Salon 100 // Hello Uzbekistan

And action. Hello everyone, my name is Colin Goldberg, and I'm a Techspressionist. Today is Thursday, November 6th, 2025, and we're here for our 100th salon. So for those of you who aren't familiar with what a Techspressionist Salon is, the very first salon was held on September 1st, 2020, and that was, our first virtual meetup, artist meetup, conducted via Zoom. In attendance were artists Oz Van Rosen, Steve Miller, Patrick Lichty, and myself. As long… as well as the art historian and longtime director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Helen Harrison. So this was the first meetup of the artist group, and it was conceived of as a modern counterpart to the Surrealist salons of the 1920s, in which artists could meet informally to socialize and discuss ideas.

Colin Goldberg

The most recent roundtable recording is a discussion between the members of this first salon, and that's available at Techspressionism.com slash roundtable. A little over 5 years later, Techspressionism has grown into a global community with over 350 artists from more than 45 countries. There are currently over 80,000 posts on Instagram using the hashtag Techspressionism. Hello, Uzbekistan marks the first international museum exhibition for the group, and is a fitting topic for today's salon.

Colin Goldberg

Hello, Uzbekistan was, and continues to be, a true group effort. It's impossible to take apart who did what. Everyone in the exhibition worked to make this happen, from creating a catalog to even the presentations that we were about to see. Cynthia Beth Rubin served as the organizer of this cooperative effort. She's a Techspressionist artist whose work has been included in our major exhibitions, Techspressionism Digital and Beyond at the Southampton Arts Center in 2022, Hello, Brooklyn at the Kingsborough Art Museum in 2024, and Hello Chelsea in 2025.

Colin Goldberg

At the Hudson Guild Gallery in New York City. With Cynthia DiDonato, she organized the weekly Techspressionist co-working sessions, which have been ongoing for nearly 2 years. Previously, Ruben held leadership roles in other organizations, including serving as a board member of ISAEA, as Digital Arts Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, and as Chair of the SIGGRAPH Arts Awards Committee, among other roles. Through all of this, she continues to make Techspressionist art, as we will soon see.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionist salons now incorporate Zoom-translated captions, which enable users to have the speech in a meeting or webinar automatically translated in real time to captions in another language. For example, if the speaker is speaking English in a meeting, captions can be made available in Spanish, Chinese, Ukrainian, and more. Many thanks to Cynthia Beth Rubin for taking the lead on this initiative. Instructions on how to enable captions are available at Techspressionism.com slash captions.

Colin Goldberg

So, before we get going, I just ask that if you're not presenting, please mute yourselves, which it looks like everyone has already. And, now I will pass the mic on to Cynthia Beth Rubin, who will serve as our moderator today. So, Cynthia, take it away.

Okay, great. Well, I think we're ready to roll. This is, again, the true spirit of this exhibit. This is a cooperative effort, and Greg Garvey is controlling the actual slideshow, so we will… get going. And Greg, you can just go right ahead, because we're into our trails.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Great! So, a lot of people have asked how this show came about. So, it came about in 2002, I was in a show with, that was organized by Andrei Martinov, and this is Andre, who initiated our show in Uzbekistan, and, left us before the show came to fruition, but I got to really know him through the years. He put my work in other exhibitions. You can see over in the Kyrgyzstan State Museum. So this exhibition is dedicated to him. Where were we? Well, this map gives you an idea of, where Uzbekistan is, and then you can see where Urgenth is, which I've circled here, within Uzbekistan.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Uzbekistan is really a desert country, so this is a little background of where we were, and you will notice that there are these green spots. Those are the oases that became the city. When we were in Organche, we were surrounded by these incredible textures, and everywhere. This is the hotel we stayed in, so every day we saw these textures, the sidewalks. Not every sidewalk has textures on it, but a lot of them did. And this is electronic art. Right across the street.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

From our hotel. We saw this hospital, I don't know what it's like to stay in a hospital with the lights flashing all the time, but there we were. Okay, you can go on to the next one, we seem stuck on that. So, on a very hot day, we went trudging over with our artwork that we had all hand-carried, and we knew we got to the right place when we saw our poster in front of this wonderful museum. So, we approached the museum, And, this is the courtyard of the museum.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Wonderfully, carved pillars. It was the former post office, and you can see the landscape, used a desert vegetation, but just incredible. So, I wanted… Sharin is here with us. We went in and we met Shirin, the director. This is what she said about the exhibit that's in the catalog, and then we went in and we met with this… these fabulous staff members who stayed with us the whole time. They were really great helping us. I wanted to include this picture to give you an idea of what's… the museum is kind of symmetrical, and on the other side is this collection of paintings, just stacked, salon-style. And the museum does amazing outreach. All kinds of people come. These are artists who have worked in The permanent collection who came to our opening. A couple of them have self-portraits, so you can see that.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Which was really great, too, to meet them, and they were very enthusiastic about our exhibit. On the night of our first day there, we went out for dinner, and this gives you another idea of the ambience and the experience of being in Uzbekistan. And just before that, this is what we were doing. Greg, I'm not hearing sound with this.

Oh, here we go. Okay, this dish.

I'll show you.

There was a lot of fun going on.

We've moved on now. So, Shirin took us to Kiva, wonderful tour guide. Kiva's a historic city that's right near, Ergenth, and here's a sense of the textures that we're seeing. This is a… not as old as some of the other buildings, but it's a historic building with the kinds of textures that we saw. And one of the great things about being in Kiva is that there's permanently installed sculptures that remind you of the history, that this… you're on the Silk Road. So we went from the very modern buildings in Ergansh, with this incredible sensibility, to feeling that we were in History. But here we are installing. We came back to reality, we were there for the exhibit, everybody had to work.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

The staff was fabulous staying with us, and then we were installed. We were… the show was up, and this just gives you a little bit of a hint of the space. You're gonna see more. And then we went into Sharin's office and had tea, which is something that we did frequently. So, not only was she gracious giving us tea, but if you look at the art on the walls, you'll see selections from previous exhibits. So, A large number of people came to the opening. It was a great crowd that gathered around.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

As we prepare to give our speeches, and hopefully the sound is on for the speeches, which…

Comes up next week. Welcome to….

Gregory Patrick Garvey

Okay, and now I'm going to show you a little bit… excerpt from a wonderful television report. Who's back, and the translation, I don't think, will work for me.

It gives you an idea of the opening.

