I have three shows' worth of work being brought back into the studio this week, and It's not yet ready to handle all of it. I've been busy with work related tasks, and have not spent much time repairing the studio from the work done to get the bau 6, and via beacon work completed.
I did run out to Iowa two weeks ago for family matters. While there, I stopped in at the Bemis Art Center in Omaha NE. Saw a couple of exhibits there, and spoke with the assistant curator, Jeremy Stern, who's also from Denver. One of the exhibits was an exploration of "Large-format Photography." The thing I was immediately struck by was that several of the pieces actually consisted of small scale images collaged or assembled to create a much larger piece. I did not make any notes on the show, but there was a beautiful Judy Pfaff piece that consisted of 3 images of aprox. 9 x 12 inches or so, and primarily saturated in green. Another piece by an artist I dont recall created a 4 to 6 ft collage of 4x6 prints of images of people sleeping. It seemed that all of these photos had come from a variety of sources as the settings, and individuals were all different. The images were close ups of people in bed, or a car, on a train, or plane, sleeping. I became absorbed in moving from one person to another, and creating this narrative from all of these informal snapshots. After a while, the entire piece became somewhat creepy, and morbid. I started seeing these folks as dead, and the piece as an entity became something like a bulletien board festooned with faces of victims of some random trajedy. Picking up on this sensation of remnants of death was another piece that was a fuzzy digital image of the wreckage of an airliner in a hangar being investigated. The image was printed on a jigsaw puzzle which, for me, played on the large-small scale relationship going on in many of the other pieces. In fact as I remember, there was only one piece, that on the face of it would constitute an actual large scale photograph, all the others had some amalgamation of digital images or actual collage of smaller prints working together on a larger scale.
Afterwards, I found a really great used bookstore around the corner, and had to make a few purchases.
Anyway, I am in the process of getting things back to normal, getting the studio reassembled, and get moving on new work.
