2016

● Discovery Channel - Large Asteroid Impact Simulation (2008). Earth was born as a result of repeated asteroid collisions, the moon was created by a single giant impact event. Then, Earth's size attracted huge meteorites, which slammed into it, causing super-high-temperature rock vapour to cover the entire surface and evaporate all ocean water.

New Box

I'm working on a box that I see as more of a book.  I just completed the chapter on hands.  I am also creating a chapter on "heart" and a chapter on "mind" ...here is one of the small pieces from that box.  The original is 4 x 3.5 inches.  The photos of the little people are from an album of old family photos that a student, Chip, gave me.  The hands belong to my friend, Levi.

Interesting read...

I found Jake Romm's article about the subversive nature of Time Magazine's Trump cover particularly insightful.  of course, I'm talking about this photo:

Nutshell of his points...

1.  That the image is presented in a Kodachrome color palette -not something I would have noticed, btw- causing us to see the photo through whatever notions we have of the 1940's. 

2.  The pose and its relationship to other artworks depicting monarchs and leaders in seated positions.  His analysis of the power between the viewer and the subject of the photo, wherein the leader doesn't rise for the viewer -that the viewer must approach the leader... I also agree that there is a conspiratorial kind of expression generated by the looking-back-at-us body position as opposed to images of other leaders where we see them straight-on.

Romm also talks a bit about the shadow lurking in the background...I don't see any light source on the subject that would've cast that shadow, so adding it was a choice -a statement, if you will.

3.  THE CHAIR.  Which is one of the main things I noticed about the photo.  The back of it looks decayed...then your eyes go around and start noticing other things...like the chips in the paint.  And honestly, like the shadow.  For me, the decay on the back of the chair is so out of place that it causes me to closely observe the rest of the shot. 

Anyhow, worth thinking about.  Man, I love photography!

a part is still partly something that was felt or seen when it was blue or green, or: the dream of the bugs and the airfish

how many years had I walked past that house?
how many lifetimes?
with how many lovers, friends, parents, siblings?
it stood on lill st in chicago, on delaware park in buffalo, mesita in el paso…
it never changes.
flakey-gray clapboard, green gables…i never knew: was the gray really just dingy weathered white? i suppose it doesn’t matter.

i am small. both of my hands are being held…by my mother on one side and my father on the other. and we are gliding down the tree-lined sidewalk. it is spring; short puffy sleeves and patent leather sandals, boys on boards, cats in windows and all of us responding quite nobly to the urge of life, if you will...gliding, gliding…and there, on the corner, gray clapboard and the brush of weeping birch on shingles.
“can we go home now, mom?”
“why of course, dear, where else would we go?”
and we approached the gray clapboard building and glided like so much silk onto the front porch.
“hey!” my father said, “i have an idea!!! let’s act like our neighbors do and go through the front door!” he opened the front door as my mother and i landed with a little “plunk” onto our feet and walked into the wallpapered living room.

i am 13. i have not left the house in 23 years. the boards squeak when i walk…my cat has become so thin; all i can see of her is her shadow. and she hides a lot, right there, between the stove and the fridge. and my father wants to read his letters and i am standing at the dining room table, now collecting them from the vestibule, now bending to remove some he has taped to the underside of the table, now standing on a chair, peeling his letters from the ceiling, when . . .

i am 23 and standing on a chair peeling letters from the ceiling. i have not left the house in 37 years and the wallpaper is dark and blistered. and now…

i am 37. i have not left the house in 20 years. sunshine and dust motes twirling in the air; wilted tulips. the sound of stephen drury’s leather pants squeaking away on a piano bench, of people fucking in the women’s room at limelight & me, too many cocktails later carving yeats onto a cell wall with a safety pin, and now standing on a chair peeling letters from the ceiling, when…

i am 20. and i am standing on a chair peeling my dad’s letters from the ceiling. when…
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
skutskitssss-sss-sitchshusi
and a throb
and a push
and the stained yuckiness of urine soaked paper and plaster. i peel an envelope from the ceiling and
the sounds
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
. . . when
a hole opens up in the ceiling, small. but there: the movement of shiny blackness, and a sense of overwhelm as plaster whitens my hair, the hole crumbles on, as thin, black, bodies and feathery articulated legs now emerging, pushing themselves through the hole.
oh fuck.
FUCK.
and i start screaming and yelling and my dad freaking out, thinks i’m hurt, and the weight of the bodies, their blind, instinctive urge to emerge, and the wetness of the plaster, my heart the breeding ground and stable for an infinitude of conflicting beliefs, sensations and emotions, the chair quite rickety, i come crashing to the ground just as the entire ceiling collapses under the weight of 1000’s of enormous, black cockroach-like beetles loading themselves through the hole at the speed of darkness. and i am lying there, panic stricken, screaming, screaming, screaming.
my father.
a tank of green poison.
and a landscape of belly-side-up, legs now helplessly scrunched, bespeckling the squeaky floorboards singly, in pairs & small colonies and i wonder if bugs have families, too.
and dad, my hero, still needs his letters.
and so
i say
how about a glass of water instead?
“ok” he says; he loves me.
and in the kitchen. . .
skrittll-sssskiiit-sss-s—sshussiktip
shissss-shussik-ssss-ss
skutskitssss-sss-sitchshusi
and screaming,
and green tanks,
and more dead bodies.
our house is filled with poison.
our house is filled with poison.
our house is filled with poison.

