Activities in Cities
Anyone who knows me knows I love to go thrifting. Sometimes I find useful things and sometimes I find things so outrageous I just have to share. This would be one of those times. I found this little stuffed mascot recently and the tag reads “City of Phoenix Storm Drain” hmmmm . . . take a look and let me know if you think this happy little guy looks like a storm drain.
I am working on a project called Park Here as a part of the Open for Business exhibit at the ASU Art Musuem. The project is a survey project in collaboration with the DTC, Tempe. The parking garages will have signage alerting visitors that there is an online survey that participants can fill out and by doing so they’ll have the opportunity to win gift certificates to downtown Tempe businesses and to win a drawing from by me, from the project. Each week DTC will select two survey winners to receive these prizes. For the artistic component of this piece I will review the survey data weekly and create drawings based on the weekly answers. These drawings will be placed in the ASU Art Museum weekly, during the run of the exhibition. The drawings will all be given away to the winners at the close of the show in January. I have created this project to encourage conversation between Tempe businesses, community artists and ASU and I am excited to read the weekly results as inspiration for drawings.
Click to participate in the online survey. You might win something!
About the Exhibition:
Open for Business: An Exhibition by Local Artists at ASU Art Museum
October 9, 2010 – January 29, 2011
What do the ASU Art Museum, Tempe Chamber of Commerce, Tempe Convention and Visitors Bureau, Downtown Tempe Community (DTC), Local First Arizona, Create Connect, *Scottsdale Public Art and Volunteer Legal Assistance for Artists (VLAA) have in common? They engage, educate, raise awareness and connect communities. In a collaborative effort to create increased understanding and dialogue about local community, these organizations will join forces with local business owners and artists for Open for Business, an exhibition which will take place jointly at businesses of downtown Tempe and an interrelated exhibition in galleries of the ASU Art Museum. The exhibition will involve sixteen Arizona artists exploring, and allowing the audience to explore, businesses of the Tempe community with onsite installations and projects. The work created for the exhibition will address the purpose of each business, challenging the audience to interact with the physical space and purpose of each business. Guide maps to the locations will be produced and available throughout downtown Tempe, Scottsdale and the ASU Art Museum. The projects intention is to connect local contemporary artists with local businesses in hopes of a mutually beneficial art/business related outcome. The projects will be respectful, relevant and engaged with the actual purpose of that individual business. The projects may have fun with the business and/or its customer, but will not make fun of that business and/or its customer.
Opening reception: Friday, October 8, 7-9pm
How you ask can I be so happy about my new (to me) kitchen trash can? Oh I am happy. We have needed a new can for a while the cute one from IKEA we’ve been using for the last couple of years has finally started to eat itself and is left with permanent bad breath. Even without a bag in it, fully washed it still stinks. So we had to send it out to the garden and the hunt was on for a new one. We took this on as a Labor Day thrift shopping adventure since I had been to every store and all of the new ones were either plastic or ugly. The short one made up a song about the trash can hunt on the day of Labor she called it. She was really excited to go on the hunt and we thought she was really on board until about two hours into it she said what is a trash hunt? Is it where you kill a bear who eats trash and then you cook it and eat it? Mmmmm . . . bear she said but only the mama bear, we don’t kill the babies. She was so excited about the idea of eating meat she lost track of her original question.
So finally we saw it glowing from across the room at the ARC in Tempe. It appears to have been a filing cabinet for a Sunday school. Whatever it was, Labor day was 50% off day and at ten bucks, a nice shade of brown and square, with a functioning lid, I (read the Tall one) grabbed it down from its perch and ran to the check out.It has a perfect home in our pantry. I think we are both happy, me and my new trash can.
Laboratory5 Inc. is a small business based in Tempe, Arizona
Visit our website: Laboratory5 Follow us on Twitter: @lab5 Become a fan on Facebook: Laboratory5
Contact Us at anytime – we’d love to hear from you
Lab5 BLOG 