My Show is Open

My exhibit, titled Constructed Realities, is now open in DeCaprio Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College. Tuesday is the official opening day, but it was open on Monday, because we got all the work installed pretty quickly last Thursday.

The show looks pretty good. I'll take some photos in the gallery and post them here soon. I'm showing 38 pieces total, which fills the space nicely. The number of pieces to include was a guess. Because I hung nine prints of photos taken at the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco in a salon-style grouping, and had frames of varying sizes, I really had no idea how many pieces it would take to fill the space. I was thinking that I would have too many, but while laying out the show, I thought I would need to quickly frame a couple more pieces to fill the space. It turns out that I got it just right.

The opening reception is this Thursday, March 27, from 2-4 PM. Good food, live music, rubbing elbows with artists and students, how can you refuse?

Much (although not all) of the work in the show has appeared in this blog over the past few months, so it seems appropriate to post the artist statement I wrote for it. Understand that I hate writing these things, and procrastinated it for as long as I possibly could. It's not a bad statement, all things considered. It does what a good statement should: Explains the underlying ideas without revealing too much.

Constructed Realities
Artist Statement

The work in this exhibit reflects an interest in how information is organized and presented, and how the display of information effects our interactions with and understanding of that information.

From museums to shop windows and even parks and public spaces, displays are created with the aim of guiding our thoughts, feelings and interactions with these created spaces. These displays strip away some aspects of the world while heightening others. In museums, an attempt at education is made by focusing on specific bits of information to heighten or emphasize scientific narratives. In a similar manner, retail window displays are designed to emphasize the psychology of desire.

I photograph these spaces, created to elicit a particular response or to communicate a specific concept, not as a straightforward documentation of how materials are used or displayed or information conveyed. Rather, I examine them in an expressive manner, achieving a subtle subversion of their intended function. The camera and photographic processes I use obfuscate the motivational or instructional intent of these displays, allowing the viewer’s reactions and responses to recontextualize and create content. Through this recontextualization, new realities are constructed which question the authority of informational and commercial display.

Experimenting With Polaroid Transfers, and The End Of Polaroid?

I spent the last couple days of spring break trying some different ideas with Polaroid transfers. I don’t think anything turned out that great, but I do see potential in some of it.

First up, I made a transfer of an image, and then put a Polaroid lift of the same image on top of it.


OK, it’s pretty uninteresting, but at least I tried something different!

Next are a couple of panoramic pieces made by putting three transfers in a row. These are both made from images I shot in the Field Museum.




The same panoramas were also both done as Polaroid lift panoramas last summer, with less success. Here is my post from last summer on the lift panoramas. You can compare both of these panoramas, made from Polaroid transfers, with the ones I made from Polaroid lifts if you click on the link.

These came out ok, but didn’t thrill me that much either. As I wrote about the lift panoramas last summer, I think the geometry and perspective present in the original photos gets lost when treating them in this manner. The transfers don’t suffer from this as much as the lifts do, but the visual noise that the transfer process brings to the panoramas (one of the desired results of the transfer process) is a little distracting here.

One more try. This one, instead of a panoramic image, is more a mosaic made from four separate photos I shot at Fairyland in Oakland, CA last October.


I like this one, even though it’s honestly not that great. It works much better than the panoramic images shot in the Field Museum. I like it because out of everything I tried, this seems to nave the most potential. I’m considering shooting some more mosaic scenes to try a few more of these. Polaroid images are always going to be much lower in quality than other photo processes, but I like the look of this and think some interesting work could be done with it.

Speaking of Polaroid, you may have heard that they are discontinuing the manufacture of most of their films at the end of 2008. That means no more lifts or transfers, unless someone decides to buy the patents from Polaroid and continue manufacturing the film. While Polaroid processes can be a little gimmicky and predictable, there has also been a lot of interesting work made with them. Check out the work of Lucas Samaras to see manipulated SX-70 prints (Time Zero film for SX-70 cameras was discontinued by Polaroid a couple of years ago).

There’s a website, Save Polaroid, for people trying to convince another company to begin producing the film after Polaroid stops producing it. I personally think these processes are worth saving, although I don’t know how effective the campaign to save the film will be. We’ll have to wait and see.

