Snapshots of my last days in Latvia

August 30, 2013 by brigitaozolins

I’m on a plane, on my way to Venice to see the Biennale and to Padua to see Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovengi Chapel. Unless I stop sleeping altogether and start taking drugs, there is no way I can write up all the experiences I have had in Latvia since my last posting with the attention to detail I would like to give them. So, instead, I offer a series of snapshots with brief comments. I go on a canoeing […]

Categories: Architecture, Art, Latvia, Libraries, National Library of Latvia, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Architecture, Gauja River, KIM?, Latvia, Mezaparks, National Library of Latvia, Rigas Maklas Telpa, Saulkrasti, Travel, Travel writing

Lost in the woods… and other adventures in Latgale

August 19, 2013 by brigitaozolins

…Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. Thoreau, quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s, A field guide to getting lost. We are in a dense forest on an unposted dirt road about two or three kilometers from the highway.  Viktors keeps driving until the road becomes more like an overgrown track. “I’m sure it was this […]

Categories: Art, Daugavpils, Latgale, Latvia, Rothko Museum, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Art, Daugavpils, Garden of Destiny, Kurcums, Latgale, Latvia, Liktendarzs, Mark Rothko, Rothko Museum, Storks, Svente

On leave in Latvia

August 13, 2013 by brigitaozolins

The desire to go home … is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars… Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.  Rebecca Solnit As soon as I arrive at Gate 16 at Gatwick airport, I am in the company of my brothers and sisters. Everyone, with the exception of two […]

Categories: Architecture, Latvia, Riga, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Art Nouveau, Latvia, Riga, Riga Architecture, Travel, Travel writing

Loving London Part 2

July 30, 2013 by brigitaozolins

A group of Romanians has been camping out at Marble Arch recently, a short walk from where I am staying. The police have attempted to move them on, and while they apparently leave for a short time, they keep returning. I see them on BBC1 news and then I see them in reality as I make my way to Hyde Park. There are about a dozen people, including children, gathered on the grass with their belongings packed in carry-on sized […]

Categories: Art, Buckingham Palace, Contemporary Art, Hyde Park, London, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Adam Phillips, Apsley House, Art, Bill Viola, Blain Southern Gallery, Buckingham Palace, Coll & Cortes Gallery, Contemporary Art, Douglas Gordon, Ellen Gallagher, Hyde Park, ICA, John Soane Museum, Katarina Fritsch, London, Marble Arch, Meshac Gaba, Museums, Paul Holdengraber, Robert Irwin, Serpentine Gallery, Serpentine Park Nights, Simon Starling, Speakers' Corner, Susan Wilson, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Fourth Plinth, The Mall, The Queen's Gallery, The Royal Academy, Travel, Travel writing, Wellington Arch, Word Sound Power

Loving London Part 1

July 25, 2013 by brigitaozolins

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: a tour of the world’s greatest fictional city. The new heir to the British throne, Prince George, was born two days ago. Last night, along with millions of others, I watched on television as his parents showed him to the world outside St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which is not very far at all from where I am […]

Categories: Art, Contemporary Art, London, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Art, Contemporary Art, Greenwich, Hyde Park, London, Mark Landy, Prince George, Punch Drunk Theatre Company, Temple Film Studios, The British Museum, The Drowned Man, The National Gallery London, the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Family, The Serpentine Gallery, Travel, Travel writing

The last post for New York

July 20, 2013 by brigitaozolins

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. John Updike New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she […]

Categories: Art, Australia Council Studio, Contemporary Art, Long Island, New York, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Ad Reinhardt, Aida Sehovic, Art, Big Nick's, Contemporary Art, Francoise Grossen, Green River Cemetery, Gwen Hardie, Hannah Wilke, Harold Rosenburg, Jackson Pollock, Katz's Deli, Lee Krasner, Long Island, Mary Lum, New York, Simon Harsent, Sto te nema?, The Springs, The Swiss Institute, Travel, Travel writing, When Harry met Sally

Beautiful Boston

July 16, 2013 by brigitaozolins

O happy town beside the sea, Whose roads lead everywhere to all; Than thine no deeper moat can be, No stouter fence, no steeper wall! Ralph Waldo Emerson I’m on the train to Boston on my second last big excursion before leaving New York. I’m very happy. Outside it’s misty and completely overcast, such a refreshing change from the heat wave we’ve been having in Manhattan. There is no air conditioning in the studio, and the heat builds up day […]

Categories: Art, Boston, Contemporary Art, Libraries, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Art, Barry McGee, Boston, Boston Athenaeum, Boston Botanic Gardens, Boston Commons, Boston Duck Tours, Boston Public Library, Contemporary Art, ICA Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, John Jeffries House, John Singer Sargent, Mark Cooper, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Old Granary Burial Ground

More art and more shiny happy people

July 8, 2013 by brigitaozolins

My art deals with light itself. It’s not the bearer of revelation – it is the revelation. James Turrell I’m in the final days of my Greene Street residency – only 8 days left before I leave New York and head for London. I still have a lot to write about so I’m going to use subheadings and take a more shorthand approach in this post – well, as much as I possibly can! THE CLOISTERS The Metropolitan Museum of […]

Categories: Art, Contemporary Art, Guggenheim, New Museum, New York, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: Annette Allman, Apex Art, Ariel Krupnik, Art, Art in General, Artists Spaces, Contemporary Art, Dia Beacon, Fiona Lee, Guggenheim, Idiosyncratic Fashionistas, James Turrell, medieval imagination, MoMA PS1, New York, The Cloisters, Travel, Travel writing, unicorn tapestries

The Toronto Trip

June 25, 2013 by brigitaozolins

Last week I spent 4 days in Toronto. I went there to visit an academic at Ryerson University and to experience some of the art scene, but I was also obsessed with making a trip to Niagara Falls. Toronto is hard to describe. Parts of it, especially around the west end of trendy Queen Street which is known as the Indie capital of the city, are reminiscent of Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, but the rest of it is more like Brisbane, […]

Categories: AGO, Art, Contemporary Art, OCAD, ROM, Ryerson University, Toronto, Travel, Travel writing • Tags: 401 Richmond, AGO, Art, Contemporary Art, Lewiston, Niagara Falls, OCAD, Queen Street, ROM, Ryerson Image Centre, Ryerson University, Spadina Avenue, The Gladstone Hotel, The Harbourfront Centre, The maid of the mist, Toronto, Travel writing, Vid Ingelevics