Merchant Street Art & Craft Fair

Feed, has been asked to help organize an art/craft fair to be a part of the annual Merchant Street Music Fest in downtown Kankakee. This year's festival will take place on Friday and Saturday, August 13th and 14th.

In the past several years the Merchant Street Music Fest has grown into the premier live music festival in Kankakee and one of the most anticipated summer weekends in the entire region. This year the festival will feature more than 30 musical acts on two stages including Grammy nominees Liquid Soul, Southern Rocker Devon Allman and his band Honeytribe, "Chicago Jazz Act of the Year" Joel Patterson and the Modern Sounds, and the eclectic world music of The Chicago Afrobeat Project. Not to mention local favorites The Swing Kings, Ponyboy, Lisa Jackson & Shades of Gray, Lupe Carroll and many more.

The art and craft fair, new for this year, will be a major component of the festival with vendors located centrally along the path between the two music stages. The festival organizers feel so strongly about the importance of the art fair that they have given us permission to waive the entry fee to art and craft vendors. Those vendors that need access to electricity, however, are being asked to pay a minimal $20 surcharge. The entire reason for organizing the Music Fest is to offer something positive for the community, so in that spirit, we are hoping to find vendors willing to hold informal mini-demos of their areas of expertise or to simply be working on your craft for visitors to see.

If you are interested in setting up a booth, please send an email to feedartcenter@gmail.com and we'll get a vendor entry form out to you right away. As always, if you have an questions, concerns or suggestions, please let us know. More info on the festival can be found at merchantstreetmusicfest.com and on Facebook.

Spree

Our second photography event in as many weeks. Feed is sending out an assignment to all area photographers. Simply attend the Bourbonnais Friendship Festival anytime between June 23rd and June 27th and take some photos. Email your favorites to feedartcenter@gmail.com before July 17th.

An online gallery of all the submitted photos will go up on July 18th and the best of them will be published in a hand made postcard book.

View Finding

Last weekend's View Finding workshop was nice and laid back. Seven people showed up with vintage cameras, ready to point a digital camera through them. Today I edited, formatted and printed two photos from each participant. Tomorrow those prints are headed to Ireland where they will be included in John Baucher's TTV exhibition. The rest of the photos are available for viewing right now in the slideshow below. All in all it was a nice, fun, easy project and I hope to be able to do it again for next year's World TTV Day.

View Finding

June 19th, 2010 is World TTV Day, an international event intended to promote the re-purposing of vintage, analog cameras in a modern, digital world. In a nutshell, the TTV technique involves using a digital camera to take pictures "through the viewfinder" of an older, waist level camera. Pictures shot TTV have a look all their own. The glossy hi-tech nature of a modern digital photograph disappears behind the dust, grime, distortion, and ghosting typical of old cameras leaving a timeless image with an old-fashioned style you just can’t get with a nice clean digital camera.

To celebrate the process, we'll be hosting a TTV workshop on Saturday, June 19th at Perry Farm's Pavilion at Noon. We'll quickly examine the technique, build simple cardboard TTV rigs, and then spend the afternoon shooting pictures. This event will be totally free, but please RSVP to let us know how many people to expect.

We'll Provide:
• Supplies for building a cardboard contraption to eliminate reflections and glare.
• An online gallery of the best pictures taken by our photographers.
• Entry into a TTV exhibition in Belfast, Ireland

You Provide:
• A digital camera.
• A vintage camera with a viewfinder to shoot through. These cameras are commonly found in attics, yard sales, basements and thrift stores. Online, good cameras are commonly sold on ebay for just a few dollars. Pretty much any cheap camera with "flex" in its name will work. We'll only be using the viewfinder so it doesn't even matter if the camera is fully functional. Some of the popular models to search for are: The Kodak Duaflex, The Brownie Starflex, The Argoflex, The Anscoflex, The Ansco Rediflex.

For inspiration, examples of TTV pics from more than 6000 photographers can be found online at the Through the Viewfinder Flickr Group or the Official World TTV Day Group.