Old City/New City

I started with this prompt and a very watery idea of what I might do. There were words floating through my head in various forms of order and association: life, death, youth age, presence, absence, remembrance, forgetfulness  and so forth. As I usually do, I throw a mental dart and go for whatever idea it sticks to first; something that doesn't make my frown at least.

I believe I started looking for shots of young and old people, of new buildings and old buildings and of new signs and old signs. That quickly changed to me taking pictures of anything that looked gritty, used, industrial and sort of lived in and worn upon.

When I got the photos into photoshop I knew I wanted to alter them but was torn between altering them overtly, or covertly. I didn't know if I wanted my hand to be apparent in the photos. As I started working though, I began to notice I was inclined to use a heavier hand in editing. I wanted dark, gritty, high contrasting, high intensity and a higher saturation than the original photo had. So I went with it. I realized I enjoyed the whimsical, illustrative/graphic and painterly quality the photos began to exude. How this relates to Old City/New City I believe is found in a transformative process from the old images of reality to the more emotive and impassioned images of the New City I was compelled to created.

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First Fall Showing in the Library Commons of the White Stag Building

Conceptually I've had issues with this first show. Our theme is layers. It's a very open-ended concept and full of various interpretations that I've struggled to grasp on a visual level. Every idea I have seems to be tired, played out or already well handled. I feel like I'm having issues being original in my expressions; visually. Conceptually I'm fine. I have ideas, lots of them. I have more than  I can handle. My terminal project focus for the BFA seems to be strongly rooted in perception, characterization and alteration. These are big concepts with many branching roads of expressive form by which so far I have decided on portraits to start exploring.

Panorama

I had two ideas. I completed one.

The concept for both ideas was going to be the same: cognitive dissonance. The ability of reality and perception to exist in a manner of disarray that we rationalize, piece together and edit into something we can process... or not (like me). Hence my panorama: the way I interpret my environment; small pieces of information that I can handle separately but begin to loose when clustered together. Certain things will get pushed out of focus, out of importance while others will be grabbed and obsessed over; while others still will be completely altered to fit whatever cause they best serve.

This is subsequently what my memory is like. Some memories are fragmented experiences, loose perceptions lacking significant form, but others are reinforced by similar perceptions from other experiences and skewed by conflicting perceptions from other experienced. Ultimately the world consists of layers of experience in which my understanding of them is a processes of selection and alteration. =D

Signs of Life

Surface

Photos taken around my home with focus on surface or the illusion thereof.