, is this question of "when are you offering an opportunity to someone, and when are you just asking for a favor?". So Comfort Station on one hand is "offering" our space and programming calendar to others to take over, but is that really an opportunity or are we really saying, "will you do us the favor of programming a shit load of things in our space in one month for essentially no money"? Even in a somewhat utopian art context where we conceive of our labor as freely given or traded, there are all kinds of assumptions about what someone's time and creativity are worth. Let alone what kinds of privileges are in the background of someone's ability to do something for free. So the question is, what kinds of exchanges are fair? We tried to collectively figure out a strategy for allocating a base amount of actual money to programming leaders and people running particular events, but we also had to rely on other understandings of what values were being mobilized at the different levels of this project. Some of that is just the nuts and bolts of arts organizing that Comfort Station and the ALCN carried out, allocating volunteers, promoting events, documentation, sending out press releases, etc. But I also think giving someone autonomy has a certain value, and Brett and I talked a lot about how to logistically support the programming that each week's leader was putting together but not micro-managing it. I've been thinking a lot about just the basic hospitality of collaboration, and how if you tell someone "do whatever you want" you should avoid saying "oh, but don't do that".
Brett Swinney is a curator, organizer, producer, videographer, photographer, web developer, podcast producer and musician. He is the co-founder of the Art Leaders of Color Network and AnySquared Projects and serves as the Production Director for Links Hall, Project Manager for Cream Co. Art Collective and Volunteer Coordinator for the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. As the first public programming of the ALCN, Brett co-produced the P.O.W.E.R. Project at Comfort Station and P.E.E.P. at Reunion Chicago. He also co-produced The Instigation Festival in Chicago and New Orleans and the premiere of Mike Reed's Flesh & Bone at the Art Institute. He was a 2016 Hatch Curatorial Resident at Chicago Artist Coalition. Projects he produced through Anysquared include the "Cinema Minima Film Residency," "Post Post Post Modernism," and a variety of other gallery shows, screenings, and community art events for the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival – named 2012 Best Public Art Event by the Chicago Reader. Brett has received awards from the Propeller Fund, SAIC Enrichment Fund, and Awesome Foundation. Previously, Brett was the Program Manager for Chicago Artists Resource, a Teaching Artist in Film for Scenarios USA, and a commercial photographer. Brett received his M.A. in Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and a B.A. in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2004.
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, educator, and musician. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil in 2007 and has been an instructor at North Park University since 2008. He co-founded the Comfort Music series at Comfort Station in 2011 and has served as Executive Director of Comfort Station since 2015. Martins's visual work is based in collage processes, including mixed media two dimensional work, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. He is co-director of the Perto da Lá, a biennial multidisplinary art event with international artists in Salvador, Brazil. From 2014 to 2016 he served on the programming committee for the Chicago Jazz Festival. He was a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition's HATCH program in 2013, a mentor for their LAUNCH program in 2016 and 2017, and currently serves on their Educational Advisory Panel. In additional to his involvement with the exhibition programming at Comfort Station, he curates the visual art program at Elastic Arts.
Tselanie Townsend is an illustrator and musician. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia College, Chicago in Film and Video Editing and Studio Art. When she's not working at her day job with Studio Gang Architects, Tselanie is the Print and Digital Content Director at the arts nonprofit Homeroom and volunteers for MAKE Literary Magazine's biannual Lit & Luz Festival. She writes a comic called ALMA and produces music under the same name. She lives in Logan Square, Chicago.
Angela, ferry to Morro de São Paulo, December 2015
Holga, Kodak Portra 400
prompts for musical performance on 8/6/17
sound collage
Something surprising and kind of magical happened this past Sunday during a musical performance in conjunction with my installation on the lawn of Comfort Station. I had invited Katherine Young, Ryan Packard and Ben LaMar to improvise with the surrounding sounds based on some loose prompts provided by myself. When we set up the surrounding sounds included a large event across the street featuring rap battles, break-dancing competitions, and much more (for Chicagoans not familiar with the annual #writersbench event put on by Barry Allen and others... it's pretty incredible). The volume of the event seemed at first to be too loud for us to carry out this performance of discrete sounds, but the musicians graciously decided to give it a shot.
It was truly a unique sonic experience hearing the ambient bed of sound they created wrap around the beats and voices bleeding over from across the street. Part of my intention for this performance was to explore a notion of live sound collage, and the Writer's Bench event provided a whole lot of fodder for the musicians to juxtapose and play with. At times the two sonic zones operated separately, at other times they melded into one large, strange audio-organism that provided a very surreal soundtrack to everything happening--cars and people zipping by, wind blowing in the cicada-filled trees, the sun setting, dogs pooping...
Thank you to all who made it out for this event, and special thanks to Ben, Katie, and Ryan for their skills at sonic transmutation!
Differences in Permeability
Text Divination #3: Differences in Permeability
July 28th (Friday), 8pm, Comfort Station Lawn
"Differences in Permeability (Text Divination #3)" is a reading-performance, in conjunction with Jordan Martins' site specific installation "Stay out come in stay in come out" on the lawn of Comfort Station. Three readers situated within the installation will simultaneously read a set of related scripts, each of which scrambles various appropriated textual sources: technical descriptions of biochemical processes, first hand accounts of border crossing, observations about bird mating rituals, instructions for crowd control tactics, and dubious advice about flirtation from askmen.com.
Text composition and reading staging by Jordan Martins
Allen Moore
Tracy Montes
Rebecca Himelstein
More about the Text Divinations series:
More about "Stay out come in stay in come out"...
"stay out come in stay in come out"(cloaking device #2) is a site specific, participatory installation. Installed on the lawn of Comfort Station in Logan Square for two months, the project consists of 6 barricade structures with a striped "dazzle" camouflage pattern based on the colors of the immediate surroundings of the Logan Square traffic circle. The patterns are designed to both attract attention and at the same time visually obfuscate the form of whatever or whomever is behind them. The barricades are constructed in a modular fashion to allow different configurations--a wall, a shelter, a fortress, a scattered cluster--with a bench built into the anterior side of each.
The barricade structure was chosen for its function as a barrier that is both firm but permeable: it marks a line between inside/outside, allowed/not-allowed, and public/private, but it functions differently according to who is implicitly or explicitly granted access to one side or the other. By making this installation re-configurable, various publics are encouraged to create their own spaces with it, or imagine how a structure that limits movement could be a space that is protective, inviting, or empowering."
Stay out come in stay in come out: sound performance with Katherine Young, Ben Lamar Gay and Ryan Packard
August 6th (Sunday), 6:30pm
In conjunction with Jordan Martins' site specific installation "Stay out come in stay in come out" on the lawn of Comfort Station, Chicago improvisers Ryan Packard, Katherine Young and Ben Lamar Gay will perform a sonic response to the installation. Based on loose cues and guides provided by the artist, Young, Packard and Lamar Gay will improvise sounds reacting both to one another and surrounding ambient noise.
About "Stay out come in stay in come out"...
"stay out come in stay in come out"(cloaking device #2) is a site specific, participatory installation. Installed on the lawn of Comfort Station in Logan Square for two months, the project consists of 6 barricade structures with a striped "dazzle" camouflage pattern based on the colors of the immediate surroundings of the Logan Square traffic circle. The patterns are designed to both attract attention and at the same time visually obfuscate the form of whatever or whomever is behind them. The barricades are constructed in a modular fashion to allow different configurations--a wall, a shelter, a fortress, a scattered cluster--with a bench built into the anterior side of each.
The barricade structure was chosen for its function as a barrier that is both firm but permeable: it marks a line between inside/outside, allowed/not-allowed, and public/private, but it functions differently according to who is implicitly or explicitly granted access to one side or the other. By making this installation re-configurable, various publics are encouraged to create their own spaces with it, or imagine how a structure that limits movement could be a space that is protective, inviting, or empowering."
Bad at Sports interview
Thanks to Bad at Sports for interviewing Nina Yeboah, Felicia Holman and myself about the POWER Project at Comfort Station!
The POWER Project
I'm extremely proud of the programming coming together for The POWER Project this June at Comfort Station. We're partnering with the Art Leaders of Color Network (ALCN)--led by Felicia Holman and Brett Swinney--to produce daily events for the entirety of June. Brett and Felicia selected four members of the ALCN to take one week of the programming each, with the goal of having a variety of events that in some way provide Preparation, Organization, Wonderment, Empowerment, and Resistance.