Tene… temple, and I took… Photographs, and color, and pure… abstraction. Ailande. So, I have a selection of…

Okay, and the museum continues to attract visitors to our exhibition. This is a couple weeks after a group of med students, and this is… had to include this, because this is typical of how we… hanging out in this restaurant, and, James Dawson, who's here, Roz's husband. Gave a little speech about how great the restaurant was, so they gave him something special. We got great press coverage, thanks to Sharin's hard work, and there are links to this, and we have to thank all of our supportive friends, Partners who came thinking they might have a vacation, but had to go to work, and the people who really helped us understand Uzbek culture and helped with our translations. We absolutely could have not done this without their help.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, that's our introduction, and we are going to go on now to the artists who are actually organized alphabetically by first name. So, here we go.

Okay, so I was really pleased to be part of the Techspressionist Show. Using the floor plan that was provided for us, I calculated the amount of running space per person and came up with an estimate of 10 to 13 feet. So on that basis, I did a mock-up on my… of my installation plan, which you see here. And I decided to use the space to show a 10-foot panorama from my Myrtle Walk series, and a set of 4 16x20 virtual still-life images. From the Junk Door Rhapsody series. The panorama was printed on vinyl in California and fitted with grommets for ease of hanging. The prints were done in my studio on my Epson printer. I was really concerned about color fidelity, but the vinyl printing matched my studio prints.

Annette Weintraub

The two series are related, but they have slightly different color. But despite the differences in support, media, and print type, I felt they worked together. So this is an insulation shot. On the right, you see Zolfia, who's one of Sharin's assistants. And, all the… all the images were laid out on the floor, to set up the room. At first, I thought we might have some problems hand-carrying the work into the country. But… That really never happened. My vinyl print rolled up into a tube.

Annette Weintraub

And the, Epson prints were in glassine bags, also in the tube. And they ended up installing, fairly, easily. So this is a series of four prints from the Drunk Draw Rhapsodies. They're virtual still-life images composed of low-polygon 3D models that have been altered by me. And then composed in 3D space. You can't really see it from the front view, but the positioning of these objects is an illusion, and there are visual tricks in the way perspective and scale have been used.

Annette Weintraub

I'm really interested in the formal relationship of the objects, as well as their metaphorical impact. And use point of view and virtual camera lenses to accentuate these properties. I also use lighting, including tinted light and reflection to complicate the space. So, I'm really intrigued by common… by the commonplace objects that surround us. And try to bring out their innate poetry and inherent strangeness. The virtual syllabs are also a commentary on how we create unique environments out of so many small and innocuous things. And in this, I've been influenced by the French poet Francis Ponshe.

Annette Weintraub

Whose work minutely examined everyday objects. This piece is actually a duplex panorama, two panoramas of different scales. This series came out of daily walks that I took in my studio neighborhood in which I photographed discarded objects Architectural elements and building material textures. The first series of panoramas were produced as prints. And scrolling JavaScript animations with ambient sound. For the Department of Cultural Affairs in New York City, City Canvas program, I created a second set of panoramas that were 50, 100, and 150 feet length. One issue with print panoramas, that they were long, but not wide.

Annette Weintraub

So in fact, the original series was 7x92 image. So for this series, I decided to duplex the panoramas by stacking them, so that you see a complete view of the one on top, and a close-up view, or a partial view, of a second one. These images use a similar process to the virtual still-life images, but in this case, the 3D models are composited against the background of collage 2D photographic fragments. And the lighting and reflection are mostly, minimized.

Annette Weintraub

We can go to the next slide.

Annette Weintraub

Next slide, Bec. And finally, this is an installation shot of the work with the young visitor for scale. It was great to work with Syringe staff, meet some of the local artists, and talk with the university students. And I have to say that our group of expressionists worked really hard to make this come off.

Okay. Okay, so you get me again, because we're going alphabetical. This is my work when it was first unrolled, and you can get an overview here. I'm working with plankton, I have been for a number of years. I'm drawn to plankton, first of all, because of the idea of making… oh, I had to stick this in, so it's just a little aside. This artist did a drawing of me solely, and it was really fun to hang out. So, overview of my work installed, I'm interested in making things that are unseen visible, so that's one of the reasons for being interested in plankton. Also the fact that plankton provide more than 50% of the oxygen that we breathe, they're bottom of the food chain, super important.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, this is adjacent to the installation you just saw. This one larger piece that was… Somewhat featured in the exhibition, and this is all very recent work. This is what the plankton looked like under the microscope. I use a powerful microscope at Rhode Island School of Design, and I hang out and get advice with and help and interact with the Mendo Enduro Lab at the School of Oceanography at the Rhode Island School of Design. This detail shows you that it's very layered, so under the microscope, it's completely colorless. Here, there's a detail where I'm playing with it. I'm just playing with pure color, texture, pulling them out, a little bit of gold lace in there. So back to the overall exhibition, I'm gonna talk a little bit about, the piece that's in yellow in a little bit more detail.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But first, I wanted to mention these that may seem a little bit They're very different. These were done as a collaboration with a graduate student who was sampling the water, and so it brings us much more in touch with the marine environment. I took her data, which together we decided to create the shaped graphs, and I treated them as visual objects, working with Andrea Miller, whose data it was. When we did this series, it was part of a synergy project.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

In Rhode Island. So it really was a true meeting of art and science, and I, and also Cezanne Mendendure advised on this. So, back to the larger pieces with the plankton. I investigate the plankton in many ways. There's a photographic element, relating to my previous work. I did this piece to include some of the actual elements. I recycled them into this piece, and this piece is also in the show. In the earlier work, the plankton I used was less distinctive, but the salt, those cubes, are cubes of salt.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Under a big push from the virtual co-working group, I started to include actual images of what's under the microscope, and then put Playfully, something new for me, put in actual lace. So these are details I'm showing, and in my understanding of the plankton, I do some quick gesture drawings. So, in this piece, I also included adjust your drawing, and then after it's printed out, I actually draw on it. So here you can see what's in the lower right, that I took the piece and emphasized the forms of the salt.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And this piece… Has all of those elements in it, in different layers. Printed out in and out many times. I had an uncolored version of it, I colored it, I re-photographed it. Having an iPhone and being able to just photograph is the most amazing thing. And this piece… which I did just before the show. Also, it shows that this… these plankton make chains. They're dead when I photograph them, and so you kind of see the dead chain, and then… The plankton, and then, again, this idea of immersing it in an environment. So, thanks to all the people who made this series of work possible.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

The… in some ways, it's collaborative. So that's what I have. So, thank you. Thanks for listening. And looking.

Okay, I'm ready to go. Hello, everyone. I'm talking to you from Oberlin, Ohio. I included this slide because I… and this slide because, Sharin sent me these to confirm that my work… work had arrived after sitting in customs in Tashkamp for approximately 2 weeks. This is the installation view of the work in the gallery, and I made some decisions about how to ship the work and hang the work in the most expedient way. Here is an installation view of the gallery, again, which we've seen several of, but you can see that there were several visitors. I'm going to talk briefly about three different bodies of work that are included in the show, and there's a lot of information here, so I'm going to speak pretty quickly.

