Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Foreign Exchange video



I have a series of drawings I did a few years back that I've been waiting to do something with, they felt very static on the pieces of vellum I drew them on. I was lucky enough to have Bill from Radical Cartography do some individual scans of the drawings and so I've finally decided to make them into a short video. Here is the background on the project:

This video was created from a series of drawings inspired by a teacher's edition atlas from the mid-1990's. Each country in the atlas had a graphic with it’s shape superimposed to scale on an outline of the US. I recreated the entire series from A-Z using ink on vellum. I was intrigued by the slow, methodical process of precisely drawing each shape of every country and redrawing the outline of the US over and over and over. I created visual conversations based on line, shape and scale that depoliticized these shapes. Because the source I was using was at least 15 years old,  some of the countries do not even exist today or their borders have changed. I like to think that maps are similar to photographs in that they represent something at a given moment that will inevitably change or become out of date.

Link to the video on vimeo.

Friday, December 16, 2011

New art/ 20x200

I've been meaning to buy something from 20x200 for years and the time has finally come! If you haven't seen this website, I strongly encourage you to check it out. It's a really great way to buy art but at a much more affordable price than a gallery. Here are two pieces I just bought:


Yes, it's another map. But this was too cool to pass up. It's by Aaron Stroup Cope from a series called prettymaps which is also an awesome website (more on that in a separate post). In case you can't tell, it's Chicago:)


This is the other piece, alleverythingthatisyou sno8_231 by Mike + Doug Starn. This was super exciting because I've liked their work since I was in high school. Their older work had a very 90's feel (lots of layers, wax, varnish, photos presented in a grid, black + white, etc.) but this series is newer and more minimal. The coolest part? The brothers created a camera that could capture individual snowflakes in the moments between a solid and liquid state.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Photobooth slideshow



It's taken me awhile but I've finally done something with the 550+ photos we had from the "photobooth" at our wedding!
Check it out here:
http://vimeo.com/33408403