family

Merry Christmas.

of time and the city

Just saw a trailer for Terence Davies’ latest Film, Of Time and the City. It looks like a documentary masterpiece, where Davies returns to his hometown of Liverpool, creating both a love song and a eulogy to it. As described in a review, “it is a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes it’s toll. Terence Davies returnes to his native liverpool and to his film making roots to caputure a sense of the City today and its influences on him growning up in the late 40’s and early 50’s.”

Go and watch this trailer! I hate that WP won’t let me embed anymore but am working out the snafus with that. As I have been spending a better portion of the past year looking into my past and material from long ago, it is wonderful to see an award winning documentary doing just that. I can’t wait to go see how Davies achieves this bringing back of the past and meshing it with the future. I have been sitting at a standstill within my work for the past couple of months of so, but after see a trailer like this and looking at work such as John Folson [below image], I am finally beginning to get energized and excited again.

is this freedom?

Stumbling across my old journals from Peru last summer, I found my entry from when I got stuck in Andahualas en route to Cuzco, a small dot on very selective maps that cannot be accessed by any place other than a long long bus ride. While there, I found myself at Lake Pacucha, the only person around for miles as I had to walk quite a ways to reach it. I sat by the lake and watched a storm blow through a mountain range in the distance.

On June 29, 2008, I wrote the following:
I felt liberated in a way that I didn’t know existed. I had no specific plans, responsibilities, or anyone to talk to or tell where I am going. I wish that I could live my life with this sense of freedom, yet know that once I return to Allie, my mom, and back to reality, living entirely for the pleasure of myself will be nearly impossible. And while that saddens me, it it also met with great excitement to get back to the familiar.

I have been writing about the familiar within my thesis for several months now, and have recently hit a wall that frustrated me and made me want to quit. I have been grappling with this sense of familiarity and what it means to me, growing exhausted every time I try making something new, dissatisfied with its lack of clarity. But maybe I will never find this clarity. Maybe that is part of what I am trying to define, the undefinable and its shifting journey. I sat by that lake feeling completely alone, clinging to the thought of seeing home in a few weeks, and now that I am home and very far removed from that seemingly different life, I want to escape once more. So maybe familiarity is impossible. But I am still plagued with this one question, is this freedom?

Mundanity

Driving back to campus, it is another foggy Sewanee morning.

if this lady were a car

you never know what you will find

looking through some old photos, I ran across this picture of Barney in Peru?!
It make me realize that you really never do know what you will find in unexpected places.

video test

The irony of the art majors

This is what happens when we are left with a white board and a desire to procrastinate. Caitlin and I took an old joke and turned it into a masterpiece of our depictions of all the art seniors.

iPost

Testing out the iPhone wordpress app. Awesome.

video installation

After a very exhausting 12 hours of moving, hauling, wiring, and arranging, my video installation is finally complete! After much persuasion from Sam, I decided to move it to the basement of Guerry, and I am so glad I did. I am really pleased and excited about the way it turned out. Here are some stills from it- I will add some video later.

step one- find an outlet

Here is a picture I just snapped of the beginning stages of my video installation. Since it is daytime, the projection is really light, but I am REALLY excited about this installation! So far, I haven’t had too many problems and am loving the mix of projection and televisions. Now Im kind of at a standstill until I can find more extension cords and outlets, and need to go beg the dupont people to lend me two laptops, as I’m waiting to order my ideal screens- although I did try a test video on my professor’s screen and it looks amazing.

moo

Adam Bizanzki created this amazing stop-mo video on his weekend breaks from serving in the Israeli army. He used paper mache, and scraps and supplies entirely from around the house. Here is the music video for The Shins song, Pink Bullets. There seems to be a tiny glitch in the new wordpress update where I can’t directly embed videos, so am working that out, but until then, click on the link and enjoy.

The Shins- Pink Bullets

one in eight million

The New York Times has recently starting a weekly multimedia collection of photographs and sound of different people in New York City. A new character is added weekly. This is a really fascinating collection, filled with moving audio and beautiful black and white photographs documenting of a few of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vacations and obsessions.



NY Times One in EIght Million

seeing new

Here are two photographs I took over the past weekend. I am quickly and excitedly moving into this new realm of photography, but for the first time, am not going into it with any expectations or ideas of how it is going to look when finished. I am merely shooting, and shooting a lot, letting my emotions guide my shutter

.

shady grove

Went to see my Shady Grove
She was standing in the door
Her shoes and stockin’s in her hand
And her little bare feet on the floor

Shady Grove, my little love
Shady Grove I say
Shady Grove, my little love
I’m bound to go away

moving away from the familiar

so it has been a long week. i promise to start blogging more from now on, and to put up current thesis work. i just need to get in the habit again…

a little tangent about thesis work recently though… as of lately I have been frustrated. And not the kind of frustrated that you get when you don’t want to take a test or write a paper, but the complete soul-draining, angry-making, about ready to throw in the towel kind of frustration. And honestly, the midterm presentations just intensified that. But as of this morning, thanks to a great conversation with P, I have finally found clarity. The video series is complete, or very near completion, and I see that this is what G, P, and J have been trying to show me for a while now. I am ready to move on from the video work, and honeslty am quite relieved, as I hit a very large wall a few weeks ago, and couldn’t quite find my way up or around it.

So I am saying goodbye to video… as least for now. Now it is the time for me to let me photographs take over for a while, which they have pretty much been begging to do since April. The weather is perfect for me right now in Sewanee to start photographing: foggy, haunting, and absolutely beautiful. I am excited. Finally. Which is both relieving and nerve-wracking, as I have spent the past 7 months on a body of work that I was confident in creating. And now it is time to start again.

I will keep posting on the progression of this new work. I am staying here over fall break, so Im hoping to get a lot of time in for shooting and printing… maybe even a hike here and there.

the whispering well

having been working on my thesis for many months now, i can undoubtedly say that i have learned two things:

1. stealing sound effects, music, and videos from any place on the internet.
2. i am more confused and lost in this work than i was at the beginning.

i dont know how to say the things in writing- that is why i am an artist and not an author.

i have recently chosen a title for my body, the whispering well, coming from the song, after all, by dar williams. i chose this title and this song because it means a lot to me, personally, but i have been asked to take myself out of the equation. how is it possible for me to remove myself entirely as the author, narrator, and artist, when the entire body of work is an autobiography in a sense? i am enjoying making the work and feel that with each new piece, it is growing, but i am struggling with the inner meaning and concerns. i know what the work is about, but the viewers will never feel that or see that.

as roland barthes writes, “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary;” at most it would interest your studium; but in it, for you, no wound.”

so how do i make my ‘winter garden photograph’ speak to the outside?

hello world... again

Here I am again, just shortly after a year since I starting blogging, starting again.

There were some severe technical difficulties with the server [thank you Sewanee] which caused my website to go in major malfunction mode. So with the help of some savvy tech people, my old blog was deleted and was left blank and white, ready and waiting for me to begin again.
This is the first post of [hopefully] many to come, and will [hopefully] be around a long time. I do have all my old posts saved on a word document, but am thinking that it might just not be worth the time to transfer over 40 posts and images onto the new blog. So we will see.

But for now, enjoy the blog, new site [portfolios coming soon] and the last ‘hello world’ post… hopefully.