Gregory Little

The bodies of work are… Memories of place is the oldest body of work, and this is a body of work based on memories of travel to India. Jaipur on the left, and Varanasi on the right. And I worked with, pure pigments, layers and layers of pure pigments, and then laser etching digital artifacts and images and assets into the layers of pure pigment, revealing other colors underneath. Something about the pigments reminded me of my time in India, and… so, I worked from that. This last piece I'll show you from that group is, based on Delhi, and this is the entrance dome to the Red Fort in Delhi. The geometry fascinated me completely, and a morning shot of the birds at the Yuma Gat.

Gregory Little

Agat is where the bodies are burned, in case you weren't aware, burned with sandalwood. So here's Delhi, and you can see the combination of the, the dome and the birds. And this is a close-up view showing you the layers of etching. And, hand-ground pigments. These are small images, approximately 9 by 12. That particular image, I scanned the original work and printed it at a large scale and did not like it. Therefore, I worked on it more and created that particular image.

Gregory Little

A second body of work is called Others in Their World, and this is based on, Afrofuturism, my reading and study of the musician and Sunra, philosopher Sunra, and also, Moore Mother, who is a poet, musician, activist, if you're not aware of her work with Black Quantum Futurism, you should check her out. Also, influences from my past as a painter include Mata, Paul Clay, Lenora Carrington, and people who are painting, basically painting other worlds.

Gregory Little

As places of liberation. So this is… one of the images from that, you can see that I'm pulling digital assets of my own from the past and placing them into this pixelated world. This one was based on a very small sketch I did during a faculty meeting, and then blew it up, printed it, and began painting and adding digital assets. And this is a third one. And again, these… The works that were in the exhibition in Ergenth were digital prints from scans of these artworks. So here we have the artworks again, our pigment, aqueous media, transfer, collage on paper.

Gregory Little

The third body of work, called Making Visible the Visible, And this is basically… going back to the Paul Clay statement from the past about, about, art makes the invisible visible? I went to Richard Feynman's diagrams of particles and waves as related to quantum theory. I just love these little things, and he made infinite numbers of these diagrams, and so I included those into these works. My thinking was, what's invisible to us today? What can I make visible?

Gregory Little

And trying to get down to the kind of lowest level elements that I could. This is the last one I worked on. These are all called Feynman's Dream, and this one is, digital transfers and encaustic on panel. So I was very happy to be included in this exhibition, and felt very fortunate, and… really appreciate all of the support. Thank you.

Okay, I'm next, so here goes. So, our artistic adventure took place in Uzbekistan, but it actually began earlier in 2023, when I visited Japan, and while attending the conference, I visited the Kaisean Dai Jingu Shrine in Koryama, Fukushima Prefecture. And I took photos of, like this, of angular branching of pine trees on the grounds of the Shinto shrine. I uploaded these into Midjourney. I wrote prompts to distort the source images increasingly towards abstraction, then repeatedly and recursively took the output images and fed them back in multiple times.

Gregory Patrick Garvey

And using the image weight parameter, I was able to control the influence of previous generations. On the current generation, there I could tease out the desired effects. Through multiple generations and iterations, the obstructions were an emergent phenomenon, which I curated to form the Daisi Kai Sei-san Dai Jingu series. Which was exhibited in Erge. Selective use of key terms like cable, TV, glitch, pixelated breakup, along with specific color references to saturated, inverted complementary, split complements gave me indirect control of the image generation, yet each image was infused with serendipity.

Gregory Patrick Garvey

Midjourney became a partner that augmented and amplified my artistic experiments and process, and did not replace it. So, I do not view AI as a threat, but rather an enhancement, allowing me to quickly explore entirely new direction image making that would be difficult to achieve with traditional media or even with programming code. The Daiseang Day Jingo series is a continuation of a long-time interest in glitch distortion, a term I did not use in 1988, but… now aiming at expressive abstraction. And the students which you saw in many of the photographs were present, and Kodorov Saleh, used by artists, is standing in front of his painting in the permanent collection. This slide shows how the series was hung. It is designed to lead the eye in unexpected ways through gaps in predictable grid arrangement.

Gregory Patrick Garvey

A much simpler prompt, slowly evolving glitch distortion 3D rotations, was repeatedly used recursively to generate the video, which I'm about to show you. And it should start… now.

Gregory Patrick Garvey

Thank you. And great group to work with.

Oh, hello! Lee Day here. My project is clipping suburbia, Japan, and one of the things that I'm really interested in is how algorithms see the world, and how we're affected by the algorithmic soup that we swim these days. So, I have a bit written here. Moments jam up against each other. Staring from a train hurtling through the city, the world flashes by. A mangled jumble of screen impressions seen and not seen, racing forward in a distraction of thoughts, thrown out by cloud-computed algorithms. We're making a new digital world for ourselves. Gone is our leisurely pace of thought and lifestyle. And driven by frictionless connectivity, this digital life is a headlong rush.

Lee Day

These photos are an expression of the speed, the cascade of experiences that are the defining aspect of this brave new world. And while my work is, on the one hand, an exploration of how this digital world feels to me, I'm also interested in the question of how the algorithmic devices we populate our lives with experience this very same environment. In other words, how would an AI see the world? The Clipping Suburbia series is generative at its core. The content of the images are compiled entirely by the algorithmic processes of my iPhone's AI as it struggles to cope with the novel experience of recording a panorama from a train window speeding through the landscape at 40 to 50 miles per hour.

Lee Day

But, in this struggle, it creates these wonderful images of time and space compressed, of fragments flowing together to form digitized impressions of the world racing by. But, in the end, these results still pose a question. And that is, will AIs see in the same beautifully formed, 3D technicolor renderings as we do, or… could their world maybe actually be more like this, a constellation of fragmentary images? Or even, perhaps they see something unseeable to us, something entirely of their own imagining. The two worlds, digital space and our experiences of tangible world, are not separate. As we continue incorporating artificial intelligence into our daily lives, we merge. We increasingly experience our world through their eyes, through their senses. And that, I feel, is one of the most important points of this work. For me, especially these smaller images, really feel like the world these days. It feels like everything is rushing too fast. Before you get one thought, another thought comes Intruding upon it. You can never really finish putting together ideas before there's something else happening, and you have to jump away to something else, so… on Expressionists, this is expressionism, after all, on an expressionist point of view, that's a lot of what I feel is expressed in this, the speed and the fragmentary nature of the world we live in today. One of the great things about, going to Urgenth was that we had a big wall to work with, and for the first time, I was able to actually install this work in a bit different way. Usually, you end up installing things sort of in a straight line, going across, everything all laid out beautifully. Here, I tried to make the installation work a bit more like the images themselves, so it's sort of… it's dashes and patterns and it's flowing across as if the wall itself and the windows in the installation are interrupting the space, and it's like a ticker tape going through space.

