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I see the drab backgrounds of Ian Hartshorne or George Shawe, a pertinent observation of soft skin, and then these cartoon based visuals. There's a seamless blend between earth tones and rich pastel-neons which really appeals to me.

 

He describes his practice like, "pulling gold out of filth whilst also perverting gold into filth."

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I'd been on Curatorspace daily just applying for things, even if my work didn't really fit, in the hopes of getting recognition or attention or gain a foothold of some intangible artist network. I felt absolutely pathetic doing it. And then I have a conversation and I remember what a privilege it is to make artwork in the first place.

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When we talked about painting, he described it in a way that made it sound like paintings were constructs of vision, like portals into unreality. Maybe that's not what he meant, but it's what I heard.

filled with inspiration, I tried my hand at painting and failed, as I usually do, to create anything I believed in;

in the process i gleaned a sense of that incredible privilege, that special kind of freedom that creative expression allows.

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Fischer shook my hand when he left and that was the last physical contact I had with another human being, 5 weeks ago. Not that i'm counting or anything.

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Then about a week ago I attended a virtual music festival hosted by Open Pit on Twitch, where American Football were headlining. I couldn't stay that long. It started with one of the Open Pit members making a beat from samples voted on by Twitch Chat. The server crashed often, as if the bandwidth police were perpetually shutting it down, but the music stayed on.

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Kai Whiston of IGLOO had a DJ set, and I looked him up afterwards and found his project "No World as Good As Mine".

 

The album was densely laden with sounds and concepts. The interview-style PDF features images, paintings and a series of journal style interviews. It's a blessing to access something you really care about completely on accident, that's the kind of thing that doesn't usually happen when you visit a gallery. Often the intent is to seek out, look at and consume art, and that intent stops an element of surprise.

I was surprised to find Kai's project, I wasn't surprised when he didn't reply to my tweets, but then I was really surprised when he replied to my email. That's another privilege, the feeling of human connection.

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A few days ago he released a poem that features in one of the songs.

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