*** *** ***
i am 37b. i am 23. i am 48; i am a'. i am upstairs, lying on my bed supine. eyes watching, ears listening. and yes, i can hear the sounds of the living and the dead. can see the shimmering energies of earth-bound things and in my mind's eye, bodies boiling in thick green goo downstairs and the bones of my ancestors exhumed now by curious anthropologists . . .they can't help it. . .driven by human frailty on their quest for answers to the mystery of human existence, they dig.
they measure.
they perform multifarious carbon dating procedures on minute shards of pottery.
they study the relation of bodies to artifacts and archeological structures.
elaborate charts and graphs are drawn that have as much to do with existence as about the tartness of cherry pie. and still there are bugs. they press on and on; they are upstairs now. why? because there is no method for control. that's why. hose 'em down with the green stuff in one place, they scatter and multiply in another.
i am afraid of the bugs.
i am afraid of the blisters in the wallpaper.
i am afraid of the bespectacled anthropologists and of the invisibility of my mother.
and
i can't stay in this bed, worn springs, host to hundreds of anonymous couplings eons old, to my grandmother's final dusty gasp, no.
back downstairs...my chair is still in the middle of the dining room, my dad's letters have all surrendered and have dropped from the ceiling, blistered wallpaper has now sweat itself free and underneath i see the wall is plastered with 1000's of statistical charts, graphs, bar and pie diagrams, all squashed together in a sea of nonsensical relations. the radio is playing billie holiday's 'strange fruit,' but both of my parents are missing and i wonder who billie is singing to. the floor looks like a battleground. and me on the chair peering into the hole from which the first onslaught of bugs raged forth. and movement, still.
frightened, i hit the floor running. to return with my dad's green tank in hand, only...no bugs, but large, brown fish floating through the hole and now happily swimming through the air above the dining room table. WOOOOOOOOW! they are so WEIRD!!! so puffy, like brown balloons with fish faces... and i get really close to one, and look at it and realize that the scales are arranged in whorls. and from this distance i also see that it is not just brown, but many shades of brown & rust & metallic copper, here & there the copper gleams green like an oil slick. i wonder if they act like balloons. and i take my hand and gently hit one on the face. and yes, it moves backwards like a balloon, but: horrified expression, and:
"do NOT hit me in the face...in fact, NEVER HIT ME ANYWHERE."
"ooooooh noooooo, i'm so sorry...please forgive; i didn't know you were...um...like, alive."
"are you stupid?"
"maybe. what are you? i mean, i've never seen any of your kind."
"i am an airfish." she said, and she puffed herself up, her scales lifting from her body, and beneath them, silver and copper accentuating the darkness of her scales. "and i am beautiful."
"you were beautiful before you puffed yourself up, you know."
and she smiled broadly.
"so, i have never seen one of your kind either, yet i could sense your beingness (it's why we came out, actually)" and her sisters meandered over in their airfish-swimway, all with different scale arrangements. "...yet, i would never have hit YOU in the face....say, what happened to your wallpaper? we much prefer the floral motif."
and before my eyes, the graphs and charts and diagrams, the statistics & figurings & and very important calculations began to mutate. they grew, they stretched themselves beyond their former incarnation as dissheveled scraps into the unlikliest of ornate floral scrollwork, becoming nonsense entwined with nonsense, entwined with sweat, entwined with tears, entwined here with the cilia of 2 paramecium and there with dust of granite, my walls an ocean of...
"smith?" my airfish wants me.
"yes?"
"i give you three gifts: 1. the gift of this wallpaper. it contains secrets beyond the numbers themselves and beyond their new configurations. the answers lie in their relation: every bit to every bit, every interim to every interim, and every bit to every interim. you are unable to know it; physically, it is too large to be accomodated by the tools you were given in this existence. your friends, the writers and scholars among you will approach the wallpaper with their magnifying glasses extended, and all of them will see a different fragment, magnified...the more any individual knows or purports to know about the minutia of a single locus, the less they know of its meaning in the larger cosmos. you see, each locus is inextricably bound to the interims embedded within it and to the bits and interims in every other speck of the galaxy. know this: all stories are particles of other stories. and be delighted: because, yes...there IS more. don't trust your scholars for they know as much as you do. do not waste time quoting them. do not waste time quoting me. hear the multitude of voices; within it, that of your mother, that of your teacher, that of your student, that of your trees, bushes, giraffes and beagles.
the second two gifts are things your friends will call "faith"
gift #2: know this: you are an airfish, waiting to be born.
gift #3: and this: the bit that goes unnoticed is called the "interim." the interim is NOT an absence.
and with that she brushes herself against my cheek.
"do you want to remember me?"
"yes."
and she presses herself first against my left cheek and then against my right. and then she and her sisters swim into the walls their particles disbursing, now joining with the tendrils and scrollwork of my wallpaper.