This project is also emblematic of the kind of collaborative programming that I'm trying to establish at Comfort Station, where an outside organization or group is given full ownership and vision for the space and the Comfort Station team acts as facilitators to connect all the dots of the production.
Loudon Still Life (after Willem Van Aelst)
How easy is a bush a bear? Interview with Makenzi Fricker
In advance of my video exhibition at The Mission's "SUB-MISSION" project space, Makenzi Fricker interviewed me about the work in the show…
Interview with Jordan Martins
How Easy is a Bush a Bear
March 11 – April 23, 2016
By Makenzi Fricker
MF: Although your work isn't process-oriented, the creation of your videos is nonetheless very involved. Can you describe that process?
JM: My work with video the past few years has mostly been experimental, in the sense that I've been trying out different ideas without necessarily having a particular final piece in mind. This project at THE SUB-MISSION is one of my first attempts at sifting through all the various experiments to channel them into a specific experience. The clips that comprise this video installation are all dealing with principles identified by gestalt psychologists, camoufleurs, and other visual researchers that hone in on the peculiar ways in which the human brain is wired to process visual information. Techniques of unit-forming, unit-breaking, disruptive coloration, figure/ground blending, coincident disruption and others, are used in both a controlled studio environment and site-specific installations in natural settings. While these videos are not specifically demonstrative of any single principle, each combines various techniques that engage vision in a different way. I staged these videos both in studio and "in nature".
Most of the studio based footage is essentially an installation of planes of fabric suspended a few inches apart, cut into in various ways and lit evenly to minimize the depth. I used mostly "loud" fabric patterns that contradict one another or otherwise create a kind of visual collapse. But I also tried to make these read as landscapes in some way. I carried out a similar process with printouts of scanner based collages I made, again cutting into them and moving them around to imply different kinds of depths and figure/ground relationships. I also shot footage in the woods in Wisconsin (summer) and Tennessee (winter), creating installations of bright colored flagging tape. These were more about overlaying a bold, geometric abstraction onto a natural landscape that was still integrated into it, as it both disrupts the landscape and completes it. I'm still figuring out why I'm doing these, but I'm partly curious about how the bright lines might erase the depth of the landscape, or perhaps how they impose a different visual framework onto it?
MF: In what contexts do the objects that comprise your collages usually appear?
JM: I often use source material whose everyday function is visually bold and conspicuous in a certain way, either in its color or pattern. I've been playing with neon flagging tape, the kind used to mark off areas for construction, surveying, or to highlight a point in an otherwise undifferentiated landscape. Its function is extremely condensed down to simply "standing out" visually. Moreover, it seems to occupy an intersection of the optical dimensions of color and a particular cultural semiotic coding: hue and saturation are chosen for their efficient means of being visibly distinct, but their use evokes a kind of official activity (surveying, construction, civic projects). Flagging tape hues aren't assigned particular meanings the way red and green traffic lights are, for instance, yet they still assert themselves onto a context as a wholly "other" element, a colorful punctuation that resists integrating. The chromatic "otherness" of flagging tape can be so intense that it appears almost as a virtual set of lines superimposed over a visual field, rather than existing within space. The fabric patterns I use tend to be bold, but they include more "traditional" ones as well as pretty kitschy ones. I try to be fairly democratic in how I choose them, focusing more on their possible visual effects than their particular aesthetics. In the scanner collages I've been making recently (which mostly becomes source material for other collages and videos) I'm pulling from a lot of different sources, but I'm been particularly interested in football uniforms, tradition dress from Papua New Guinea, and nature photography.
MF: How do you decide how to compile objects? Is it meticulously planned or do you rely on subconscious, surrealist automatic methods?
JM: It's basically an ongoing improvisation. There's an overarching methodology to it for sure one that feeds insight from one experiment into the next but in each moment I'm just trying to be sensitive to the materials and conditions in a way that can tease out some new possibilities.
MF: For you, what is the relationship between collage and film?
JM: I'm not a film expert by any means, but from what I understand one of the biggest breakthroughs in the medium was Eisenstein's radical use of montage: cutting and juxtaposing between disparate elements. That's essentially an act of collage, cutting something to bring it closer to something else. This is a basic tool of even the most banal film now, so it's fair to draw a direct connection between these two media. And I think it's not accident that a lot of breakthroughs like this were happening in around the same time period the development of camouflage, modern film techniques, collage…
MF: Do you think that the act of filming neuters the materiality of your collaged objects?
JM: I might not use the word "neuter", but I think it visually flattens and re-contextualizes the physical space of the objects. That's an important effect for me, because it means that a viewer is less able to orient themselves in terms of scale, distance, figure/ground relationships, etc. But the goal is that this leads to some kind of reconstituted physicality or spatiality in the viewing.
MF: Gestalt theory, a subject concerned with psychology and visual perception, posits that the mind is predisposed to create order out of chaos. How do you apply this theory to your work?
JM: In many ways I'm trying to create visual fields that straddle that line between order and chaos. In both my 2D collages and my video pieces I'm trying to provide enough visual structure to "hook" a viewer while also leaving the composition unresolved or undifferentiated basically leaving enough space for their own perceptual instincts to give form to it. I'm also interested in the difference between passive and active perception for example, walking through the woods with no goal versus walking through the woods looking for something (foraging for mushrooms, for instance). When you're looking for something discreet within a complicated visual field it's not so much a matter of scanning every square inch of the landscape as it is relaxing your vision to sense small aberrations. Early Gestalt psychologists like Kurt Gottschaldt created visual puzzles with "embedded figures", essentially camouflaging a simple abstract form within a more complex one, that require the viewer to shift their vision in order "solve" the puzzle. My video installation aims at a similar effect without having a specific solution to the puzzle.
MF: Are you, as in gestalt theory, more concerned with the sum of your videos/collages than the individual elements?
JM: That's an interesting connection, and actually pretty accurate. I do think that all of my individual projects are pointing at something in common that isn't completely intelligible in any one of them. And I tend to let things spill into one another: most of the work I make has elements that get folded into one another in different ways. So if you look at a set of recent collage works you'll see specific forms repeated because I've generated a certain image and then sampled it across several individual pieces. I like the idea that someone could notice the pattern of that specific motif popping up in different contexts. Similarly, when I make videos it's hard for me to create a hard endpoint it's highly likely that the footage used in this particular installation will get reworked into other ones.
MF: How do you think earning your MFA in Brazil distinguishes your practice from those of artists trained in the United States?
JM: Good question! Working on an MFA in Brazil probably influenced my practice in innumerable ways that I'm not fully conscious of, but at the time a big part of the impetus to do it was immersing myself in a different language and artistic community. For one, having to learn a new language loosens certain connections in your brain and forms new ones, and I just felt that it would be an inherently fruitful context to try to make work in, purposefully disorienting myself in order to dislodge other pathways my practice could take. Much of my work there also revolved around just the experience of navigating a foreign city and culture literally the experience of figuring out the logic of the urban space or where to buy certain materials. Things operate differently and that challenged me to find new ways of making work. And, as much there is more and more a certain global "contemporary art" world, there really are discrete pockets of artistic communities out there that don't reflect the same trends, aesthetics and presuppositions that one would find in programs in the US, so immersing myself in a different creative landscape helped me scrutinize my a work in a particular way.
MF: Is there a specific reference in the title, "How Easy is a Bush a Bear"?
JM: I lifted the title from a chapter of Roy R. Behren's book "False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage". Behren, in turn, was riffing on a passage from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" where a character is referencing the paranoid imagination that takes over when you see something in the dark. It's about the mutability of vision, how our own perception can trick us into seeing something that is not there, essentially a hallucination.
MF: How do you plan to transform THE SUB-MISSION space, and how do you see this project fitting into the narrative of your work as a whole?
