Photosynthesis, almost

Feeling It Through

Balmorhea - Take Away Show - Bowsprit from valerie toumayan on Vimeo.

Seasons, encased

(drawing of winter, drowning of spring)

My hair covers these thoughts with heavy foliage

(Collaborative Installation between A'alia Brown and Sarah Jenks, Spring 2009)





(Images courtesy of A'alia Brown)

script:

I love this place.

The place

where this mask which wraps my face

is let free.

A vessel splintering the seas.

She dances on her own violation.

Or so it would seem.

In the water she pulls hard,

yearning sovereignty.

The further she drifts

the more I long her pull.

Return

and wrap me inside.

Clothe me in familiarity.

I can remember the smell of my mothers hair.

I remember its texture on my cheek when I cried in it.

These useless strings

filled with so much touch.

Matching the wrinkles on her hand

interrupting her long and graceful fingers.

The feathers.

The wings.

The dove.

The flight.

She fed me quiet words

full of touch.

And silence filled with listening.

I fall into rusting memories.

Decrepit and precious

these times are filled with little awareness,

just eyes.

Young eyes,

unlooked

and full of looking.

The pretty dresses

sit like patient wings around my hips.

Waiting for this female

to wave back and forth,

making a shadow,

a dark blanket on the ground

from fabric floating above.

A man asks me to share the shade.

He cuts me a slice of watermelon

and I fear my hesitation to a smile

and resistance of his proximity.

Only our ears can hear the volume of our exchanging glances.

Deep ink colors a lightening bolt across his eye.

His eyes are looking.

Outstretched hand,

he offers his greatest utensil

for the purpose of extinguishing our temporary solitude.

His occurrence in my mirror of the tree make me nervous.

So I run to the sun spot.

This freckles my skin.

I can feel his shadow crawl across

and connect these skin spots.

Closer it comes to me

the more I must chase it.

It runs faster from me,

faster than my own.

It is my own.

Alone I am my own.

It’s only my shadow.

My crooked wing stuck in ground.

We can fly between,

on the clouds

and share the whisper songs of our flight.

Take me home.

Drop my in the sea

and I will breathe full breaths

and swim with the birds.

The mermaids let the waves lull their hair.

Swinging back and forth

to a source more their own.

I want to take it back.

I want to rock these waves myself.

But I cannot hold this moon inside my heart,

the light leaks through my ventricles

will expose these bones and illuminate the inside out.

Fading.

Diluted.

Gone.

The pirate catches me.

He steal from the seas.

I am romanced again

by the sight of his entrenched eye patch.

I am looking.

And I can no longer look

at the suns fractured rays in the water.

I cannot hide in my window,

as beautiful as it might be,

there is no breeze for my hair to breathe.

But when we float above

we can see the stars,

the light leaks of swallowed moons.

Only the whales can see the salt water marks

where the pink of his face touched mine.

Tattered with the rising tide.

The lace on my dress traces my knees.

Like the branches in my head.

the ruffles above it.

My hair covers my thoughts

with heavy foliage.

Only the rain can get through

to water this growth.

It perforates my skin

and encases the pockets between my organs.

Permeating their structures

to fill with this silence.

Swallowing the space between these veins.

Exiting through the very gateways,

which birthed it.

And I let it.

Good(bye) Winter

(Originally posted March 30)

Bon Iver - Skinny Love

I have watched this video about 50 times, and every time it makes me fall in love while simultaneously breaking my heart.

Naked Trees

Made Winter 2009



Winter is coming,
winter is here.
Rolling across my fingers and eating into my branches below.
The leaves I use to feel the world crinkle and fade.
Their dust coats the ground and insulates my core.
As winter grasps my hand,
it wipes away the fingerprints left by others.
And I think there is something beautiful,
in my new found nudity.

Finding Comfort

The Roaming Days

obscure, 1
obscure, 2
obscure, 3

Artist statement from final show in Rome:

“I think that our sense of realism has been changes to some extent since surrealism- well, really, since Freud- because we’ve been made more conscious of how realism can drawn on the unconscious….I believe that realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continuously re-invented…I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be re-created otherwise it will be just an illustration of something – which will be very second hand.”