Happy thanksgiving!

I am grateful that the sun rises and sets and that I get to be here on this amazing planet, with these particular people and in this particular place.  I'm grateful for my bed mates (CATS!!) -who keep my world bright even on the rainiest days.  But on the top of the gratitude list is my sobriety.  Cuz without that, I wouldn't be sitting here wishing everybody a HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

One of my bed mates, Punkin.

One of my bed mates, Punkin.

Thien Nguyen

One of the weirdest pedagogical experiences I get to have:  students who don't believe me.  Who come to me with a question for which I provide an answer, and then tell me I'm wrong.  Just for the record, because I have no problem confessing ignorance when I don't have answers, I am not actually wrong a lot. (LOL!! Don't ask my mom about this!) And since we're "on the record" I should also say that when I recognize that a question appears to require a subjective response I situate my feedback in context.  When these things don't work, I will say something like this:  "Student, pretend I am your client.  I just asked you for 5 widgets.  Give me the widgets or you won't be paid." or "GREAT!  I'm glad you love it printed with the 5 filter; you can put that on your refrigerator and now make one for me."

You might ask:  WTF with all this clap-trap about teaching when I'm posting awesome photos by one of my students?  Um.  Yeah.  Thien's been a pretty tough nut.  From happily stating in critique of others' efforts: "I don't like any of it."  to telling me I'm wrong about what a print should look like, to not getting stuff done on time because it's just his little way...this list could be extended, but you get the idea.  Thing is, he has also been one of the most rewarding students I've had in years.  

The dude is "ON."  Always thinking, always assessing, exploring, trying new things.  He wants to talk about stuff and he likes arguing and being challenged...he is actually looking for answers.  He's got his own style, and his own ideas which are complex and in constant flux.  And yeah, he has been critical of others' photos, but he also turns that critical eye onto his own work, and in my opinion, with really amazing results.  Furthermore, this quarter his prints have been golden, and he is developing his own photographic vision and style...I'm putting some of his work below.  

What I like the best about Thien's photos is that they are peculiar, unnatural somehow, surreal.   His use of fingers and legs as primary touch-points, the shapes he creates with bodies, and what's missing are all features that interest me about the photos and that leave me feeling that I've been allowed a glimpse into a privately coded universe where things are just half-a-bubble off.  I also love his attention to light, and his sense of overall composition.  If you would like to see more of Thien's work, you can check out his Flickr page!

Michael Todea

So last night I wrote that my students were really inspiring me right now.   After creating that post here on Ruminations, I began scanning Michael Todea's photos so that I could show them to future students for the "Image and Text" assignment, and thought it would be great to post my student work here. 

Michael did this incredible series of Macro shots.  One of the things he did that was really awesome, was that below his photos he also pinned a little baggie to the wall that contained all the tiny text scraps he'd shot with.  It was wonderful because it gave a real sense of the degree of magnification.  The asterisk, for example, was so miniscule that I might never have even seen it if it had been just loose somewhere. 

Just in case you can't tell what you're looking at...

The first photo is the surface of a leaf.  The second one down is pretty obvious, I think...note the detail of the water drops!!  The third photo is a single sugar crystal -I love the horizon line and the way the letter recedes into the background.  The fourth photo is not mysterious.

One of the things that I so loved about his project was not just the way the photos look, and the technical sass of them, but I also really liked the ideas about symbols contained in his work. Text and words are just symbols of the things they represent.  What I extract from these photos is something like this:  "L is for Leaf" so the letter L is a symbol of a symbol of the symbol (i.e., the photo is also a symbol) of a leaf.  OK, yes, that does sound confusing, but I think you catch my meaning...maybe.  