JM: How Easy is a Bush a Bear is a two channel video installation dealing with conditions of visual perception. I want to create a space where a viewer can in fact question and recalibrate their perceptual faculties to a certain extent not only recognizing patterns and visual tensions, but also noticing how and when these patterns and tensions emerge. I'm loosely inspired by two precedents that treated vision didactically: Abbott Thayer's early 20th century research into animal coloration which pretty much invented modern camouflage and early Soviet era "psychotechnics" labs that trained citizens to free themselves from "automatic perception" by demonstrating illusions of space, angles, and volume. Thayer used a simple stencil structure to show how patterns of animals corresponded to their natural environments, and psychotechnics labs were essentially rigorously constructed visual playgrounds that highlighted specific distortions. So, part of my idea for this installation is to take on that hypothetical model where vision is a trainable activity, and the exhibition space becomes the site for that.
My work in general has shifted more and more toward this interest in the dynamics of vision. I've worked with various collage methods for years, and I think there's a natural link there. The act of collage not only creates a certain effect in the final piece, but it also cultivates a certain way of seeing, noticing the ruptures that occur when something is removed from its context; the reactions that arise when it is grafted onto another system; how the "edges" of these interactions engender different results if they are smoothly cut or jaggedly torn, seamlessly integrated or bluntly repelling each other.
Interview with Inside/Within
As a big fan of this site and the artists that it has profiled in the past few years, I was flattered to be included in this round! See the full interview (with their beautiful pictures) here.
Jordan Martin's Mutating Phenotypes
Layers permeate each aspect of Jordan's practice, collages produced in resin, flatbed scans, and on video. Currently producing work created on flatbed scanners, Jordan prints, cuts, and layers back in elements that include photographs, paint, and imagery from books. Moving these pieces around on the scanner, he attempts to finds the perfect composition, often reworking original source material until the audience is unable to tell which elements are scanned, photographed or painted.
Published February, 2016
I\W: How has your practice evolved from collage-based works in resin to distorted flatbed scans?
JM: Part of it is just the expedient factor of being able to generate my own collage content. For a long time I really liked the mining of books and other texts. I enjoyed having to hunt for each specific piece, but that allure kind of wore off and left me with the problem that once you spend that piece, you will never get it back. It can be cumbersome to always get new material. The texts that I could previously manipulate were all old, and for a while I really liked that. There is just a certain point with any collage work where you have to decide if the pastness of the source material is something you want to own, or is something that is just automatic. With the flatbed scanner I can take several images and experiment with arrangements and then make as many copies of it as I want. I can go to the library at North Park where I teach and get new books that I couldn't normally alter and scan them into collages. I think working with the flatbed scanner began in a very practical manner, and it evolved into a different way of working that has now allowed an infinite reproducibility.
Why do you refer to these works as phenotypes?
A phenotype is a genetic form that has certain types of properties that have infinite variations. Digital media is a phenotype in that sense. I was thinking about how these same pieces of collage that are just moved differently are part of the same phenotype that I could theoretically makes hundreds of expressions from. So unlike previous bodies of work, these scanner-based pieces took on different implications because I could take one set of visual fragments and show them mutating slightly with each scan. Each one is related to the other, while being completely unique at the same time.
What source material besides books are you using to layer within your scans?
There are new books and then also older printouts. I will take past printouts I've made of other scanned collages and I will paint on them, cut them out, and put them back on the scanner with new material. Certain works have third or fourth generation pieces in them. There are also printouts I've made of photographs. I really like that sometimes you can't tell the difference between what is collage and what is a photograph of a collage. I also integrate photographs of my computer monitor. At one point I wanted more imagery of football uniforms and realized I could just Google search images of them. I will Google a specific topic, expand the screen, then photograph them. The images have a grain which I can drag and distort on the scanner and add new textures.
It seems like you are then contrasting the digital from the physical, placing fabricated paint strokes alongside actual paint.
Exactly. I like the idea that something completely virtual can look really physical, and vice versa. Sometimes some of the physical qualities of the collage start to have a similar effect. I am using the same techniques of collaging in both ways of my working, where the physical collages are suspended in resin instead of being put on a scanner. I am trying to leverage similar visual effects by completely different techniques.
Does the physical layering of your collages relate to free improv music?
There is a certain thing in free improv music that I like which is this immediate success or failure. When there is a free improvising ensemble it is essentially a collaborative collage of sound. When I make collage I get to make my own decisions with what looks good where and what works well. With a group, when you make a choice, someone might read that differently and respond to it in a way that can lead to interesting results or complete meltdowns. I definitely have the later in my personal work. Most of my work goes through that stage. I try to treat them like ecosystems that develop and reach some sort of threshold where they will either get channeled into some final form that works, or I will push it too far and it will have a meltdown like Chernobyl.
How do your collage and resin coated pieces serve different pleasure points in your practice from the digitally composed works?
That's getting right to the point with my resin pieces. When I first started making the scanner collages, I was really excited and really depressed at the same time. I very quickly had some effects that I was really into, and then I realized it was accomplishing what the work I was doing before had achieved but with 5 percent of the effort and investment. It makes these works seem almost futile. I am a little more at peace with it now because I think the physical works are now doing something the others can't, and I am also realizing that they are more of a visual training ground. I don't want to say that these are practice, but a way to cultivate ways of seeing. Part of the reason that I feel the scanner pieces have been so easy and quick is because I had spent hours, days, months, years on these. I don't want to relegate these to drafts, but I did realize the importance of these for me is about a place to develop strategies that get deployed in videos or other works.
How do you incorporate video into your practice?
I dabble in music videos, but then I also have an upcoming exhibition at the SUB-MISSION that will be a video. In the piece I will be creating a 3D collage stencil out of videos. I am going to build a false wall in front of the back wall of the gallery which I will cut a hole in. I am going to have a projection inside the piece as well. It is going to be a trippy piece that is again made from layers. Part of the idea is the exploration of the physical distance. Will it be perceptible when you walk in? Will it collapse? Or will the back projection come forward in space? It will definitely get psychedelic. Part of the reference point is of a certain history of visual didactics. Abbott Thayer was this late 19th century painter who basically invented camouflage and he made these stencil demonstration kits where he would cut out the shape of a duck and put it in front of a field to show how the field's natural pattern immediately looked like a duck's coloring once the outline was imposed on it. To a certain extent there was this act of collage already at the beginning of the invention of camouflage. The other reference point I am thinking about is this moment right after the Bolshevik Revolution there were these avant garde artists doing this thing called psychotechnics. The premise was that the proletariat needed to be liberated from their automatic vision, so they made these laboratories for citizens to come in view these visual didactic space installations and come out cured of bourgeois vision. I am very lightly suggesting that this space is going to be similar, but with no goal. It's more based around if a can viewer recalibrate their own senses to the video installation.
I love your reference with your work title Ghost Nets. Can you explain your thought process for relating this idea to your works?
I think it is a really interesting metaphor for collage because you have this assemblage of lost or obsolete nets, which are these capturing devices that have something textual about them too. The idea that they have a life after their function is extraordinary. They can form these complex ecosystems that allow for marine life to grow on them and fish to eat out of them. I feel like images are texts that we eliminate a lingering sense of a narrative or ideology from. The idea that they can still nurture you or insnare you is interesting. I was applying the title based on that. The function of certain elements can flip—a net or piece of garbage that is in the ghost net had one function when it was being used, and then when it got sucked into this weird assemblage in the ocean it got repurposed. That is what language does, and that is what collage is about for me often times. Recently I've become more concerned with the visual effects of what I'm collaging, but the visual anthropology of the pieces has always been important to me as well.
Angela James: In Between
This is my first foray into making a music video! I collaborate with my wife Angela on her music project--co-writing songs, playing in her band, playing and production on her records--so it was fitting to make this video for her first single from her new record.
We shot everything in one afternoon with our twin nieces while we were visiting my in-laws in eastern Tennessee, the summer of 2015.


