dandelions.

sophomore year silver prints of a childhood retrospective.






2008.

perceiving me.

2009-10.

printing with ink.

highlights from my printmaking side projects.








2009.

window.

found this at school and thought i would give it a fresh look. feeling a little film noir.



2009.

narkiewicz-jodko.

Jacob von Narkiewicz-Jodko. found this guy in photo history. i have a lot of connections to 19th century photography, evidently.



"Effluvia From an Electrified Hand Resting on a Photographic Plate" (1896)

walnut frame.

this is a splined walnut frame i made for a commission from an artist i know. first time working with walnut, but i definitely enjoyed it. it's a very rich wood. and oiling changed everything.

unoiled





oiled.





2010.

moon.

i just happened to see this movie on the shelves at blockbuster and picked it up on a whim. i'm really impressed by it. Sam Rockwell is great and so is the score (because everything Clint Mansell touches turns to gold.) it also touches on a lot of things i've been thinking about in my work. if you haven't picked it up, do it.

thesis talk.

i have to give a thesis presentation to an auditorium full of people come march 1st. and because of that as well as a conversation i had with A. Lovell-Smith (kind of) i've been thinking a lot about my artwork, art in general and why i make it.

i feel as if art is a type of problem solving tool, for me. i find some kind of a problem that i don't have an answer for and then try to work it out through some kind of creative means, photographs, installations, prints. the end product is my solution or at least reconciliation with the issue, visible to whoever wants to see it. a sort of negotiation to being alive, existing and perceiving. i feel as if Bob Irwin clarifies this concept well.

"To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception."

i've compiled a list of ideas that my work revolves around in different veins: kinetic qualities of photography, process, the artist's presence, image as object, identity, time and event, space and environment, perception and metaphysics. the talk will cover work from my junior year until now, most of what's posted on this blog through my current thesis work. it's strange to see where i've been in relationship to where i'm going. how the last eight years of making images could have brought me here. i guess i'll have to wait and see.

instax.

first successful experimentations with my instant film modified 4x5 camera. i really enjoyed this image, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with anything in my thesis. i'll have more thesis work up, soon.



2009.

broken bells.

shimon.

Shimon Attie is an artist we very briefly covered in a class of mine recently. these are projections in berlin's pre-holocaust jewish neighborhood, projecting photos of shops or people who lived there on the original location or near by it. space/place/time/identity.

samaras.

found out about Lucas Samaras when i first started to mess around with instant film. (thanks, Patrick Clancy.) this was all sx-70 and hand/in process manipulation. pretty crazy and a lot of self-portraits which i'm of course partial to.

zoe.

this is an excerpt from a great interview i read by photographer/filmmaker Zoe Leonard. (thanks, Diana Heise.) i enjoyed the interview and if you're a photographic fine artist, i think you'll enjoy her sentiments, too. but her commentary on process really strikes a nice chord for me.

"If there's a scratch on the negative, I leave it there. The roughness in my prints is my way of letting the viewer into my process, the process of photography. I think that photography has been considered a poor relation to fine arts for far too long. The highest compliment you could pay a photographer is to say, "Your work is so painterly". If I wanted to paint, I would paint. My work is about taking pictures, using a camera to observe what's out in the world."

"Photographs play with the idea of absolute truth. When people look at a photograph, they believe it. We believe that it exposes reality. That a portrait can show someone's true character. If you see a picture of something, you believe it really happened that way. Pictures are proof. My photographs crawl along that edge. I document the world, but from my own biased point of view. I want to draw the viewer into the process of looking so we can look at these things together. I want to show you what I see."

find the rest of the article here.

rather lovely thing.

grey room.

2008-09.

finger prints.

these are (darkroom) prints in association with my next installation, but apart from it.





where is my presence in the clean, pristine photographs i've been taught to make? do i not touch my supplies? do all traces get washed away in some bath before i have to handle them with cotton gloves? and are these prints not three dimensional objects, not simply windows to another time and place? i wanted to see my images without the images, see my hands, how i touch them, where i am and that they are objects right in front of me.

2009.

three frames.

i saw this site on a friend of a friend's blog. a nice dialogue between the still/moving image and creating three dimensions on a two dimensional plane. i really liked it and the site that is linked on the main page. here are a few of the images i liked. ... which don't want to move. so you'll have to just go to the sites.

three frames




aloha friday