February 17, 2008
Snowflake Cares
Recently I sat down with Bevin and David Early from Snowflake/City Stock to talk about their new exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum. Snowflake Cares, February 19-22, 2008
Dana Smith: So, this thing at Contemporary, when does it start?
Snowflake/City Stock: The first day is Tuesday, February 19 is the first day and it runs each day from 10am – 5pm thru Friday. Thursday the 21st we’re having an opening and that’s our fitness competition. We got a cardio, you know, a cardio-buster in the garage, this thing you row on. And we’re going to see how many rows you can do in 3 min.
DS: What time is the opening?
SCS: It starts at 6pm, the doors open at 5pm and the competition is at 6pm. Then after that it flows into an event Matthew Strauss is hosting the open laptop event, that starts at 6:30pm.
DS: What is this fitness idea?
SCS: It kind of comes out a couple of things, like, here’s the evolution of the whole idea. We’re hanging out one day and we see all these bicyclist coming by, so we go out there and start handing out water and they were taking them. And I was like, it’s cool that they are into athletics and we’re a gallery, we have
no relationship but we were just interacting. So I was like maybe it would be fun to host a 10k run down here. It would be cool to cross pollinate these different crowds and have the event as a performance piece. I’d like to see 50 artists barreling down Cherokee street. So then we starting thinking about, “ok let’s host this event”, and not only do you cross pollinate different crowds but as a gallery we’re interested in good work and in order to have good work you gotta have healthy artist, so we need to get a fitness program going for any artist that shows here. So then we decided “let’s start a gym”, so Snowflake Cares was born out of that idea.
DS: On the night of the opening, you’d like artists to come down and exercises?
SCS: Oh yeah, well you can come in all week and exercises. You just pop in, you get an appointment and if you do a 20 min workout you’ll get a set of wristbands that have a custom Snowflake/City Stock design on them. We have a treadmill, cardio fitness machine, stationary bike, yoga videos and free weights. You can come in and use whatever you want for 20 min. Thursday night you can either come and workout or take part in the competition. The 3 min row, how many rows can you do in 3 min or how many times around can you jump rope in 2 min and then after that we have a couple prizes for the top winner in each category. We encourage people to come down in your fitness gear, don’t come dressed up for an opening, come on down in your sweats and sneakers and get ready to get fit and leave with some limit edition Snowflake City Stock wristbands.
Bevin and David Early
illustration by Dana Smith
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