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.

Round Spine, Flat Spine

Back in spring semester of 2009, I was in an artist's book class. Remember? These two books were the last editions I made, and the fanciest. They're real hardback books, with many signatures, stitched and bound traditionally and really nicely. The quality of these editions is something I'm very proud of. First, the round spine:


Both books' innards are 50% found paper (posters, wrapping paper, opalescent tissue) and 50% purchased paper. The paper I bought is soft and ribbed, good for sketching or writing. For the round spine book, I used this drawing paper, striped brown wrapping paper, tissue, and the remnants of an old water-stained poster for Guatemala.






And now, the flat spine:



This pages in this book are comprised of the same soft drawing paper and tissue, as well as found posters from the first Austin Powers movie, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.








•••

OTHER NEWS:

This Friday, I'm participating the seventh installment of the EAR EATER reading series, previously curated by Cassandra Troyan and Sara Drake, and now curated just by Sara Drake (at least this time). Anyway, I'll be doing a performative reading of the prose version of the story of the Squishsacks, and it should be pretty exciting. I will be really nervous, come watch me try not to shake when I talk.

The other readers at the event are:
Halle Butler
Kristin Hayter
Nick Jackson
Anders Nilsen
and Sara Drake.

You should come. It's at 1622 S. Allport St. Apt. #1, commencing between 8-11pm, on Friday, June 24th.

4x4

Color Tests and Obligatory Self-Congratulation

You guys like color tests? Huh? Yeah?





Color tests are how you figure out what filters you need on an optical printer in order for your finished print to be the appropriate shade. These are a couple tests for two of the four films I'm currently finishing (you may recognize The Mystic and House Fuck.)

•••

OK SO IN OTHER NEWS, I uh, I'm graduating after this week, which means three things:
     1. The URL for this Blogspot will no longer be correct (currently it's I am an art student what am I doing, but I won't be an art student anymore! Should I change it to I was an art student? Or leave it, in anticipation of educational purgatory such as graduate and doctoral studies? Does it matter? The answer is no, ergo the URL (while factually inaccurate) will remain the same, no need to update your bookmarks.)
     2. OMG I'm going to be done with school what the hell
     3. I can't remember the third thing because I'm completely exhausted, up to my old shenanigans (see bottom of linked post) again.

ALSO GUESS WHAT
     4. I won the top prize SAIC Excellence in Student Leadership award, which is pretty cool. They're going to feature me on the SAIC website, and interview me for SAIC Student Association's new website as well.
     5. I am also the recipient of one of the SAIC BFA Fellowship Awards, which means I submitted a portfolio and artist's statement and resume and a bunch of important people who run prestigious schools and museums were like, "yeah, this girl is alright," and then they gave me a bunch of money. So I can actually fund the films I was planning to make this summer, now. Thanks SAIC!

I'M STILL SHOWIN' STUFF
     6. On Monday night, May 23rd, ExTV will be airing the second of two (identical) episodes of work by yours truly. It's playing on CANTV, Chicago's public access station (channel 21!) at 11pm. They wrote some nice things about me on the poster; I'm honored.
     7. This is not really an official event, but Ross and I will be showing several finished 16mm prints for our family and friends at 8pm on Friday, May 20th, in room 1307 of 112 S Michigan Ave. Anyone is welcome to come, just tell security that you're there for a screening and they'll let you up. Both Ross and my families will be there (it's the night before graduation) and it will also be the unofficial premier of a buttload of stuff I've been working on for years.

AND FINALLY
     8. Here are some pictures of me installing Llama Man and Night City in a glass case at the Flaxman library. The show was called Object Relations, and featured three artists (including myself) who work both in film/video and the physical realm. He lives!

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.

Bong Hits for Voting

So I'm in a class right now called "Sound and Image" and for the most part I've been finishing soundtracks for House Fuck and The Mysic (both of which have been edited/altered since I posted them here) as well as another movie I'm working on called My Sister At My Mother's House. In the meantime, though, I still have regular assignments.

One of those assignments was to ADR some footage. ADR stands for Automated Dialog Replacement, and it basically means dubbing over something. So that's my voice that you hear in the video above. Actually, every sound in the video above is me doing something (the original video had a Tool song playing the background; I chose not to recreate that). I picked the original video because Marijuana Man seemed like a nice guy and I like his videos. I hope he's not offended. Thanks, Marijuana Man!

Are You Lonesome Tonight (Color)

 

Hey, remember this comic? I recently tabled the second annual Chicago Zine Fest, and I wanted Are You Lonesome Tonight? to be one of the comics available. (I also sold a considerable number of Dock Ellis comics, bike accident comics, and Motion Sickness posters.)

But, since I hadn't yet produced a nice run of Lonesome Tonight, I thought I'd add some color before doing so. Furthering my intimate relationship with color copier color separation, I experimented with paper towels, a pencil, and a light table to create textured, two-tone washes in the background of the comic.

The whole comic fits on two sides of one page (I drew it on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, but printed this run on a 11 x 17 sheet). I wanted to have two overlaid, misregistered washes of color on each side of the original B&W sheet, so I had to color in four different paper towel overlays, two for each side. I laid the original sheet (not seen above) on the light table with a clean towel on top, and used a soft graphite pencil to color around the Elvis impersonators and their word bubbles. While I was drawing each two overlays for the same side, I didn't compare, preferring to create the shapes from memory, and contributing to the inexactness of the shaded areas once the overlays were combined. You can see in the second picture above that the drawings do not perfectly match.

The other advantage of drawing this way on paper towels was the texture from the quilted pattern.

After I finished shading the paper towels, I took them to the color copier and made a photocopy of each, setting the printer to 'single color.'

You can see how the texture of the graphite and the quilted towels made its way through the copying process, ending up looking a lot like crayon drawings.

 

Finally, I copied these differently colored overlays onto my original B&W photocopied pages of line drawings. I placed the blue and green layers together, and the red and magenta layers together as well. Because I couldn't decide whether I liked the combination of red and magenta or red and yellow better, I made half of the comics one way and half the other.

A lot of people at Zine Fest told me they were impressed with my crayon drawings. I didn't know it would turn out with that identifiable of a texture, but I think it's pretty cool and it works well with the weird, melancholy attitude of the comic.