Scans are in!

No real corrections made here except for color. These are all original color. I will start with the "snow drawing" I made the other day.

Here is a little organic vs. gmo/canned/frozen etc. 

canned beets:

organic beet:

Here are the menus I have been dabbling with….. I am not one who is good with choosing font. Any feedback would be appreciated. I am sure I will revisit how this is written again later. 

 I have not written the menu on this above image yet. But it is the ingredients to the grapefruit I ate and video tapped the other day. The other is the papaya boat which was also recorded but was cut short unfortunately. 

Here are some prints I did after returning from the residency of onions, oranges, artichokes, tomatoes and potatoes. I was fascinated by the color and so when I returned from the residency, since I was not using sun anymore as a resource, I was going to revisit the other fruits and veggies that had yielded a fruitful color in the past but then the sun washed it out when they were exposed. Here are some more now. These have not been exposed to the sun so they keep their original color. 

I also have about fifteen dyed pieces of fabric I was going to sew together this weekend but I am going to wait till after I see my mentor to see what thoughts may come about from them and if I will ruin them by sewing. 

I also have the print of the salad I made about a week ago scanned in…not as exciting as I had hoped but from this idea I will be going to the goodwill again and getting some more plates and printing my actual dinners on the plates. We will see how that goes. Similar to the idea I posted a couple weeks ago. 

I also, still while working on the other "constellations", I am making some more. Ones of different sizes….they are mounted and ready to be pinned….just need some more string and want to read up a little more on the idea of constellations. They will be ready for when I see my mentor on Tuesday. 

Lastly, I have the updates of the jars I have been studying and some more additions. I am still unaware where this body will be headed but I will tell you I am reading about fermentation……. The carrots are a test of organic, canned and frozen. 

Snow Day = Work Day

So a foot of snow has worked in my favor today!

I have een productive and I am sorry that the pictures, some of them just don't do the images justice, until they are scanned. Of course right now….some of them still need time to dry :)

Knocking off the ideas that I have presented after this second residency:

Playing with making menu pages. The goal here is to create a anthotype page made up of the ingredients for the recipe made. Then printing the recipe on the page. Of course now, I am realizing I might have to scan the page and then digitally print the recipe onto the image. Here are the images:

I will be scanning these soon and then printing the recipe on top of the image. I will post them later next week. 

Here are some of the digital images I shot of the food. Later this weekend will be my edit day so you will see some of these come back to visit. Take a sneak peak. 

Here are the videos I made of me consuming the product. I ended up short on one because I don't have much space on my phone and I apologize for the tape on the corner…that will be edited out later. 

Other than that… I spent some time researching constellations. In my understanding in older times the farmers used to use the stars to help them to know when winter or summer were to come and when to sow or harvest their crop. This was interesting to me because right now I am working in a more natural way and I thought well….maybe that could be something….time will tell. On that note, here are the constellations I am currently attempting to make with some of my prints. One is a snow print that I have been producing and I have not been very good at posting them online because it has been right before the last residency. Two of them are on digital prints of the anthotypes I have produced last semester. Simply, I looked for brightest areas, places that stuck out to me to place the pin. They are all unfinished pieces though…keep that in mind. I am currently building them.

Here are some images of the small snow prints I made today in the snow. I also did some on fabrics as well and they did not capture well on the camera so I will attempt to scan them this weekend. I also have some fabric pieces I printed onions and artichokes on and will also be playing around with sewing them together this weekend. Here are the snow prints. 

These are just made with a coated sheet of watercolor paper and a vegetable or fruit juice. They are put outside to capture the snow as it falls and let to dry inside. These are the marks left behind. 

This is an image of what I did earlier this week. By making a meal and then placing it on a coated sheet of paper. I had hoped to get to goodwill this afternoon to see about getting more plates to print on but Im snowed in and its not worth my risk. Ill go tomorrow. This is my salad meal from the other day. Dark image Im sorry. 

