My life has become a real balancing act, I mean I knew it would be going in to this and it continues to be. Finishing this residency and going right back to work has been a challenge. I feel in a much better place than I was in the fall. The past two weeks I have been thinking about my work and all the questions I have what will me next leap be? As I go back over my notes and listen to recordings of critiques (glad I got the voice recorder it has been very helpful) and thinking about ideas and different ways to print. I don't have the answers to my questions yet I do know I need to get into the studio and make and keep reading. I'm in the process of updating new information for the semester onto my blog.
Last Friday I went to the Griffin Museum to see the Stephen Wilkes gallery talk. His image of Ellis Island are beautiful and got me thinking both about his scale and the text he put next to his images, both things I have been thinking about in my own work.

As an archive below is my book list that I read and artists from Semester 1:
Else/Where: Mapping. Janet Abrams
Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography. Roland Barthes
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Walter Benjamin
Ways of Seeing. John Berger
The Future of Nostalgia. Svetlana Boym
The Art of Light + Space. Jan Butterfield
You Are Here. Katherine Harmon
Photography: A Critical Introduction. Liz Wells
“Sweet it is to Scan…’: Personal Photographs and Popular Photography.” Patricia Holland
Illuminations Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. Liz Heron and Val Williams. “Remembrance” Annette Kuhn and “What Becomes a Legend Most: The Short, Sad Career of Diane Arbus.” Catherine Lord.
On Photography. Susan Sontag
Everything That Rises A Book of Convergences. Lawerence Weschler
Artists:
David Salle, Gary Duehr, Cindy Sherman, Abelardo Morell, William Eggleston, Nikki S. Lee, Bruce Gilden, Azra Aksamija, Lewis Baltz, Light and Space artists of Southern California, Jerry Eisenberg, Gerhard Richter, Georges Braque, James Valerio, Karen Kitchel, John Virtue, John Walker, Anne Appleby, Robert Smithson, Starn twins, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rosemary Laing, Justine Kurland, and Lauren Greenfield.
Aaron Siskind, Dan Eldon, Robert Frank, William Wegman, and Irene Shwachman.

It's been a week and half since the residency ended and it seems like it was a long time ago. Work has been insane since coming back from the residency. I plan on spending this weekend going through all my notes and compiling my thoughts for my first paper. I have been working on processing all the ideas from critiques there was a lot of great information floating in my head! Thinking a lot about my last critique of the residency with Oscar Palacio he had great recommendations and questions for my to tackle. I know I just need to start making work again to push through where I am currently, what am I trying to say about my sense of place? I am looking forward to taking more risks this semester in my work I'm just not sure what those are yet. Lot's of things to think about....

I can't believe it's 2008 and I'm about to start my second residency. It's been a busy year and I'm excited about where my work is headed. I have been starting to think about questions I have about my work for the residency. How can I further incorporate maps into my work? Is a visual narrative coming through in my imagery?
I want to begin further exploring drawing my own maps. When I drove home for the holidays I thought a lot about the space around me and what I was seeing as I was driving. Ways I could translate what I saw into a drawn map of my own. I'm sure I will have more questions and answers over the next 10 days.