I did my last shift at Artomatic last Friday night. I’d already done 3 shifts as a gallery manager but came in to close so that the indefatigable Jeanan Oxley could actually go home early and have almost 20 hours away from the Artomatic building. I wish I could have helped out more than I did, but this summer has just been wildly busy and I definitely made it down to AOM a lot less than I would have liked, both as a visitor and as a volunteer/gallery manager.

I had a good experience this year, with one exception: some asshole decided it would be fun to steal my guestbook. Hey, thanks, whoever you are. That’s very cool. I hadn’t been able to check it since a week or so before the show closed, so there are a few comments I’m sure I missed. If you left one of them and you’re reading this now, drop me a line or post a comment here and it would be much appreciated!

Anyway, I sold this piece and this piece and had a couple other nibbles. And I had a great time, met some great folks, saw some fun concerts, browsed a ton of art, and seemingly ran into every one of my friends at the show at various points during the month of June. The location right next to the baseball stadium really did amazing things for foot traffic this year.

I didn’t take too many photos this year, and frankly I’m hard-pressed to remember specific exhibits that really blew me away. As is typical for me, I tended to gravitate to the relatively minimalistic stuff with bold patterns, shapes, or colors. Lots of clutter doesn’t do it for me so much, although I do remember one triptych that was extremely busy but so colorful and well-put-together that I was very impressed by it. Wish I could remember the artist’s name.

I only saw a couple concerts (Molly Hagen, hello, babies and The Verbas) and would have loved to have seen a lot more, especially the Sonic Circuits marathon that happened on the opening weekend. Too bad. Artomatic concert shots are never going to be the most exciting ever, but with those graffiti background and decent (if static) lighting, it’s a good place to get reliably usable stuff.

I thought the Peeps were amusing, although I was generally more impressed with last year’s batch. Frustratingly, I didn’t take a picture of my favorite one from this year, which depicted angry Metro commuters behind a clueless tourist standing on the left side of an escalator, but it can be seen on the right side of this photo:

So another year in the books, and I’m already looking forward to doing it again next year. Part of me wants to do a concert photography exhibit - where else would I be able to do something like that? The other part of me wants to stick to the artsy stuff, as I don’t get that much of a chance to share that kind of thing and the past couple years I’ve been able to sell some of it as well. (I don’t think concert photos would really sell at Artomatic.) Hmm… we’ll see.

My photos (not that many) from Artomatic 2008 and 2009 are in this Flickr set.

Tags: Artomatic

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 9:50 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.