post-thesis morning.

The sun is spilling throughout my kitchen. I’m drinking coffee from my favorite wheat-patterned teacup and a woodpecker is tap-tap-tapping outside the window, the noise competing with the sounds of morning traffic. I’m watching steam evaporate from the tar roof outside my kitchen window as the sun comes out from behind the clouds, appearing after an evening of spring rain.

Spring arrived once my thesis was complete. The winter months were spent thinking about writing, not being able to write, writing incoherently, writing while baking bread (banana, coconut, almond, chocolate chunk! pumpkin ginger chocolate chunk!) writing while distracted, writing while drinking, talking about writing and occasionally, writing with ease and fluidity. I found the process to be extremely challenging in the midst of teaching and other demands on my time and energy.  But then it was complete, 3 weeks ahead of schedule. How’d that happen?

Endings and beginnings. Change. 

At this juncture, it’s hard to not reflect back upon the last two years. During this period of time, swift, unexpected and significant changes have been prevalent. Within days of beginning the program, the first of a series of changes rolled through. I questioned my abilities to stay enrolled and focused. Fortunately, my advisor Jan Avgikos asked me a simple question when I discussed my concerns. “Mary, does it feel right to you to take pictures right now?” The answer was unquestionably “yes”.  In fact, I wasn’t sure what else to do. I looked through the camera and I tried to organize the chaos of my rapidly-shifting external and internal landscape. Through that process, my work shifted and changed with me. 

My artistic practice often begins with questions that may not even be at the stage of articulation. I look for something and seek the answer visually. The explanation and a greater understanding usually come later, after the more intuitive process of doing. Research helps to connect my intuitive and intellectual processes and pushes my practice outside of myself.

As I finish the my coffee this morning, I’m late to work and now behind on packing for my last mentor meeting in New York. Ah, well. This morning, I am grateful for a stolen moment to reflect, repoint and reimagine.  

image/apparatus/program/information

Image contains within it magic; apparatus contains within it automation and play; program contains within it chance and necessity; information contains within it the symbolic and the improbable. This results in a broader definition of the photograph: It is an image created and distributed automatically by programmed apparatuses in the course of a game necessarily based on chance, an image of a magic state of things whose symbols inform its receivers how to act in an improbable fashion. 

Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography

 

post residency update.

another night at the desk.

"Images are mediations between the world and human beings..."

Villem Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography

Spending another quiet Sunday evening at home in my apartment, alone with some hot buttered chocolate banana bread,  bourbon and some readings. This evening, I honestly would have preferred to enjoy dinner in the company of others, but the demands of the coming months require otherwise. Tonight, I will catch up on the blogging, gather my thoughts and notes and perhaps do a bit of writing.

I arrived home from the January residency about a month ago, the last one before the thesis work is presented and defended in June. So much to do between now and then - research, the writing, the work and the talk. Manageable, but only if I stay on schedule. I crave unscheduled time but will likely have little in the coming months. Google calendar rules my life.

 

objects that interest me lately.

I am reading - alot. About 650 pages since my return. Aperture's collection of essays, Words Without Pictures and Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography as well as some essays. I'm also making progress with studio work, more experiments with the scanner-generated constructions. Had a meeting in NYC about 2 weeks ago with my continued mentor, Joy Episalla.  Joy has been so incredibly generous with her time and energy since I started working with her in January of last year, and I am thrilled to be finishing this process with her. I feel both focused and open to seeing what happens.

Writing has been a challenge but is coming along at it's own pace. After a failed attempt at beginning (damn the white, blank MS Word page) I contacted my dear friend Mel in Colorado. She's an amazing writer, has known me since I was 18, and she knows my work. She talked me off the ledge and had some helpful writing tips. Someday, Mel and I hope to collaborate, her poetry and my visual work... but that's another thing for the post-grad school list....

In other news, several years ago, I spent some time documenting the interior of the Moran Plant, a now-defunct city-operated power plant on the Burlington, VT waterfront. The city is currently trying to determine what to do with the plant. I was asked on short notice to project my work during the
"Pop-Up Moran" event in the entrance of the plant last Saturday. 

We were going to use a 12 foot rear-projection screen; however, it was so cold in the space that the screen shrank and would not fit over the frame. This was discovered the morning of the event. I improvised and projected directly into the space, which in actuality, was far more interesting to me given my interest in site-specific work. I love the space itself - it's amazing - and it was great to pull out this older work and re-imagine it's presentation. 18 images were rotated through the space until about 10pm and a lighting designer created a beautiful display throughout the empty plant. And - there was a huge bonfire and smores. Not anything related to all the thesis work that needs doing, but I was excited for the opportunity.

ah, improvisation.