text:
Alex Rodriguez still hasn't realized that we don't want to see pictures of him. I thought we made it clear when he did the picture of himself kissing the mirror.
No shots of Alex Rodriguez kissing himself in the mirror. #WorldSeriesComplaints @Comedian_U @YatesComedy pic.twitter.com/DbNe8IZwnm— Punished McSurly (@WhyIsDaddyAngry) November 3, 2015
Apparently not.
His latest attempt to make us like him is a picture of himself racking his mind trying to figure out "Who will win the World Series this year?"
Who will win the World Series this year? #mlb pic.twitter.com/4knU1LluGx— Alex Rodriguez (@AROD) March 29, 2017


text:
Truth Hair brought out an amazing VIP gift for July, I am in love with it! I also really loved the gacha set I got from REIGN's gacha at The Epiphany! It is like REIGN went pompom mad HA!
outfit and props
Hair ~ Tori, Truth Hair VIP group gift
Shorts and halter top ~ POMPOM and laced, REIGN, The Eiphany
POMPOM Shoes ~ REIGN, The Epiphany
Backdrop ~ Places Sweet 7, Ninety, The Epiphany
Paint cans ~ Random Matter, The Epiphany


text:
Lianna New Pump
- Color: Select Color
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null% of customers say this fits as expected
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"Love these shoes. I am a teacher and wear these to work a few days a week. I am never uncomfortable or have sore feet when I get home. I will absolutely keep buying Rockport!"
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- Breathable Polyurethane is moisture absorbent and odor resistant
- Heel Height: 75mm


