celebrity

I used to take a lot of pictures of my brother when he was little, because he wasn't self-conscious and would do whatever I said. One time I had him posing in front of the sliding-glass door in the porch, which had a large, heavy curtain covering it. As I was focusing the lens I told him to back up a little. Then a little more. All of a sudden he disappeared through the curtain. Turns out the sliding-glass door was open. He went tumbling backwards down the stairs into the backyard. I felt pretty bad about that. But even though I almost killed him with photography, he still kept posing for pictures. What a trooper.

stove sitter

35mm negative printed through crumpled cellophane.

hand mirror

There's a universe within your own nostrils.

(b&w film)

win a prize

At a 4th of July fair in Lexington last year.

Carpineto cross

Another one from Carpineto della Nora, Italy.

diamond heart

No "jewel hearts" here, no sir.

The Rog + cat

Roger mans the electronic pianos in The Appreciation Post, but sometimes he lets his American flag t-shirt cat play a few bars. It's much like Toonces the Driving Cat, but with Moogs.

jewel heart

This image started as a digital picture I took by setting my camera on rapid-fire and waving it around. The actual image I captured is only half of what you see. What I'm saying is, imagine a line going down the middle of the image. One half of that is what the camera actually captured. I took that picture, made a copy, reversed it, and put the two together, and that's what you see above.

To me it looks like a chest cavity, or maybe a throat, with a heart dangling by a thread, and the heart has jewelry impaled in it and hanging from it.

This is probably one of my favorite things I've ever made. First of all, it looks really cool. Secondably, it's just crazy to me that I captured such a great image in such a haphazard way, and that I knew exactly what to do with it when I saw it. I like when things like that happen.

The Mansion Show pt. two

It's been almost a week. I think that's the longest I've gone without making a new post since I started this thing. I have a good excuse though. I was preparing my work for The Mansion Show reception, which happened this past Friday. It was good. Between the 5 other artists and me, there ended up being 50 pieces total. A lot more people came than I expected. All the work seemed to be very well-received.

All my pieces in the show were from my Deconstructure series. In the top image are six 11x14 prints. The Beebe Estate is a historic (and haunted) building, and they don't allow you to attach anything to the walls. So they have chains (probably borrowed from the ghosts) hanging down from the moulding, from which you can hang your work on hooks. This makes hanging your work properly an infuriating process, but it ends up looking pretty badass. With the chains and all.

In the second image are ten 16x20 prints. I had originally wanted these to be frameless; just the prints mounted on black board. But the day after I hung them up, the humidity in the building caused the boards to start warping. So the morning of the reception I rushed out to buy frames, put all the prints in them, and hung them back up. I'm not a fan of having glass over them, because the images are very tactile-looking, and printed on matte paper, and having shiny glass over them totally nullifies that effect. But there wasn't really anything else I could do to prevent them from warping, and I guess it does look pretty good despite the glare.

Know what else looks good? Hot pink walls. I'm mounting all my black & white prints on hot pink board from now on. I'll also give out snap bracelets at all future shows.

shed

Last week I talked about how I plan to take a walk down the train tracks and take pictures of stuff. This picture is almost like that. When I take the train, I like to set my camera to rapid-fire and hold it up to the window. Usually I get one or two pictures I like out of every one- or two-hundred I take like this. This is one photo that grabbed my attention.

I don't know what's going on here. It seems to be some kind of shed plopped down in the middle of a fence. It's not just a wall with a door in it, it's actually a three-dimensional structure that someone built at the edge of their backyard.

There are a lot of weird things about it. It's much bigger than a regular shed. You could fit a fleet of lawnmowers in there. Its placement is strange. Why was it built in the middle of a fence, rather than just in the yard? And If you assume that the fence is the boundary between these folks' land and the rail area, why does it straddle the two? (You can't tell from the picture, but the structure comes out beyond the fence). Baffling.

I like the blurry, out-of-focus quality of the picture. Yeah, any photo that's blurry and out-of-focus can seem dreeeaaammmliiiiike. But I think this photo works well because of the composition, this odd monument in the middle of the frame with the fence sections stretching to the sides, and the sharpness and richness of the trees and sky compared to the blurriness and dull brown + yellow/green of the lower half. I probably wouldn't hang it on the wall, but I like it.