Last Nights Reading

"Postmodernism and Consumer Society" - Frederic Jameson

Jameson speaking about Postmodernism -

"the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents"

Nice.

Catharsis

Read, believe, understand, know, delete.

Important Thing to Know

Every contact leaves a trace.

Artist Statement

I remember this day from my childhood vividly. I was three years old and it was a gloriously sunny morning at the zoo with my family. I was sitting on the shoulders of my Uncle Dave, and I wore a bright red baseball cap to shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. As we watched a giraffe happily chewing on some leaves provided to him by his keeper, it stopped chewing and awkwardly walked over to the fence where we stood. The giraffe stretched his long neck down over the fence, and gently took the baseball cap from my head, and retreated back to the center of his yard. It was an amazing experience that I told people for years. The only problem with this story is that it never actually happened.

How could something that I remembered with such detail be a figment of my imagination? This is the question that drives my work. How is it that images and scenes are perceived, stitched together as memories, and then recalled? How are memories created of events that never took place? How do five different people have five different memories of the same event?

Salvador Dali once said “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” Memories are like circles, never ending, no beginning, constantly trying to find an origin. Take multiple memories and try to stack them together and there are gaps; small spaces that require interpretation to fill in the details. It is in this place that I find myself; trying to fill in the gaps, trying to make sense of what I am seeing and of what I am feeling; trying to create an understandable thought out of unintelligible pieces. It is the ultimate conundrum, and it is the inability to find the solution that keeps me searching.

Tick, Tick, Tick...

Well, there is no avoiding it. Every minute that goes by gets us one minute closer to the next residency. I, for one, am thrilled that it is nearly upon us. I feel like I have had a very productive semester of work, and I have to get it out someplace where people can see it.

I was very pleased with the baseball photos that I made a couple of posts earlier. These scarred circles, remnants of stitches, simultaneously simple and incredibly complex. Miles of thread wound into a ball, stripped of its hide. Some were already stripped, some I helped a little bit, curious to see what lay underneath the peeling skin. It’s similar to the fascination I have with picking at peeling paint, glue, tape, or chewed gum stuck under a desk (I know, gross, but I can’t help it).

I then took these photos a step further, allowing the weather that contributed to the appearance of the baseballs to contribute to the appearance of their prints as well. I made large cyanotypes, using the sun to create the image, and let the negative stay on the paper until the wind blew it off, allowing nature to control the length of the exposure as well.

I am fascinated with these results. So this is where I am on June 1, 2015. Paraphrasing Diane Arbus, this has all become a question about a question. The more I figure out, the less I know.

Finished. I think...

22" x 30" Cyanotype, Oil Paint, on BFK Rives.

These are Circles, Right?

Life/Death
Useful/Useless
Beautiful Lie/Painful Truth
New/Old
Clothed/Naked
Covered/Skinless

Progress - More Circles

Change of Pace

Progress Interrupti

We interrupt the regularly scheduled art work to spend time whacking on a keyboard writing a paper. Art making will commence in 24 hours.

Moving Forward

I just keep moving forward. Keep printing, keep cutting, keep sticking, keep trimming, keep scraping, keep placing, keep moving, keep arranging, keep thinking.

Making Success out of Failure

Following one of my image transfer failures, I had an image that was printed on acetate that had all of these circles on it. I decided to use that print as a negative for making a new image. This has prompted someone to ask about the significance of the circles. They seem to be in a lot of what I am doing this semester. 

• Running in Circles
• Endless Circle
• Circular Argument
• Vicious Circle
• Perfect Circle
• Balance/Unbalance
• Circle of Life
• Circular Thought
• Balls - Weight
• Bubbles - Floating - Weightless
• Holes - Missing
• Never Fit Together - Always Gaps

In Progress

Plugging along at this. It is a somewhat tedious process to transfer the image to the discs, but the resulting disc looks very cool. I haven't started mounting any of these to the acrylic rods yet, as I need to figure out the background structure. I'm not sure that I am keen on the white box (although it does set off the disc nicely), but if I can backlight the disc with an LED inserted into the back end of the rod, then I might go with black background. My original idea was to mount the whole thing on acrylic so that it didn't appear to have a background, but the more I worked on these, the more I realized that the placement of the discs within the frame was significant. Remove the frame and you remove that element.

Hey Failure, Screw Off.

So, they say that you learn more from your failures than from your successes. True enough.

KAPOW! Take that Failure! Bite me.

More Miserable Failures

This is all of the ink and acrylic that I am scraping off of my acrylic discs with a razor blade because I can't get this to work yet. No matter how long I leave it, it just won't dry because (I think) that there is just no where for the moisture to go because it is sealed in between two layers of plastic (the acrylic disc and the acetate print). Of course, once I peel the sandwich apart it is dry in less than five minutes, which is why I am spending all day scraping the discs with a razor blade.

Better by Mistake

A pile of acrylic discs on the work table getting ready for attempt an image transfer to the disc.

Just laying out the discs in a rough arrangement trying to get some ideas for the first layer.

The first disc that I attempted to transfer onto. Failure. But lessons learned. I am more confident that my technique will work, but I have to give it a few tweaks, including being more patient.

Kismet?

Sometimes, if you let it, life will put what you need right in front of you. A large section of my last paper was devoted to David Hockney, as I am researching artists that take images apart and then put them back together. Flea Market, 25 cents. 1982 Polaroid Close-Up, featuring........David Hockney. Lesson: Don't close your eyes to what is right in front of you.

Yes, I am Still Doing Stuff...

Each section is 12" x 12" and hand stitched together with that twine using a giant needle that I carved out of a stick. Right now it is 3' x 3', but I have 15 more sections to stitch on. I just didn't want anyone to think I had fallen asleep under a tree or something.

Video Inspiration