Something is Happening

I used to carry my Pentax K100 around with me pretty much everywhere to take pictures of the things I did and the people I was with. Then my camera broke and I didn't have the money to fix it or get another one so I just started to use my phone to take the same kind of pictures. I realized it was a lot better suited to the kind of images I was taking and the settings I was in - it was faster, more discreet and the images were easier to share. I realized my relationship to my phone camera was changing, it had become an art making tool for me. For this show and my book I went through all the photographs I had taken with my Iphone over the last year and a half, over 5000 images, and whittled them down to the 22 images in the book and then from that the 2 I wanted to print and hang. It was interesting to go through the different edits of the images until I got to my final one because I had taken each image in a very different setting and context but somehow together they all made sense and conveyed a certain feeling.

These are the images I hung in the show

Good Girls Gone Bad

T

This image perfectly sums up why I love Cher, why she is "goals", but also why I don't understand her relationship with Sonny Bono at all. Ann and I were really interested in the power dynamics in their relationship, Cher is a young, beautiful, Native woman who meets Sonny when she's 17 and Sonny is this really creepy (at least to us) seeming 27 year old who has no talent but a lot of connections. To us it seemed very clear that He was taking advantage of her and that she should have been the star.
In our sound piece we wanted to use the song "I Got You Babe" and take it out of it's very pop sound and reimagine it in the avant-garde tradition of John Cage and LaMonte Young. For the sound of our piece I was thinking a lot about the Cocteau Twins - how their music moves beyond language at many points. I wanted this piece to do some of that work, to feel like a trance, to resist comprehension and instead to elicit an emotional and physical response.

John Cage and La Monte Young came in with how we chose to exhibit the piece. We wanted to disrupt the ways you normally listen to music, which can be this very isolated act, and force a connection. This started by taking everyone to the stairwell of the wellness center,everyone was on a different level visually and aurally which made the group listening experience strange and disorienting. I'm interested in our music and listening is effected by the space that it happens in. We had everyone play the song from their phones at the same time, though it was off (which I liked better) so that when listening you'd experience different levels of reverberation, resonance, and dissonance.
Here's the piece, try to find some other people with computers or phones to listen to it with!

Here's some footage of me and Annie rehearsing

W I L T

Here's some photos
https://www.flickr.com/photos/147242456@N06/albums/72157676176714773

D A W N

D A W N - A cinematic masterpiece coming soon to a theater near no one 

         I imagined this project as the opening sequence of a non-existent movie about the unraveling of social order told through a woman, Dawn (played by Annie Connolly) , drawn to kill and an altar boy drawn into sin. The altar boy doesn't appear in this version of the opening but he's off screen praying for Dawn's soul because he sense that she has transgressed all boundaries and killed. While I had these elaborate plans for what this fake movie would look like, I wanted the title sequence not to reveal them. I focused instead on the interaction of Annie's character with her things - her clothes and especially her cigarette. I was really inspired by the work of Kenneth Anger and wanted to recreate the charged relationship he crafts between his subjects and their things. So I imagined the cigarette, the blue fuzz of her coat, her pink shoes against the snow holding the tension, passion, and tragedy of the murder she was going to commit. Visually and aurally I waned to evoke the melodrama of old Hollywood Cinema. Marshall McLuhan wrote, "We approach the new with the psychological conditions and sensory responses to the old" (94). Looking at the modes of classical cinema as patterns we have been psychologically conditioned to consume, I see them working similarly to McLuhan's theory of the alphabet - as a construction of fragmented parts into an imagined whole that as a result shape our ways of seeing and thinking. I wanted to call upon these expectations to consider how my view of a female subject is negotiated through them.

What's that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?

         I’m interested in the image not only as an aesthetic experience but as a manipulative one. The images below come from a small photo book given to me by my mother a few months ago. I’ve quickly come to cherish the images that fill it, photographs of women I will never know. It makes sense that the people captured in these moments are distant from me; I'm not supposed to know them as they were in these moments - grandmothers and great-grandmothers, are not young. While most of the people living in this book are now dead these images momentarily resurrect them - but it's a strange kind of disjunctive resurrection where the person whose presence I feel is seen in a time and space far removed from my experience of them. The image has the power to evoke both presence and absence  while remaining fixed.

My grandmother, Adele, stops scrubbing to pose for my grandfather's photo - I wonder if  he helped her clean?

  
                                                             The tree across from her porch
 

My mother’s photo book also speaks to a specific relationship to the image. These images, taken by my grandfather sixty some odd years ago are not unlike images I consume,create, and share today. However, while my grandfather had these images printed and bound, so that I can hold them today I share the equivalent image on Instagram. In my work I am interested in exploring how the images you consume and the way you consume them shape your consciousness particularly in terms of a rapidly changing culture of images.

For these collages I pulled images from the 1966 book to be alive! based on a film of the same name . Using digital manipulation I hoped to distance the found images from their visual and narrative contexts. 

                                                              T E A S E

                                                                           S P I N

D I V E

 M U N C H