Lee Day

So it was really great, being in our gench. We had a wonderful group, and, I hope we can do some more of this. It was… it was just great.

Hi, I'm Michael Woodruff, and I'm, as it says, I'm in London. So this is my first exhibition printing the work as well, you know, as a digital artist, and I've decided on a selection of images based around my digital graffiti, collage, and abstraction works. So being mostly video and animation, I thought it was a really positive experience in working up the static images to be printed, and also the physical implications that got associated with that. And the one thing I drew was the importance of how much, like, digital work really needs the physical as well.

Michael Woodruff

We're so used to the screen, and the ease of use of digital platforms. And it's not just that, but in the artistic thinking, and it's really helped me with the work I'm doing. So you can see some of my images, and thanks for the help, guys, in installing. So you can sort of see some of the video work installed, the projector, which was a bit of a challenge, and as you know, it's one of the many issues we have with digital artifacts in galleries. So you can see me talking to some of the people on the right there.

Michael Woodruff

And, you know, there's a bunch of people getting in the way of my work. There….

Michael Woodruff

And, you know, as part of the group as well, I was putting together a lot of the video formats. Like, we had the… we had an open submission, which you can see on the right there, so I think we had 27, 28 artists. And also as well, because of my work that I do in my professional studio, I produce the trailer as well, and tried to bring a bit of a branding consistency across the exhibition, which I think is missing in a lot. And, you know, a lot of people submit a lot of digital work, and it's kind of hard to sort of see where it's all fitting in. And one of the other challenges of digital work in traditional kind of exhibitions but here's my work.

Michael Woodruff

Kind of thing, so in the age of, like, digital perfection, you know, it's being endlessly reproducible, you know, even generated. I'm interested in excavating what we've buried in that rush forward, you know, the glitches, the grain, the glows, the ghosts in the machine. So I'm searching for a kind of sublime language I can work and reflect. You know, in the cultural sedation which we have. So this is battle group number one, the things we lost just to get here.

Michael Woodruff

Oh, so in my meditation on digital loss, masquerading as visual abundance, I'm drawing on my background on entertainment, film, and advertising. So I'm applying the emotional logic of abstract expressionism and the democratic energy of pop art, neo-expressionism, graphic design, and graffiti to create what I think has as, like, meta-nostalgic abstraction. This is work that doesn't repackage historical art practices, but interrogates how looking back has become a primary way of actually moving forward.

Michael Woodruff

You know, each piece functions as a visual system, it's sequence-reactive and fragmented. I think of them as mixtapes, like colleges, where movement, color, and forms collapse into one another. You know, in a moment where new technology markets itself through seamlessness, I'm choosing friction, analog imperfections that aren't merely replicated, but they're rebuilt within these digital systems, in these structures. You know, they're becoming formal elements, as you know, as considered as brush marks or paint blocking.

Michael Woodruff

You know, the results is imagery that I hope carries, like, a gender and emotional weight, and surfaces that feel haunted by the media technologies that shape us. You know, this work is about what we embed in our tools, and what the tools also embed in us. You know, it's about the stories we're telling through the things we save, and the things we let go and decay. You know, it's also about how memory itself has become a technological problem, and how that problem might be art's kind of urgent subject to explore in a world of repackaging ideas.

Michael Woodruff

So we had the last picture just before was called, My Nerves are raw on Being Accessible As I Dig a Hole for My Information. And one of the people there, a 14-year-old girl, came up to me and said that was her favourite piece in the old exhibition, which was really great to see people engage with, so sorry about that, guys. This one is called, If You Close My Eyes Forever, We'll All Remain Unchanged. And if there's any Ozzy Osbourne fans in here, that was a homage to him who passed away as I was making that. And this is, the last one here, so it's 200 views of Rothko's Digital Graffiti, which was one of my first pieces, and it's just frames from that animation. They're displayed together, so I'm evoking the color field theory that he sought.

Michael Woodruff

And it's a great way of showing, mostly my video, long-form format in a singular static image. And hoping you can get that meditation from. And I just, yeah, I'd just like to thank Cynthia for inviting me, because I work with her weekly in the various things, and is the UK representative, and how great it was to hang out with everyone, you know, and share the stories, and the adventure, because Uzbekistan was an adventure.

Good afternoon. This is Patrick, and we're talking about the piece we did called The House on the Water. It expands on our Google Earth work about being a part to being together in an uncertain state. So, the next piece is, this… the body of work has to do with,. Pieces that were generated, a lot of the time, and some of them seen here as arriving in Uzbekistan, from… pieces relating to our, our lives together and apart. At this time, a lot of them created while we were spending time in Germany. Here's Lee Day, and. Ursula and Licker, I… you know, basically doing us a fantastic solid, putting the work up in Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make it.

NPT / Negin Ehtesabian and Patrick Lichty

So, once again, it's sort of a good metaphor about our, you know, being there or being not, or not. So, the work in itself, The House on the Water expands on this Googled Earth. Work that we did that had to do with, our having to be together in third spaces. Now that we're together. We have these bodies of work that were generated partially in our time in Germany now is… are being fulfilled in, in Winona, having to do with, a lot of them having to do with ideas of water. There's a metaphor in Persian culture talking about being in an uncertain state as we go forward through immigration and naturalization, that… you know, there's, living on a house on the water, almost like, being on a shifting sand. So we have 3 different, kind of movements within this particular piece, and… we'll get into that in a moment. One is a metaphor of the water goddess Anahita, which Negin, first worked on, and a lot of this built from.

NPT / Negin Ehtesabian and Patrick Lichty

What's interesting about this is that the central piece… Can you give me the next slide? Is, actually an illustration of Negin's that was brought into Meshi AI, and was turned into this amazing 3D, figure that was then brought into New Art City, and then we created, these images also from other, pieces that were created from other metaphors that we had. So this particular set of works had to do with, my having seen, Caspar Friedrich's, romantic work in Weimar, and, basically what, Goethe wanted to wanted him to do was basically create a skylight, but he didn't. So the thing is, is that I wanted to, look at my ideas of neoromanticism and expressionism in regards to climate change, AI, and this idea of the sublime.

