blog.jasonconny.com

In the spirit of my topic, I am presenting this paper on the internet as part of my blog. It was written, revised and edited exclusively in WordPress’s text editor and will be maintained, in some form, by me for as long as I host this website. By making it publicly accessible I am opening it to other forms of digital archiving and realize it may have a life beyond this website. Nothing on the internet ever really goes away.
-jdc

“They speak (I know) of the ‘feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.’ ”
-The Library of Babel, Jorge Louis Borges

Earlier this year I participated in a show at Roots and Culture curated by Eric Fleischauer called “The End of Analog.” The thesis of the show was to celebrate/call attention to/examine/question/what have you the government mandated switch from analog to digital television broadcast signals. Much of the work employed various analog and outdated technologies to evoke memories and nostalgia for a soon to be bygone time. Accompanying the show was a book [pdf, 796 KB] of essay’s ruminating on the implications of the evolution of technology and its effects on culture at this particular moment in time.

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So said Jaime Henderson while executing her bar napkin portrait of me. It’s a new school year and that means a new crop of grad students to draw me. Plus I can get some from folks who didn’t draw me last year. I also cut my hair which means the signifiers have changed making it that much harder to capture my likeness in this most unforgiving of mediums. That being the case, I’m allowing people who drew me during round one to have another go at it. So, keeping with tradition, let’s start things off with Nudelman:

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In the last three weeks I installed my work at the SAIC Graduate Exhibition, attended the openings to NEXT and said SAIC Graduate Exhibition (and probably a few others), launched a new, WordPress-ified version of fnewsmagazine.com (a student publication of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), had a record release party for my roommates friend, Dietrich Gosser, at our place and had lunch with the F News staff and school president at The Cliff Dwellers where I also managed to hear Edward Hopper’s biographer, Gail Levin, give a short talk.

The next three weeks look to be just as packed. There’s still a large drawing and even larger paper to be completed for school, my mom and sister are coming to visit, Fuck Shit City is going into the studio to record our first #1 hit single, work will begin on the show I’m co-curating at Devening Projects and Editions, a couple of freelance web projects should be launching and the Rock Lotto show will be happening which is a bunch of bands that were formed by drawing names from a hat and have three weeks to write and rehearse an original song. I’m playing drums in Onion Rings and BBQ Sauce (unless we change our name).

Luckily I’ve already secured employment for the summer. I’ll be back at the consulting firm I worked for between semesters full-time and doing some work on fnewsmagazine.com here and there. Also fortunate is the fact that I will have a studio at school for the summer and won’t have to schlep everything home only to bring it back in a couple months.

Over the weekend I installed four recent paintings in my little corner of the 2008 Graduate Exhibition. All are watercolor on paper (or Yupo in the case of the top two). My space was only eight feet wide (I’m standing in front of the piece of tape that demarcated the boundary during installation), but I think I made pretty good use of it. The people on either side of me each have one large painting which creates a nice contrast with my smaller pieces.

The opening is this Friday and, from all accounts, it’s going to be a pretty big deal. It coincides with Art Chicago, NEXT, and a few other art related happenings in Chicago this weekend so there will already be a fairly large buzz around town. The first two hours are only for participants and invitees. Not sure who exactly is on the school’s invitation list, but I imagine there will be a fair amount of gallery owners and collectors in attendance. One student from the post-bacc program last year got a show at a gallery in Chelsea. I’m just hoping to sell a piece so I can make back the money I spent on framing!

This semester I’ve been collecting portraits of myself done by fellow graduate students in the painting and drawing department. All portraits are executed in Sharpie on bar napkins over beers at a bar. Anyone that’s a graduate student in the painting and drawing department that has a drink with me at a bar has to make a portrait in Sharpie on a bar napkin.

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Applications are done and there’s still nearly two whole weeks before school starts back up. I’ve got a job doing HTML production for a consulting firm to earn some cash for rent and heating bills. I’m hoping they’ll want to keep me on part-time during the semester since it pays better than work study.

Now that I’m not sweating out the details of re-applying to grad school maybe I can start to check out Chicago beyond what lies between my apartment and school.

This Friday, November 9. Check out the guy on the far right.