glow nation!

i've been doing some painting in the past few days & apparently so has my old chum & consistent collaborator Patrick Hebron. P paints with pixels, i paint with glow-in-the-dark goop i purchased from www.glonation.com. don't you just love the internet & it's collaboratory possibilities?

stay tuned...

HF40137066C (Abe Lincoln, U.S. Federal Reserve Series 2006), 2009

this image is from a new series i've been working on for the last few months tentatively titled, The Currency $eries. we use money everyday but very rarely make visual or mental note of the monetary notes we carry & exchange constantly. i have been using these two dimensional objects as my negative, using the color enlarger to document & emphasize the watermarks & the strange details we overlook on a daily basis. the images i create are a permanent reference to the actual bill that, after use, i put back into circulation. i think i used this $5 dollar bill to buy dinner later that day.

i'll try to get more images up on my rebsite in the near future.

(re)photographing the archive

usually any writing on the slide mount refers to medium or size, but look what i found in the files today! i wonder what REB meant to the person who wrote it...

when i undertook the study of light many many many moons ago, i was under the assumption that i would one day become a professional photographer. well, that didn't happen quite as i had anticipated & at some point i got dumped on old man archive's door. instead of taking photographs for my bread, i digitize pictures that have already been made: (mostly) anonymous photographers' documents of artworks that were produced by another person. one man's archive consists of thousands of images & i battle against time & decaying emulsions armed with only 2 sophisticated scanners, a wacom stylus, photoshop 2 & my own fastidious compulsions!

okay so let's recap: artist - makes drawing, sculpture, object, etc. at some point in the past. photographer - documents object at a date closer to the present (but still pretty far away) than the original fabrication. reb - scans 2D film object (that photographer had made of artist's rendering) into binary code, fixes up any temporal wear & tear & organizes files & objects appropriately. it's a boring, time consuming task - but somebody has to do it...

& then we didn't

back from boston.

i guess i should be writing (poetry) instead

my beloved angela beallor using my (also) beloved 4x5 in 2007. she is photographed with a cell phone in front of her former home in queens.

i blog of her this day of days because she has a show up at the border street cultural center in east boston that will be closing this saturday may 30th. to commemorate this event she's hosting a reading - of which i am one of the participants. check the details here

(formerly titled)

i hate the title i gave to this 2008 picture. so i'm not going to include it. it may have had something to do with being afraid of spiders - maybe.

photographs of photographs

Stephen Shore's Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue page 151, 2007

from an ongoing series of photographs of decaying book pages & the images that inhabit them. this project has taken a different direction in the last year, but i intend to return to these moldy texts again at some point soon. also: i hope these can read as the respectful homage which engendered them & not (only) the oedipal gesture i realize they are.