How's Things?

Here's the video of my performance at The Burlington on July 12th. It's longer than the first performance of Go Down. I re-timed the video to give more space to the darkness before each scene (and to myself, to build sounds in that darkness). I knew more clearly what voices to program into the pedal I was using, and I was more confident in my performance. I also enlisted Krystal to help me get my all-white contact lenses in before I went on stage. (I wanted to at Brain Frame, but didn't have time.)

---

Ian has completed the blog entry for which I drew this Sliders comic. It's very strange, and features excellent comics from many friends and peers, so I highly recommend it.

---

Here are some photos from Brain Trubble, the Brain Frame/Trubble Club/CAKE opening night party I helped organize in June. That's me, Ian, and Jeremy reading some comics - Ian and I did a mime section later in the night, that's why we're in makeup.

I'm talking to the Sackley puppet built by Bernie McGovern and puppeteered by Jeremy.

That's Gabrielle Bell, doing a live portait of an audience member.

The live drawing was a new idea, and went over really well, thanks especially to improvised accompaniment by Alex Inglesian and Stephen Ptacek. This is Mike Taylor illustrating 'face eating is a problem' live. Gillian Fry took all these beautiful photos.

Dork Photobooth

Drunk art: I say, "Hey, let's go in the photo booth!" and then I say, "we have to plan it first" because I like making everything difficult for everyone. This is a page of my sketchbook with the organizational sketch and the resultant composition; I'm in the middle, with Melissa on the left and AJ on the right. We got everything right except for Melissa forgetting to take off her sunglasses in the last frame. Yes, this post is worthy of my blog; it's my blog and I say so.

More Stepped Exposures

More of this. You should really look at these up close. The image above is from Ventura, CA. Accidentally, the compositions here do wonderful things: look at the shape of the dock across the photograph. That lone surfer kills me. Those are our shadows waving at the beach.

These two are from inside my apartment. That's my brother's silhouette in the second set. Nice colors, yeah?

To take the cake, as they say: Ross, Sara, Bowen and I on the roof. There are plenty of beautiful things to identify here. Primarily, I'm a fan of the way the two-point perspective of the buildings in the landscape combine with the vertical breaks in differing exposures to create a really confusing medley of dimensions. Also, everybody looks so happy.

Stepped Exposures

Last summer Andrew and I drove across the southern United States to move him to Los Angeles. I brought my Holga, which is broken more than Holgas are usually broken (primarily, the flash doesn't work, but other things are wrong too). I really appreciate my Holga for this reason. It's not a reflex camera, which means my framing will always be inexact at best. There's no way to tell if the light will be right, and the process of scrolling to the next spot in your negative can be completely arbitrary.

This is what I explored briefly during that road trip. The two exposures above are of my father and my grandfather walking the goats, and the one below is of Andrew at the Grand Canyon. It's the best one.

Clam Shell Box

Here's another of my final projects from that artist's books class I took two years ago. This is called a 'clam shell box' because of the way it nestles together, and the broad flexible hinge. It's very similar to the hardback cover of a book with a flat spine, but instead of pages, there's more bookboard making up the sides of the box.


I wanted an interesting cover on the box, so I made two windows in the front bookboard panel, using them as frames for prints of old photographs. I was thinking about a refrigerator (no joke) when I mapped out the two photo-windows.




The rest of the box is made of more bookboard, covered in bookcloth and lined with found sheet music. The slot in the box's bottom wall is there so you can lift out its contents without turning the box upside down. I measured this box to fit the two hardbound books I had just made, but it is also the perfect size for 5x7 photographs, or drug paraphernalia or prophylactics, you know, whatever.

Carbondale

These are old photos. They're from a camping trip I took with two friends, two years ago, in March of 2009, to southern Illinois, outside Carbondale.



You may remember this film, which was shot during the same trip. Here's Aj in action:


These are not all of the photographs, just ones that I think are particularly interesting. I take a lot of photos, but only because I'm on this vacation or that one, or someone is visiting, that kind of thing. I approach them as snapshots, which is a welcome relief from the lengthily and detailed planning that goes into most of the things I create. Photos are a way for me to document my life (like diary comics) without the pressure of premeditation or commitment, and any artistic merit that shows up when I get the prints back is an unexpected joy.

