I’m in Regina for the CAFAD Conference at the University of Regina. I was lucky to be able to catch Maria Hupfield and Merritt Johnson’s performance Double Self Double at the opening of the My Evil Twin exhibition curated by Timothy Long at the Mackenzie Art Gallery tonight.

We went to the Zero Garbage Potluck Dinner at the Roundhouse. As part of their Dig In - Environmental Art weekend, everyone brought a potluck dish, plate and cutlery. The food was great. Dinner was followed by talk by Waterpod artist/collaborators Derek and Mira Hunter. They were joined by Mary Mattingly via Skype.

It is hard not to be amazed by Waterpod. It is a 3000-square-foot barge which is an experiment in community living which has been open to the public as it was docked in five boroughs of New York for the past three months. This is the last weekend Waterpod is open to the public and it is docked at the World’s Fair Marina in Queens on the East River.

It’s great to be in London again, there is so much to see. Yesterday I went to see Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet at the Barbican. It was interesting to see that much work focusing on environmental issues and the recreation of old ‘environmental art’ projects, but it was also disconcerting to see that much green plant matter artificially lit and growing indoors. I enjoyed seeing Hans Haacke’s Grass Mound from the late 60s, and I liked Henrik Håkansson’s Fallen Forest from 2006, but despite an elaborate root watering system the leaves were dying.

I particularly liked Heather and Ivan Morrisson’s twin geodesic shingled domes outside on the terrace. It reminded me of the utopian optimism of the 60s and 70s here on the west coast. It was also great shelter from a sudden rain storm.

The Venice Biennale seems slower this year. It is interesting to see the country pavilions in the Giardini and the choices the various curators have made. Great Britain’s Steve McQueen made an interesting two channel film Giardini set in the Biennale gardens in the off season. Macro photography- details of trees, the gravel, bits of debris, fixed camera, dogs, a night encounter.

Overall remarkably similar formally to John Cale’s 45 minute, five channel audio/video Dark Days shot is Wales- his reflections on remembering his childhood growing up there.

Some of the real highlights were some works from the 1970s: the recreation of Blinky Palermo’s 1976 installation “Himmelsrichtungen” complete with the original installation invoices, and the André Cadere multi-striped poles that were scattered throughout the exhibition. Simon Starling’s Wilhelm Noack oHG, spiral film loop projector that he made for and exhibited at PHG last year, and Spencer Finch’s coloured glass window installations.

We spent a day in the Giardini and then a second afternoon walking through the disappointing Arsenale. I can’t figure out how two parts of an exhibition could be so dissimilar. Where the Giardini was thoughtful and considered- with certain strains of Daniel Birnbaum’s curatorial thesis running throughout the exhibition, all that was lost in the vastness of the Arsenale.

It was fun to be in Venice again. My favorite project was Scotland’s Martin Boyce No Reflections. He installed a beautiful multi-room installation in the Palazzo Pisani. For my money it was the best work we saw there this year.

We’re getting ready to leave for Europe on Monday and I’m finding as I get older that it takes more time and better organization to travel. I don’t remember it being this complicated. I’ve been focused on finishing up nonsite before we leave as well as my Unit 3 written report, as I’m not sure how easy it will be to connect to the internet while traveling. We’re flying into Paris, then taking the train down to Venice to see the Biennale on Thursday.

Working on nonsite, I’ve been thinking a lot about when I went to see the 1976 Venice Biennale. I was still an art student and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I arrived in Venice for the opening. I found a pensione near the train station (single bed, 7500 lira) and once I got to the Giardini it was very exciting to see that many people coming to see contemporary art.

Highlights for me in 1976 were mostly in the Germano Celant curated the Aperto part of the Biennale. I remember the Jannis Kounellis horses that were led into the converted gallery space every day for a couple of hours and the clean tile floors.

Dan Graham installed his amazing two rooms. Joseph Beuys installed Tram Stop in the German Pavilion. I’m trying to remember, but I think Greg Curnoe was in the Canadian Pavilion.

I’m looking forward to being in London for the first week of July. I haven’t started to look at what’s on in the galleries. A friend just sent me a link to the exhibition: Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour 1950 to Today currently on at the Tate Liverpool, which includes Elsworth Kelly’s Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance II from 1951.

Thursday, July 2 is Late at the Tate: Fool Spectrum. I think it would be worth the trip.

Ian Skedd will be presenting is latest project Sign-Signing, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division 1979, Deaf Choir 2009 at the Western Front May 23- June 27.

