Odds and Ends

hepburn house final copy, originally uploaded by a secret humming.

These two projects gave me lots of trouble and I am not really totally happy with either of them but I sure learned a lot!

I intended these to be sort of opposite halves that go together (there are two other hair curtain images but I am not as happy with them so they are not posted here but if you click on it you can see them on flickr). I wanted them to speak about the way our imaginations can encapsulate us and invite us in, and the ways it can also shut us out.

In image on the top, I used scanned negatives and well as the digital 4by 5 back which allowed me endless possibilities of manipulation. In this sea of pixels there really are no limits other than those imposed by the strange and confusing conditions of "file size." The digital medium corresponded well for me with my intentions because I wanted to show the viewer a place they could picture... clearly it's manipulated, imagined, framed. This hair curtain opens up the picture into a familiar world that is strangely comforting as we can all recognize it as completely unworldly--a place of escape, a place that isn't an actual place.

Where as with the mirrors I wanted to deal with the part of the imagination that faces the feeling of absence. Missing is a sometimes eerie emotion, particularly if you are not missing any one person in particular. These objects/images are intended to play with idea of feeling someone's absence which in some weird sense demands imagination as well. One imagines what one misses, or maybe what one remembers.

In terms of the mirrors I faced endless material problems dealing with the all too real and all too pricey black magick liquid emulsion! All and all I am still happy I attempted them... It's funny how the stubborn reality of physical materials can make ya rethink things... Each failure (the one to the left and even the one to the right is still a failure I think...) had to be scrubbed off of the originally pristine porcelain surface. Each attempt would dirty the mirror taking it away from my intended cold object and putting it back into the category of an object one touches and marks up. Becoming familiar with erasing away an image was the weirdest process (wow sorry for using the word weird so often!) which after 20 or so times made me think of new ideas about how we become familiar and comfortable with our own sense of this "absence." The bottom line I am getting at here with this increasingly confusing ramble is that the mirrors presented problems which pushed back at me and made me rethink my ideas. What those specific ideas are I am clearly still struggling with, but I think that the use of non digital materials is really crucial for me in that it forces me to re-think in ways that digital does not. I am not saying that I won't continue to use digital, but it's just interesting how we can learn from the things we make, especially the failures... anyway... I'll keep ya posted! Even all the way from the United Kingdom!

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4005/4186702064_f4e30ecd06_s.jpg