In mid-September, the UrbanArt Commission issued a call to the “creative, interesting, and a little bit obsessed” for a show-and-tell event to be held this Saturday at the Cove.
A raw-foodist and a furniture-maker responded, as did photographers and painters, along with a handful of others, who will each have six minutes and 40 seconds to present 20 slides, detailing their particular passion. The event, spearheaded by Joel Parsons, is based on pecha kucha, a short-and-sweet approach to presentations originally used by Japanese businessmen that has since spread to artistic communities around the globe. The idea, Parsons says, is to keep the presenter “on task” and the audience engaged.
“We have one guy who makes recycled furniture from wood that he finds. We have a woman who eats only raw food, and she takes pictures and documents all her meals,” Parson says. “We also have some more traditional fine artists. There’s one woman who’s going to show her collection of Kodachrome slides. One guy is going to show found photographs. He goes to thrift stores and collects photographs and then creates narratives around the photographs. It’s a pretty good mix of people and subjects.”
According to Parsons, if the inaugural show-and-tell is successful, the commission hopes to hold the event every three or four months. “The idea is that a community will grow around this event, that people will come back time after time and bring their friends in — that it will be a great place for people in Memphis to meet other creative interesting people on a semiregular basis.”
UrbanArt Show-and-Tell, Saturday, November 1st, from 6 to 8 p.m. at The Cove, 2559 Broad.