Polaroid Transfers

I’ve been trying some Polaroid transfers during my spring break. I’ve made a lot of Polaroid lifts, but until now have procrastinated trying transfers. There were two reasons for this. One, I've always liked the look of Polaroid lifts better than transfers, and two, everything I’d read about these processes led me to believe that the transfers were kind of a pain in the butt and took a long time to learn to do well. When I actually started doing some this week, I found the opposite to be true. I like the transfers better than I thought I would, although I still like the look of Polaroid lifts better. I think the transfers are the easier of the two processes, however. They are a little more predictable and easier to control than Polaroid lifts.

I’ve made about twenty of these transfers this week. Here’s a few of the more interesting ones. The one at the top of the post is a photo of a diorama at the Exhibit Museum in Ann Arbor.


This is a shop window in Blue Island, IL. The building is actually across the street, and was reflected in the window.



This photo is part of a display of taxidermied birds in the Field Museum in Chicago.



This is also in the Field Museum, in the main hall.



Another one from the Field Museum, this is one of the dioramas.



This one’s part of something I’ve been working on for a while. I don’t like discussing work in progress, especially when I haven’t thought it through fully, so for now I’ll say it’s a closeup photo of an old comic book and leave it at that.

I’ve got a few experiments with Polaroid transfers in progress. They should be finished in a day or two, and I’ll post the results then.

Constructed Realities

Here's the announcement for my upcoming exhibit. Titled Constructed Realities, it will be held at the DeCaprio Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, IL. Dates for the exhibition are March 25–April 17, 2008. The opening reception is Thursday, March 27, 2:00–4:00 p.m. There will be good food and live music at the reception, so come if you can.

I'll also be doing a gallery talk on Wednesday, April 16. I plan on talking mainly about alternative photographic processes, and hopefully demonstrating some processes as well.

Hope to see you there!

I’m Still Here

Long time between updates lately. I’m going to try to update more often, I’ve just been sidetracked recently. First was preparation for my upcoming exhibit. I’ll post more on that soon. Basically, I’ll be showing work made during my sabbatical. Much of it has appeared on this blog, so for those in the area, you can go and see the work in person. There will be at least 30 pieces in the exhibit. so cutting mats and assembling frames was very time consuming.

Then, I got sick. I still don’t know what it was. I thought it was a cold at first, then the flu. All I know is that for a week and a half, I had a severe sore throat and very congested lungs with lots of coughing. I was a little feverish at times as well. With all of that, my studio work ground to a halt. I’m pretty much over being sick (still have a bit of a cough), all the work for the show is framed and ready to go, and I’m on spring break. I’m hoping to spend the coming week relaxing and working in the studio.

Here’s a couple of recent pieces. The first is a cyanotype print of an image shot with my Holga camera last October. It was taken in Japantown in San Francisco.


I like the print, but it doesn’t really fit with the other work in my show, so for now this is the only place you’ll see it.

Here’s two Polaroid lifts, These were made while demonstrating this process to some of my students. They turned out pretty well, so here they are. These would easily fit thematically into my upcoming exhibit, but I’ve already got more work than I need to fill the gallery. So, like the cyanotype above, this is the only place you’ll see these.


This one was taken at the Communist Sculpture Park in Budapest. Readers of this blog have seen several photos teken there.


This one is a closeup of the hand of an accupunture model in a Chinatown shop window in San Francisco. Just like the last image, nothing new here for people who have been reading this blog.

How To Screw Up An Interesting Print

I had to share this horrible print. It’s a good example of how happy accidents and a willingness to experiment can lead to interesting results. In this case, It’s also an example of how easy it is to go too far when experimenting and ruin a piece.

The negative for this print was made as an afterthought. I was making a 13 X 13 inch negative of an image I shot with my Holga camera (which turned out good-I’ll post it in a couple of days). I was using a 13 X 19 sheet of Pictorico transparency, and couldn’t bring myself to waste the 6 X 13 bit left over. So, I threw together this image, made from two photos I took at the University of Michigan’s Exhibit Museum last summer. Here’s the grayscale version used to print the negative:


I was planning to make a cyanotype print, in fact the negative was printed with the cyanotype transfer curve I created last Fall. However, at the same time I was cutting paper for this print, I was also cutting several pieces to make gum prints with. My first mistake was shrinking and sizing the the paper for this print along with the paper for the gum prints. Preshrinking and sizing are necessary for gum prints, but not for cyanotypes. No big deal, I can still do a cyanotype on paper that has been sized with gesso. But, it changed the exposure, and the resulting cyanotype was too light.

