deconstructures pt. eleven

deconstructures pt. ten

Combined negatives.

deconstructures pt. nine

Two combined negatives.

deconstructures pt. eight

Yet another version of this.

deconstructures pt. seven (cyanotype)

Another version of this one.

deconstructures pt. six

More here and at my website.

deconstructures pt. five (cyanotype)

A small cyanotype version of one of my scratched-negative building photos.

Deconstructure 03 (exhibit version)

The fifth piece I had in the Various Perspectives show.

This one was originally in the first Mansion Show in June of 2008. Part of the Deconstructure series.

deconstructures pt. four

See similar ones here.

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.

deconstructures pt. three

I've been working on my photos for The Mansion Show. Here are two negatives I scratched out. They're intended to fit together. Like this!


I scanned the negatives and then combined them in Photoshop. There's no digital trickery, except for lowering the opacity so both images are visible, and fixing the brightness and contrast a little bit because the exposure of the negatives is really bad. This is the first time I've done this digitally, and I think it looks really good, even if it doesn't look quite the same as if I had printed it in the darkroom. I actually did make a print of this in the darkroom today, but I just couldn't get it right. The image above is what I was going for. But with the crappily-exposed negatives I'm working with, I don't think it's even possible to darkroom-print it as well as this.

home front

Like the last post says, I'm going to be in a show in June. If you want to come to the reception on June 6th, the Beebe Estate website has driving directions.

Directions by MBTA:
1) Take the Orange line outbound to Oak Grove.
2) Catch the #136 or #137 bus towards Reading or Wakefield (not Malden Station, which is the southbound direction). Take this into Melrose center (about an 8 minute ride), and get off at Foster St. (YMCA stop).
3) Walk two blocks west on West Foster to Beebe Estate, which is a large Greek Revival style white house on the north side. There is a sign for it. Take a look at the website, beebeestate.org for a photo of the estate.

I'll have 4 pieces in the show. They'll be mostly skyscrapers, with a few smokestacks thrown in. The image above won't be in the show, but it's along the lines of what I've been working on lately; more deconstructures.

I made this yesterday, probably the quickest one I've ever done. It's a 35mm negative, scratched up, then scanned with a negative scanner. Negative scanners are pretty much the best things ever invented.

chop tree

Trees are ripping me off.

Rock & Art: Chris Cornell

A comment in one of the previous posts reminded me that I made this last year. It was for Rock & Art at the Bank of America Pavillion. For each concert during the summer, they choose an artist to make a 3-foot x 3-foot piece, which is then 1) put on display backstage during the show 2) possibly signed by the musician or musicians 3) displayed around the venue all summer 4) auctioned off in the fall. In my case, only one of these things happened.

My piece was for the Chris Cornell show. It's a series of darkroom prints mounted on the 3'x3' gesso board they gave me. The text is some Chris Cornell lyrics that I thought fit with the visual theme. I wrote them in sharpie, which is either visible or invisible depending on the angle you're looking at it.

Almost all the other pieces were paintings. There were a couple collage-y type things. I was the only one who did photography... great idea. The whole thing was a total nightmare. When I think about the whole experience all I see is the Easter Bunny from the last post. Everything that could possibly be frustrating and demoralizing happened.



It actually was in the auction, so that was good, even if nobody bid on it. Plus I got to be right up in the front for the Chris Cornell show, for free. He and his band played a lot of Soundgarden songs. He's still an amazing singer. Hey, how do you think he learned how to scream like that?

deconstructures pt. two

After a few months of scraping negatives with the intention of combining them, I decided to see how single negatives would look on their own.

Hey, they look pretty different. Instead of the dense, compacted hustle and bustle of the combined buildings, the single ones seem very empty and still. Whereas the combined buildings were deafeningly loud, these single ones are totally silent. It's like the buildings exploded, but a second later time and space just stopped. That's how it seems to me when I imagine them in the real world.

Like I said in the last post, these images only came about out of the process I decided to use, not from any specific idea I was trying to illustrate. So it's always been strange for me to look at them and try to figure out what they're all about. I'm still not really sure what these are about, but they do give me a much different feeling than the previous ones. More eerie, but also cleaner and prettier, if those words can possibly apply here.

deconstructures pt. one

I've been scratching up my negatives for a long time. It drove some of my photo teachers and classmates crazy. Some of them didn't really consider it photography, in the "pure" sense at least. Others couldn't believe why anyone would do that to their negatives. I can kind of understand the first point, although I don't see how it matters at all. On the second point... I guess I don't see how that matters either. If an image is good enough to print as it is, great. I won't mess with it if there's no reason to. But when some images just don't do it for me, I try to come up with a way to make them work. Scratching up the negatives is one way I've done that over the years.

Eventually I found that photos of buildings were really conducive to this method. I'd take two building negatives and scrape the emulsion off each of them in such a way that I could fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle, like in the examples above.

When I first started doing these building pieces, it was all about the process. I never had an idea about what they were supposed to mean or anything like that. I just enjoyed the act of working on them and creating weird combined landscapes.

As I printed more and more of these, they started being about the passing of time. And the destruction of old things and build up of new things. They made me think about density and population, and how nothing stays the same or lasts forever. It's super deep and stuff.

Usually the first response I get from people is that these are really scary, and I've been asked if I love destruction and if I'm looking forward to the apocalypse. No, I'm not, just so you know. I'll post more scary stuff tomorrow. IF THERE IS A TOMORROW.

Here's an example of two different stages of one of these pieces (Sorry, I can't figure out how to put images side-by-side on this stupid thing):