another house visit plus studio thingamajigz

Hello again. I’m not very consistent with posting but then again there’s not too much to report.

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I went for another house visit, but this time it’s at NUS Secretariat Board of Trustees, which is a bunch of words I barely know. For privacy reasons (hah privacy in the internet age) I’m gonna call the lady who was my point of contact T.

T was very helpful and gave me all the directions I needed to venture into Pulau NUS but guess what! I still got lost. That’s my secret power. But my other secret power is understanding how lost I can get, so I still got there on time because I gave myself half an hour for buffer.

The work that was at NUS is called Vela which is one of the Terra Sensa babies. This time this wasn’t a clone, like it was for CL. Vela was in a very quiet and soundproofed room. My throat felt like vacuum and I could hear my ears doing nothing. There were other paintings in there and two of them were Ian Woo’s. I always thought Ian and Jeremy were like broskis because they look alike and they vibe alike. I told Jeremy that Ian’s probadly Jeremy without the anxiety, to which Jeremy agreed.

So Vela’s problem is that she sustained a few chips. I was gonna take photos with a ruler when T appeared with a printed document of several pages with pictures and labels of the things I was gonna check out. It was even printed in colour! The Virgo of me was so happy. That made things easier because I can show Jeremy the document directly (I still took pictures for good measure) and also I can peek at how the client sees the issues by how they document the issues. Strange perk but still a perk to me.

I’m writing this on the bus on my phone and Wix isn’t the best at this blog mobile interface thing and things kept resetting whenever I get a notification so please bear with the bad formatting today.

I’ve included a few photos above for some of the types of the cosmetic damages Vela has gotten. Altogether there were like five or six areas of concern. Also that’s one of Ian’s paintings! The collector guy really likes Ian Woo. T brought me downstairs to look at the third Ian Woo painting which was huge and had a lot of blacks in it, which I’ve never seen before. She’s really nice to bring me to see it.

Anyway! Jeremy and I discussed briefly about Vela before we saw the damages and he mentioned that he could sand down the areas so it doesn’t look too apparently chipped, so I’m not top worried about the damages. For the stain we could probably try to clean it off or leave it. Since it’s at the sides which are flat and cleanly cut I don’t think it’s good to take material off of it.

However one thing was really really strange to me and I couldn’t figure it out. I asked Tina how they maintained Vela and she said they just left it in the room, where the collector guy works in. Before this it was in a meeting room. They apparently don’t do anything special to it.

But as you can see Vela didn’t have the dust problem that CL’s did. I was so surprised! The room was pretty air tight and clean, granted. But CL cleaned it constantly and with that air purifier around 24/7, I don’t know how Vela managed to be more clean and pristine than CL’s.

I told Jeremy that and showed him the textures of Vela from the photos I took. He concluded that since the clone that CL has was made with his usual fabricator and the initial OGs were made by another group of people, the initial ones probably used better foam that didn’t deteriorate as much as his usual fabricator’s foam did.

That sounds like a plausible deduction, but the issue of cleaning CL’s still stands. I was at least relieved that we didn’t have to clean Vela. I was also thinking we should work on Vela first so we get some hands on experience with the type of foam and how it behaves before we tackle CL’s.

Another interesting but less bewildering thing was how Vela was hung. I didn’t check CL’s because she was with me all the time and I didn’t wanna be weird and put my entire head on her wall to peer behind, but T left me alone for a bit so I could do that with Vela. Vela was secured with three pieces of slanted wood blocks.

So one is mounted against the wall, and it has a trapezium cross section with the longest side facing out. I should’ve taken a photo of it instead of trying to explain it in words. Anyway, another piece of wood is mounted on the top back of Vela, but with the pointy thing that’s jutting out facing downwards. So at this point the two pieces of wood are like upside down, facing each other, but otherwise the same shape. The Vela wood then slides along the slope and rests on the wall wood so its like one long ass hook. You know what I’ll just sketch it out the next time I come on here. The third piece of wood is down back on Vela, presumably to hold her against the wall so it doesn’t just swing into the wall and she can float a little.

So that was an interesting day and was over in an hour. Essentially of the 100% of the time spent that day, 66% was spent on travelling and 33% was spent doing a photoshoot with Vela. I got to nap on the bus back so that was great. I also uploaded the photos onto drive to show Jeremy during the bus ride because I am the multitasking Virgo that I am.

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That house visit happened in late June. Today is July and I was at Telok Kurau. Jeremy’s only back next week on Monday but they need to do the new tenancy agreement with a new property company thing. Since they have a deadline with NAC, we figured out with our point of contact, let’s call her S, that Jeremy could do a digital signing first informally, and when he’s back we can arrange to pass it to them hard copy in person.

Today I was supposed to wait for S to come for inspection between 1 to 5, so I went down and started to clean the studio up. In the start of August Jeremy will have a visitor from New York and he’s gotta show some work so I wanted to make it extra clean. I couldn’t finish today so I’ll go on Friday too.

I swept everywhere and saw like seven spiders of three species. Then I used like six rags to wipe the floor down like Japanese elementary school style. Artify kids lessons and Taiwanese elementary school experience have trained me well. I forgot that I was wearing white pants and now I’m on the way to a shoot so I’m gonna have to show up with dirty knees.

I‘m sorting out the shelving next and moving the furniture and instruments back in place. I also collected all the cords and wires from all the corners and surfaces and put them on the trolley. I don’t know what they are so I’m gonna wait until Jeremy‘s back to do cable management with him. Also I wanna learn what all of them are and what they do. It seems like a useful skill.

I’ve moved a few times and lived on my own so I think I’m pretty good at shelving and storage solutions, although I’m pretty okay with my room not being prioritised lol. I’m gonna get some baskets or empty cartons or boxes to sort his miscellaneous shelf junk. I won’t touch the artwork yet until he’s back in case I mess anything up. The easiest way to make something look neat is give everything a home and make it look like it belongs. Everything should be easily accessible. It’s a studio! A work space!

Anyway turns out inspection didn’t happen, NAC is taking their time with Jeremy‘s contract, but at least I got him to clear his outstanding fees yesterday. Chairman of the studio compounds chewed me out about some storage issue in the common area. I also need to contact Terry to clean out his stuff in Jeremy’s studio soon before New York people come by.

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[edit: fixed formatting glitches]