2013, A Look Back

2013, the year I graduated from college.

This image was from my first go-round at my senior project. It wasn’t a success, according to my professor, and after grappling with it a bit longer, I agreed.

I learned from a printmaking professor how to create photogravures – both 4 color seperations and black and white, and relished the opportunity to combine this process with my toy photography. Above you see a 16″x20″ or so crime scene file. The idea was that a man had committed a murder and was discovered sitting casually behind his desk at work covered in blood. Grusome I know but I had gotten really into the idea of what stress does to the brain and was inspired by a documentary I had recently seen on the subject.

This piece then is from my reworked senior project, in which I made images based on my dreams. At the time I was largely having negative or dark dreams and remebering them to a large degree. The full series was called ‘The Conception and Senstation of Time,” a phrase taken from a quote by Charles Baudelaire, that I don’t feel compelled to quote here because in itself I don’t like it at all, and I’m assuming there was a larger context to it that I knew at the time.

I grew up in a religious household and grappled with an extreme fear of Hell. I created the above in a time where I was working to overcome that fear. The man stands at a Hellish alter – Hell has become such a preoccupation it is the thing, in metaphor, being worshipped in itself.

This piece, if I’m remembering correctly, I created after graduating. I wanted to explore abstracting scenes with reflections. This is something I had dabbled with in my Black and White Photography class Freshman year, but I was essentially trying to do macro shots without a macro lens and it just wasn’t successful.

So overall 2013 was a transition year. A year of evolving with the way I thought about the art I was making (and the year I met my now fiance). I’m not overly proud of most the pieces I made that year, but I can connect them to a lot of techiques and ideas I continue to explore.