Artwalk
We have the coolest house, Rhonda and I.I can't take credit, Rhonda was the one who found it, I just went along with it when she suggested that we go look at this Artisan Village place. Kind of a condo situation, but the difference being that, on the first floor, some of the homes here have a small retail space that faces Roosevelt street, right on the first floor. We didn't think twice about selling our house, and buying this place. Best decision we ever made.
The idea behind these places is that they're live/work spaces. You can have a business on the first floor, live right above it and be an incredibly happy bastard for having done so. We decided to call our place Karmic Calamity Studio and Gallery. It will, obviously, be an art gallery, and since we're both artists, Rhonda and I effectively constitute Karmic Calamity Studio. The Studio has been open 24 hours a day, every day, since we moved in here. The reason being that I pitched Hold My Life to GirlAMatic within days of moving in here, and I've been working on it every day since.
Some of the businesses around us are open. Tammy Coe Cakes is open right next door, there's a music store down the street, and Retail Laboratory. So, on the first Friday of the month, during downtown Phoenix's artwalk, it seems like traffic on this end of Roosevelt is really picking up. We hosted a charity event that was organized by our friend Monica last month, and even with no promotion, a few hundred people came through the doors, and the event was a success.
Karmic Calamity Gallery isn't going to open until March, but over the course of last week, I came to realize that didn't mean the place had to sit there in the dark gathering dust. No, we could use the place for something, even if we weren't gonna necessarily profit from it.
The idea had come up before, of projecting Hold My Life onto the wall of the gallery sometime, perhaps when we had a show of our art, but it occurred to me that maybe it'd be cool to just do that now. I mean, it' s artwalk, right? People want to see art, why the hell shouldn't I show Hold My Life for free? For nothing, just "here, take a look. If you like it, then by all means go to girlamatic.com and read it there."
So, that's what I did. I took Friday off, and compiled all of the episodes of HML into one Flash movie that just moved from panel to panel at 30 second intervals. Fast enough that it didn't get boring, and yet slow enough that you could probably still read the thing. Borrowed a projector, opened the blinds on the retail space, and projected the comic onto the wall so it was about 4'x6'. I also stuffed these little 2.5"x6" Hold My Life promo cards into the door in case anybody was interested enough to want to go to the website and check out the series there.
The thing looked really cool. Best thing about vector art is that we could'a blown the thing up to the size of the entire building, and the resolution still would've been perfect. The colors were crisp, and you could read it from outside. Turned the thing on, and went upstairs to get tanked.
We had some friends over, bought some alcohol and had a small party while artwalk was going on. We were able to watch from our kitchen, and the balcony in front of it, as people passed by, stopped and read the comic like it was a silent film or something. As it turns out, the idea seemed to work. More people stopped than I thought we would get, more than a few actually stuck around down there to read a decent chunk of the story, and people seemed to be picking up the cards as well.
Hopefully, they went to girlamatic and checked the series out in it's intended venue. I was watching the traffic over the weekend, and it seemed like we got some people.
The thing is, I really thought it'd be cool to just show something free. And it was.
posted by Dale Ingram @ 7:54 PM
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