Philadelphia Stream of Consciousness

I just returned from the SAQA/SDA conference in Philadelphia and I have lots of thoughts rambling around in my head, which I'm just going to spit out at you.
The first event we went to was a panel discussion by the three jurors of the AQE show.  Elizabeth Barton, Sandra Sider and David Revere McFadden spoke to us about what they were looking for when they juried this show and I found a few of the comments interesting (most of them, such as good photography, composition and meaning, I had heard before). Elizabeth talked about the art work being the right size for the subject, and about working in a series vs. working with a formula. Agreeing with Elizabeth, David said the dimension should fit the work, he also felt it was good to apply to lots of shows because the jurors become familiar with your work and while it may not work in a specific show, they may remember it for a later event ( I'm thinking about that solo museum show they're going to want me for)  Sandra said that texture, visual and physical, is overwhelmingly important. Sandra also thinks it's important to enter three pieces in a show (if allowed) and that they should show progression of the work.

 I don't have a lot of photos to show you from the various galleries, mainly because I didn't know you could take photos in them.  I finally figured it out at the last show we went to, which was the Inside/Outside the Box exhibit at the Crane Arts Building.  The only photos I took there were of the new Nancy Crow diptych, seen below.

These were monoprinted and they were really wonderful.

Some of the other work I loved included Dorothy Caldwell, Erin Endicott and Ilaria Margutti at the Mending = Art exhibit, Shizuko Kimura, Jeanne Williamson and Michael James at the Snyderman Works Gallery, Flore Gardner at the Wexler, and at the AQE show, I loved Diane Firth's new piece, which wasn't  photographed adequately for the book, and Shin-hee Chin's wonderful work Chinmoku: Silence.
I have a lot of images and ideas spinning around in my head, and whenever I get home from conferences like this I look at what I'm working on and try to figure out how to improve it.  As Dominie Nash said in the conference "Never settle for the simplest solution"