-Francis Bacon

This quote by artist Francis Bacon taps directly into the ideas I am exploring in my photography projects. Living in a foreign country and surrounding yourself with a completely unfamiliar context inevitably causes some recreation of your personal reality. You remain caught between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the reality of existing where you are, and the dream of your presence somewhere seeming so unreal. The images taken inside a camera obscura, illustrate this idea by contrasting a normal room, with unnatural depictions of the outside streaming across the walls. The experience of seeing these images in the room they were taken, but warped by the affects of a camera obscura causes a disorientation and hopeful reconsideration of reality, similar to the experience of studying abroad.

seen, unseen

(click on image to view full scale)

within, without

In addition to being caught between the realities I am familiar with and the reality of living in Italy, I have also observed Rome as a place caught between opposing forces. Between it’s history as the once most powerful empire in the world, and now how that history is preventing it from modernizing. Between the ever-present Catholicism, muddled with depictions of Greek Gods. Between the gender roles and relationships of the old world contrasted with those of the new. I explored this idea with a series of blurred images of the heavenly virtues and deadly sins, which leave the viewer unsure of which is good and which is evil. The interaction between the two makes their seemingly clear distinction less apparent. The dark doorway begs for one to follow the unknown path- the portal between these distinct poles, and the place to find a new, individual reality. This is an unfamiliar place where, like in Rome, these polar forces collide and find an identity in the space in-between.

virtue and sin

(click on image to view full scale)

Italian Influences

The artistic influences in Italy were overwhelming . From classical sculpture and painting to modern installations and photography, I saw more art in the three months there than I have in probably my entire life. Here are some of the highlights:

Niki De Sait Phalle

(Tarrot Gardens and Museum of the Rome Foundation)

Niki is French artist known for her "nana" sculptures with bright colors, curvy figures and whimsical style. I love her playful images and sculptures and her ability to transplant you directly into her vivid imagination. There was a show of her work in Rome containing a mix of drawing and sculpture, and a permanent installation called the "Tarot Gardens" in the countryside of Tuscany containing complex sculptures inspired by the Tarot cards.

Exit of the School, The Dressmaker, Machine to Dream

It Giardindo de Tarrochi

(The Tarrot Gardens)

Tuscany, Italy

"If life is a game of cards, we are born without knowing the rules. Yet we must play out hands throughout the ages. Poets, philosophers, alchemists, artists, have devoted themselves to finding their meaning."

- (Engraved in pathway through the gardens)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

(Villa Borghese)

The most beautiful thing I saw in Rome.

Apollo e Dafne, Persephone

Fiona Tan

(Venice Biennale)

Video Still from "Rise and Fall"

One minute clip here

This was one of my favorite artists at the Venice Biennale. Her split screen film comments on memory, nostalgia, and aging.

Francis Bacon and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

(Villa Borghese)

Paired together, these two artists offered contrasting perspective on reality and portraiture. Bacon tends to blur his portraits in an attempt to capture the spirit of the individual through their implied motion. Caravaggio, however, has overwhelming "realistic" style, so much so that some of his commissions were denied for being unfaltering, also for his common use of street people and prostitutes to pose as the Virgin Mary.

"I think that our sense of realism has been changed to some extent since surrealism- well, really, since Freud- because we've been made more conscious of how realism can drawn on the unconscious... I believe that realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continuously re-invented... I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be re-created otherwise it will be just an illustration of something- which will very second hand." - Francis Bacon

Saskia Olde Wolbers

("Manipulating Reality", Srozzina, Florence)

Film Stills from "Placebo"

This is the best HD film I've seen. Ever. An architectural environment is created with the movement of this white liquid, while a voice narrates a complex story about a lover, and at the end your left wondering what was true and what was a fantasy. "Wolbers uses events that actually happened to develop stories that shimmer and sway between dream and reality."

Thinking

Drowning in ideas.
Drought of art.
Thinking with my hands.

Collections

I decided to continue doing similar "collections" to the first one I did while in Seattle. Every place I've gone while in Europe, I have been collecting random objects around the city and photographing them together. The objects are usually insignificant and often broken, but my hope is that by putting them together- piecing them into the same frame, and photographing them in good light, they can become beautiful and whole again.

The objects are always photographed in or around the place that I stay while in each place. Since these found "things" are essentially my only possessions (other than the clothes and few items I have with me), it seems only fitting that they be in the place closest to my "home".

I select the objects with no particular pre-requisite in mind. Just anything I notice, or that catches my eye. Some collections are much larger than others, and some follow more patterns (things found on the beach, construction tools) which provides an interesting commentary on each city I'm in.

The thing I like most about these collections is that they seem to capture the feelings of being in a new place and trying to digest a myriad of new stimuli. The result is a fragmented and jumbled experience grounded only by a memory of the place you were.