text:
Press release
Rugby World Cup to thrust Cardiff into the global sporting spotlight
Stephen Crabb gives his backing to Welsh rugby squad's World Cup campaign
With eight days to go until the curtain rises on the 2015 Rugby World Cup, Secretary of State for Wales, Stephen Crabb has today given his support to Warren Gatland's Welsh squad as the final preparations for the tournament get underway.
Mr Crabb joined the Welsh contingent as they were put through their paces during a training session at their state of the art facilities in the Vale of Glamorgan today (10 September).
The eighth Rugby World Cup gets underway on 18 September with Wales set to kick off their campaign against Uruguay in Cardiff two days later. Cardiff's Millennium Stadium is set to host eight tournament matches in all – including two quarter finals – bringing with it the opportunity to showcase the city to a global audience.
A recent report carried out by Econactive for the Welsh Rugby Union showed that the Millennium Stadium generates over £130m a year for Cardiff and sustains more than 2,500 jobs.
Secretary of State for Wales, Stephen Crabb said:
From the Ashes to the Champions League, Wales has an excellent history of securing and delivering major sporting events. Over the next two months, we have another fantastic opportunity to showcase one of Europe's youngest capital cities to the world.
We cannot underestimate the significant benefits events like the Rugby World Cup can bring to a host nation. This year's tournament is expected to provide an estimated boost of almost £1bn to the UK's economy and is anticipated to attract 466,000 international visitors to England and Wales.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to give my personal support and best wishes to our national squad and the management team today. I look forward to watching their progress through the tournament and wish them every success in their campaign.


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Featured Releases
LERM – The White Book Of The Mind
Legendary electronic band LERM releases 'The White Book Of The Mind' and enters into the world of film-bound and mystical music inspired by films such as Blade Runner.
Benjamin Koll – Songs For A Better Future
After more than 2 years in the making, the debut album from Benjamin Koll is finally here! Get ready for a music-driven time travel, back to the eighties and fast forward to the future.
Benjamin Koll – I Don't Wanna Fight
Celebrating the release of the his new video, Benjamin Koll delivers a new set of remixes of 'I Don't Wanna Fight'.


