Assistants:

Set-up from a month ago, Thanksgiving weekend. Yes, these are the same painted sticks from this piece. I was disappointed that the weather wasn’t gloomy, so I waited till I came back to visit for Christmas, and it was perfectly drizzly and chilly.

No, this isn’t an homage to William Hundley, just something I felt like I had to do.

All photography, graphic design, verbiage, digital printing & staple binding personally completed with love by yours truly in Austin, Texas.

24 pages
5″ x 7″
signed limited first edition of 31 prints

Yours for a mere $5.00 per copy via my etsy shop. No postage or shipping fees in the U.S.!

[click pics for full image]

[click pics for full image]

Drawings, zines, photography, graphic design, sculpture [click pics for full image]… a few samples of new work for the show at Satellite Studios on Friday.

These images were shot in a basement in downtown Tucson on January 15, 2010, as notated by gCal, which serves as my diary (5th generation grandchildren, take note).

Credits:

• Hair/MU/”model” (ha!) = me
• Photos/editing = Jers
• Styling/musical inspiration = collaborative. Think Kate Bush & Siouxsie Sioux meets Nite Jewel,Geneva Jacuzzi, and brilliant but obscure Ladies of the 80s.

After conducting an online keyword search and sifting through photo sharing sites, Swiss/French artist Corinne Vionnet carefully layers 200 to 300 photos on top of one another until she gets her desired result.

We are looking at a monument that we somehow already know. As a part of knowing that we have also been there, we need the photograph to fix the memory of our visit. By pressing the shutter button, time becomes event, a unique moment. The significance of the representation of the subject is shifted to the presence of the photographers themselves.

The images made by tourists are picture imitations. They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen. It is in fact a style of manipulating the viewer. Why do we always take the same picture, if not to interact with what already exists? The photograph proves our presence. And to be true, the picture will be perfectly consistent with the pictures in our collective memory.”They demonstrate the desire to produce a photograph of an image that already exists, one like those we have already seen. It is in fact a style of manipulating the viewer. Why do we always take the same picture, if not to interact with what already exists? The photograph proves our presence. And to be true, the picture will be perfectly consistent with the pictures in our collective memory.”

[Interview with Welmer Keesmaat in YVI #2 Consumption, 2008]

It’s not so much the sheer quantity of photos available on the Internet, appropriated through total strangers without their knowledge, as well as examining photography simply as a record, or the gee-ain’t-that-neat technical meme of digitally “creating an Impressionist painting” but the similarity of the resulting images that is truly startling because it confronts our ideals about expectations and memory. How do we envision a place, person or event to look, in terms of appearance, in anticipation (before it happens), or reflection (after it happens) of the subject? I think it would look something like these photographs. Hundreds of pictures of the thing from slightly different angles, but not an exact representation of the thing itself. Plato’s cave. What is real? The shadows on the wall? The objects creating the shadows? Or the light behind them? …What is more important in human consciousness in imagined and expressed visual and verbal expectations and memories of a person or thing? The Eiffel Tower the Object? Or capturing/narrating Eiffel-Towerness?

I don’t have a iPhone and didn’t care too much about owning one, till some of my favorite bloggers and tweeps starting using Instagram earlier this year. Now I want one specifically to use that app! But alas, such a purchase is not in my financial future, so I will just have to ignore my obsession.*

When hipstamatic was all the craze last year, I recall coming across debate in the photography community about the further demise of “analog” photography through hipstamatic’s shortcut of mimicry of lenses and development processes. What I didn’t hear much of was these apps’ mimicry of photographic prints, and not even fine art lab-created prints, but drugstore and 1-hour photomat snapshots of the mid-to-late 20th century that serve as a visual reference point for most people, whether as lived memory or family history. Do we still inherently long for arts/culture/folklife/documentation solely produced and exhibited in the digital realm to be rendered physically? Why?

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*King Of The Hill, Season 1, Episode 5: “Luanne’s Saga”

HANK: Luanne, sometimes life throws you a curve ball. Now there’s two ways you can deal with it. You can cry — and that’s the path you’ve chosen — or you can not cry.
LUANNE: How do you not cry?
HANK: Well, instead of letting it out, try holding it in. Every time you have a feeling, just stick it into a little pit inside your stomach and never let it out.
LUANNE (trying it): Are you supposed to have a pain under your rib?
HANK: Yes. That’s natural. The body doesn’t want to swallow its emotions. But now you go ahead and put that pain inside your stomach too.
LUANNE: I think it’s workin’, Uncle Hank. I feel sick, but not sad.