NPT / Negin Ehtesabian and Patrick Lichty

So, there was a quick, transition there with, one of the AI generations of this house that we have on the water, that basically wound up going from the first movement into the second movement into this third set of images. Which combined, you know, this idea of the sky atlas along with the goddess, and then the, that looks over the house floating over the water. So the thing is, is that, this is almost like a second version, because the first version didn't come in. And, we're very grateful for the, TV media that was, shown with, our, the local coverage and also Lee Day. We're very grateful also to Sharin and everybody for helping put the work, together because it had to be, reprinted in Uzbekistan. And, and also, just, you know, so many thanks to everybody who, helped us put the… put the work, you know, together, and get it there, and get it up on the wall. And, you know, thanks for Cynthia for having us, and, in this particular, piece. And… that's our story, and we're staying with it, so thank you.

Hello, it's Raj from Shelter Island. How did I get to this place? Uzbekistan. Yes, that's how it's pronounced. Uzbekistan. It's all because of this woman, Cynthia Beth Rubin, who invited me to be part of this. Here we are walking from our hotel to the museum, and it's a wonderful sharing group that we were a part of, this whole experience. I mean, just such an adventure. Here, you've seen a lot of installation shots, but here's another one. We all helped one another, and, the assistants and Sharin at the museum were, of course, wonderful to work with.

Roz Dimon

They helped us with everything. I actually shipped my pieces early, and I was just so thankful that they did arrive. Here I am with my pieces installed. Someone asked earlier about media, in terms of the vinyl banners. These are my latest works that are about football, and I… it was a wonderful way to use this medium with grommets, kind of giving it a pop art kind of feeling. All of my work seems to be, about, layering, of course, with digital and early on, pixels that entered my paintings, but they all… they are all also about American… topics, like from football to guns to Jesus to, you know, Coca-Cola, and Lincoln. Here are some of our guests who came with, Feruza. I know Faruza's last name, but can't remember it. She's a professor, and these are her university students, and they were so polite and so interested in sharing with all of us their Instagram, you know, posts and.

Roz Dimon

And becoming friends, and just crossing borders. It made me think so much and feel so good about sisterhood, brotherhood, international relations, humanity itself, which has been somewhat lacking, I feel, here in the United States. My pieces, to get into it a bit, these are… these are pieces I've thought about a long time, but as my husband sometimes occasionally watches football, I take these low-grain pictures of these guys who just seemed to be, speaking of brotherhood, that they're, like, in an embrace here, but, I was fascinated with the colors, the crowds, the whole thing, that it is a game, it is not war, and I've been thinking a lot about, The forces in the world right now, where male testosterone is, seems out of bounds in a way that isn't healthy, and I thought about the Olympic Games and how here they are, they're, they're going after each other with all that they have, but the rules of the game keep them from killing each other, and it's usually, and it's… it's not war. It's a first mark of civilization, those Olympic Games, and I watched football, and I've just been doing these multi-layered pieces. So many of my compatriots here, wow, what a talented group, have spoken to the actual medium or the tool.

Roz Dimon

And you just cannot do a multi-layered piece as a painting, the way you can, I can do this digitally in Photoshop, or just, I'm really, I use the brush tool a lot. But there are funny things going on with these pieces, and I'm being very self-conscious about them. I'm even putting the tools of the toolbar in there. They're kind of funny. Oh my god, there's a baby under here. I mean, I don't know what that orange blob is in the middle, but I mess around with these and include my sort of spiritual Side and commentary and text with the pieces. These are just small crops, actually, of the actual football paintings, and I think we're gonna go to the next slide in a minute.

Roz Dimon

No, well, okay, yes, it's fine. I'm sharing the catalog, with friends. We went to, Bukhara after, we were in Ergenth, and it was great to share the catalog with people, and of course, the show may keep traveling. Here's, in summary, thank you to Cynthia, to Shiren, to my fellow artists. It was such a moving experience, and I look forward to seeing where it goes next, because it looks like it is going to travel. Thank you very much.

Okay. I think… That's covering all of our artists. Before we move on to the next phase.

Oh, wait, no, we have Stephen Paré. Oh, sorry! I knew someone was missing, and I'm…

Okay.

Person in our group.

The alphabet is not my strong point. Good.

Safe.

Okay, so we have to go back here.

This reinforces my home. Story about how I show up in, society.

Stephen Paré

Get to see how the sausage is made, as that is.

Yep.

Yes, great, thank you. That was funny. Yeah, I want to, so, acknowledgement, I mean, I, I was, you know, given 11 foot of wall space. And, so my, my goal was to be, simple. Coherent characteristic, and have the whole… thing be immediately graspable as a unity? I was, interviewed by the BBC, and, so these are, screenshots from that, and, it was, sort of, yeah. And I think you've seen Mr. Kodorov, already, doing, his caricature portraits. It was… wonderful to be surrounded by a whole lot of, dark-haired young people asking questions. One of the great things about The trip was, seeing the ancient things, things from the old Silk Road.

Stephen Paré

I think a weakness in my, presentation is that the titles, the pictures were made over several months, and, the more or less, Poetic titles, I think, are not consistent with each other, although they interest me, including the title of the whole thing. But they are unified by style and the simplicity of the human face. I think another inconsistency with this one is that the colors are more vivid than the, The other four… pictures. I am amused by the sort of caricature of myself. In this picture, but, I can see, that,. My, more or less poetic titles are, not consistent with each other.

Stephen Paré

So… Old friend was a tango enthusiast, and she said, after a while, your closet becomes all black. I always liked that about it, and that was, sort of the inspiration for this one.

Stephen Paré

Yeah, interesting about the, Timings. This is the one that seemed to touch the cord with most of those young people. I'm interested in that. But I don't have a good explanation for it. That previous one, the Tango, is the, one that most people… Remark on, I think, this one has the most, Poignant title, and that's one of the reasons why I put it on the and reading from left to right, the right is the end. And, so,. Yeah, another, shot there of, from the tomb of Tamerlane in, Samarkan, which I… had always wanted to visit.

Stephen Paré

Thanks to, Cynthia Beth Rubin, above all. I'm, very fortunate that she, kept after it, and I've decided at last to join and be part of this. Unforgettable experience. Thanks to everyone. Extraordinary group of people. And good in this presentation to have another look at your wonderful art.

Okay, thank you. That was… that was really great, and we're gonna hear more from Steven in a minute, because we will be seeing the digital screen, videos, but before we do that, I wanted to take a minute to see if Sharin, who… it's very late at night for her, we had the time change, so when we first said, we're doing this Zoom, you can come, and it'll be at 9 o'clock your time in the evening, like, a little late, but not so bad, and then all of a sudden, whoops, it's 10 o'clock at night, and now it's 11 o'clock at night.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

But, Sharin… Would you like to say hello?

: Of course.

Do you have anything to say to the group?

: Nope.: My dear friend from the United States of… Thank you very much.: Everyone For we sit for you, where you find our… In our museum.: And, at tomorrow morning, in… In this hall.: We're preparing, cheer, cheer.: Cheese, souvenir.: Tour near young people play teeth, Shakhmati.: You know, cheese.

