How do we pay attention? And how do we pay attention to what we’re paying attention to? In this 3-hour workshop, we’ll explore the relationship between attention and tenderness, between scent and memory, between what is gifted and what is given. Participants will leave with a collection of visual experiments and a syllabus of resources for further reading and exploration.

Creativity is founded on curiosity, and curiosity is a phenomenon of wonder activated by noticing. Yet, the simple task of directing our gaze is constantly hampered by distractions of external conditioning and internal perception. An artistic practice requires a profound ability to pay attention, but in a demanding life engulfed in the familiar, how do we exercise taking notice, seeing the ordinary and observing miniscule?

Framed around the notion of wandering without a destination the workshop challenges participants to seek and capture the unexpected and overlooked. The workshop will begin with a discussion of provided texts and visual examples of other artists who utilize the ordinary and unnoticed. We will then wander the city in order to collect the unimagined and the potential of the unheeded, meeting back as a group to share our collections and our thoughts on our passage through the familiar. The workshop will conclude with investigations into strategies of archiving, resulting in a visual record that Heid and Karl will complete and share with the participants in the weeks following the workshop. 

We use all our five senses when we eat – but knowing how they work can up your game when you shop for, prepare, cook and eat food.  In this workshop we’ll learn how our senses engage with food through art, science, sound and nature – and take your tastebuds on a trip to a totally new dimension.

The unspoken has always been crucial to human expression. Ernest Hemingway observed that “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water.” The novelist Shirley Hazard noted that “Speech—in literature as in life—can crucially suggest what is not said.” The value of the unsaid is not limited to literary expression. Its most eloquent expression in recent times may be found in the sheets of blank white paper used by dissidents in Russia to protest the invasion in Ukraine; and in China where such sheets are used to protest Covid lock-downs. The empty page points to the lack of free expression in those countries where protestors fear speaking out. One young student said that these sheets also convey the message that while the paper is blank, “people’s minds are not.” Such blank sheets say nothing and they say everything. And all of this has particular meaning in the era of TMI, an age of information and visual overload. This workshop will investigate the rhythm of absence and presence and the balance between the said and the unsaid, reassessing how these can collaborate for powerful human statements. What is revealed, what remains hidden are the choices artists and writers make. This will not be a writing exercise as much as one in how to say more with less. We will reassess blanks and look at erasure in printed work that allows participants to find ways in which distillation, redaction, and sometimes outright erasure can locate new meanings in narrative expression.

Erik will lead an experimental workshop that people of all ages will enjoy. Using old fashioned Letraset and a simple scaled grid, participants will be guided through a series of formal studies that begin small but have large scale possibilities. The use of this once dominant medium allows for a reinterpretation of the possibilities of type and language, focusing on image building and formal investigation of time and space. All materials will be provided, and the hands on nature of the workshop promises much delight.

Admission: $25 (Workshop is limited to 12 participants – please Register below)