this evening i’ve been enjoying the lunar eclipse, amongst other things. here in brisbane we saw it as a beautiful deep dark orangey-red colour, i have never seen such a bloody moon before! it was obscured from time to time by cloud but for a lot of the evening it was very clear. soon after 9pm it started to go back to normal, with the brilliant white contrasting dramatically against the blood colour. apparently it wasn’t so colourful everywhere – my brother in karamea said there was a shadow but no red. i also went to an exhibition opening, the vernacular terrain, which has some pretty interesting works in it – but too much too close together for me to be able to watch one thing at a time. there were four giant projections, a strip of 4 screens, & a diagonal screen in the centre of the gallery that had 2 different works projected onto one side and another on the other side; oh and there was one projected onto the floor – not to mention a cluster of small screens at one end, 4 computers, & 2 separate small rooms with single works in them. the cumulative effect was pretty distracting, apart from the very large dominating ones i found it impossible to focus. but my favourite was by Julie Pitts and Miles Blow – a suitcase of puppets with a miniature screen showing stop-frame animation with the puppets. it reminded me of the work of jan svankmeyer. amongst all the flashy digital video and clever effects it was a dark & mysterious world which you had to get close to and peer into, to discerne tiny objects carefully displayed like precious relics. i will have to go back & have another look when it’s not crowded; but first i must get my outline of chapters for my thesis into a reasonable form to show to my supervisor in the morning …