I like thinking about my photos in groups of three. Here are three closer examinations of the natural world:




And three pictures of Lale sitting on something far away:




And one picture that looks prehistoric:


This post has been short on discussion and analysis, so I'll throw in one more photograph that strikes me as particularly beautiful. I love the proxy-horizon-line here and how it tips you off the left side; the way that second rock is not quite strong enough to keep your eye in the image. And how the upper earth - the ground that is visible, somehow, on top of the mountains - is curved away from you like an exaggeration of the bow in the planet's crust. I find the perspective in this photograph discombobulating in the best, most breath-catching way. Aj's precarious position on the right side of the frame seems tenuous at best, and even he is leaning in to try and make some sense of the balance within the image. And, that rosy rust color of the leaves on the ground kills me.

Film Frame

This event is past. Actually, all of the Experimental Film Society events (except one special one) for the spring semester have passed. I am relieved as well as saddened to be done with the constant barrage of minute, mundane tasks that were the running of EFS. (As well as larger, more interesting but similarly time and energy consuming tasks.)

This was a special screening for me. It wasn't the last screening, nor the second to last - those two spots were held by programs of work by Betzy Bromberg, an incredible filmmaker, teacher, and woman in general - but it was the last that I made a poster for. It was also the screening that I had the most to do with creatively. This was one of the few screenings Ross and I programmed that had more to do with a conceptual or stylistic idea as opposed to a convenient grouping of films we wanted to see. As such, it almost feels valid to say that I... curated... this screening.

Anyway, you don't care about that, you (ostensibly) care about the poster. Well, the poster is, you guessed it, more color copier color separation, this time using the technique to separate the different levels of frames-within-frames, avoiding overlapping colors and the combinations that result thereof. The only exciting about this specific instance was the color/frame layer made of two hands.

Most of the images that make up the poster were pulled from Google Image Search, but for the hands I used my MacBook's built in camera to take photos of my own hands. When blown up to 300dpi and 11x17 inches, however, the photos looked pretty shitty. So I printed them out at this size, then drew over them with a mechanical pencil to highlight the shading and creasing in the hands, as well as create a kind of faux-realist crisp resolution and increase visual interest. Then, I scanned the printout back in to the computer and composited it with the rest of the color/frame layers.

I know this story is not all that exciting, but I thought these photos of my hand over-drawing looked kind of nice. Enjoy.

Llama Man: Documentation

Here are some photos documenting the making of my final film for the semester. Most of them are from the super 8 shoot, which happened in early March in the Chicago Forest Preserve and on Montrose Beach.


Mark and AJ helped me out with this part, AJ working the camera and Mark helping me get my costume on and off and move stuff around.




At first we were having a really difficult time as it had rained the previous day, so these big fields we were in were very muddy and my stilts got caught in the ground. This is a disaster for anyone who knows how to stiltwalk; because you have no ankles or toes on the bottom of your 'feet', you must keep in constant motion to stay balanced, and that is impossible if your legs are glued to the ground.




We finally had to find places for me to walk on concrete drains or paths, with a natural background to make it appear as though Llama Man were walking on the grass. This is why, in the film, you'll see that his feet are cut off in several shots.




AJ did really well considering he didn't know that much about film or shooting film. We'd frame shots together and then I would yell at him through my mask how many seconds I wanted him to roll. The time was around lunch, and there were lots of working men on their breaks, eating in parked cars and watching us.




Llama Man must have looked really bizarre to them, especially since this girl kept emerging from behind the mask. I would wave at them in costume as often as possible, and usually they were good sports about it and waved back. A couple cops stopped to ask what we were doing, if we were shooting a horror film. I said yes because I didn't really want to launch into the whole explaination.



The shoot for the 16mm stuff was way different and much harder. Most of the time was spent constructing the set.


My crew could not have been a better group of people. They were all very patient and supportive and I owe them eternally for it. Here's Zaven, my camera man, on the dolly at probably around three in the morning:


Thanks guys!