Edinburgh, Scotland

fall flowers, old sea glass, red rock, new shell, yellow rock, spiral shell, tree coral, lost reminder, castle wall, yellow leaf, old shell, early Christmas, blind pirate, naked seagull, would-be sea glass

Florence, Italy

broken piece of old wall, found blue button, shiny shard, metal tube, lost blue note in Italian, metal vertebra, drunken couple, piece of new wall, purple broken sacrifice , tightly packed glass shards, metal hook

Venice, Italy

once glowing red leaves, questionable bottle, tree brains, 'love therapy' gnome


Palermo, Italy

broken mosaic, red flowers, wired glass, half of a postcard, spring, light bulb remnant's, volcanic rock, green gem from trash pile, red leaves, banyon tree seed, tooth/rock, curious metal disk



Syracuse, Italy

ocean floors, strange rock, banyon tree seeds, snail shells found in ruins, old tiles, rock with fossil imprints, bird bone

Starting the Unicorn Hunt

Unicorn
From Biennale, Venice Italy
Image curtousy of by tschnitzlein [soon to be back on Flickr]

-This post was originally written at the end of Sept-



As I currently sit in the Amsterdam airport, it is finally starting to sink in. I have made it to Europe, and shortly I will living in Rome for the next few months. After weeks of people asking “Are you excited?!” and my rehearsed reply “Yes, I am really excited”, but the reality was that it hadn’t really hit me. And how can it? Consumed in the logistics applying for the program, moving back to my home in Portland, packing and getting everything ready to go, you never have a chance to really think about the going part.

But as I sit here sipping a Koffee, brain and body befuddled of the day and time, I felt it. Realizing where I was, where I was going, that I was doing it completely independently my excitement sunk in. Knowing that I am embarking on, undoubtedly, one of the most significant journeys of my life, I felt a mix of curiosity, anticipation and hopeful expectations.

I felt the most appropriate thing to call my time in Rome “the unicorn hunt” because, where could be a better place to find the majestic creature than a place as magical as Roma?

More importantly, this is the first time that I will be able art and only art. It is the first time I will have a studio, and the ability to really take advantage of studio time. The unicorn is a creature that is majestic, pure and true. It is beautiful as something, which both exists and does not exist, paradoxically real and unreal- or finding a home somewhere in between. It is everything I desire my art to become. Alas, this quest is in a foreign land lined with artistic influence and a place where I am doing nothing but breathing aesthetics. My hope is that his romantic new stetting ill be the context most ideal for the capture of this mythical creature and the discovery of all it represents.

Bringing War Home

- Images taken Fall of 2008-

"Bringing War Home"
Large Format B&W Prints
Double Exposures with Stenciled Layer Mask

Civil War

World War II

Vietnam War

Iraq War

Inspiration:



In making each of these photos, the black shapes were made from actual images taken in each war. Meaning Hitler stands on the end of the WWII image and they are Iraqi solders hiding in front of the house. In this series I was thinking about the way war is portrayed, and how images are transient across time periods. When the weaponry is blurred to black, it is difficult to distinguish one time from another. The images steaming into our homes are a single dimensional portrait of war, which will never be able to depict the entirety of being in the battlefield. In this way, they become a cartoonist depictions shaped by our shallow comprehension of war and animated by our expectations of it's likeness.

Things, Not Stuff

Things, not stuff. Only the most beautiful things.

I recently moved out of my room- where I had lived for two years. I was amazed how much stuff I accumulated in just 24 months. Much of it was useless or excessive- three sets of sheets, birthday cards from three years ago, three pairs of polka dot rain boots, 24 chap sticks etc.

After packing up the contents of this space, I went for a walk with some friends through a park nearby my house. It was early in the evening, marked by the soft light of late summer casting through the trees, and I started collecting the above "things". Believing, at that time, they were the most beautiful things I could find- emphasized by the excellent lighting.

All of this got me thinking about possessions, specifically the difference between "stuff" and "things". Why to we hold onto things that are of no use to us? Is is for the sake of owning them? Or is it out of fear of not having them?

I don't know why I was so drawn to the various leaves from above. I think it was a reminder that sometimes simplicity can be more beautiful than anything else, but we are sometimes sifting through too much stuff to find it. These leaves were all that was needed to adorn the trees in their own lovely foliage. Perhaps, the best things are a few nice leaves collected from a stuffed forest.

I then made a pact with myself that in the future I would only keep the most beautiful and most valuable things, and to try to filter out the extra stuff which suffocates us everyday.

Annie of My Eye

Photograph from Book

Karen Finley at her home in Nyack, New York, 1992
Annie Leibovitz
"A Photographer's Life"

The Story of My Favorite Dress

dress

v. dressed, dress·ing, dress·es

v.tr.

1. To decorate or adorn.



2.To furnish with clothing.



3. To arrange a display in.



4. To garnish.



5. A one-piece outer garment for women or girls.

Outta My Light

Great photography always boils down to great "photo", in it's literal sense. Although light should always be taken into consideration when taking a photograph, light itself can often times be the subject.

In the word of "Little Wings":

Got it like a ghost that girly gleaming
Look at what the light did now

"Through the window"
Black and White Digital Images










"Tea Cups"
Studio Lit
Black and White Digital Images