Memories

I never realized just how important your living or working space is. I guess I have been exceptionally lucky up until now that I have always felt good where I was and just accepted that as a given. Well, that is until I moved to my current space in NDG. 

I am not sure if it was the light, the location or the sound insulation but last year I felt inspired from morning till night and now I find myself looking for reasons to not be here and waste more time than I have wandering aimlessly downtown.

This photo I found of my ex-studio illustrates the obsessive focused passion of last year well. My current studio is so barren and empty you would swear it was abandoned. 

And again!

Since I felt the last 4 color litho was such a success i decided to up the challenge with a much finer dot resolution and try it again. Of course, I got myself completely in over my head and had no end of trouble printing this. Wasted films, plates, paper and time to finally end up with a paltry edition of 3! 250$ worth of material and perhaps 35 hours to get 3 prints that are not even that well printed. At least I ended last year with a valuable lesson in humility. 

So this is how JPG compression works!

I have so much more respect for the computer after trying to draw like one. Understanding how simple things like compressing a JPG image require some pretty creative constructions has completely changed my view of the dichotomy between the analog and the digital. 

Art Matters 2008

My drawing installation at last years Art Matters Festival at the FOFA Gallery. Three grenades, or perhaps, three representations of grenades. 

So many people automatically assumed that I was protesting war with this work. As if an image of an unarmed grenade was inherently political. Or even the actual grenade lying on the floor between the two images. Anti-war or pro-war? 

Maybe it had nothing to do with war and more to do with the way we, as thinking creatures, relate and identify to an object of our own creation. This work turned out to be a great example of the paradox of being attracted to something we have been conditioned to revile. And, luckily for me, more people than I had originally expected came in for a close look and realized that the grenade was not the real subject of this work, but merely a vehicle for a more abstract idea of relative truth and tautological systems.