One of my play ideas was to reprint an anthotype on a digital print of one. This digital print, if my memory serves me correct, is of an orange on a red cabbage. Scanned and printed larger. This here is an image of it re-coated with red cabbage and slices of orange placed on top with a piece of red cabbage in the middle. What was I looking to get…..I don't know. Just a trial to see what turns out. 

Hope you enjoyed my adventures this day!! 

Some trials...

So like I said I was going to photograph myself eating the food that I made. I will make a menu item tomorrow I hope...

Here is the video of me eating the salad that I made today. I dont know why I video recorded it, I just did. I also have a couple images that I recorded before eating and am making an anthotype from the meal. Tonight or tomorrow I will make an anthotype of all the materials in the meal and then print the recipe on the paper, or at least that is the hope.

Here is the video:

 These are unedited photos. Playing around with trying to photograph the meal before eating it and the last image is of the meal on a piece of coated paper.

Organic vs. GMO?

HI there!

Alright so I am in full swing now. Returning from my family loss, although he will never be forgotten, cleared and ready to go! Some ideas that came up last week were the idea of organic vs. GMO. How would these fruits and vegetables decomposed according to how they have been packaged and produced. I am currently studying some carrots for this idea, a canned , frozen and organic carrots. Unfortunately what most people come to know as a carrot is the baby carrot which is not necessarily a carrot at all. I tried both these while making prints and placing them into jars and I was disgusted. I could never make a meal with this food, or course that is my personal opinion but I think life would be far more rich for any individual if they made the choice to go organic. That debate is something I am always interested in. Here are a couple images.

Ok. SO this whole idea brings me to the concept of food waste. I received a lot of books that I ordered this week and last. Ones I am reading are: American Wasteland, Waste by Jonathan Bloom; Uncovering the global food scandal by Tristram Stuart, The ARt of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland and a couple books on paper making. 

So food waste is a theory that I may come to investigate through this work. So far the beginnings of the books are all aligned with ideas I have expressed for years and thoughts that have come to mind when thinking about art and food.  With this idea I have researched a couple recipes that I thought would be interesting to make and I am about to go to the store and buy their ingredients now and make them. I will make these dishes and allow one to decompose and I will also be photographing the finished product along with my attempts the make a video of myself eating the food. Why? Not sure. That answer will come later after I review how terrible or great it all seems. The joys of art and experiments. Besides that I want to further study the idea of making food and printing it on coated plates like I did earlier last week and posted some pictures. 

While studying food and art I found a couple artists that were quite interesting. Here are some links to their work. 

ANYA GALLACCIO

http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/anya-gallaccio#1

Justin Beal

http://www.justinbeal.com/murmansk_01.html

I came across these artists on this page :

http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/use-of-nature-in-art/natural-process-in-art.html

Here are a couple more images of experiments I did this week. I will be working on making more dyed fabrics and printing on them. Almong with sewing them together, making more constellations which I did the end of the last semester and should put some images up for you all. I will continue with the idea of plates, food, recipes, videos, etc. 

Lots of work so I must get to it. This morning was a time of academic reading and preparation. I know want to get my hands dirty!!!!

Art Opening

So I entered two pieces of this current work into the alumni exhibition at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, not expecting much but what I got was overwhelming. I can't remember a whole lot, due to blacking out when put on the spot in social crowd settings, but I was told something along best in the show and both my pieces were purchased from the school for their permanent collection! Wow! Not only did they want one...but both! And I was told that they would both be shown together side by side. Super exciting! A successful night in the world of art making. I think I'll go to bed early. 

Some results....

Here are some images from the work I did yesterday. Enjoy! Sorry they are a little dark. 

Back at it!

Alrighty....papers written....second residency done....I'm well on my way to........Ill tell you when I figure it out.

In the meantime I had a productive night. I have a lot ideas(listed in my last post) I am brewing right now and I am delving into a couple tonight. I though about printing on plates with the process and then photographing it and printing the photograph. Making the plate almost like a dinner itself. I am not sure where this is going but the joy if it is that I should be able to wash the plate and make another anytime I want!! Check out these images:

I have done three plates and I have just placed an onion and an orange on them to see how the juices take and how it dries. From this test I will be able to make dinners and then do this process with a dinner plate. Sounds more exciting right?

