New Year

Hoping 2014 is going to be a big year! I have continued to work on photographing the home my husband and I own. Working on shooting, editing, and trying to figure out where this project can go. As I still work on putting this body of work together I have been entering images into shows. I have two shows coming up.

I will be featured in the online part of the exhibition for One by One at Colorado Photographic Arts Center.

I will have two photographs in the ICEBREAKER 5 Show, see attached poster.

Here are some images from my new project.

Life

Well as I look at my last post from August 2011,  I realize life has happened and I have not been keeping up with my blog. It's been a busy almost three years since arriving in Denver. I had a teaching job, lost a teaching job, then got another great teaching job that I am currently in (finally teaching mostly photography). Got engaged, bought house, got married. Phew as I said it's been busy. I have kept my promise to myself that I would continue to go to SPE national conferences to energize and rejuvenate myself. Last fall I was able to help with the SW regional conference and this spring I just recently attended the national in Chicago!

It's been a crazy past few months but I have been making work again which is wonderful. While inspired by the trash behind our old apartment we have since moved into our own home. Now that I finally feel a sense of roots and being more grounded I have started investigating my space again. When I approached home and my own personal space early on in graduate school the work was missing something. That it was not my home but merely a rental that my possessions lived in.

I have been thinking a lot about both home and objects. My thesis work is being presented in a group show http://www.artsbrookfield.com/denver/republic_plaza/. I have not had the whole project up since AIB and it's been refreshing to both revisit that work while I am simultaneously working on a new project. I was able to bring new work to SPE and got some reviews. I have more shooting and ideas to consider for the project, but it feels good to have a new focus.

New Work

I am looking forward to some solid studio time hopefully soon. I have been photographing for the past few weeks, I now need to look at this new project before I make some decisions. I have been photographing the trash in the dumpsters and the alley behind my house. For a time I focused on why we keep our possessions and I am still intrigued by how people make those choices why inanimate objects carry such importance. However, since moving to Denver I have been amazed that particularly the alley behind my block is filled with furniture and mountains of trash every week. A few things play into that, there is a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds in the neighborhood, as well as I believe people come from the next town over and dump illegally into our dumpsters creating more trash than what could possibly come from this small block radius.
I hope to set up a time lapse camera in the next month to capture even more changes. In the meantime I have been photographing everyday till about a week ago. Looking and observing for what as changed from one day to the next.

I was intrigued when I watched the film Waste Land by the artist Vik Muniz, http://www.wastelandmovie.com/ his project documents the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho located outside of Rio de Janeiro. He collaborates with the pickers to recreate photographic images of themselves out of the garbage/recyclable materials they collect. A very powerful film and the images are beautiful. It was interesting to see how another artist who I admire dealt with trash in a completely different way.

Show!

I got one of my cell phone images in a show that opens in July. Can You See Me Now: Photos Made on Phones, http://www.artspaceatuntitled.org/exhibitions/index.cfm?page=upcoming

The show will be at Artspace at Untitled in Oklahoma City, OK. Pretty excited to be part of this show, as I have been working an experimenting with the iPhone as another tool for my photography, images taken from my phone can be found on my Tumblr blog http://myexposure.tumblr.com/

Looking forward to more photographing this summer and more to come. Above is the image that is in the show.

The Sketchbook Tour continues and more..

I participated in The Sketchbook Project: 2011 through Art House Co-op. My book is still currently on tour around the country with around 10,000 other sketchbooks check out the dates, http://www.arthousecoop.com/sketchbookproject2011

Meanwhile I continue to think about my own work and how I need to be photographing more. The spring has been busy with other parts of life and I want to be making more time for my photography. The project I embarked on this year documenting the differences between Boston and Denver has been an important part of my transition, however, now I feel it's relevance is not as important. The project was a good leap for me to make new work but it did not have a voice. While I could push the project further to gain that voice I don't feel that the work is there. Instead I need to push myself further. What can I do next that will translate my own voice but still be a meaningful and contemporary project? So I have been considering the enormous question of excites me and what do I want to be photographing?

My MFA focused around the objects we possess and why we keep and attach meaning to them. While I needed take a break from that work, I still find myself intrigued by our possessions what we keep what we throw away. Especially as I made this large move across the country and my fiancee and I made choices about what would not fit in the POD to be moved. Again I considered what we discard from what we keep. Behind my house is a shared alley with large dumpsters, I am continually amazed at the amount of objects, possessions, and trash that fill and overfill the dumpsters each week. I know it's not the same all over the city and yet I can't stop looking at the piles of furniture, TVs and other discarded possessions.

So I am intrigued by our current consumption of everything. I found this website while I researched for my thesis, The Story of Stuff http://www.storyofstuff.com/ upon doing a quick search I found another blog Consumption and Consumerism http://www.globalissues.org/issue/235/consumption-and-consumerism there will be more research and images to come. I look forward to seeing where this will take me.

In a funk

As I work on this new body of work exploring the changes and differences between Boston and Denver, I feel as though I have hit a wall. I was feeling so inspired after SPE and I have been doing more research which has helped and frustrated me.

My voice needs to come through more in the work which is something I have heard before. So what is my voice is what I'm working on now. My focus has been around my change in environment and space, naturally I moved to a totally different part of the country than where I had been. But as I read more and consider landscape photography, I have to also acknowledge changes within photography and how much the landscape has already been documented. How do I make the work my own?

I consider changes in our technology, iPhone, Tumblr, Facebook, the list goes on. I considered this more after reading the article On (Digital) Photography: Sontag, 34 Years Later http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Riff-t.html
I recently purchased an iPhone and I find myself documenting with that a lot and posting images to Tumblr, I think about it as another way to be thinking about the space that I occupy. However, it also makes me consider that I need to change the focus of my project? More to consider but the research and reading has been great!