“For this project, Skedd worked with a deaf choir to create a signed interpretation of British post-punk band Joy Division’s 1979 single Love Will Tear Us Apart, matching the cadence of the original song to sign motions that capture its emotional meaning. This song, which became a brooding anthem for the post-punk generation, was written by the band’s vocalist Ian Curtis, and was the band’s first chart hit.

In Skedd’s Sign Signing, sound is expressed through an ‘inaudible’ form of communication. Visually, the choir’s hands, bodies and facial movements become the only “readable” aspects of the song. Silence rather than sound is emphasized, yet when engaged with the motions of the choir, the familiarity of the song takes hold.”

Ian Skedd is a Vancouver-based artist currently residing in London, England.

How do I make the aesthetic decisions about my artworks?

I think I make my decisions based on my learned values- I feel this colour is better than that one. These decisions are in part informed by my intuitive ‘knowing’ that this is ‘right’ and a better choice or solution than something else. I choose a specific colour or refine the curve of a form or choose one image over another based on a lifetime of knowledge.

Michael Polanyi helped clarify tacit knowing as an area of knowledge. He thought that creative acts are charged with strong personal feelings, intuitions or ‘tacit’ forms of knowing.

He argues that that “the informed guesses, hunches and imaginings that are part of exploratory acts are motivated by what he describes as ‘passions’. They might well be aimed at discovering ‘truth’, but they are not necessarily in a form that can be stated in propositional or formal terms. As he wrote in The Tacit Dimension, we should start from the fact that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. He termed this pre-logical phase of knowing as ‘tacit knowledge’. Tacit knowledge comprises a range of conceptual and sensory information and images that can be brought to bear in an attempt to make sense of something. Many bits of tacit knowledge can be brought together to help form a new model or theory. This inevitably led him to explore connoisseurship and the process of discovery.”

These ideas makes sense to me when I reflect on how I make decisions on the drawings and paintings that I make and how I decide to keep one over another. I make a certain decisions that feel ‘right’.

As artists we are encouraged to be self archivists and keep everything we do. I’ve kept all the drawings I’ve made since I was an art student in the 1970s. There’s a lot of them. Many have been made into paintings, and even more have not. I was implicitly taught to believe that even my doodles might have value some day. I have also thrown away a lot of stuff I now regret. I had a journal that I kept for a year or two back in the early 70s before I went to NSCAD. I wish I could read it now, but it is unfortunately long gone.

So why do we choose to keep what we keep? What gives these objects value?

I have a lot of small mementos that have great value to me- some I keep in my office and some I keep at home. I keep them because they are beautiful things, and also I think in part I keep them as mnemonic aids. They serve as souvenirs from the past that not only trigger memories and allow me to recall and call up that past, but they also are familiar. I think we need to surround ourselves with a certain amount of the familiar in order to feel comfortable with where we are.

Why do we choose to keep some things and not others? I have a pair of shoes, penny loafers that I bought in the late 1960s and I had completely resoled by this Italian cobbler in the late 80s. They’re beautiful shoes, a little tight and I haven’t worn them in years. I’m not sure that they even fit, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away. Why are they so valuable to me?

I have drawings my son made when he was a child and stacks of photographs I’ve taken over the years. What gives them value? Why do I keep them?I haven’t do it, but I wonder if I could decide what the most valuable thing that I have is? I’m sure it wouldn’t have much value to others, but I’m guessing that it would be an object that has a huge sentimental value attached to it.

When I was going to Banff last year in May for six weeks, I took a few things with me- a couple of photograps, a map of London, a coffee mug. But mostly it was my laptop that had huge value. That was the thing that connected me to my life in Vancouver as well as the rest of the world via the internet. It also carried years of work, ideas, writing, images, sketches- digitally. When I moved into my office studio I upacked a few thinkgs, plugged in my laptop and was set up.

Yesterday I worked with Robert Held Glass artisans to blow the first full scale prototype glass globe for my project Kingsway Luminaires, the public art project I am working on as part of Vancouver’s Mapping and Marking public art competition.

Kingsway Luminaires will activate six, 5.4 metre poles that are located in the centre median on Kingsway near Knight Street intersection. Three poles are located one block west of Knight at Clark Street and an additional three poles are currently being installed to the east at Dumfries Street. Each of the six poles will be crowned with illuminated glass-blown unique forms that will slowly change colour from dusk to dawn. These white opaque glass globes will be lit from within by full-spectrum LED lights that display a randomly changing array of nine colours which will change very slowly over several hours.

I now have signed a contract and submitted my first invoice to the city, so it is really happening. Miles Thorogood is working on the controller for the LEDs.

Here’s an older photograph of one of the two sites. We are changing these current poles with 8 sided tapered poles that narrow at the neck to better accentuate the swell of the glass globes.