Vanitas revisited

In an interesting turn of events since beginning work on my video archive I was contacted in February by Berlin-based Dane, Jens Christian Madsen about using an older work of mine, Vanitas 100 (from 13 years ago!!! Is that possible!?!), in a clip for his band/project Tjaere+Fjer‘s song Faking It All.

As a video within a video it will appear without Jamie Kiffiak’s deliciously soporific voiceover, but it’s quite exciting to think something from so long ago has some life. I was intruiged by the directors synopsis and am really looking forward to seeing the finished piece which must be in production AS I TYPE!

I made it while living in Vancouver, Canada in 2000 and there are a lot of things I would do differently now, but I still like the 100 freakishly differing self-portraits taken with a Nintendo Gameboy camera and anyone who’s really UP with everything I do will recognise Jamies script as having been re-used for 2011′s A Pack of Lies and indeed was the concept model for ALL the scripts from that work.

You can hear Tjaere+Fjer’s latest release II including Faking It All here.

This is a video for an earlier track Away which I quite dig too. Retro sounding electronica with 80′s mumbles.

Activity

I just wanted to post a record that indicates things are still happening. The PhD research is a project about lived time. It takes time.

testing, always testing…

chalkboard

Searching for a new aesthetic.

The vital noodle

…in that this piece, Ectoplasmic, was what I was noodling away at earlier this year when I thought I might just have a project for further postgrad study and decided to apply for the PhD program. In it’s first stages at any rate, my research is about non-linear time. I love me some loops, which is how I (very slowly) came back to gifs. I used to make them for my first websites in the 90′s. Crazy days.

The frames here are watercolour and coffee over inkjet and while initially it was poverty that led me to include the frames where my printer’s ink supply gave out on me, I like the added texture – like old-fashioned broadcast telelvision signal interferance – something we’ll never see again I guess.

I’ll be having my first commercial exhibition at Bett Gallery in their rear/trial space near the end of the year and I think this will be the direction I head for that as well. Brief animated video loops and the painted frames that make them up.  I think.

Just quietly, I can’t tell you what a hoot it is to suddenly be a watercolourist.

Needs a sawing accordian soundtrack…

An early simple one, but I like it’s structure.

EDIT: NOW WITH SAWING ACCORDIAN SOUNDTRACK THANKS TO MAT WARD. THANK YOU MAT WARD!

 

Studio tests

This is an animated gif test of some studio play with salt crusted photographs. I think I’ve decided that I do want this work to end up as a short animated loop but this one has just been the ‘sampler’ to work out the process and best method for this particular work, which is currently untitled.

I started a tumblr to hold my gif experiments but it actually doesn’t work as well with larger gifs as WordPress so I’m about to do some retrospective posting to bring stuff back here.

I’m really keen to pursue the gif as the starting form for new video and as a form in itself. So. PhD… awayyyyyyy we go.

I went making

…so there should be something new to see soon.
Thanks for the assistance and taking the photo of me making Pip Stafford.

Just my cup of tea, art-wise…

Something Specific About Everything, photographs of nifty little assemblages by Samuel Henne.

These really tickle my art bone and remind me that it would be really nice to make less figurative work.

Via Triangulation Blog

I’m not usually one to fly the ‘fat chick’ freak flag…

…but whoa!  Check out this fashion shoot styled by Nicole Formichetti for an upcoming V Magazine.

Hot.  Maybe pregnant ladies will be the new black next…