Apology for the Hiatus & I finally fucking made something

Hunter and I spoke a few weeks ago about the necessity for us to begin to get our heads out of our asses and go ahead and book a space. Maybe we should sort of take another vote as to who is truly in. Or is that unnecessary? I am just thinking so we have a better idea about the physical size of the potential space so we know what we'll have to fill. I am all in for Chitown. I guess when is the big question.

I finally have some work of my own to put out there and contribute to the blog. I guess immediate reactions would be cool to hear. I also plan on responding in more detail or responding in the first place to some of the last blogs. I sort of check out the last few months. Readjusting back US side has been a bit of a drag. I think out of sheer angst and for the sake of my sanity I made this. It is called Unremarkable Parking Garage 1. 1 because it is the first one (more to come). I don't at the moment have all that much to say about it other than when I went to school in Vancouver for my first year of college a good friend and I would spend a lot of nights hanging out in the parking garage near our dorm smoking incredible amounts of weed, staying out of the rain. Sometimes we would organize mid-week indoor soccer games in there. We shot a few short films as well using the parking garage as our set. Since that time I have always taken to parking garages and structures. I think part of me still connects them to creative endeavors like making weird amateur videos. I also find them to be incredibly lonely and alienating places, most all of them void of identity and occupying sizable amounts of space. They seem like architectural no-brainers, yet some our better (by that I mean clearly more thought was put into the design of them) than others.
So, the other night I photographed a parking garage on UNM campus. Stitching it together in the way I did, I guess I wanted to created a fractured sense of space and reality. Not to mention parking garages are in my experience incredibly boring spaces. I'm sort of curious to see if it is possible to make something visually engaging from kind of boring material.
Tomorrow I am going to print it. probably 24 x 60 or so. I showed the file to a friend while it was in a much more incomplete stage. He told me it looked cubist. For some reason that made me very sad. I think it came across in my mind as a dismissive statement when in fact it was more like an honest observation.
I'll post more shit as it comes out of me ; )  In the meantime I welcome any and all criticism and feedback.

Fon Seks Candidate

Here is what I was thinking of entering into that show that Kate posted. I made this quite awhile ago. One of the few pieces I feel is "finished." I don't really feel like typing that much about it. That's been my problem recently btw. I'm either depressed, lazy, or both. Why don't I want to type? Have I forgotten what it's like to write papers? ACK! Typing...words....semantics....failing....must......express self.........differently......... .af..we... .a;ragojpj;g ..,b......

311B - that was the title of the original sext image sent to me

One thing I will type about it: This image is from a large collections of images I exchanged with my ex during a period of time when we we're not together - nor even sleeping together. These masturbatory digital exchanges were the last bit of intimacy I had with him before all communication between the two of us stopped. It raises a much different set of problems than Cliff's images do (although they are obviously related in other ways.) The biggest one being permission. How the hell do I go to him and say.... hey... remember that pic of your giant hard dick you sent me? Can I use it for Art?

Fon Seks - a show to apply to . . .

http://www.uis.edu/visualarts/gallery/submissions.html

Something Recent

After seeing what Kate posted today, I felt the need to post this.

New work. Not to be confused with New York.

This is some brand new work.  I've been asking friends of mine to compose and send me sext photos of themselves.  So far it's been only people I know as I've been really interested in the awkwardness of the interaction when I solicit them for the pictures and how insecure I am about being perceived as slimy and creepy or feeling like I'm asking someone to do something that makes them uncomfortable.  Which I am asking, but then I feel strange about it.  Like a director who pressures an actress to do a nude scene that she later regrets.  I feel less weird about soliciting guys for them because well, I am a guy I guess and I don't feel bad about exploiting them maybe.  Maybe that's bullshit.  But I'm interested in the process of getting them.  But I'm also interested in sexts that people have sent as well as received in real-life scenarios as well as found images from the web which I know nothing about, but for now, these images are only the ones that were composed for me in the name of this project.

I'm interested in so many aspects of the sext message photo, but I think primarily these pictures are a study in courtship through digital medium and the tension between intimacy and distance that the digital medium of text messaging provides, in sext photos as equivalent to facefook "profile pictures" in the sense that they are images that attempt to succinctly define us in one idealized photo or twitter message that define us in one or two sentences and encourages snap judgments and vice versa.  Our expectation that we'll be quickly judged and so our photos are modeled to a template that will grab readers with the first sentence.  Mostly, I think I'm interested in how self-conscious and insecure these images are.  They're profile pictures to the nth.  Sext messages are used to, hopefully, sexually arouse the recipient and there is a desperation, a kind of poignancy to them.  The male-to-female images are much different than the male-to-male images are much different than the female-to-male images and so on and so forth.  I'm interested in how they are miscommunicated.  Where they succeed and where they fail.  I'm just kind of ranting now.  But I think most of my work tends to be about a sort of ubiquitous misunderstanding.  Or fear of perennial miscommunication and insecurity.  Blah blah blah tell me what you think.  They're organized in the order that I received them, not in any other way, though it is kind of interesting that they go from really safe to more exposed.

The images are really large, well, 24 x 32 or so, so if you can, save and open them and zoom in on them to see the image quality degradation.  I'm not sure if you can do that here though.  Can you?  I'm sure I can upload them another way if you want or something.  I don't know.  I thought that enlarging them to this scale and revealing the bad quality of the images played with our idea of enlarging photos expecting to get more content or information, which we of course don't get when the quality is this poor.  It's maybe similar to the kind of closeness and distance provided by sexts.  In a way very distant and comfortable maybe and also still exposing and revealing in its easily wielded distribution and/or reproduction.   Oh, and thanks, Hunter for the .gif tip.  That and a few other things did pretty much exactly what I was hoping to do.

Just had an idea, not sure if it's interesting or not, but it might be interesting if I set it up somehow so that if someone were to choose to look at the images, the images would be forwarded to a random e-mail address or uploaded to a new site on the web or something.  Or even just telling potential viewers that them looking at the pictures would result in their distribution.  Would that stop them?  I'm totally just thinking as I type.

Oh, also if you want to participate or know anyone who would for some reason, let me know or just tell them to text me or something.  I definitely have a shortage on dudes at the moment.  Initially, it was quite the opposite and then all the guys bailed.

you guys seen this?

upper class white dude makes beautiful images using google maps of poor black people:

http://www.dougrickard.com/photographs/a-new-american-picture/

thoughts?