If you would like to see more of Michael's photos, you can check out his Facebook page!

Good Week...

While the US political universe seems to implode around me, my personal/private life is going really well. 

On Tuesday I got home from work and discovered this clipped to my mailbox:

I love my mail carrier!!!  Also, right now I've got a wonderful group of students.  Their photos are amazing, and they are really inspiring me!  I have my fingers and toes crossed that many of them return next quarter!!

Then on Thursday I arrived home to an email in my box from Diana Nicholette Jeon...She'd discovered a link to her website in the side bar of this page.  It was great to hear her e-voice, as I don't know her at all!  And Tonight I came home and found an email in my box from a local gallery.  A studio visit may happen.  We'll see. 

I have also had a number of coffee dates lately with good friends.  It's been important for me in this trying time to find respite in my community.  I've built a good one here in Portland over the last 20 years.  I think sometimes of leaving here as the population density climbs, but ???  Maybe I will stay...we'll see.  I don't need to figure that out right now.

I'M LEARNING A NEW MEDIUM!!!  I mean, totally new:  sewing!   I started by doing Tina Givens patterns, now I'm working on a Simplicity pattern.  I also took a 3-session class.  I have no clue what I'm doing, but have lots of grand ideas for wearable and non-wearable items I want to create.  My desires and goals are so much bigger than my skill set is!!  BUT...one step at a time.  I will learn from everything I do, and everything I absorb will apply to something in the future.

Good night world!

Ghost Ship #3

About a month and a half ago I went on a photo shoot with Alder.  I shot 5 rolls of film and there is all of ONE photo I'm actually interested in.

I'm looking for something very specific in my photos...but it's more like this:  "specific, but undefined"...I don't know what, exactly, "it" is.  But I know when I feel it there.  Enter Ghost Ship #3, "Untethered Pearls," from a previous shoot.  I created this using the F-effect, and I love this piece.  I love the length of the form, the way the hand stands out a bit and is backlit by the window.  I like that it requires extra time to see the person on the ground, and I love the inset at the top and the stitches going across the bottom...holding the letters on.  Some are floating...because that is just what letters do, I suppose.

"Untethered Pearls" (because pearls of wisdom come in the form of text.)(right?)

"Untethered Pearls" 

(because pearls of wisdom come in the form of text.)

(right?)

a door.
a peephole.
me,
in what feels like a wooden chair (rickety -yes)
in a room cramped with clanking ductwork.
looking at...there! across the room:

a door.
with a peephole.
a small circle of flickering light
copperdust
cobwebs.

"what are you doing here?" (an unidentifiable voice)

"i was sent here to contemplate the problem of nuclear fusion, to unravel the mystery of HAARP; i was sent here to achieve psychic contact with sasquatch, to discover the origin of belly button lint...yes indeed...i was sent here to determine how many 7-and-a-half inch forks laid end to end it would take to get to the moon, but right now i'm trying to calculate the measure and quality of force necessary to rearrange my DNA molecules. i wanted to be a newt and now look at me."

"no, YOU look at YOU...look, for instance, at your hand" (the voice...identifiable only as the last unidentifiable voice)

and i put my hand out, palm side up. it's covered with ant-sized words and letters all scrambling around, scurrying up my wrist and to my elbow.

"you are swarming"

"i am gathering"

"you are swarming."

"ok."

i get up, scared.
what does it mean to be swarming?
what DOES it mean to be swarming?

and now a tentative shuffle to the door.
dust, scraps of foil, bullet casings and mouse turds part like the red fucking sea, carving out my destiny in the form of a straight line from chair to door.
"hey, wait...wasn't there something in there about smelling the roses?"

"in where?"

"ummm...this life thing. in there."

"there are no roses, sorry. "rose" is not even in the dictionary. there is the path. that is all. you are either on it or not."

"my choice?"

"your choice."

ok...(press "play")
(tentative shuffle re-begun.)
i can see it more clearly now...
that delectable flicker.
like a candle, with all of the sensual associations of fire and candleness.
mothlike, i approach the door. it is made of flesh and blood. i can feel its warmth, its pulse, its rhythm & churn from yards away. i know this pull.
opiatic and necessary, and me: as predictable as the next addict.

i am there.
my hand on the door disappears into its wooden fleshiness.

"stop...look before you leap"

i retract my hand...but oh!...my fingers are bent this-way, that-way. they don't fit together. and the words that once were random are now forming into patterned, illogical strands.

