It unexpectedly changed b/c my expected bad time at the DMV turned out to be pretty fun instead and I thought I’d apply that philosophy to my life. I will be celebrating my 15 year anniversary of going to the DMV on June 30th, 2004 when my life changed.
#LUMEN PRINTS SERIES#
This series imagines working with nature, using it as our guiding light, in order to generate positive change in the world.Ĭan’t take a road trip without a trip to the DMV, naturally, and who says they ain’t open on Sunday?! This Sunday, the day before I leave for Sudan on my way to Santa Fe, join David Roe, Ukulele Jake & myself + special guest Phillip Whitmore from 4-7pm at the World’s Strangest Song Circle, DMV Anniversary & Uke Off at Buffa’s Bar & Restuarant…haa WHAAT. While creating this work, I thought of it as one and the same. We often speak of it as if its something outside of ourselves, the natural world versus humans. It’s an interesting relationship we have with nature. The birds outside my window sounded like they were having a party - then again, they were probably fighting over the last crumb of human activity.
Yet as I walked around the neighborhood I couldn’t help but notice the contrast - that the flowers seemed oblivious, the sunlight coming through my window in the morning shone brightly and my body felt thankful for the much needed rest it had been begging for in years prior. Fear & anger flooded the airwaves, and we were embarking on uncertain times. Its origin was influenced by a termite the lockdown and all that was happening in the world and I wondered if a lightswitch would make a good frame for a termite, it does. In doing so, the answer to the question ‘to fix or not to fix’ is found by simply serving the both the subject and the solution, finding what works best.įlip the Switch began in late spring 2020. To do so would be to lose the original lumen print, so I opted to keep them in, as/is - fixed, but unfixed. My first instinct was to further “fix” it by digitally removing the dark spots.
#LUMEN PRINTS FULL#
Looking at my final (fixed) image of the full Night Blooming Cereus print, the dark spots reveal the spaces where the petals were pressed hard onto the paper, creating a deep impression causing the high water content to be revealed as the bloom is encapsulated in condensation. So often we just want to “fix things” - find a problem and fix it without really knowing what’s behind it, or within it. Urine fixer seemed a much gentler method but less stable.It’s not lost on me that the technical terminology used is that a fixer bath is a solution that removes the remaining silver halide crystals from the print so that it is fixed and will not react to more exposure. With lumen prints I discovered that normal chemical darkroom fixer is not just an environmental problem but also an aesthetic one, aggressively altering the original image. This was quite a challenge since bottles are obviously not flat and it was difficult to incorporate them along a flat plane with plants. For example, I tried to incorporate images of bottles found buried near my house - a former WW2 site. I also found that the condensation created by the humidity caused by damp foliage under glass was an uncontrollable factor producing both surprise but also equal degrees of success and failure. Exposure time, not unexpectedly, depended on the strength of sunlight at a particular time. I pressed these plants under glass onto these papers exposing them to the sun. For these, I used out-of-date photographic paper quickly finding that different papers produced different colour results. I began making Lumen prints using garden plants and weeds. Spring 2020 was a period of fine weather with many sunny days and I therefore decided to try sunlight-based, nineteenth-century photographic techniques known as lumen prints and chemigrams. Confined to my garden I was able to try things out ideas without the pressure of commissions and deadlines. During Lockdown I opened up my studio and began experimenting with photographic techniques requiring minimal resources, even doing without a camera.
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