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|About Us
|Patients, Families & Visitors
|For Health Professionals
|Research & Training
|Ways to Give
There are many sources of information and support available to learn about Chronic Kidney Disease.
A gentle reminder that information gathered using the Internet is not always a trusted research based source of information. If you find information on the Internet that is of interest to you, please bring it with you to your next visit with the team to identify if this is appropriate information to be followed.
For more online resources see our "On-Line education on CKD" handout.


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Olivia Wilde Reveals She Was Completely 'Hammered' Filming 'Drinking Buddies'
Well, this is ironic. While Olivia Wilde was filming the 2013 comedy 'Drinking Buddies,' the cast was completely drunk, the actress revealed in a new interview! Talking about really getting into the role.
Olivia Wilde, 31, and her castmates, including Anna Kendrick, 30, really put the "drinking" in Drinking Buddies. The actress confessed in an all-new interview that she was completely "hammered" while filming the movie because using real beer was actually cheaper than using water! Literally laughing out loud right now.
"We were hammered the entire movie because it was real beer, because beer on that set was cheaper than water, because we were shooting in a brewery," Olivia told Sam Jones for Off Camera With Sam Jones.
Drinking Buddies
The funny part is, some of the cast, namely Anna, didn't realize they were drinking real beer at first!
"She sat down to do the first scene and took a huge gulp of beer, not realizing it was real, and was like instantly hammered," Olivia said. "She was like, 'What's happening? What are you guys doing?' and we were like, 'Oh, we forgot to tell you – the beer's all real and everyone's drunk. It's 10 a.m., welcome to Drinking Buddies."
There was a legitimate reason why the cast, which also included Jake Johnson and Ron Livingston, decided to drink beer for the duration of filming. "The reason we wanted to drink the beer wasn't to loosen up, it was because we were working within this very specific world in the film – the craft-beer world of Chicago – so we wanted to be able to improvise accordingly," Olivia told The Daily Beast in 2013. "And this community had really adopted us, and we were working in an actual brewery. We'd have to pause scenes so a guy in a forklift could carry kegs across the floor. So drinking would be organic."
HollywoodLifers, can you believe Olivia and the Drinking Buddies cast were drunk while filming? Let us know!
— Avery Thompson


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Debit Card-i | 30 September 2017-30 November 2017
Tesco Retail Privileges for Hong Leong Islamic Mastercard® Cardholders.
Terms and conditions apply. HLISB Cardholders will be automatically be eligible for one (1) entry in this campaign for every purchase of RM150 and above in a single contactless transaction at Tesco Stores/Express Stores in Malaysia paid with a Mastercard Debit Card-i. After the end of the contest, 100 winners will be selected and each winner will get a complimentary Petrol voucher. Promotion period is from 30 September 2017 to 30 November 2017. Pictures shown are for illustration purposes only. Other merchant's terms and conditions apply. Merchant reserves the right to change these terms and conditions at anytime. Hong Leong Islamic Bank makes no representation or warranty for product and services offered by merchant and shall not be liable or responsible for any changes, claims, loss or damages resulting from this offer. The T&Cs herein, General Terms and Conditions of Accounts, Debit Card-i Terms and Conditions, or any relevant terms and conditions that the HLISB may specify from time to time are read as an entire agreement and if there is any discrepancy, the specific T&Cs herein shall prevail to the extent of such discrepancy.


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March 2, 2011
A 10-year study will assess the affects of exposure to oil and chemical dispersants on the health of workers and volunteers involved in cleanup operations after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched the GuLF STUDY (Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study), the largest study ever of its kind, to learn if people who worked in cleanup efforts after the Horizon spill develop adverse health conditions caused by the oil and dispersants.
"Over the last 50 years, there have been 40 known oil spills around the world. Only eight of these spills have been studied for human health effects," said Dale Sandler, Ph.D., chief of the Epidemiology Branch at NIEHS and principal investigator of the GuLF STUDY. "The goal of the GuLF STUDY is to help us learn if oil spills and exposure to crude oil and dispersants affect physical and mental health."
The first phase of the GuLF STUDY will involve 55,000 of the 100,000 people who responded to the Gulf spill crisis. Researchers will interview participants by phone with questions about the work they did with the oil spill cleanup, and about their health, lifestyle and job history. Researchers will then ask about 20,000 participants to take part in the second study phase involving a home visit and follow-up telephone interviews in subsequent years. They will collect samples of blood, urine, toenail clippings, hair and house dust during the home visit and take clinical measurements such as blood pressure, height and weight, urine glucose and lung function.
"We are enrolling workers and volunteers because they were closest to the disaster and had the highest potential for being exposed to oil and dispersants," said Sandler.
According to Nola.com, the first 1000 study invitations went out to potential participants in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida on Monday.
The National Institutes of Health has allocated $17.8 million dollars for the study. Although a small part of funding, just $6 million, came to the NIH from BP, the oil company is not involved in the study.
People who worked the spill operations have reported health conditions such as respiratory issues, long lasting skin rashes, dizziness, watering eyes and a feeling of being sick all the time, reports The Destin Log.
Study data will influence future policy decisions on health care and health services in the Gulf region. It may also affect oil spill response in the future.


