3rd Mentor Meeting

I met with Cameron last week for our third meeting. It was a great meeting, and he was very enthused about my new work. I felt this work was interesting, but was a little nervous about it. Our meeting brought some clarity to me and I am very interested in continuing this direction. I brought all of my fabric work so far, including some new work with digital pinhole images and transfers on windows:

Pinhole print on leopard gauze fabric

Multiple pass print behind two panels of the print above

Print on unprimed, wet fabric

3 passes: Pinhole print on primed canvas with gesso

Print of same pinhole image on stretchy fabric.
The print on the left was on unprimed fabric, and 3-4 passes.
The right print was a single pass on primed fabric.

Print on primed rice paper

Detail of mylar

Print on unprimed mylar (same image as printed on rice paper above)

Pinhole inkjet transfer on window

Pinhole inkjet transfer on window

Pinhole inkjet transfer on window

Cameron suggested I look at Sarah Greenburger Rafferty and Sam Falls for the work on fabric. He felt there was still many things to explore in this work, such as layering sheer fabric with one image with a different image underneath. He also suggested maybe introducing a third element, to add a texture or get further off the wall. The work that most interested Cameron was the less literal, more transformative pieces. The pinholes seemed to lend themselves to this ambiguity. We talked about display, and Cameron felt leaving these unstretch, and able to move was important. The fabric lends to the impression of fleeting moments, and also is less referential to traditional modes of photography.

He felt the windows were too heavy, with the frames, too rectangular and clique. The glass might be an interesting direction, but in a different form. I like the idea of trying some more glass pieces, personally because it ties into work I started the program with and it would interesting to see that technique go full circle. 

Overall, the meeting generated many interesting thoughts for me to consider. I am looking forward to continuing this work. I'm very excited about its potential.

Printed Surfaces

I've spent the last few weeks experimenting on different printing surfaces. I've focused mostly on fabrics because their flexible, thin materiality is ideal for going through the printer. There were some interesting discoveries, and I plan to continue this exploration.

These are some of the results I've gotten so far:

Unprimed* eyelet fabric

Detail of eyelet fabric print

Print on unprimed fabric with rubber dots. 

Detail of rubber dot texture

Simultaneous print on unprimed white muslin and sheer gauze

Detail of simultaneous print of sheer gauze and muslin

Detail of print with sheer gauze pulled back

Simultaneous print on two pieces of fabric: unprimed plain white muslin with white netted fabric 

Detail on simultaneous print with two fabrics

Detail of white muslin without netting layer

Additional detail of white muslin without netting layer

Dry-brush coat of primer on faux silk fabric

*Note: unprimed in this post means I did not coat the fabric with Golden Digital Ground, which I've used in the past. This product helps absorb ink to achieve more accurate colors. Since accuracy is not my primary motive, this step seems unnecessary at the moment.

I will get better photographs of this work once I've accumulated more, perhaps towards the end of the month.

Some of the things I found very exciting was how when printing on multiple pieces of fabric, the fabrics actually move at two different speeds because of how the runners are set up on the printer. The top piece moves much faster.  In the details of the print with the netting, you can see how the pattern of the netting gets more and less distinct on the muslin. This is because the netting continued to move through the printer, but the muslin didn't so the printer head made multiple passes over the same spot. Something else I love, so much, is what happened with the fabric with the rubber dots. In the full length shot, you can see an additional 6 inches or so of fabric above where the images ends. The original digital image size is actually the full length of the fabric (with a small border) but the rubber dots caused the fabric to move through the printer slowly and therefore it didn't print the full length. I actually had to pull on the fabric while it move through the printer to prevent it from jamming and stop printing altogether. The dark bands in the print show where the print moved particularly slow, where my tension was less (I tried to only pull enough to keep the fabric moving, but not to stop the slowing down effect).

I am considering how to present this work, and currently think I'll stretch them like a canvas. I also am considering less traditional forms too, for example hung like a clothes line or pinned to a board.

Additionally, I currently plan moving into less concrete images. During our last conversation, Cameron mention the actual image seems less important to my process, and while I am choosing images that reference time and transitional spaces, I think there is truth to that statement.

I am making some digital pinhole images that might work nicely for this.

Mentor Meeting 2

I had my second meeting with Cameron Martin two weeks ago. At the end of our first meeting, I had decided to continue working with abstract imagery, and begin experimenting with materials. My last post with the sliced flower imagery was an extend of my abstract work. I continued this with another piece as well, but found neither of these pieces resonated with me or expanded my exploration of time and space. I decided to then do multiple pass prints, like I had done previously with the window and the door prints, but this time on fabric and with imagery showing a progression of time (through a series of movements).

This second, horizontal piece is harder to read. It was a time lapse of ice cubes melting and moving across the plate. In hindsight, the light color of the ice cubes makes this image difficult in multiple passes, where the white is not preserved. I also applied strips of tape, adding and removing stripes for each pass through the printer, as a way to the measure analogue time. Some stripes remained on the entire time, some just one pass and some multiple passes. Overall, these pieces are more interesting to me, and are beginning to speak to a collapse of time that happens in the digital world. 

I also created a few time lapse movies, in which I jumbled up the frames so that the evidence of time passing is visible, but the progression is lost. 

Cameron was particularly interested in this time-lapse piece:

The screen door behind the main door created a grid-like pattern that appear to be an almost digital technique that was not created digitally. The stagnant nature of the shot causes the viewer to question what's beyond the edge of the frame, and it can almost seem to be a set-up of just a door. Cameron pointed out with much of my work, the digital sits on the surface, but with this piece, the digital takes a more secondary place. Cameron encouraged me to continue experimenting with materials, without self-censoring and wondering if what I'm doing is "right"--something I've found myself constantly doing as I approach the final semesters of this program.

After our meeting, I went to the MoMA to see the Christopher Williams show. I'm glad Cameron had mentioned to look for the red pamphlet that accompanied the show. It was a great show to see, and also just good to see the rest of the MoMA's collection. I haven't been for a couple years, and it was fun to see work I have now written about.

Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams 

Giacomo Bella

Marcel Duchamp

Eadweard Muybridge

Eileen Quinlan

Mariah Robertson

Walead Beshty

John Coplans

Robert Gober