New Work - Tropes of Paradise/Oil Tanker Series

While drafting my thesis, I've been able photograph oil tankers anchored outside Kewalo Basin. A few weeks ago, the conditions were challenging due to rain and winds but it was good to work with this subject matter in different kinds weather. Some of the new ships have different lighting equipment that do not clearly render as a sunset when photographed over time. Nevertheless it's been good to reconnect with making work especially after spending so much time on Microsoft Word writing my thesis.

Awesome Marine Traffic Resource

I found an incredible resource that will help me track oil tankers anchored in and around Honolulu. This site researches global marine traffic and has extensive information on ports, ships, and their trajectories.

Link: http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ports/1458/USA_port:PORT_OF_HONOLULU_

Here is a screen capture of a satellite image showing international boat paths. Pretty amazing imagery of our goods and their travels.

www.marinetraffic.com

Artist Talk: Eyes of Hawaii

I will be giving an artist talk on my recent work at the Eyes of Hawaii meeting at Kapiolani Community College this evening. Looking forward to seeing familiar faces and meeting new artists. Thank you Cliff and Gary for the invitation.

Photography Lectures at the Honolulu Museum of Art

I'm so looking forward to attending this free lecture series at HMA.

Link for more info: http://honolulumuseum.org/13554-decisive_moments_photography_program

• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | The Last 100 Years in 100 Photographs  Jan 22 • 5:30pm
• Lecture:  James Jensen | Decisive Moments: Stieglitz + Steichen to Now Jan 29 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Lessons from the Vault: The Role of Permanent Photography Collections in Museums | Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, New Orleans Museum of Art Feb 12 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | Glamour or How Photographs Make the World a More Fabulous Place Feb 26 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Archeology and Google: A Conversation about Surveillance with Gaye Chan and Thomas Dye  Mar 3 at 7pm
• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | Boring Photographs (That Are Actually Cool)  Mar 5 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | Violence: How Photographs Remind Us of Our Brutality  Mar 12 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Soo Kim: The Near and the Elsewhere March 24 at 7pm 
• Lecture:  Theresa Papanikolas | The Uncanny Commonplace: Surrealism and Photography Mar 26 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  Collecting Photography: Jim and Cherye Pierce Mar 31 at 7pm
• Lecture:  Gallery talk | Theresa Papanikolas: The Surrealist Photograph and Botanical Photographs from the Collection of Cherye R. and James A. Pierce Apr 3 at 2pm
• Lecture:  Lalla Essaydi: Gender, Power, and Traditions April 21 at 7pm
• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | Teacher to Student: How Great Artists Learned To Be Great Apr 23 at 5:30pm
• Lecture:  The Photographic Spectrum: David Ulrich and Mark Arbeit Apr 28 at 7pm
• Lecture:  Stephan Jost | Honolulu Today: As YOU See It May 7 at 5:30pm

Simulated Sunset Ads in Beijing

Fascinating & frightening.
Time.com: Jan 17, 2014 http://world.time.com/2014/01/17/sunrise-in-smoggy-beijing/

http://world.time.com/2014/01/17/sunrise-in-smoggy-beijing/

In preparation for the residency

It has been an extremely busy end of the semester. To wrap up my blog posts, I've included a few examples of my final prints that I'm bringing to Boston and a photograph of the oil tanker postcards I plan to organize into a grid.

Chasing Ice

This film was recommended by a fellow AIBer as I research portrayals of nature in photography. The film features the work of nature photographer James Balog. His images of the changing arctic landscape are breathtaking.

http://www.chasingice.com/
http://jamesbalog.com/

MMM Exhbiition

Mixed Media Miniature Exhibition
Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College
Nov 21-Dec 18th
Opening Reception Thurs Nov 21 4:30-7pm

I have three pieces featured in this show. It was great running into fellow AIBer Noriko Suzuki who also had artwork in the exhibition!

Exhibition Vertias II by Kaili Chun

This show features images of a perfomance installation by local artist and sculptor Kaili Chun. My current mentor, Jaimey Hamilton Faris, and her UH students helped with the installation at Waimanolo Beach. While I did not see the performance live last year, I found the images documented by Erin Yuasa evocative and somewhat haunting.

A quote by Chun featured at the exhibition:

"...The tensions that persist between western and indigenous ways of knowing and understanding the world, serve as catalysts for demarcating sculptural forms of containment that serve not only as reminders of the many ways in which each person is shapad and constrained, but as negoitiable boundaries between inside and outside, between concealment, and reveleatin. Who occupies whom? How do we move between the two worlds in which we live? Are we subject to the boundaries defined by others or do we delineate the boundaries that explicate our situations? The lines are not always so clear-cut."

