Dear Kickstarter Donators,

I have recently returned to the lower 48 (what "mainland" US is referred to up north) from Alaska with a nice load of newly collected material for the Markers of TIme project. I will be getting in touch with you shortly to get your appropriate shipping information so your pledge rewards make their way into your hands.

 Over the next four months I will be spending time on both the east and west coast focused on the production of segments of the project and will be sending along periodic updates. My current update includes news that my collected glacial ice made it safely back south to a California freezer with the help of a seafood company used to shipping frozen Alaskan seafood all over the world daily. When I inquired about the possibility of using some of their ice to ship mine they seemed completely unfazed by my request. As it turns out they often ship glacial ice for scientists crazily making my seemingly daunting task of retrieving glacial ice from Alaska a strangely smooth experience from start to finish (more on it's fate to come...). 

My tour to take photographic portraits of five glaciers over a 10 day trip also went off without a hitch. Below are a few photos of my 4x5 camera poised to shoot the Matanuska and Worthington glaciers.

I hope you are all having a relaxing summer and thank you again for your generous support.

Cheers,

Christina 

DEAR KICKSTARTER BACKERS,

I am writing you now from a library that looks out over Kachemak Bay and mountains of Alaska in the town of Homer at the tip of the Kenai Pennisula. I am on a road trip tour this week to photograph a series of glaciers that are rapidly receding for the Markers of Time project and I could not be doing this without you!

I want to thank you so very much for your support and for helping make the Kickstarter campaign for Markers of Time a success. Your support is helping to facilitate the next phase of this complex project and it is allowing me to move forward with this work in a way I could not without your backing. I can not thank you enough! 

I don't think I have ever felt more supported from all factions of my life than I have over the last month while working on this fund raising and I feel incredibly lucky to have the amazing community I do. Thank you for being a part of it! 

I will send along more updates soon and be in touch with you about your pledge rewards in the next few weeks. 

Many thanks and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Wishing you my best from the magnificent (though melting) far North!

Cheers, 

Christina 

Hello Everyone, AGAIN THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR HELPING ME MAKE MY 10K GOAL!

I have about 3 days left of the campaign. So if you know any stragglers who are planning to donate please do give them a last little nudge: I would love to bring the final number up as high as possible before the deadline, Saturday the 17th (I'm aiming for 12-13K to cover all fees and taxes etc. so a whole10K will be able to go to the project!).

There are still some great investment opportunities to snag via the pledge rewards for collector types. Artworks by EIRIK JOHNSON, REBECCA FOSTER +MIGUEL ARZABE are still available as well as special edition prints from the Markers of Time project and personalized full moon podcasts created by Civil Twilight Collective.

THANK YOU AGAIN FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT!

 Cheers,

Christina

 Here's a bit about each of the available artworks and their creators:

EIRIK JOHNSON: His Kickstarter print donation Melrose Montana is from his series "Animal Holes". By presenting the motif of the abandoned burrow in a direct and as close-cropped way as possible, Johnson allows the full differences, similarities, and significance of his subject to speak directly to the viewer, unencumbered by distracting elements. What is left is the stripped-down simplicity, variety, and adaptability of hiding places lurking amidst the ever-changing realms of property developers, a catalogue of survival, preservation and, ultimately, escape. (Press Release Gail Gibson Gallery)

BIO: Born in Seattle in 1974, is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, George Eastman House and Aperture Gallery. His first book, Borderlands, was awarded the Santa Fe Prize for Photography in 2005. in 2010 Eirik had an exhibition of his project and published the correlating monograph Sawdust Mountain with Aperture Foundation in NYC. He was also awarded the Foster Award by the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston.  www.eirikjohnson.com

REBECCA FOSTER: Her donated print 360 degrees is drawn from a series of twelve etchings of houses on stilts. The series is an investigation into the concept of "home"---a place from which we go forth and return, a place of origin, destination, and longing. The practice of building a house on stilts is utilized globally, presumably to create an interior space that hovers above an inhospitable exterior landscape.

BIO: Rebecca Foster is an interdisciplinary artist who was trained as a printmaker and has collaborated on the production of a limited edition, hand-sewn Louise Bourgeois artist’s book. Originally from Baltimore, MD, she earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in English Literature from Cornell University in 2001. She teaches courses in printmaking and drawing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Rebecca is spending the month of July in Amsterdam working on her latest project July 22, 1941/2011 for which she is taking 5.5 seconds of film footage, the only existing moving images of Anne Frank, and translating it into 132 meticulously rendered drawings and a short experimental film. (Read more on her funded Kickstarter page).   www.buildupteardown.com

MIGUEL ARZABE: Miguel’s donated piece Kings Canyon Wilderness Remade is a fossilized interface for exploring the wilderness. Each piece in this series is made up of an Etch a Sketch drawing that first were photographed. The grey screen areas of the resulting photograph were erased by hand in Photoshop and the subsequent line drawing was laser etched onto an oak panel and filled in with wood filler. The process of taking a material first found in the natural landscape, then depicting it through a machine (Etch-a-sketch) whose negative is then limned (engraved) through another machine (computer), creates a dialogue that seeks to disrupt the common dichotomy within levels of processing - analog with digital, the manual with the mechanized, also the original with the copy. The works form nested frames of reference for the natural world.

BIO: Drawing from his interests in landscape and sport, in his work Miguel explores the tension between an idealized conception and a perceived experience through measured negotiations within time and space. He has shown his work at the Pompidou Center in Paris, in the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Arzabe holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS in Fluid Dynamics from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. www.miguelarzabe.net

I am so happy to say that with your generous help I reached my 10K goal for the Markers of Time Kickstarter this morning!  THANK YOU SO MUCH! 

These last few weeks have been amazing and I cannot tell you have lucky and supported I feel both as an artist and as a human. 

I ALSO WANT TO UPDATE YOU ON MARKERS OF TIME PROJECT HAPPENINGS: On Sunday I embarked on my latest Markers of Time adventure by hiking through a mountainous valley in the Chugach Range, following a lush path aside a river flowing grey blue with glacier dust, all the way up a snowy slope, to the foot of Byron Glacier just a few hours outside of Anchorage (yes it is pretty much exactly as you are picturing from an Alaskan brochure). My quest, completed only with the help of two stealthy Alaskan friends, was to collect some chunks of glacial ice to ship back to California. Success! At the top I found the ideal array of different sized glacial boulders to chose from. I could not have found a more perfect glacier to supply me. I have now traveled to some of the most sublime frozen places on the planet and seen my share of brilliant glaciers but this one I have to say trumped them all. Here are some snaps: 

My amazing colleagues from Civil Twilight Collective and creators of Lunar Resonant Streetlights have donated the $100 pledge reward for the Markers of Time Kickstarter, a podcast guide for a full moon hike personalized for your location. Here's a little bit about them... 

In 2007 Civil Twilight Collective formed and won Metropolis Magazine's Next Generation Competition with their Lunar Resonant Streetlight project which has since received attention from around the world and in and out of the city. They've since had their hand in many an exciting project and check out the latest, the incredible Oru, a folding origami kayak designed by Anton Willis that weighs 20lbs, takes 5 mins to assemble and handles like a dream! Trust me I've tried it (It also received an I.D. design distinction at the 2010 Index Award Design Annual). Take a look: