Millerprojects:Notes

Season of Thanks and Complaints

Linked to from Seth Godin's marketing blog is this video from a Finnish husband-wife artist team, Oliver Kochta Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen.

The couple invited people in various international cities to submit their complaints, which were then set to churchly choir music under the direction of a local choral director. So far there have been complaints choirs in Hamburg, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and Birmingham, England — with videos for the latter two available online.

Maybe a little less complaining this holiday season? At least it's good to know that it can all become funny if put to music and sung with gusto!

New Seesaw!!!

The new issue of Seesaw magazine is now online!

NYFA Source

To find grant opportunities (and lots of other useful info), go to NYFA Source. You can search by discipline and see what is really available, the requirements, deadlines, etc.

Anonymous Grants

So glad to see that Terry Evans received one of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation's grants. The entire list of recipients is in yesterday's Artnet News.

From Terry's bio:
Terry Evans is a photographer whose work is primarily an inquiry into the nature of prairie from its native state to its use, abandonment, and care. She photographs from both ground and aerial perspectives and lately within the confines of natural history herbaria, and bird and mammal museum storage areas, where she has recently photographed 19th Century prairie specimens. Her intention is to tell the prairie's stories, past and present, through visible facts and layers of time and memory on the landscape.

Don't miss her Revealing Chicago project.

Statesmen at Smith

Now on exhibit through December 1 at the Oresmann Gallery at Smith College, Northampton, MA is the full set of fifty images from the Statesmen project. Installation views to come!

Also coming soon are new images from the City Seen project, which expanded this year to cities in China. Slowly working through the film, cutting and proofing, and hope to get to some workprints fairly soon. In San Francisco this week to visit my friend Carol Charney, out to shoot more city work today in downtown SF. Last year's work from this project that is now online is in desperate need of updating, but that will not happen in the near future. One of the really appealing things about shooting digitally is the immediate feedback from each day's work. But one of the equally appealing things about shooting film and working with a much longer timeframe is how I forget what I've done or what I'd hoped I'd done and when I do finally start going through the contact sheets weeks or even months later, they are full of surprises.

Fur

Fur, An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, opens Nov. 10. You can see a trailer on the website. I have to say that I have really mixed feelings--based on the trailer, Arbus comes across as a desperate housewife (and looks like one, too, thanks to the casting of Kidman in the lead). I wonder if the film shows her taking private lessons from Lisette Model as well as being led into a creative life by a fictitious creepy neighbor played by Robert Downey, Jr.? Or gives a true portrait of her unique family, or a sense of her distinct personality and mind, of her true and undeniable genius? The documentary video that came out years ago does give us this glimpse and a real sense of the time and place that helped form her sensibility. And Doon's hair in the documentary is amazing!

But like everything to do with her, we'll have to watch.