Category: News

Posted on

Tracing Thin Air Installation

The collaborative Tracing Thin Air project I’ve been making with Karen Brummund and Allison Grant culminates in a one-night only video and sound installation on Friday.

December 2 7-9pm
Tracing Thin Air Installation
between Monarch Coffee and The Alcove
Tuscaloosa AL

For this part of the project I’ve created a sound installation driven by air quality data that we collected over the last 9 months using Purple Air sensors. I sonify the data using a variety of sound generating and audio processing devices built with Cycling ’74’s Max.

Screenshot of Tracing Thin Air Max patch

It’s been fun digging into Max’s multichannel mc. system, especially in combination with the gen~ suite of objects. Graham Wakefield & Gregory Taylor’s excellent book Generating Sound & Organizing Time has been a particularly timely (hah!) and useful resource. Highly recommended.

Posted on

Tracing Thin Air Exhibit

Hopson: Average Color of the Sky Every Minute for 24 Hours – 20220915

I’ve been having a great time working with Karen Brummund and Allison Grant on our collaborative project Tracing Thin Air. The exhibition portion of the project opens Friday at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A one-night-only video and sound installation will follow in early December.

November 4 – 18
Tracing Thin Air Exhibition
Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center
Tuscaloosa AL
Opening reception: Friday November 4 5-7pm

Read more about the event
https://tuscarts.org/cac/galleries-venues/cac-gallery/
https://art.ua.edu/news/ua-art-professors-collaborate-in-tracing-thin-air/

Tracing Thin Air is supported by the Verdant Fund.

Posted on

Virtual Tour: Book as Art

YouTube player

Here’s a virtual tour of the Book As Art, Vol. 13: Transformation exhibit that Half Premonitions of the Moon, the collaborative piece Sarah Bryant and I made. Our piece is highlighted at 7:34. Sarah has another piece in the gallery that is featured at 6:27 in the video.

The exhibit is supported by the Decatur Arts Alliance, Georgia Center for the Book, the DeKalb Co. Public Library, and DeKalb Library Foundation.

Posted on

Artist Talk: Book Arts with Mary Ann Sampson

virtual artist talk: book arts with Mary Ann Sampson and Holland Hopson

I’m pleased to participate in an online artist tomorrow talk highlighting the book artist Mary Ann Sampson. I met Mary Ann and saw her work at her current exhibit at the Wiregrass Museum of Art. Her artwork is inventive, playful, improvisatory, and full of characters as well as character (also it’s often on gorgeous paper…) She’s a delight to visit with, too, so this conversation promises to be plenty of fun.

The event is free. Registration is required.

Here’s more about Mary Ann from the Wiregrass announcement: “Masters in Book Arts from the University of Alabama. Is an active member of the Guild of Book Workers. Founder of the One-Eye Opera Company – which publishes limited edition letterpress books, custom bookbinding and unique editions.”

“Handmade books are a personal stage and a memory stick for a life lived…a field for random thoughts and imagination. Flat works and three dimensional pieces are mostly singular ideas that have fallen off the pages. It’s the plurality of techniques and materials that make them seem different.”

Mary Ann Sampson
Posted on

Saturday in Inwood, My Eighth Birthday, August, 1977

YouTube player

I had a great time working with poet John Barger on this music to accompany his poem and family footage. John already has another book out, but don’t miss his Resurrection Fail that contains this poem.

I’m particularly fond of “At the Barnes Museum on a Cold Fall Afternoon” as a testament to the twinning and twining of art/poetry/life that happens so often in museums.