Chess? They're playing young people…

: Huh.

Young people come and play chess, that's wonderful.

: Huh.

Yeah.

: And, Thank you very much, and welcome, again to Kench, to Kiva, to Pakistan.: And… I, I like, aren't everyone.: From your group.

Thank you so much. I mean, this, Sharin, you've been wonderful to work with, and as I mentioned earlier, you keep bringing people to see the work. And, we carried over some catalogs, and Sharin is making sure that people get the catalogs, and she is talking to people about possibly traveling the show. So, very hard at work on our behalf. As well as welcoming us so much. So, at this point, we are going to turn to Lucy Boyd-Wilson, who can share her screen, we… and she will mention a little bit of an overview of the digital screen artists that we had, and as you will find out, you'll be hearing, Stephen's work.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, okay, let's see.

All right, hello everybody, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm just sharing my screen. And welcome from Southern California. My name is Lucy Boyd-Wilson. I'm very happy to be here presenting the digital screen artworks. In the spring this year, Sidi Beth Rubin put out a call for art in the… to expressionist salons and the co-working sessions. The call was to submit either 3 images or short video clips of only 15 seconds. Of all the submissions. Roughly half were images, and half were videos, so it's a nice balance of image artwork and video.

Lucy Boyd-Wilson

And these were compiled together by Michael Woodruff. Michael, I'm glad you talked a little bit about it in your presentation. And the resulting reel is a little less than 8 minutes.

Lucy Boyd-Wilson

In the exhibition, this was the setup. There was a high-definition monitor mounted on the wall. The… small rectangles on the left side of the monitor. These were thumbnails and names of each of the artists showing in the… in the reel. For the exhibition, it was decided that it should be presented silently. Of course, the image artwork had no audio, and the 15-second video clips, the audio had a wide range, so it just made more sense to present it silently. And at the reception, there was a larger projection set up, also showing the digital reel. While it was presented silently in the exhibition, we thought that we're here on Zoom, it would be great to have music with it, and Stephen Paré composed the music for the full 8 minutes yesterday, in one day, so that is really impressive, and right now.

Lucy Boyd-Wilson

I'm gonna play it.

That's an exaggeration, but thank you.

Okay, two days. And here we go, less than 8 minutes.

Lucy Boyd-Wilson

All right, wonderful to see the entire reel right now. Congratulations, everybody, artists and all contributors, and back to Cynthia.

Okay, great, thanks so much. We wanted to include an overview of how wonderful Techspressionist is, the wide variety of artists that we have. And this reel is on YouTube right now. I think it's on Silently, gonna give Steven a little time to breathe, and eventually we'll go on with some sound. And you can find the exhibition website by going to the Techspressionist page. And there you'll find, links also to the catalog. And if you go to the catalog, you will see everybody's website, not, The artists who all presented, you saw their website, but everyone in the digital reel in the catalog has their website listed, so it's a way that you can go back and see what else people are doing, and it's… there's a nice icon thumbnail from each person as well.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, we now have, if we, in fact, stop at 1.30, but we can go on a little bit longer, we have, 13 minutes for any comments and questions. So, I guess we have the hand-raising thing happening. Zoom now has, like, if you go like this, it raises your hand too, I think. But, you can also…

By the way, Cynthia, our catalogs just came over, and they look great.

Oh, that's great. I'm glad you got your catalogs, and I snuck in a little cat book, too.

Yes, thanks so much, and also thanks so much to, Sharin, and I think for, you know, the… the kind documentation, that sort of thing, she gave all this, so that was very kind.

Oh, yes, do you have that? She gave everybody, in the other room. If yours is nearby, we all got certificates, so…

Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much.

Yeah, certificates of participation. It's a nice touch. Gregory Little, I still have to send you yours. So, one of the requirements for the show was that people attend, and that was one of the reasons for doing the digital reel as well, because there were a lot of wonderful people who were unable to come. And then, of course, we made exceptions for some emergency, unforeseen circumstances. But, it's a great model for future international shows. Due.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And we hope… More. So, any questions? Comments? Really? No questions?

Just a comment, again, since this is the hundredth, Salon. It's just fantastic, Cynthia, to see all of you who made it there, to see the truly international flavor of Techspressionism. And as someone who's been part of this group for quite some time now. I'm just really thrilled. I, I just think this says so much about who we are, what we're about, the inclusivity of this group, the international flavor of this group, and just the wonderful work and human beings that all of you are. So, thanks.

Great, thank you. I should mention that Sharin is also an artist herself, and she has done some digital works, and she will be joining the Techspressionist Greater Collective we don't know exactly what shows are coming up in the future, and I actually have been so busy preparing for this that I didn't yet fill out the form. It's to get her on the list, but that's coming as well, so we will be… definitely have an Uzbek artist with us, if not more.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And… Okay, so… and it's really, to go back to what I said in the introduction, it was really Andre, who got this started. He… was a curator originally based in Siberia, and then moved to Moscow, and did a number of international exhibitions, and began working with Sharin. So he curated Japanese artists, and he curated Italian artists, and then said to me, well, you could have your own show. If you want to, but it might be more interesting to make it a group show. And at that point, I'm, like, so immersed into Expressionism that this is what we did.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

So, Cynthia, since I've been talking, Cynthia DiDonato, do you want to give a plug for Tuesday co-working?

Absolutely. Every Tuesday, we gather together on Zoom, to… share our work after we've had about… approximately about an hour to work on whatever it is we need to work on. Some of us are creating new works, some of us are collaborating, some of us are doing whatever artists need to do. Sometimes a call for art comes up, and we share that call with one another, and we perhaps might ask for some input on our work. It's a very friendly group, and we welcome anyone who'd like to join us. There is a link on the Techspressionist site for co-working. If you just click on that link, you can register, and we'd be happy to have you join us.

So, the co-working aspect of it really makes it work better than just a regular quick group, because you focus back into what you're doing for an hour before you present. So, Alan, you have something to say?

I just want to second what Cynthia's just said. For me, the people there are so skilled, it's greatly improved me. I mean, it just… you get all kinds of interesting, talented feedback. And people give you ideas about how to improve your work, and how to think about directions that you wouldn't have thought of yourself, because the group is, in fact, very skilled. I really want to make that clear.

That's great, yeah. It's a nice exchange of approaches. Takes place. Bam. For myself, I have to say, I never would have included the actual scientific images under the microscope if the group hadn't kind of forced me to do it. And I think other people have experienced similar kinds of changes in their work. So… anyone else who… well, we worked so hard to make sure that this would fit in the allotted time that, now we have a few extra minutes, so…

Very efficient.

It was very fun to travel to Uzbekistan with everyone, and thank you very much for putting up that video of me dancing there.