Still no big deal, I’ve been experimenting with making gum prints using metallic acrylic paint, and thought the underexposed cyanotype would be interesting with a gum layer made from the copper colored metallic paint I just bought. Unfortunately, I guessed at the paint to gum ratio and exposure time (It worked for the gold metallic paint-see my last post) and what I got was a solid copper colored print with no details. While soaking the print (gum prints develop by soaking in s tray of still water), I decided to add a splash of ammonia (ammonia is used to reduce density in an overexposed gum layer). It didn’t do anything for the copper layer, but I could see that something was happening. Then I remembered: Ammonia bleaches cyanotype prints, it’s one of the methods used to tone a cyanotype print. Sure enough, I now had a bleached cyanotype covered with a solid opaque layer of metallic copper acrylic.

I needed to get rid of the copper, and ammonia wasn’t cutting it. So I took a wet cotton ball and rubbed the entire copper layer off (wet layers on gum prints are really soft and easily manipulated).I was left with a bleached out cyanotype with a bit of copper colored stain. I threw this print into a tray, and grabbed a bottle of tannic acid I mixed a couple of months ago when making a bunch of toned cyanotypes (tannic acid is used in a lot of cyanotype toning formulas). Unfortunately, tannic acid is susceptible to mold, which I discovered when I poured it in the tray and saw huge globs of mold landing on the surface of the print. FIguring the print was ruined anyway, I dumped the entire bottle of moldy tannic acid on it and left it to soak while making a couple more gum prints.

Surprisingly, the results were pretty nice. The cyanotype had turned a light purple-gray color. It ws still underexposed, but the color was really nice, one of the nicer toned cyanotypes I‘ve done. I could have stopped there, but the cyanotype was too light, and I had some silver metallic paint I wanted to try gum printing with. Yesterday, I attempted a silver gum layer, and got the result you see above. While the print was soaking to develop the silver gum layer, I could see the back of the print discoloring, so I knew something was up. I’m not sure what went wrong. I made another silver gum print at the same time that doesn’t have the odd staining. If I had to guess, I’d say that the tannic acid hadn’t been washed out of the paper fully, and that it reacted with the gum sensitizer to give me that ugly, stained print. I tried removing the silver layer with a wet cotton ball, but it didn’t budge.

It was a fun experiment, and I do think that a silver or copper gum layer would look good over a cyanotype. For now, I think I’ll just do a plain cyanotype of this image and see how I like it.

Recent Gum Bichromate Prints

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. School has been keeping me really busy, and I’m also starting to prepare for my upcoming exhibit. I’ve made the initial selection of work I want to show, and have been busy cutting mats and assembling frames. I have a few pieces I need to reprint, work I want in the show but the original print has too many flaws. I’ve also got several new prints in progress, including a few experiments, so plenty to keep me busy.

Here are four recently completed gum bichromate prints. The first one is a three color gum print that I touched up a bit with black pencil to add contrast.


I like the use of the pencil in the Chinese characters, but Im not so sure about the eyes.


This one I like a lot. It’s a duotone (magenta and black) of a photo I took with my Holga camera at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. I posted the original photo in an early entry to this blog last May. The duotone is really nice, it brings out some detail in the shadows,and has a nice look to it.

I’ve been trying some experiments with gum printing, here’s the first.



It’s the same image, but instead of magenta watercolor paint (the usual way of making a gum print) I used a pearlescent magenta acrylic. I’d read somewhere that you can make gum prints using acrylics, but only for the first layer (acrylic paints are opaque), and wanted to try it. The results are interesting, but not something I want to continue with. First, the acrylic emulsion cracked and fell off the print very easily when wet, resulting in a distressed looking image. Second,the pearlescent effect vanished, leaving a strong magenta color, but no shimmer.

This one turned out much better.



This duotone was made with black watercolor paint and gold metallic acrylic paint (you can a original yellow/black duotone of the same image in the previous post). This one is really beautiful. The gold metallic effect is really strong (I printed each color twice), and the gold paint is much more stable than the pearlescent magenta. The metallic effect doesn’t show on screen, you’ll have to trust me that it looks really great (or come to my show next month). I’m going to try several more prints using this paint, and I’ll post them here.