To Minnesota for Thanksgiving

With one day to spare I booked a ticket to visit my family in Minnesota for Thanksgiving. I normally visit at Christmas - but this year we won’t be going, so it made sense to visit for the next-nearest holiday.

As a non-American, Thanksgiving is a weird non-Christmas-yet-still-festive holiday. The decorations are up, it’s cold, and there’s turkey. But there aren’t so many jingles on the radio.

Looking along the shore of Lake Harriet. Close to the shore the edges of the lake have frozen in to intricate shapes. The banks are brown and autumnal. — Lake Harriet ― 2018/11/22
1/750s at f/5.6, 24mm, ISO 100, Nikon D800

I’m told that in Minnesota there’s a 50/50 chance that there’ll be snow around this time. This year there wasn’t, but it was still chilly - between 3ºc and -10ºc whilst I visited.

A photo of frozen ice on a lake. The ice has formed in to scalloped shapes as if large shells were pressed in to the surface and then removed when frozen. — Lake Harriet ― 2018/11/22
1/350s at f/4, 60mm, ISO 100, Nikon D800

The fluctuating temperatures around zero cause interesting features to form in the ice. Here my best guess is that pools have started to melt, and have then refrozen. It’s fascinating all the different ways that ice manifest.

A photo of frozen ice on a lake. The ice has broken up in to many sharp pieces, then refrozen. As a result the surface is cracked and bumpy, yet solid. — Lake Harriet ― 2018/11/22
1/500s at f/4.8, 70mm, ISO 100, Nikon D800

50m beyond the previous photo and the ice was completely different. It looked like this had formed in to big sheets that had broken up and then frozen together. It was still rather thing though - you wouldn’t want to walk on this yet.

Walker Art Center

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The Walker is one of my favourite museums (up there with the Hayward Gallery and New Museum). We went to see the Siah Armajani show - which was excellent, but didn’t inspire any photos. He had a wide variety across his career. I particularly liked his mathematically inspired drawings using factorials and typewriters.

A wall covered neatly with posters, 4 high and 11 across. The posters are mostly text based with some bold colours and show pro-EU, anti-brexit messages. — Pro-EU anti-brexit poster campaign, 2016, by Wolfgang Tillmans
Walker Art Center ― 2018/11/27
1/20s at f/1.8, 28mm, ISO 40, iPhone 7

Five projectors in a dark room project black and white photos on to a wall. — Walker Art Center ― 2018/11/27
1/15s at f/1.8, 28mm, ISO 40, iPhone 7

I wonder sometimes if museums will be the last place you’ll find certain bits of technology. Obviously museums about technology will - but also so many museums still use them for contemporary exhibitions. Will future generations start to associate big cube TVs and projectors as specialist items for exhibitions?

An area is marked off in the corner of a room in the shape of a cube. Ed Horsford stands in the area. To the left is a sign that reads “By standing in the zone created by this drawing, and for the period you remain there, you declare and agree that you are a citizen of the United States of America.”. — Declared Void II, 2013, by Carey Young
Ed Horsford ― Walker Art Center ― 2018/11/27
1/60s at f/1.8, 26mm, ISO 100, iPhone Xs

It seems increasingly that shows and works are made with Instagram in mind. The Hayward’s Space Shifters was great for this. I assume it’s a win-win for the gallery - they get increased exposure for their show, and the user gets a selfie.