I think there were more.

War.

There were more. I mean, yeah, there are way more videos of you dancing. James proved to be a great cultural ambassador, you know, uninhibited, just… out there, so the restaurant loved him, that we went to, and, do you have.

A couple of, you know, doctorate students next door who were studying to be surgeons, took me in their own car to the liquor store to buy booze, and then brought me back to the museum. And then they showed up at the museum at the opening. Very nice country. Everybody said thank you and put their hand on their chest when they said thank you.

Fair enough.

So nice.

Hmm.

Really nice.

And it was nice, Cynthia, I don't think that we could hear you, but I think you said, Assalamu alaykum, didn't you, when you…

Yeah, Z…

Good, everyone. Yeah.

I've tested this many times, but apparently Zoom fixed the sound so that you couldn't hear it. So I practiced for 3 months, so that I could say, absolutely, highly, Coon, it was noontime, or evening, highly tuned, I'm not sure which one it was, but I had all three times of the day down. And I just practiced and practiced and practiced for my few words, and the crowd broke out clapping. They were so, thrilled that I could say four words of Uzbek. So that… that was really, Yeah, it was really great, but Zoom has its own sound filter that we didn't anticipate, so thank you. Maybe we'll…

Nope. I'm just… I'm just taken by how you guys got that whole thing together, that… that long… I mean, everybody talked. I don't understand how you worked it. They talked here, and at the right time. I guess. What… what do you use to do that?

You mean… well, technically today, first, the big picture is that we met over Zoom pretty regularly. We didn't have an absolute tight schedule of saying, you know, every Monday at such and such a time. We… we… there were times when we knew we had to meet more frequently, and then, actually, in the past two weeks, we didn't meet at all once we set what we were going to do for today, because people were madly working on their presentations and catching up on their lives. But… The meeting to plan the exhibit was absolutely essential, and, what people did… I mean, there are people in this group here who, worked on the catalog.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

In fact, we could do a quick little, like, you know. Who worked on the catalog? Like, who helped design the catalog and do the layout thing? Do you want to, like, want to wave your hand a little and say you were a catalog person? Yeah, including, I'm seeing Cynthia Di Donato actually proofread our, the Uzbek. Because chat… without being able to read it, because ChatGPT translated people's names, and we had to… we wanted to translate them back, proper names, so that was great. And so, all these people who just raised their hand.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

People, Roz designed the logo, The overall design of the catalog was just a huge job in going back in and fixing the styles, the proofreading, and I think… who else helped proofread besides, Cynthia? I know Annette did it, Roz did it, Steven did it, I… I did it, but as you can see, I'm… the alphabet's not my strong point, so that, you know, proofreading. We had… I'm trying to think… I mean, there was so much work that went into this, just the communication back and forth, Sardor at the U.S. Embassy really pushed us to be culturally aware, which was great.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

We didn't exactly follow Patrick's advice to practice our Russian, which would have been helpful. We… but we practiced our different ways of communicating. So what else? You know, Michael worked forever on the videos, and if you notice, he did this really great thing of having Bars at the bottom to give you an idea of how long it was going, which was really important. We wanted to make it quick enough so that walking around the gallery, people would catch more than one artist, but long enough so you would become interested, and then we had the websites there. Lucy worked on communicating with all of the digital screen artists and organizing, which… which was really great. Lee.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Stepped in so many times to do so many things. Helping us envision the space was a really biggie, dealing with some of the catalog issues that we had. And, what else, Lee?

I don't know. All of that kind of stuff. You know, bring a few magnets and nails, you know.

Oh, yeah.

All kinds of stuff.

Magnus and Nails.

Relation parts.

And James went out and bought us hammers, the installation, yeah, you were great, and Gregory Little overnighted some, more magnets to me right before I left, when he realized that he couldn't come, and his work had to go up with magnets as well. Greg, greg Garvey just signed off, I think he… this is, you know, the problem of having.

No, I think he's there. He's there? He's got his hand up.

Oh, Brett, okay, go ahead.

I just wanted to… I think Cheryl's question, if I understood her, was about how we put together The presentation, is that correct? Today. So, it basically, everyone did their own PowerPoint, or Keynote, slide deck, and then we merged them all, and each one, each slide was timed, and then I… we were able to then create a smooth presentation without the usual Zoom mix-up, except I… took sort of my cue from Cynthia, and I apologize to Steven. Because we ended prematurely, but got back on track. But basically, it's a very good strategy to have one person run the master slide presentation. And with that, I… I have to leave. I have to go teach, but I wanted to thank all of you for coming to view this, and it was an extraordinary experience, and I'm grateful to Sharin.

Gregory Patrick Garvey

For hosting us, and… running the entire show, but Cynthia, of course, is the prime mover, and we are grateful for Cynthia's invaluable driving force in making this.

Stop.

And Greg, we're so grateful for you for running the show today, too. It really, greg collected all of the PowerPoints. And he kept saying, I need them by such and such a date, and then people said, wait a minute, I made a quick change! And then he was… and finally, you know, it's, like, really, wonderful. But for this kind of presentation, it was great that Greg Garvey volunteered to do this. And this was, I have to say.

I have to leak. Okay.

I guess you go. I'll keep saying how great you are. Because people just stepped up. We would have our meetings, and we'd say, somebody has to do this, somebody has to do something else, and it got done. People were really great about this.

Graz had something to say there, too.

Oh, I just wanted to add a thanks to Sharon, you know, she was sort of our… the museum director, but also our hostess, in a way, and you know, she planned trips for us to Kiva. It was a fantastic thing where we took a break from the museum, and her assistants were there to help us with everything, and we drank a lot of tea in her office. And we just, it's really a wonderful host, and she planned things like we would all go together to eat plov, which is the.

Roz Dimon

The main, dish of Uzbekistan. So, little things like that were really appreciated, and it was just a warm, amazing adventure with tons of work, and of course, we got at each other, and, you know, but Cynthia kept us always going. And I think we were really a great working group, and of course, salutes to Colin Goldberg. I mean, Techspressionism is now going across the globe, and it's… it's just so exciting, so thank you, and thank you all.

Yep.

Banking.

So, whoever wants to organize, Next exhibit, we all… as veterans, we'd be happy to share more of our experience.

I… well, I just wanted to say that it was really a 6-month evolution, because if I remember. We started talking about this as a Techspressionist show in March. And at the beginning, you know, the grand rules were that you had to come. And at the beginning, a lot of people weren't sure that they wanted to come, or they could come, and the logistics seemed kind of overwhelming. But over time, as we met on the Zooms, and we talked things out. A lot of issues got resolved, but the process always got… also got more complicated, because instead of just sending our work, or bringing our work for the show, we decided to do a catalog, a trailer, the, Additional artist presentations. So, we really needed everybody on board, like, from March through, the… through mid-September. So, it was a tremendous group effort, but Cynthia did keep everybody on track.

