These photographs are of environments created in my studio. They portray uncannily vacant narratives. Through them I invite the viewer to think about -- much the same way one can in representational illustration, drawing, or painting -- slippery transitions that exist between reality and its edges.
My environments are fashioned from toothpicks, old clothes, blankets, cereal boxes, little sample paints from Home Depot and other stuff from around the house. They are lit using a plethora of different lights then photographed. Some take a few hours to create and some take hundreds. Staging these sets for the camera is the only time I feel completely connected to my surroundings. I hear sound effects inside my head, more parts of my brain seem to function, there is direction and purpose, I even get boosts of adrenaline when revelations pop out of nowhere and help me finish an environment.
Let’s pretend we’re on an archeological dig on a foreign planet and we carefully unearth, or un-planet rather, a round box…. Imagination and hope conjure all sorts of wonderful possibilities for what could be inside the round box. A new biological species, something that will make the discoverer rich, something that will change the model of the universe, an artifact from God, something that lets the discoverer adapt to experiencing the present in four-dimensional space and time, or a gateway in space and time. Whatever is inside won’t be as earth shattering as building imaginative bridges to what’s inside. —It’s probably just something that fell off your spacecraft, thus preventing you from getting home.
Hope found in the imagination is my favorite human quality.
in which I create friction between interior and exterior space.
Why art, why photography, why this kind of photography?
Let me first start off by saying whether you are here by choice, or not, I appreciate you being here.
One can categorize life by all the things we have to do but do not mind doing,
and the things we do not want to do but have to.
Suppose every summer you have to stain the deck. It might take three days, 8 hours per day, 24 hours total -- essentially, one entire day. Was it worth it? Well, yes, you have given more longevity to something you paid for. If you do not have a deck, use it analogously with something else you need to do. April taxes, or cleaning a boat hull...
I do not know whether your memory functions like mine but, let us say you are staining the deck, it is boring but cathartic -- you listen to music. About an hour into staining, you are reminded of the fact that EVERY SUMMER you are doing this. EVERY SUMMER it takes three days. EVERY SUMMER the stain gets more expensive and does not last as long. You remember certain qualities from the summer before and the summer before that. You forget about other things and your life seems to revolve around this deck. It seems like you are always staining it. In other words, you get years mixed up. You reinvent the past and get confused in the present. A solipsistic existence, just you and deck staining. The memories of you and the deck form a kind of relationship monologue. A seemingly infinite, ying-yang camaraderie, just you and the deck.
Are you familiar with the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? The premise behind it is the focused erasure of memories. There was recent scientific work published on this subject, which slightly pre-dates the movie. In the late 1970s trials were conducted on rats and humans using protein inhibitor drugs like anisomycin, which in fact not only prevents new memories from being formed but can also erase specific ones. The whole discussion is a bit creepy. It questions how we form and recall memories from our past. And, in the case of the deck, what we know we will repeat in the future and how we perceive those past and future experiences in the present.
The future, you ask? What I am saying is, you can predict certain experiences of your future, staining the deck next summer for example, and it weighs into your present frustration at staining the deck this summer. Next year you know you will be re-staining and the year after that, more staining. All those pasts and futures begin colliding in your mind.
Anyway, there I am working the deck having difficulty reliving anything but staining the deck. I try to think about the last time I kissed my girlfriend. I relive job interviews while staining the deck, all the inner-speech we experience all the time, but time swells around this deck-staining-repetitive-act. When you do this in the form of a career from age 18 every day, pretty soon, you will wake-up and you're 50…. That is how time shrinks. For me it does this except when I am creating photographs. Only when I am building a new set, or roaming around in some scary building for a shoot do I feel like I’m accomplishing something real.
There are roughly 8,766 hours in a year. 613,000 hours in a 70-year lifetime. We sleep one third of those hours. When we quantify life like this, we see that we only have about 400,000 hours, before we die. That is if we’re lucky enough to live a long life. How much of that 400,000 do you get to use for yourself? 100,000? According to some research reported by NY Times columnist and author Malcolm Gladwell, it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours to master a complex area of study. —Oil painting, golf, the violin, weaving on a loom, computer programming. To get really good, you have to spend 10,000 hours on it. That is a lot! It is a fortieth of your waking life, or one-tenth of your free time.
For me, this boils down to two things -- creating things I love and enjoying sex often.
Gray Day
"If I wake up tomorrow and everyone is gone the first thing I will do is learn to ride a bicycle..."
My girlfriend was quietly singing to herself in the other room. She wouldn't answer me but I didn't really ask a question. She kept on... not answering me. Meanwhile I was thinking about fresh bagels with eggs on them.
A few years later our daughter was drawing a picture at the breakfast table. She wouldn't eat. I poured her cereal. She was drawing a picture of an elf. Or, her self as an elf. She was planning on going-out for Halloween dressed as this waif-elf. I was a female elf a few years ago for Halloween; I wondered if it was genetic.