"just because you don't understand them doesn't mean they're illogical"

without touching the door i put my eye to the peephole.
there, in a rock room lit only by torches: a girl and cat.
familiar and completely alien to me.
she turns.
i know those eyes.
i know that gesture, that ridiculous haircut.
she is me.
she is me at 7. and upon closer scrutiny i see that she is only letters, held together by... gravitational pull? by elmer's glue?
she looks like swarm of bees, like televised white noise...a pixelated hologram.

Oh Fun!!!

I just Googled myself to see what my site looks like from a search engine perspective and discovered that someone at the Lomography site blogged about my work after seeing the show at Davis Orton!  So nice to see something positive like this at the end of such a difficult week!

Here is the entry!!

 

The Process of Critiquing (in photography class)

One of my best students posted an entry on the school blog about critiquing.  His name is Thien, and this is his second year with me.  He started out Year 1 by consistently stating how much he disliked all his classmates' work, and we got to chuckle a lot because "There goes Thien again hatin' on another photo!" 

Towards the end of last year, he figured out that he was not acting the same as his classmates and he made a decision to change...he stopped speaking his mind, basically.  His opinions were the same, but he learned to STFU. 

Yesterday during crit a different student sitting in the back row critiqued the critique by complaining that everything was just kinda roses and daffodils during critique.  This was a bit of a head-scratcher for me since I'd just had 2 students tell me they're scared of me, but ok.  Well, Thien really picked up on this dude's comment and re-blossomed in full form!  Then last night he made a post about it entitled, "How to Critique"  What I'm posting below is my reply to him.  

I have thought about this topic A LOT over many years. I have tried a lot of different approaches.  I started out being very blunt and honest. Then one semester I watched something happen…I watched a student wilt under the weight of my words and decided it wasn’t worth it. Because at the point where a person is feeling injured, they stop listening anymore and all my “words of wisdom” (i.e., my opinions and honest assessments) don’t matter anymore.

Here are my current tactics:
1. First of all, I try to notice something good in the pictures, something i can say that will start the conversation off in a direction of OKness.
2. Then I add “things that could be better.” or “what I would do if this were MY picture.” At this point, the more difficult messages come out, if they exist.
3. Then I close by adding something nice.

So the difficult part is surrounded by the softness of positive messages. See, I want to say the truth of what I see, but I want people also to know that I appreciate the things that are right with what they did. Also important to realize, is that people see their photos as extensions of themSELVES. so when you critique a photo, they FEEL it as a personal experience and they understand it as a critique of their value as a person. I think this is an important thing to know. Also, I don’t think it works the same way for you. It seems to me that when you speak about your own work, you are very clearly talking about the photo and the properties it has. I never get the sense that you feel personally attacked by a critique, but I can promise you that others do.

Sometimes people put stuff up and I cannot find the good in it. When that happens, I have no idea what to say because I am not a convincing liar…I have also had students in my class who realize that I unconsciously make faces during critiques that reveal how I am actually feeling, and they watch me for clues, which I probably should not admit here in public, but oh well.

One thing, Thien, that is different between me and you is that you mostly DON’T like stuff. I mostly DO like stuff, and there are all kinds of pictures that are fun for me to look at for many different reasons. I like work that is completely different from mine, and I even like photos that are not "good" when the concept is so extraordinary that I just don’t give a shit about the photos anymore…like, their idea hit me regardless of “do I like it?” I also really appreciate small, personal photos…I find them beautiful and touching. I like monumental photos, I like quiet ones and loud ones. To me, on some level, all photos are expressions of being alive on planet earth. that is so beautiful, even if yeah I know I’m a dork.

So for me it’s relatively easy to say a difficult thing, because I can also say good things. For you, your window of “what makes a picture good.” is very narrow. At one point I thought, “Well, he doesn’t like anything, so it doesn’t matter.” If all you see sucks to you, then your belief that something sucks doesn’t mean much. Another thing, even in pictures that do not touch your heart…isn’t there something there that is also good? Usually, yes. But what I’ve learned over the years: It is hard to see the good properties in things we don’t like. Just like it is hard to hear wisdom from the lips of someone we don’t respect. It’s easier to paint everything with a broad brush…but the broad brush cannot get into the cracks where all the good shit is.

Another thing that is different between me and you is that I am the teacher. So my words carry a certain weight just because I’m the Queen. I need to watch myself for that reason as well. Sometimes in class I will call on people who I know will say what I think, and it relieves me of the responsibility of having to say it. I don’t want to say it….but I have sworn I will always tell the truth.

I think learning how to speak has been the biggest challenge of my sober life. How to say something that is both critical AND constructive…very, very hard. and I’m still learning.