This was my work bench for the night:

I also had an idea of making some sort of quilt....not sure again what the purpose of that was but I really wanted to dye fabrics now and not paper. I got three 1/2 yard portions of different fabric. One cotton like, one that feels synthetic, and one that is like felt. Check these colors out! 

Wow! The felt paper I thought would be a good material to use while it is still wet, the others I am going to let dry for the night and see what I can do with them tomorrow....I pressed some produce into a couple pieces and then I rolled some into a couple others. We shall see what happens over night.

 Here is what I did with the felt pieces:

Ok. While juicing...I obviously did some more prints like I used to with the colors and the watercolor paper. Tomorrow I may mix some juices and coat some others. This is where I am at right now.... I also want to coat a ton of paper and make studies and photographs of them decomposing. Ill leave it for another day. 

Thats all for now folks! See you next time! 

2nd Residency Projects

Here are some projects for this month. I would like to touch on them all within the next six weeks and see which ones will bring me into a new direction or worth experimenting more with. Check them out and leave feedback if you have anything in mind. I know it might be hard to understand if you don't fully understand my current work.

New Projects List from Residency #2

1. Make a series of prints
1.  Short series
2. all the same size
3.  made of the prints I have currently  been working on
2. Quilt making
1.  weaving
2. Making small prints on fabric, dyed fabric, and then sewing them together. 
3. Grid of one image
1. choose a fruit for subject
2. make twenty different emulsions and print that subject
3. make grid and photograph it
4. Menus
1. make an emulsion out of food for a recipe
2. make a print with each part of that recipe on it
3. create the product, photograph the product
4. print the recipe on the coated and printed paper
5. digital or original
5. Make a progression of decay
1. each day make a print of the matter
2. each day make a photograph of the matter
3. show the matter in a jar at its full decay
4. display out the progression of the decay through the anthotype and photographs
6. Snow Prints
1. make my own paper
2. coat the paper/spray/throw/dip etc
3. go on a walk/hike, place the paper on the trail in the trees etc. 
4. revisit later or at end of walk to pick up? 
5. find a place local I like to go and place one out every time it snows? 
6. go to that place and just place a handful around and revisit after a week or so
7. More jar studies
1. photograph where the jars may rest inside my house
2. make a print and place an actual shelf where the shelf lies and place the actual jars on the shelf when the study of the decay is over? or is it?
8. Framing
1. make anthotypes of organic matter 
2. make a photography of the matter
3. frame the photograph with the varies anthotype prints of that matter
9. Calendars 
1. fruitful months
2. study one fruit per month understand it/eat it every day/ make recipes for it
3. goes along with study till decay
10. Grocery Store Map
1. study the layout 
2. study the waste
3. study the most purchased
4. map put my own grocery store
5. create anthotypes of products that are fresh, frozen, canned. 
6. make paint color swatches of the three different stages which should resemble the three different types of nutrients from that product. 
7. cardboard layout/ 3d/ actual produce and swatches above to see "what to buy"
11. Contellations
1. study more with the pinning idea
2. maps/constellations/connections/symmetry
3. is there a science behind these marks or veins?
12. Think more about Fermentation/ Cataloging /Labeling
13. Dinner Plates
1. make dinner
2. coat paper/ feed myself and paper dinner
3. let it decompose completely? cook? uncooked?
4. make anthotype with food. 
5. make photograph of my place each time
6. try coating on plates?
14. Dirty Image
1. play with digital prints
2. recoat and print again?
3. coat onto the fruit and then let outside?

Check out Keith Johnson and Cary Wolinsky both came to speak with the MFA students during this current residency. Interesting perceptions and views on photography and the way we present it to the viewer.


http://www.carywolinsky.com

http://www.keithjohnsonphotographs.com

2nd Residency

At my second residency now at NHIA MFA Program in Peterborough NH. So far, things are going well...met with Cary Wolinsky this week and am having a wonderful Critical Theory class with Francine Weiss. Looking forward to working again and developing my process further. Should be active within the next week or so with new posts!