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Maryland enjoys some of the nation's strictest gun regulations, yet our 2015 firearm death rate is higher than any year since the Civil War. Baltimore's murder rate is the highest in the City's 286 year history, and total homicides and firearm homicides are second highest in history, despite a shrinking (fleeing) population. Is our aggressive gun control working?
In the coming days, we'll all hear a lot about "what can be done" about gun crime rates in America. These are important conversations. Some successful examples of gun control will be trotted out (yes, they exist), and some of them are worth considering, as a civil society. However, Maryland's 2013 gun control law will be inflated (or conflated) as an example of success, and I thought I'd provide some perspective on it. I hope you enjoy this piece, or at least find it informative. Warning: I welcome comments, even those in disagreement, but I do not tolerate an ignorance of facts or insulting tones or language on this site.
Less than 75 days after Maryland's Firearm Safety Act of 2013 (FSA), one of the nation's strictest gun laws, went into place, a gun control lobbyist published an editorial in the Baltimore Sun that led with the statement, "Maryland gun law is saving lives." The gun control lobbyists didn't mention that those 75 days included a period of record cold and near-record precipitation, both factors that can impact gun violence rates. Six months later, the lobbyists published another editorial, this time in the Maryland Reporter, simply titled "Maryland Firearms Law is Saving Lives." That's right, despite the complexities inherent to criminology, crime solving, and crime reporting, this well-paid lobbyist insisted that eight months (!!) is all that's necessary to judge the value of a law. Gun rights advocates have accused gun control lobbyists of lying, mis-using statistics, and all other brands of...well....lobbying. I do have to wonder if some of these newspaper editorials were crafted before the data was even available. Honestly, that's what I would do. But it does present a bit of a quandary when batting away gun rights advocates' claims that the gun law isn't working, "It hasn't had time!" Well, gun control lobbyists began stating that the law was clearly working, 75 days after its implementation. They're on record believing that the law works - that it is working.
But as we fast forward to early 2016, we see a different Maryland - one that gun control advocates really hoped wouldn't, or couldn't, exist. While 2015 crime statistics are still being tallied, a safe estimate is that in 2015, Maryland citizens were victims of over 500 firearm homicides and nearly 1,000 nonfatal shootings. These are drastic increases from statistics prior to FSA's enactment in October, 2013, and they mean something. 24/7 Wall Street calls post-FSA Maryland one of America's most dangerous states (#8).
Baltimore, Maryland, with an other-worldly violent crime rate of over 1,500 reported incidents per 100,000 residents, itself holds a place as America's #8 Most Dangerous City (2014, 24/7 Wall Street), America's #7 Most Dangerous City (2014, Forbes), America's #7 Most Dangerous City (2014, Huffington Post), #10 Least Livable City (2015, Areavibes), #36 World's Most Dangerous City (2014, Business Insider), #40 World's Most Dangerous City (2015, Business Insider).....should I go on?
Despite all of this, gun control advocates want to believe very badly that FSA is working. That despite the fact that Maryland's firearm death rate was higher per capita in 2015 than any year since the Civil War, that somehow, gun control is working. They believe, since they can no longer claim that the law is "saving lives," that without the law, "perhaps even more people would have been killed!"
On December 26, 2015, the Baltimore Sun published an article entitled "Weapons used in Maryland Crimes Often Purchased in Other States." This is an important claim, because it attempts to explain away FSA's failure by proposing that neighboring states each need to pass their own FSA. Then, and only then, can gun control work! Gun control advocates in my social circles re-broadcasted this Baltimore Sun article far and wide, never actually reading it.
It's a shame they didn't read it, because the article shows that while an alarming 43% 5,709 of traceable Maryland crime guns originated in other states, 57% of traceable Maryland crime guns originated in highly-regulated post-FSA Maryland. Why is that important? It's important that, first of all, a large number of guns used to commit serious crimes in Maryland were not traceable - meaning that they are in no way impacted by our gun control law (FSA). Second, that FSA was intended to directly tackle crime guns originating in Maryland - and two years after FSA was implemented, nearly 2/3 of all identifiable crime guns still originate in Maryland. "But it's much better than it was before our new law," some will say.
From a strictly statistical standpoint (when it comes to traceable illegal gun sales), it cannot be argued that the Firearm Safety Act is working. So if someone tells you it is, they are either lying or are trying to wish it into being true.
I do believe that improvements in gun control must be made. But the language of the Constitution is important, or at least it was six months ago in Obergefell v. Hodges, when the Supreme Court asserted that the rights listed in the Constitution apply equally without prejudice to the individual citizens of the United States. You'll recognize the case name as "the gay marriage case."
This nation has a long way to go in terms of finding way to keep our 300-400 million guns out of the hands of patently evil, sick, and unstable people, and (in my opinion) out of the hands of citizens with any violent history of criminality. But if I can leave you with one thought, it's a request to dig deep into the proposals you hear about in the next several days. Some of them might make a difference, others (demonstrably) will not. Some will impact constitutional rights in a way that - if validated by federal courts - will have impacts upon other enumerated constitutional rights. Let's put on our thinking caps and do this right. If, like Maryland's Firearm Safety Act, it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.


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Hello, everybody!
I am so happy with the books I got this month! I ordered more online, only they haven't arrived yet. I'll just include them in my May book haul.
I'm in love with the new covers they are designing for classics, especially the Vintage Classics. A few days ago, I was wandering in the bookstore when my eyes suddenly fell on one book. The book. I have been telling myself that I need to read more classics. I looked some up online and one book, in particular, caught my attention. Anne Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It has almost 1000 pages! I won't read this one as my first classic, but I definitely want to have started it this year. And you'll definitely see a lot of pictures with this book on my Instagram account because the cover is absolutely stunning.
Actually, all the books I bought in April have a beautiful cover.
These are the books I have added to my collection:
Anne Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Entwined by Heather Dixon
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon
What do you think of them? I want to display them all on my bookshelf, but then other books won't fit anymore. Ugh, the struggle.
Thank you so much for reading!


