Raya

Print number four from last month's Mansion Show 2.

Christian

Print number three from last month's Mansion Show 2.

Ben

Print number two from last month's Mansion Show 2.

Anna

One of my four prints from The Mansion Show 2009.

This is two negatives stacked together. One is the portrait, and on top of that is a completely black negative that I scratched up. The face is peering through the scratch mask, and all the white space is the remaining emulsion.

Mansion Show 2: success

Thanks to everyone who came out and supported local artists at the second annual Mansion Show last night. It was tons of fun. If you couldn't make it last night, the gallery is open every Saturday in June from 11am to 3pm.

I think this picture is a metaphor for the art world, but I'm not going to think too hard about how.

Mansion Show 2: final warning

This is happening tonight. Hope to see you there.

Mansion Show 2: one day warning

Don't forget to come to the Mansion Show tomorrow, and bring your friends. Or bring your enemies, get them drunk, and talk them into buying my photos.

Opening reception is 7-9pm, Friday June 5
@ The Beebe Estate, 235 West Foster St., Melrose, MA.

The Mansion Show 2

Consider the above monstrosity your invitation to the second annual Mansion Show, at the Beebe Estate in Melrose on June 5, 2009.

Join my fellow mostly-broke art school alumni and me for an evening of prime art-lookin' (and purchasin'...?). Your eyes will feast on boatloads of painting, photography, sculpture, and all other sorts of artistic alchemy. Your tastebuds will be treated to free food, beer and wine. And your hands will be treated to some super sweet hi-fives, courtesy of me. We've doubled the amount of artists this year, which in turn will double the amount of fun had by all in attendance.

As Chris mentions, I've gone from 8-bit to 16-bit on these invitation flyers.

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.

The Mansion Show