So for the rest of this evening, I will continue working through my notes, folding laundry, eating banana bread and wondering what will come next.

the abstracted domestic.

“There is never pure access to a single object; vision is always multiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors.”

Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer

  

An even white light is filling my apartment, bright and clean from the many inches of snow reflecting through my space. It's quiet, I'm alone, and I'm enjoying breakfast and coffee. I haven't been finding the mental space to write recently and despite being late this morning, I'm choosing to make the time for what will be the last update of the year, knowing that it will be a few weeks before I find myself with the time. Another cup of coffee, and an attempt to suspend my task list for a few moments...

Here is my artist statement for the January 2013 residency:


Home is a changing, fluid concept and notions of it are informed by accumulated life experiences. These experiences create the filters through which we perceive and understand our surroundings, overlapping and merging to create varying visual and psychological perspectives. The camera and other optical tools, used to consider light’s ephemeral movement through space, provide the vehicle through which this domestic landscape is abstracted, distilled and distorted, analogous to the conceptualizing process the mind undergoes as it interprets shifting experience.

reconfigured.

 

across the street.

november morning.

8:16am, Thursday November 8, 2012

But the “feel” of a place takes longer to acquire. It is made up of experiences, mostly fleeting and undramatic, repeated day after day and over the span of years. It is a unique blend of sights, sounds and smells, a unique harmony of natural and artificial rhythms such as times of sunrise and sunset.   

“Space and Place” – Yi-Fu Tuan

 

We woke before dawn, the hazy light of early morning lingering outside and filtering through condensation on the glass. Conversation moved in and out of the surface. The sun slowly rose over the trees and the even light of this cloudy November morning filled the room with diffuse light.

Coffee, eggs, cheerios, early morning partings. Left with about two hours of solitude, I turned off my phone and computer and made a cup of tea, a warm and bitter blend of roots. I took some photographs out my kitchen window, enjoying for the first time in a while the slow meditative process of looking through the ground glass of my film camera, my cat nudging her way in front of the lens, curious.

negatives, positives.

 

filters of perception.

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

 8:16am; Wednesday, October 24, 2012

My second-floor has a large window facing directly east. I can see the sky and the sun, the tops of the trees, a glimpse of the mountains and a flash of the river.

Morning light is streaming through, into the kitchen, through the wavy glass made in the late 1800’s and through the wet condensation present on the pane... through dust, and through the air. It filters yet again through a bottle of olive oil on the counter, creating a dancing projection of deep yellow-green.

Experience is defined by perception. Filters layer and merge, coalescing to create an image, an impression. The familiar can appear abstract, in flux, and mutable as the filters we create ebb, flow and change through time and space in the internal landscape of the mind. 

east facing.

the light lab.

apartment/studio/home/light lab/etc

I began writing this post on Saturday in the Art and Architecture Reading Room at the New York Public Library, as I enjoyed that architecturally stunning space to think and research before heading to see some work at the Met and finally, to JFK for a 10:45 flight home to Vermont. I am now in my kitchen, easing into my Monday of writing and work, drinking coffee and eating hot buttered toast. The monthly trek to NYC is starting to feel expected and the city is becoming more familiar. There is a dichotomy within myself; I enjoy the cultural stimulation and resources of the city and I also crave the quieter, connected experience of living in Vermont. I wonder how to meet both needs over the long-term, how to meet my career goals, both with research/teaching and being an artist, while living in a place that suits me.  As I throw in desires to have relationships, family, etc, I wonder how one meets all of those needs successfully. Today is not a day to find the answer, today is a day to keep allowing the process to reveal itself with as little resistance from my end as possible.

As I consider the direction of the work I am doing, my fascination with light within domestic space continues to be a place I return over and over again. The observation of light in photography is a given, but I specifically find observing light's play through space and surface to be poetic and engaging as it creates mutable experiences and perceptions of space over time. Creating photographic and optical "interventions" of light's play, utilizing mirrors, scanners, and other optical tools, has been on ongoing experiment with recent work. How can everyday experience become abstracted?

As I refine the concept and play it out with different methods, the notion of process is becoming more important. The act of making the image is sometimes as simple as picking up my iPhone, or Mamiya RB67, and sometimes it involves the modification of a space, such as with the camera obscura, or with recent experiments building mirrored contraptions with my scanner. I find myself repeatedly falling in love with the materials and processes of photography - that basic idea of the Greek origins of the word photography - drawing or painting with light - inspires me continually. While the work is not about process specifically, I find myself referencing photography as a medium within the work.

Yet another consideration is the construction of space within a 2D image as an object vs the experience of being within a physical space. How to translate work into installation and the experiences I wish to orchestrate continue to float in the back of my mind as I work through new experiments.

The images in this post are a gathering of new work made between June and October.