Hello everyone I hope some of you are still following me on here.  I have not posted in quite a while I know.  Mostly I have not really done anything of note that I was willing to share, and was really gearing up to move.  I am not in San Diego any more. 😥 But overall this should be a good thing.  I started Grad School in September and now I have to make Great things ok anyway, the following is a brief statement for the work and then well the work.

“Monuments”

Monuments is a project I have begun since starting in Graduate School this fall.  Thinking about how much time we spend behind screens and how we have begun leaving these seemingly virtual lives.  We superficially travel the world, meet people and even view art on small screens where we do not actually experience any thing.  Partially inspired by the work of Doug Rickard in technique and Eric Pickersgill’s critical examination of our relationship to our devices in his series Removed.  I myself have an interesting relationship to my device’s since leaving my home for Washington to attend school.  I find that I have become more dependent on social media to connect with those I would once visit with regularly.  I am going on a world journey now, I am far away from my home so now I decided to go on a journey around the world, but it is really a falsehood. 

To under take this work I turned both Digital and 35mm film cameras, to my laptop screen as I traversed the globe using google earth.  Using Jules Vern’s around the world in 80 days as inspiration for places to travel.  As I would zoom in with street view I noted that occasionally the images would slowly render, or the marks of Google, place names, directional markers would stay visible in my framing I choose to leave these as evidence of my ruse. 

I had a desire to make these false images into a physical hand made form, because of this choose the cyanotype process due to my familiarity of the process and researching what was available to in Jules Vern’s time period. After creating the images the digital images were imported into Lightroom and edited to my desire, then made into a negative and printed on transparency.  The 35mm images were printed on RC paper then scanned and turned into a negative and printed as above.  The images were then contact printed on hand coated paper, and toned with black tea to give a more desirable look.