New Website

So I am trying out a new free website hosted by Weebly. Please check it out and let me know what you think. I am slowly uploading some photos and getting text in the right places. Im finding that I will need to shrink most of my photos so as not to bog the site down too much. Thanks

When God Chooses Your Logo

When God Chooses Your Logo

It seems that I have been running into this idea a lot lately in various conversations about answers to prayer and the inspiration of art. I feel like she does a fine job of teasing out the two distinct positions in a very general way that can be extrapolated to the other 2 questions that I have run into lately. Thoughts?

Cyanotype Landscapes

Over the past year or so, I have been experimenting with large scale landscape images printed out on Pictorico film and then printed through the cyanotype process. Ive endeavored to take these images out of traditional matting and framing formats and instead, hang them in the "natural environment" of the gallery space. While the images are stunning hung like that, as they embody a beautiful kinetic aspect as well as a remarkable translucence, they are decidedly harder to sell given their exposure. I decided to enter the images in a local show at Pekin here in North Dakota so I was forced to find an alternative display method that would protect the images while still evoking aspects of the kinetic and translucent natures that I love.

The result is a large shadow box that allows the image to hang on a steel rod that spans the width of the frame. I sewed a sleeve made of asian paper to the back of the image on both top and bottom, with the top of course as the hanging device and the bottom as a weight to keep the image off of the plexi.

Artist Statement from The Archival Turn

The Archival Turn

Emerging from my interests in memory and vernacular photography this collection of work intends to explore several related questions:

What guides our thinking about historical artifacts?

How are these ideas at play in the curation of an archive?

What role does the archive play in the formation of memory and history?

Traditionally, an archive has been regarded as a repository of objects and information essential to human history. However, in the last half of the 20^th Century it underwent a profound conceptual change shifting its emphases from the objects to the archivist, and from place to process. At the heart of this archival turn is a fundamental skepticism of Modernity’s scientific methodologies.

Research has shifted from the objective recording of static and isolated objects to focus instead upon the curatorial power, and the cultural and historical embeddedness of the archivist. This turn has illuminated the inescapable fingerprint of archivist in the formation of the archive, human memory and ultimately history itself. As a result, layers of contexts, presuppositions, and the embedded power relationships between the archivist and archive come to the fore.

With two trajectories in mind, I have created an archive to explore the subjectivity of human engagement with objects while emphasizing the often-overlooked physical nature of the photographic object. I have utilized traditional archive forms of drawers and artifact trays, accession numbers and acid free enclosures to both suggest Modernity’s curatorial processes of empiricism, isolation, and limited access. These methods also intend to re-establish the viewer’s awareness of the photograph’s physicality. By modifying these forms, viewers may explore the perceived stability and instability of the relationships among the artist as curator and the objects themselves. Additionally, strategies of translucent layers, white-on-white printing, and the imaging of culturally shared symbols and collective memories, allows me to create a variety of contextual lenses through which we may explore the subjectivity of our engagements with historical objects.

Book Shots

I realized a week or so ago that I had never photographed the covers and bindings of my handmade books. So, while I still had access to them, I thought I should get that done. Besides my own records, I hope to enter them into some shows as well.

Other than the dust that inevitably clings to this sort of fabric, I love the shots with the shallow depth of field.

Theology & the Arts Reading Lists

The other day I was surfing through Duke's DITA program webpages and ran across a helpful reading list helpfully broken out into reading levels. As I looked over the two lists, I found several new texts that I was unaware of before. Over-all, its a great list...check it out.

Here is a link to it.

Two Person Show at Third Street Gallery

Friday, Jessica Christy and I hung our work down at the Third Street Gallery here in Grand Forks. We will be having a reception on June 30th from 7-9. Please come and check out the work.

Much of the work will be from our MFA exhibitions but I do have 9 new pieces (which I will show a few of when I get them shot).