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This listing is for one sodalite double-terminated point. The sodalite point is approximately 1.24 x .25 x .25 inches. It is a beautiful indigo blue stone with white streaks of calcite. Turn this point into a fine piece of jewelry or just keep it for your collection. You will receive one sodalite point similar to the points shown in the picture. All stones are unique so color and pattern will vary slightly. Sodalite is the creativity stone and the stone of self-expression.
All orders will receive a free gift plus our gemstone folklore sheet. Thank you for shopping with us.
This product hasn't received any reviews yet. Be the first to review this product!


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Client Value Analyst
|City of London, London
|Contract Type:
|Finance & Accounting
A top global law firm is looking for a Client Value Analyst to join their team in London on a permanent basis.
This is a business focused role and responsibilities will include:
Managing complex data manipulation and analysis
Creating innovative pricing models
Design dashboards and reporting processes
Develop matter efficiency improvement plans
Work alongside partners and other senior firm members and providing guidance on financial metrics
Interacting with clients.
This role is a great opportunity to gain some Analytical experience in a top firm with lots of room for progression. For this Client Value Analyst role, you will need to have strong communication, IT (particularly on Excel) and numeracy skills.
If you have a minimum of one year's relevant experience, please apply!


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Biopolitics of Lifestyle
My first book, The Biopolitics of Lifestyle: Foucault, Ethics and Healthy Choices, was published in early 2016 by Routledge. This book is part of the Interventions series edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams.
"a theoretically rich book where neoliberal economics, lifestyle epidemiology, public health and health promotion, and choice architecture interventions ('nudging' people to make particular decisions) co-exist with lifestyle media and celebrities, clinicians, and apps and wearable devices. While Mayes is not the first to locate lifestyle or obesity in a biopolitical frame, he does so more thoroughly than any author that I have read via his examination of multiple entanglements within the lifestyle dispositif" – Patricia Thille (University of Toronto)
Current Book Project
Unsettling Alternative Food: The politics of food, land and agriculture in Australia
This is under contract with Rowman & Littlefield International for the Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia series edited by Simone Bignall, P. Diego Bubbio, Joanne Faulkner and Paul Patton.
Short Description
This book casts a critical light on food, land use and political activism in Australia. Using a philosophical history of food and agriculture in Australia, this book brings contemporary alternative food discourse and practice into tension with Australia's colonial past, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and anthropocentric relations to the land.
Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements.
Alternative food networks are not reducible to a single set of practice or theories, but are shaped by local histories and environments. However, alternative food proponents from across the globe increasingly use the idea of "food sovereignty". The idea of food sovereignty originated with peasant movements in South and Central America (La Via Campesina) during their political struggles for land reform and agrarian citizenship. Food sovereignty is commonly defined as the right of people to control their own food and agricultural systems. Alternative food proponents argue that the interests of global industrial agricultural companies undermine citizens and farmers capacity to control what they eat or produce. Food sovereignty serves as an organizing idea in the struggle for a more democratic, healthy and sustainable food system. Practical expressions of these ideas occur in urban and peri-urban spaces: farmers' markets, community gardens and small-scale agriculture.
Alternative food proponents and small-scale farmers in Australia also draw on ideas food sovereignty and agrarian traditions of agricultural production to provide an alternative to the dominance of Australian industrial food system. While the critique of industrial agriculture and neoliberalism is important and needs to be further developed, food sovereignty discourses and alternative food practices risk an uncritical blurring of distinct political and historical contexts surrounding land and farming. Slogans such as "the land belongs to those who work it" powerfully represent the struggle of dispossessed peasant farmers in Central America. However, in Australia such slogans and ideas of food sovereignty have the potential to mask the role played by farming in colonialism, as well as the deeply contested nature of land ownership and sovereignty claims in Australia.
This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault's method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of the present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia.


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CHICAGO --People who received a rain check during Chicago's gun turn-in event can redeem their pre-paid card in two weeks.More than 6,800 guns were collected July 26 and displayed several days later. But many were asked to wait for a $100 pre-paid MasterCard that was offered in exchange for the weapons.
On Saturday August 16, rain check holders must return to the same location where they received it to pick up the pre-paid cards.
They will be handed out from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.


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Recently completed my first ever experience with directing in-the-round! Working with the Cabrillo Theatre Festival 2013, I produced Jeffrey Hatcher's The Turn of the Screw with Danielle Crook and Lucien Leutzinger in the two roles (Governess for Danielle and all the other roles for Lucien!) It was, without doubt, an exciting and challenging project. Danielle and Lucien were perfect in the roles and worked very hard to give me what I wanted. They also accomplished some truly professional results in their performances. My feeling about directing this particular show in-the-round is that it does lose something because, no matter how hard the director works on staging, there will be moments when one or the other of the actors has his or her face turned away. In a show which almost requires that we read the actor's expressions, this can be a very real problem. However, I have to say that audience members seemed to be getting all of the story no matter where they were seated. Of course, the staging does keep things very close and personal -- that may be the aspect that keeps the audience 'with' the material. Until I can stage this show in proscenium or even three-quarter round, I won't really know the difference!
First post
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Brian will use this blog to express thoughts on theater in general and on aspects of his own theatrical company.
July 2018


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Sylvester photographed by Henrik Bülow for CPH Vision.
Very Hot!
Love these photos, they are gorgeous! Are you a model?
beyond cooll.... love your blog, adding it to the blog roll!
so strong and soft at the same time - awful! nice blog anyway, I'll be back soon :)
love the shot with the red and white hat
great shoots, sweet guy.
Cool pics! Love the quif
stunnig photos. i just love every single one of them.
saw one photo from this shoot before and i really liked it, now i've seen them all! nice guy and the photos are beautiful.