Displaying a little femininity may grant you access into the inner-recesses of the party. These were big parties in Brooklyn loft apartments. Hidden from view was the hostess, an oil-sheik's daughter from Qatar, closed in a smoke-filled room with four other girls. Chain smoking marijuana, blowing smoke into each others' mouths. Real sleeping beauties. Vanessa was dressed-up like a member of Alex's gang from, A Clockwork Orange. She closed the door after I entered, shoved a towel back under it, then started snorting cocaine off the cover of, Women's Wear Daily. The room was thick.
When I woke-up the next day everyone had disappeared.
END
Moonlight Drive
A month before 2012, Katie and I went for a late-night drive and stopped at a small strip mall. It was warm and when we got out of the car we could smell the ocean. I was surprised to see that the frame shop had large picture frames propped-up outside and that the back door was open; someone was working inside. I thought about stealing the frames... They were nice, glass, clean mattes inside. Big frames. 7x3 feet. My pickup truck was nearby but we didn't take them. We walked around the corner of the strip mall to TJ's house. TJ was a friend of my cousin from New Jersey, I wasn't sure how Katie knew TJ too but she knocked on the door as if eager for a reply. Nobody answered.
We walked past the frames, got into the car and left. Katie said, "I want to take you to my favorite place." The car went around some hills. Down, down past a meadow lit in moon-light. She kept going faster and faster. Trees shot up into our headlights then out of view again. We started spiraling down. It would be fun to sled down these hills. The spiraling didn't make me dizzy but I couldn't see out the windshield. I kept having to sit on my hands and prop myself up to see out. "Here's my favorite part!" she said. She wasn't quite being her self. "And, here's the Atlantic Ocean." The car felt airbourne. "And, here's the Pacific Ocean!" She said. Wow, that is incredible. I didn't know where we were; I guess it must be near San Diego... Or someplace in Mexico. "We're moving pretty fast!" I yelled.
She parked, we got out into sunlight and walked over to the surf. Jungle noise echoed through the trees behind us. I splashed my foot in the water childishly as if to impress her. "You're going to wash that foot in fresh water before getting back in the car, yes?" She said pleadingly. She was being cute but it was still annoying.
In the water a spiral ying-yang amidst flotsam sparkled. It floated past my feet iridescently melting my brain in nonsense symbolism. I thought of Roman Polanski's movie "Chinatown," but didn't say anything out loud about it... I didn't want to spoil the movie.
END
Niels Bohr, a founder of quantum theory once said, "When it comes to atoms, language can only be used as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images."
Four things occurred to me simultaneously when I woke up this morning:
1. The purpose of life is reproduction and hope for the future.
2. The universe has certain laws, some of which we’re able to quantify and examine, many of which occur on earth.
3. Made from carbon and "star-stuff" walking safely on a surface, performing day to day activities in an attempt to perpetuate our lives.
4.
Reproduction. Life’s solution to the problem of radiation. Death isn’t the impetus behind why we reproduce, radiation, cancer and pleasure are. Though this isn’t to suggest that we consciously avoid radiation from stars and space, although, we do go out of our way to avoid death...
Magnitude: It could also be said that analyzing the formation of clusters of galaxies looks similar to the formation of atoms. —From the vantage point of a human, the universe is roughly the same order of magnitude large as it is small. A cell in our leg, for example, is smaller in relation to our leg than a climber on Mt. Everest is in relation to Mt. Everest. Likewise, a galactic cluster is as distant from us as electrons flying around a proton is distant, in terms of magnitude.
Our Purpose: When organisms mate and share an orgasm wouldn’t it be interesting if they produced energy that culminated to perpetuate the universe? The purpose of the universe is to produce organisms that enjoy sexual stimulation and the mere act of having an orgasm, for any creature in the universe radiates something possibly measurable, definitely tangible. Over eons and eons this tangible... whatever it is... collects on earth building and building until earth is one day destroyed. After that happens, it disperses throughout the solar system with all the star-stuff that once composed us and Mt Everest. Gravity naturally pushes "stuff" towards the center of the galaxy it just takes billions of years. The center of galaxies contain the most planets, stars, and density. Black holes may reside at these centers as well. Black holes emit very little... anything.... Not even light... They're completely collapsed gravitational gateways to unknown places in time and space. These other "spaces" might not even abide the same laws of physics that ground our understanding of what we observe on earth and through telescopes.
So, the bi-product from orgasms, the purpose, slowly, after billions of years, some of it will cascade into black holes and be transported. It kind of makes sense when you consider the fact that we shouldn't exist at all, moreover, why are we tangible? Hmmmmm, I'll get back to this, I mean, I think it sounds kinda stupid too... When I woke up and conjured it, it seemed amazing... I guess that's the neat facet of humans that we get excited about the unknown and imagination.
Regardless, sounds more logical than religious-speak.
END