Artist Talk: Thomas Lawson at University of Hawaii

Thomas Lawson 
In Residence: November 6-8 / Lecture: Wednesday, November 6, 6pm ART auditorium

Link for more info: http://www.hawaii.edu/art/news+events/events/

Revisiting an old muse and new grids

I've been thinking a lot about my interest in light. As a photographer, light is both a technical imperative and a creative tool. Over the last two years, I've spent a large chunk of time looking at and photographing sources of light in urban and natural settings, honing in on odd occurrences of light illuminating scenes in unusual ways. I became (& still am) interested in the visual effects of these light sources within long exposures and how their effects consequently render the air, ocean, and environment. This fall, I've started to considered how these abstract long exposures begin to point toward an integrated, non-dualistic relationship between human-kind and the environment. (See sky palette examples and influences of feminist environmental theory in previous paper.) In other words, the relationship between nature and humanity is not always divided by a clear specific line. I'm interested in discovering the spaces where the artificial and natural collide, making it difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other ends.  In my investigations, especially in Hawaii, I have found many occurrences where the line between the artificial and natural is blurry. It is this blended, fused, interacting space that interests me both conceptually and creatively. 

I've started to work on new variations of the grid formations. In thinking about my fascination with light, I started to overlap sections of the grid in varying opacities in Photoshop. I've chosen to repeat the artificial sun image as a background onto which I layered a selection of my "natural artifice" images. The idea is to confuse and layer these images but still maintain remnants of the grid formation. The grid provides structure yet the varying sizes and subjects disrupt its organization. Complicating the grid arrangement further blurs the lines between how images relate to each other and the whole. The idea of "blurring lines" is important in that it reiterates my initial interest in the collision of the artificial and the natural. 

Here's a great quote from Rosalind Krauss's essay Grids first published in 1979 by The MIT Press:

In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from the coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of single surface. In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of a pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.

This weekend, I also decided to return to "my friends" - the light buoys - that guide boats to harbor all along Oahu's coast. As I mentioned in my last paper, I'm exploring the possibility of working in a series and I've started to consider how different modes of working can speak to a common goal. A few weeks ago my buddy Mitchell sent me a small iPhone video of these blinking lights for fun. I was struck (again) by the simple beauty of these darn things! While I have witnessed their meditative quality countless times in person, I had not yet tried capturing this experience on film. Below is a test run. I'd like to retry this video capture with a real film camera and with slightly more ambient light so the movement of the waves is just visible.  I think better sound of the wind and waves is important as well. I like the overall feeling of disorientation created by the darkness but feel this could be enhanced by having a tiny bit more of the environment visible. This video relates to my grid work in that it once again focuses on light as subject matter and speaks to how humans navigate/interact with/relate to environment.

Hello Photography, Window Light

I took a break Saturday morning to catch up on a few articles in Aperture's Spring 2013 issue. I really enjoyed reading Arthur Ou's essay "Photo.Edu: Toward a New Curriculum"

LINK: http://www.aperture.org/blog/photo-edu-toward-a-new-curriculum-by-arthur-ou/

Excerpt:

"How do we tackle a medium in the process of breakneck evolution in the photography classroom today? We now live in a world full of photographs, or, more precisely, the world is rapidly becoming a totality of photographs. To expand on this claim, we need only consider two related trajectories in the area of “mechanical vision.” One is the eventuality of photography replacing human perception. It is not a stretch to imagine, in a not-too-distant future, mechanical vision (and the recording and presenting of this vision) reaching an event-horizon, ultimately replicating in exactitude the sensations and experiences of our biological eyes. Secondly, photography will surpass human vision. Already, something resembling photography—not quite the medium as it is defined—is replacing what we have long understood as photography. When computer-generated processes can “pre-image” something that will eventually be actualized—when photographs “imagine” the future or another reality—how do we define this type of image in the photographic lexicon? Who or what is the photographer? Where does a photograph begin? Where do photographs end?"

Printing at the lab, variations on the grid

In the classroom...Abstraction grids by my students

My research on grids and abstraction has creeped its way into my high school photography classes. I knew working on my MFA would influence my creative practice (of course) but I've welcomed its impact on my teaching practice as well. It's interesting to test out research ideas with my students. For example, in this year's integrated Photography and Philosophical Literature class, students have been studying notions of perception and reality. These grids made by students represent visual explorations of how one image can manifest into something completely new. What are similarities/differences between the original photo, the grid, or each abstracted square? How do all of these renditions shape perception? Is it all the same no matter how you slice n' dice it? These have been fun inquiries to explore with students. And the correlation to my grid experiments (at least visually) seems pretty clear... perhaps these may be working better than mine!

By LH

By LP

By CG

Article: A Conversation with Joshua Citarella

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.lavalette.com/a-conversation-with-joshua-citarella/

Excerpts:
"We are now in a curious position where we begin to measure ourselves against images that not only include the whole problematic nature of photography and representation, but are further complicated by a digital production."

"I’m also ready to do away with debasing words like “Photoshopped,” which simplifies a complex process by describing it as a single tool. Jargon like this is used in an overarching way to discredit or suppress new modes of production. As a result, we find ourselves in a place where Photoshop is present in nearly all art and commercial images but is largely not discussed. Even a relatively traditional photographic practice, where the computer only becomes involved when the image is outputted as a digital C-type or inkjet print, still involves a process of resampling and interpolation. The difference between resampling with Bicubic Smoother or Bicubic Sharper has real and quantifiable effects in the final image/print and these choices now need to be considered when we try to discuss things like the politics of representation. Different types of resampling techniques will describe nuanced surfaces, such as the gradient of a sunset, clouds, or skin, in noticeably different ways."