Thirty-Five Thousand Forty
Mike Andrew McLean
November 10 to December 10, 2011
Opening November 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Thirty-Five Thousand Forty is the physical culmination of Mike Andrew McLean’s project to shoot ninety-six photographs a day for three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days. McLean’s year of photos, now printed as 4”x6” snapshots, will tile the interior of Open Space, forming a sprawling record of the artist’s life from June 2010 to June 2011.

McLean writes “photography in the digital era is developing its own language, forging unique processes and technologies. It seems to have reached the democratic potential that George Eastman predicted one hundred years ago, when he took the process out of the studio of the trained craftsman and put it into the hands of the unskilled hobbyist.” McLean turns the idea of digital photography inside out, conferring an analogue physicality and monumentality onto a format that proliferates effortlessly, flooding websites, Facebook, memory cards and hard drives in an unimaginably deep cloak of images.

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Note the final photo posted here. Dan Milnor snaps a photo of a 2G hard drive mounted on the gallery wall. All the photos in the show are stored on that one drive.

One of the more popular posts I’d done was about retired Kamloops photo teacher and photographer Wilf Schmidt who was operating a tiny photography gallery in the Interior city.

I hadn’t been through Kamloops since last summer and that time was a quick stop so didn’t get to drop by the gallery. We were finally heading up that way again this past weekend and on Thursday I opened my email to drop Wilf a note to see if he’d be open on the Monday and there was a link to Rachel Anastasia’s blog I Heart Rachabees and a posting that Wilf had passed away a few days earlier. I knew Wilf had been battling cancer but we never really expect people to lose that battle I guess.

I can’t say that I knew Wilf that well but I’d known him for a long time as I started my newspaper photography career in Kamloops thirty plus years ago. It’s not that big a place and you get to meet most people with similiar interests.

Sunday I wandered downtown and checked out Wilf’s gallery. Closed of course but with a sign announcing a memorial service for him this coming Saturday. I won’t make it so this posting will be my small memorial.

Hanging the show

Jason Flower and Tiemen Kuipers sort through Vancouver punk singles.

The Dishrags, Scout, Jade and Dale,  with a photo of their younger selves

Friends chat during the opening

Most of you will note a similarity to Jen Bekman’s 20×200 site which was the pioneer in the lower priced quality online galleries but hey, you can’t have too many places to see and buy great art.

I must admit I actually used the 20×200 site today to make a purchase for the first time. I picked up one of the 8 x8 inch Mike and Doug Starn snowflake prints, an edition of 500 that sold out in hours. It was actually quite thrilling to snag one of the images. I tried before on earlier Starn brother releases but wasn’t quick enough, the lowest prices editions sell very fast. At the time of  writing this there are still larger prints available at $500, $1000 and $2500.

I had a great opening at the JEM Gallery Friday night.  We were scheduled to be open from 6PM until 9PM but it was after 11PM before people stopped dropping by. Saturday was excellent as well and we didn’t close up shop until 5:30. Many thanks to gallery owner Carola Goetze for all her heard work.

Thanks to Carola Goetze for extending the invitation to exhibit at her gallery.

Many thanks to Tony Bardach for the use of his song lyric  “It’s All Just Part Of The Noise”  in the show’s title.  For me it encapsulates a lot about that era, in that we all were there, creating, playing, listening, photographing,  simply because we liked the music. We were all just part of the noise.

Last weekend I attended a two day workshop presented by Luz Gallery with Toronto photographer Don Weber, a member of the VII agency. We had a diverse group of twelve workshoppers (if that’s a word). There was the legally blind Anglican minister, the woman who’d had Ansel Adams drop by her house when she was a child and critique her photos,  a philosophy professor who had just returned from a workshop with Mary Ellen Mark and the motorcycle riding government lawyer. The others were equally interesting. There was even a few of us pro photographers.

The first day focused on looking at various projects shot by Don as well as work by his fellow VII photographers and others. Don showed his Ukraine images including those from Chernobyl that are featured in his book Bastard Eden as well as images from Russia and other eastern countries. I’ve attended a fair number of lectures as well as short seminars but never a weekend workshop. Looking at it from the perspective of someone who teaches now and then I was impressed by the way Don was able to keep the day on track while allowing people to ask questions even if they were slightly off topic.

The second day we spent time looking at each other’s projects with Don doing an edit of our images. It’s always interesting ( and a good practice) to have someone else look over your images and provide feedback. Don was quite good at distilling everyone’s pile of images down to a select few.

I found the workshop allowed me to look at my own work with fresh eyes and perhaps seek a slightly different direction with a couple of projects. I was also extremely impressed with Don’s organization and his focus on his career. He appears to have a very solid understanding of where and how he wants to have his career advance and how to make that happen. That’s awfully rare I think,  so it was very useful to see it explained.

This coming Saturday I’ll be attending Don’s grant writing workshop and I’ll be looking forward to that and having the mysterious world of grants simplified.

I have to say that Luz Gallery’s Diana and Quinton’s hard work at promoting shows and putting on workshops like these have made Victoria a far more interesting place for photographers. A year ago there was simply no chance to spend a weekend with a photographer of the calibre of Don Weber.  Now we have someone coming in every few months, and sometimes weeks,  for a new show or workshop.

The Luz Gallery had an artist’s talk and opening for the work of Saskatchewan photographer Thomas Bartlett tonight. Bartlett works with digital cameras creating his abstract images, images that he likens to colour field paintings.