LVK, opening

Some pics at the opening

Yes, these photos were hung much too high *sigh*

Isami and Charlene came to visit

II thought this was really funny. as we were closing up, this woman with an umbrella peeked in the door...she looked a little skeptical. she didn't come any further than the doorway...

Ballen article

"Cut"
A nice article about Roger Ballen + Gogol in Frieze mag, here

studies

A working study, i.e. bad collage. I'm working on trying to integrate different materials, and working at a faster more intuitive pace. It started with an automatic drawing, then I was tracing some screenprints I made.

notes

Maurizio Anzeri. Embroidering on top of old found photos. I love these. Apparently his work is in the collection of Alexander Mcqueen :o

Perhaps similar is the work of this collage artist, John Stezaker.

<--

I love the clarity and decisive, yet ambiguous nature of this series. This piece is called Mask IV. It's such a decisive act, plastering a rigid landscape directly on top of a man's face, yet the affect is one, again, of instability and ambiguity

I'm officially obsessed with Fellini, and his wife for that matter. There's a great documentary that came with the criterion collection of La Strada. Included are some great Fellini interviews, where you see him at his most poetic, clever, witty, etc.:

"Perhaps the attempt to recapture, to hear once more an utterance that's been interrupted, repeated each time with a weaker and weaker voice, until I could no longer hear it. This feeling of grasping at the frayed ends of a broken string...straining to hear, with my ears and my heart, something that's been nearly forgotten."

Anch'io, Federico!

Discovered this artist, Shary Boyle. The way she's incorporating fibers into her work, in both her sculptures/ceramics and her drawings, is especially interesting to me:

I love the simplicity of the last one; I think it is how the crazy ex-wife in Jane Eyre's attic looked.

photo series, "representatives"

A portrait series of billboards, taken in MT (Billings and Sidney) and in OR (Eugene).

tintypes

Coffins for (preserved) bugs. Using a faux tintype process (a trad tintype would have a black background - rather than my almond color - and the printed image would flicker on and off the surface as you moved the print around). I put them into these mint tins (that's the first image)...trying to mimic the traditional Victorian daguerrotype portraits with the metal cases/frames. I need to embellish and decorate the mint tins though. They are bare bones right now.

Close-ups of the prints:

tintype samples

Some more of the bug-coffin prints. I was using a particular kind of liquid emulsion called Black Magic. As you apply it to your surface, it dries quickly. In the streaky prints, the emulsion dried before I fully coated the surface. Sometimes the streaks work for the image, sometiiimes they don't.

The print at the bottom is prob my fave

Cyanotypes

Van Dyke brown print.

photogram fun

it's creepy baby elizabeth :) Dunno what's up with all the dolls. I think there's some series budding there. Note the left index finger that i probably ingested at an early age

cyanotype on kitty cotta paper - the paper renders great details, and the blue is a beautiful, rich blue (the reproduction does it no justice), but the paper has the tendency to completely fall apart in the wash. i remedied this by placing a tray underneath the paper while washing it... unfortunately this left the weird striations/indentations that you see running diagonally across the image. i may be able to get rid of these by running the piece through the etching press at a really high pressure; we'll see.

The more purple colored pieces have been toned (sodium carbonate + tannic acid)

photos from walks

Sometimes I go for walks and take pictures along the way. Here are some of them.

I'd like to do a series with abandoned/lost objects like this little guy. I found the poor robin perched on the bench, waiting for his owner to return :/

This one was taken at Costco, not on a walk.

Yea, I guess Stephen Shore did a series of trees like this in the 90s but whatever.

Pop-up experiments

coming soooon

Tapestry

My first foray in to weaving/tapestry.

I was working off of this "landscape" photo I took with my Holga camera mod'ed for 35 mm film. Once I realized there was no way I could achieve photorealism in the tapestry, I just picked up some untraditional wefts and went to town. Actually all of those strange materials are fabrics and things mom gave me this summer while she was moving out of our house and cleaning out her craft supplies. It's nostalgic

string theory

I embroidered some utilitarian items (i.e. dish towel, pillow case) in the style of a traditional embroidery sampler, but my quote sources were a bit headier, specifically metaphysical and attempt to describe the nature of exist or Being (vs. "being"...thanks for the clarification Heidegger).

Idem series

I decided to post a few photos I made last fall -- it's part of a self-portrait (?) series. Essentially it was me wandering around my house naked, setting up a tripod, setting the camera's timer, and posing. They are all c-prints. Some of the color balance is cringeworthy -- I'm so bummed I no longer have access to a color processor :s

I decided to call the series Idem, which is the root for the word "identity." Oddly enough, "idem" means sameness. I photographed myself in situations where my body was mimicking forms in my house (i.e. my neck is the slope of the sink's neck, my back is the broadside of soap); I was living alone at this point, and there was something psychological occurring between myself and my living space. There's an odd melding of self and site that occurs when you live alone for so long. You begin to identify yourself as part of your surroundings...you become what you live with. It's maybe similar to couples who have lived together for a long time, and begin to take on an uncanny resemblance of one another. Or the owner and dog who bear an uncanny resemblance of one another.

I like the anxiety in the photos, and the voyeuristic quality of them...there's the sense that there's a ghostly presence in the house. I showed these photos in a class and one of the comments from another student was that it looks as though someone had been following me around my house, taking these voyeuristic photos, whiiich probably reflects my abnormal paranoia I have of being cased and robbed...

There's also a nice little pun with the word Idem -- Idem is a homophone with "item," which is how I wanted my body to appear, as a mere item. Unfortunately I recently discovered another photographer/conceptual artist who has adopted the moniker "Idem-Item." Damn him.

Quilty

under construction