On July 7, members of Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts practice a skill using obsolete technology: a Festival to Plead for Skills. From flattening pennies to binding books made of cast-off envelopes, discover an internet-based organization founded by artists and printmakers Bridget Elmer and Emily Larned that prizes process over product.
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Ice Notes
“Glaciers! Looking at them my eye never knows where to rest,” writes visual artist Oona Stern in her journal from the Arctic Circle. Stern and composer Cheryl Leonard offer a window into their work-in-process, a series of installations employing sounds, maps, images and words recorded at the foot of calving glaciers.
Counting Down
What if there were a short film for each year of your life? Julie Lequin takes up the possibility in Top 30, an ongoing video project—part storyboard, part songbook—now showing here.
Holyoke Fences
“The moment still life painting shifted to accommodate pouring wine, a spun coin, candle flame, the entire snowy field at dusk. Do you have the time?” Why yes, Zach Savich, we do. Read this excerpt from his new lyric memoir, Events Film Cannot Withstand.
Art in the Airport
Tyler Meier and Joyelle McSweeney open up the terminals, concourses, and gates of two American airports, where Lichtenstein and Smithson loom large.
Splendid Derelicts
Poet Anna Journey follows “a kind of Elysian Ur-tricycle” through Catedral vegetal, Mexican Surrealist Remedios Varo’s sepiascape, finding the place where canopies establish, fracture, and slip for the willing traveler.
Everything in Motion at Once
Painter Roger White corresponds with us about beauty, detachment, the Brita filter, and all that can’t be distilled about painting.
Notes on Aura Portraits
Anna Von Mertens walks us through her hand-dyed and stitched interpretations of the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, and others guided by the principles of aura photography.
Marcela Silva’s Galactic Objects
Artist Marcela Silva corresponds with At Length about sculpting and painting her “celestial peculiarities,” and discovering the “profoundly huge expanse” of both science and art.
A Correspondence with James Kao
Painter James Kao talks with Elaine Bleakney about light, language, Balthus, and clouds — and shares a gallery of his work in the first of our series of correspondences with artists.