9-14-2006
Our luggage arrived today! So with a swift change of clothes we were out on the streets of our neighborhood, Kensington, where we took a quick run through a photograph exhibit Lost Landscapes at the Royal Geographical Society. The exhibit contained photographic images of geographic maps and of the world's electrical use at night as well as juxtaposed images of Hong Kong from 1890 and 1990.
Continuing down the street we arrived at the Victoria and Albert Museum where we strolled through this beautiful building amongst all of its wonderful treasures. The museum has an amazing collection of architectural replicas that were made to scale, a large silver collection and rooms upon rooms of eastern art. We saw a small but thorough photography exhibit that showcased everything from a daguerreotype to a modern digital c-print (they LOVE the term c-print here). Perhaps one of the highlights of the day was an oversized Lambda print with a plastic lenticular overlay that switched between three images as you passed it within the room (dressed, bikini, and uh…natural).
Following the Victoria and Albert we headed on the underground to Tate Store, the storage facility for both Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Former Advanced Residency Program Fellow, Kate Jennings, led our tour through this facility where she explained her role as Conservator of Time-based Media at the Tate. Theresa Cho, a graduate student in book conservation at the Camberwell program, joined us for the tour. Kate spoke to us of the concerns of making surrogates for all of the analog and digital media, challenges with installations that utilize color slide projection and about their on-going cold storage project for the motion picture reels in their collection. Their storage facility (sorry pictures were not allowed inside) were OVERSIZE in EVERY way. They had at least 30 foot ceilings (probably more) with 30 foot doors, and 30 foot sliding storage racks. Huge rooms with hundreds of yellow crates. It was very impressive.
After the tour, Kate's husband, Jon Lewis, took us to an art opening at the White Cube in the trendy Londong neighborhood of Shoreditch. The art gallery is owned by Jay Jopling who represents many of the young British artists like Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-wood. After a look at the oversized monochromatic offset prints by Neal Tait, we all had a nice meal at a Vietnamese restaurant before calling it a night. Tomorrow will guarantee us a long day as we set out for a double-decker tour bus ride around all of London.
