The Purge

Finally, the quarter is drawing to a close and I am nearly done with regurgitating my half digested thoughts into some kind of communicable form. This is my first experience of the academic quarter system (we don't have such a thing in Australia) and so far I have decided that it is something akin to being a goose stuffed for academic pâté.

Which segues neatly into the work that I have produced for my art project. Entitled The Purge, the work consists of a toasting oven that spews out white foaming soap. Placed on a pedestal that has been clad in kitchen flooring vinyl and accompanied by a video of a the same burnt out toasting oven smoking against a lush backdrop of leaves, The Purge, is designed to reference the dometsic space of consumption and cleanliness and the aesthetic of 'the end' that is so central to American cultural mythology, particularly in this time of economic collapse.

The making of the installation involved getting on top of a host of things that I had never done before in a fairly short period of time. It was a crazy couple of weeks over the summer break leading up to the Devil-May-Care exhibition that opened on the 12th of January, where the work was premiered. One of the things that I found the hardest to figure out was a good system for restocking the soap (hidden in the pedestal) and how to get the consistency right so that it didn't just run everywhere. I ended up adding large amounts of laxative powder (a readily available source of polyethylene glycol) to make the soap foam, which I thought was appropriate given the subject and title of the show.

I am looking forward to have an opportunity to fix it up a little for the next run. Below are some images of the work installed in the Devil-May-Care exhibition.

update

Hey Blog,

Sorry to be out of action for a while. I've been working on a lot of things involving art/writing, and attempting to bridge the gap between the two in different ways. One way is through comics/graphic noveling, so I have a one-page strip here that's an autobiography of sorts. Each panel is a haiku.

I am working on a few larger things, one of which is also below. I am putting a lot of focus into my sketchbooks because that's where I feel I have been able to unify words and images most successfully and with the most interesting results. I have included some samples from my sketchbooks here.

KZSU photographs and prints

I'm working on photographs of the Stanford radio station, KZSU, documenting the interiors as well as some of the more long standing DJs and personalities. For the past few weeks I've mainly been shooting and processing film, both medium and large format. I've finished scanning and digital manipulation on 3 prints, and I've begun making 17x22" inkjet prints of them.









My target is to show 10 prints. The following are rough scans of several of the other photos I'm considering. I have a couple more batches of film to go through. I was originally planning to use 5 portraits and 5 interiors, but the sprawling messes I've found in the nooks and crannies of the radio station are turning out to be more fascinating to me.









Meanwhile, I've also received my frames and have to assemble them. I've never framed "full bleed" before, so it will be interesting to see how the Framespace spacers I ordered will look.