Thanks to Zoom, and.

And Google Drive, we shared tons of things that were organized. I mean, there must be 25 folders in Google Drive, from catalog, to airplane, to our travel, to what materials. I mean, I didn't know anything about these, vinyl banner things. I'd never used it, but for this particular purpose, I learned from Annette and others, and we shared a lot about… there was just a real A lot of communal activity in making this all come together.

Yeah, and Michael set up a spreadsheet so we could say who was going to be where, traveling.

Hmm.

I just wanted to add one more comment. I want to thank Steven for, you know, at short notice, adding his music to the video that Michael so beautifully put together. I thought the music was very complimentary to the video, Steven, and thank you very much.

Oh, and…

Do you want.

I don't say anything.

Cynthia about the catalog, that people can order it or anything, or no?

Yeah, so you can, order it… we… we actually have left it on MagCloud, where… so you can order one copy off of MagCloud. We have some copies to give. To, curatorial types, or people with… who are able to find us other locations for… for the exhibition. And the PDF, there's a… there's a fairly good flipbook online, and if you wanted to print your own, I can send you the PDF. And I just wanted to mention again the design. So, we were talking about all the people who worked on the catalog and the proofreading and the layout.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Michael came up with… Michael Woodruff with the patterning that we had, that we became our theme. And then, Patrick Lichty and Greg Garvey started to brainstorm how we could work that into the cover, and then, I also worked on it some, and we came up with the cover, which eventually Annette transformed into our poster. So, I just can't go on about, you know, you'd be like. Okay, somebody has to do this, someone has to do this, and it just kept, you know, going on.

Michael Woodruff also made the incredible, video and music for our, our, our temp, our, trailer, which was really awesome.

Yeah. It was really awesome, so…

And the catalog has been used. Becky, right? Cynthia's Becky, and.

Yeah, it's bilingual, so obviously the pictures are only in there once, so you need to bring up both pages when you look at it online, so that's why we made this flipbook instead of the usual kind of, if you download PDF and you see one at a time, it's a little confusing. Colin made the flipbook, Colin put everything on the website. We did have a temporary website, which is a blog, and I will soon, eventually. Just have a home page that says, nice seeing you here, but where you really want to go, is over to the Techspressionist website, which is now our permanent home, and…

I guess we should also thank Claude and ChatGPT AIs for their help in a lot of translation, both in the catalog and in all of the back and forth with Shearan and many other people, so… it's really amazing what you can do these days with, with translation, and as well as when you're over there, being able to point your little Google device or some other device at, At things and get things translated. It's really an amazing change in the last couple of years.

It's really amazing, yeah. For the catalog, Farooza did a lot of the translating. She just volunteered, started her from the U.S. Embassy, put us in touch with her, and then Kulkar, who couldn't be on at this hour because she lives in Paris and it's dinner time for her family. For her baby, but I found her online. I mean, the night that I found out that Andre was… had died, I was emailing him back and forth, or text messaging, about the exhibit, and then sent a message in the end of December, just a few days after I'd sent an earlier one, and his son answered saying, you know, sorry, he's not here anymore.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

And I really didn't know what to do, because I did not even have Sharin's contact at that point. We were really early, and so I got onto Facebook. So we have to thank Facebook. I got onto Facebook, and I looked for articles. In, who exhibited in… who, who were Uzbek, and I found Kuklar, Kuklkar, sorry, I'm saying her name wrong, and I, I actually wrote to her first in French, not realizing that she also spoke English, which made it a lot easier. And she became… I feel like she's, like, my best… one of my best friends right now, and I know she'll be watching this eventually. And then, thanks to Facebook, I looked at where… she had friends that overlapped with friends that Andre had, and, I found Sharin, and I said, do you know anybody who's willing to use Google Translate that can help me get in touch with the museum director? And she wrote back.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

I'm the museum director. And so, we went on from there. So that was January, and we kind of, you know, took a while to figure out whether we could go ahead. By February, we decided to go ahead and started meeting intensely in March. So, someone just had their hand raised? Anyone else? Okay, so Colin. Do you want to wrap things up, then, if there…

Sure. So yeah, you know, I just want to, thank, Sharin, for hosting the exhibition and the museum. Cynthia, you know, for organizing this. I know it's a massive amount of work. And, I think, you know, it was… it was something that is just an incredible achievement to get a bunch of artists together, you know, going abroad, it's like herding cats, like, anything with artists is always… pretty complicated, I've found. And, but also, you know, very, just very gratifying to see, and also having such positive, sort of.

Colin Goldberg

You know, cultural ambassadors from the United States, especially in this day and age, I think is a very important thing for all of us to, you know, to think about. So, yeah, you know, it's just incredible, what you guys have all pulled off, and I think the co-working is another example of how artists in the community just… came up with an idea, and decided to run with it, and, you know, took very little facilitation on my part, basically sharing a Zoom, you know, login and password so you guys could do your thing, and putting a link up on the website. But other than that, you know, it's all, The two Cynthias who put this together, and then the group of, you know, artists who meet regularly in this co-working session, I think it's, you know, just another subset of the community. And for those of you who are watching this as a recording on YouTube, I would invite you to, to come to these salons, first of all, which are held on the first Thursday of every month at noon, Eastern Time. They're open to everybody.

Colin Goldberg

And, usually we have a sort of rotating, set of different topics and moderators and things like that. It's pretty, pretty loose and informal. And also, you know, for anyone also watching this to, you know, add the hashtag Techspressionism to your art post, so Renata. Who's our Instagram curator, will be able to see your work, and hopefully, you know, be able to share it with the rest of the community on the official account, and, you know, invite you to become listed in the Artist Index. So, there is sort of, like, a method to the madness, but I think that the people who, use the hashtag, I always kind of think of it as, like, the layer… the layers of an onion. That's sort of the outer… part of what Techspressionism is, you know, if it's at all to be considered a movement, I would say just the use of the hashtag on social media is kind of like that level of participation. And then the people here in this group, there's sort of a core bunch of us that have been coming here for almost 5 years now.

Colin Goldberg

You know, and then the co-working group is an even smaller set of people that, you know, meet regularly and make work. So, I would invite all of you also, if you'd like, who are here now, to hang out for a little bit afterwards for the after-party, aka our advisory board, where we usually pick a topic for the next salon, and just kind of, you know, talk about, you know, what's going on, some initiatives and plans and whatever. So, with that, I'm going to stop the recording, and once again, I just want to thank you all for making this, salon really special, and for putting this exhibition together. It's really an incredible achievement. So, we will stop recording in 3, 2, 1, and cut.