On Opening Night

The opening night is over… It was amazing and I had a fab fab fab time. Thank you so much to everyone who came out!! I can hardly get my head around the fact that the Swimming Upstream project is up for show now. Cool:-)

The whole day was amazing. I was lucky enough to have Jolene help me out all day long. We made our way to Orms at about 11 am to fetch the prints and damn, they did a stellar job. Packed it all up and went to the GD straight away. As soon as we pulled up at the Grand Daddy a big car moved out of the way creating the one and only available parking space in front of the Grand Daddy Hotel. The guys helped us carry the frames into The Venue and move furniture around.  Then we still had to decide on the order of the photos. I had made a selection on my computer but it is different once you’re inside a venue. There’s only so much space available, which photos do you want people to see first when they enter the room. Certain photo go together well, other don’t… When we finally made the decision of who to put where it was more than an hour later. Handyman Sheldon was quickly bribed to forget fixing the water pump and help put up the photos. Thank you:-) 

I think my favorite part of the day was sitting on the floor with Jo, eating pasta, drinking caipirinhas, tweeting and chatting while staring at my own work and realizing it has actually become a reality. Nice:-)

Jolene and I rushed home to Woodstock at about 4 pm in order to shower and change. Made it back just in time for me to fly into a fit, to get the dj table *back* into the room, move some furniture out of the room and for the champagne to be found before the first guests came. And from then on the night just whizzed by.

Verity opened the exhibition with a beautiful introduction and what Swimming Upstream means to her after which we played the video and Akio spinned his records all evening long. He had brought another dj with and they just took turns. Thank you guys so much!

And I can’t wait to see the Pixel Revelation’s video of the evening and some of Joy’s pics:-) If you have any as well, please let me know as between the excitement, champagne, chatting to people, rum & coke, being interviewed, tequila shots, the occasional hiding behind you just so I could take it all in and some more chatting and some more rum & coke, the evening just flew by.

Made it to bed at about 3.30 am. We started the ext day with a yummie breakfast at Superette and now it’s back to reality. Pics need to be sold, banks to be paid and visas to be sorted out… But the night happened anyway:-)

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Little fish, big fish swimming in the water

Swimming Upstream – I’d say it’s going rather well. It hasn’t always been easy but as a friend reminded me early on, it really is “the only way to be in life”.  And it sure has been a lot of fun as well! After having started this project at the beginning of this year, I am finally swimming towards the end. Fortunately, in true Swimming Upstream style, this is happening in a glitchy rather wobbly way. Two shoots have been postponed and the exhibition date has been pushed back by a couple of weeks. I found out that Chew Magazine doesn’t accept any content that has been published before. The good things are that this gives me more time to actually finish and find sponsoring to help me print and frame everything. Another good thing is that I went to a Pecha Kucha meeting at Tafelberg Tavern last night and came back inspired. There are so many people doing so many cool things in this city that it really makes you try harder. Look out online for a new company called Membrane, curators of ideas and a new awesome magazine called JRNL as well GreenPop in case you’d like to add some green to our world. One tree costs R50. Now how cool is that?

The first photo, and header for the blog, is of DJ Akio, founder of Consciousflowz and Kool Out Lounge

Anyway, welcome to my blog.