Utah Rocks (and more rocks)

Monument Valley in the rain

Straddling the corner of Utah and Arizona, Monument Valley lies mostly within the Navajo Nation. The scenery has become iconic thanks to John Ford's westerns and Ansel Adam's photos of the area. The day we visited the valley it was raining sporadically, and the classic reds and golds had become muted, the azure skies dramatic shades of grey. So here is a view not many see of Monument Valley, as it rains only a few times a year. 

More old and new walls in Montreal

This is a postscript to a note from last month, about the imprints and layers contained in city walls. Someone else also liked the traces of old structures left on new buildings, as seen is this parking lot on rue Saint Xavier in Montreal's Vieux Port neighborhood. Click on the photos to get a clearer view of the bricked-up windows. Across the street in another parking lot is a less intentional roof imprint:

Tout se transforme at the Quebec Triennale

Judging from the Triennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, 38 artists in Quebec have been having quite a lot of fun for the past three years.

Adad Hannah's tableaux vivants in the Prado (see kissing photo above)use Valazquez's Las Meninas as a backdrop. The work includes video, photos, and a glimpse inside the making of (which destroys the mystery of the images a little in my opinion).

For pure viewing pleasure, I liked two photo installations: Chih-Chien Wang's smoky water themed photos of goldfish and Niagra Falls and Nicolas Baier's luminous black monolith of mirrors.

I have never laughed harder in a museum than in Karen Tam's installation, a cosy karaoke chamber composed of comfy cushions, paper cutouts, a microphone and a tv screen on which were shown various videos of English and French songs dubbed into Mandarin (not sure) and subtitled for your singalong pleasure in French, English, and possibly Cree(again, not sure...). you can view the videos here, but the experience is not at all the same.

a painter's painter

Lucian Freud is one of my all time favorite painters, although I have only seen a few of his paintings in real life.

I've seen a show of his etchings before, but missed the one at the MOMA in New York which has a good online catalog.

FOUND Magazine

Being somewhat of a treasure hunter (although I usually limit myself to broken jewelry and images I can collage - see previous post) I am a big fan of FOUND Magazine. People send in photos, drawings, and text that they find on the street which are then published daily on the website. My all time favorite is "You park like an asshole asshole," but there are many other hilarious and mysterious gems.

book of fragments and collage

These are from a recently completed book of collaged paper materials that I collected in a box for a year. My favorites are facing pages that interact with each other. Here are a few examples (best viewed on Firefox for some reason).