L to R (starting at the little wall):

• Two "old" pieces, our bios, & price list. The top piece ("Beyond the rim") is a sculpture of Sue’s made from wood and human hair. The bottom piece is a photo of mine from the train tracks here in Morris.
• "Askance" – a large profile of Sue.
• "Thought full" – a very large shot of the back of Sue’s bald head leaning slightly forward.
• (Turning the corner) "Emergence" (top) – 2 horizontal shots of *very* short hair growing back in. "Home" (bottom) – Her very freshly shaved head.

L to R:

• A group of 3 all coming from Sue having me use henna to tattoo "No freedom without privacy" onto the back of her freshly shaved head. First is a close up of the dried henna, the strip in the middle shows her hair growing back through the tattoo and the tattoo fading over time, and the third is a B&W shot from when the henna was still wet.
• Lastly, a diptych of two very large "pages" of 420 different photos of Sue taken over a 3 month period as her hair grew back.

The Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance (PRCA) asked us about possibly doing a show together this time last year, assuming (I think) that we’d just collect some of her sculptures and some of my photographs, and call it a show.

We both felt, however, that if we were going to do a show together, we wanted to do a show together, so we asked if we could wait a year and assemble some new, joint material in the meantime. The result was this collection of photographs (by me) of her head; in essence she laid the tableau through various treatments of her head as a sculptural object, I shot a metric crapton of photos, and then we sifted through them together and assembled this collection.

While it’s only 8 pieces, it uses over 500 separate photographs out of the nearly 10,000 we shot over the course of 2013 for this project. (We shot over 7,000 images from late February to early May alone!) We also chose to make some very large prints, with the 8 pieces covering nearly 100 square feet of wall. I really love printing large, but rarely can justify it, so it was quite wonderful seeing some of these big prints. :-) The original plan for the big diptych was to have a single piece, 6 feet tall by 8 feet wide, but we couldn’t find anyone that could do art quality photo printing that big, which is why we ended up dividing it into two “pages”.

For folks in the area, the show opens Wednesday, 13 Feb, and there’s a reception Sunday, 16 Feb, from 7-8:30pm.

In a desperate bid to not to be outdone by our amazing progeny, Sue and I will be hanging our first collaborative art show next week at the Prairie Renaissance Cultural Alliance (PRCA) Gallery! The kind folks at the PRCA actually approached us about doing a joint show last year; there really wasn’t time to put it together then, but we agreed to do something this year.

In many ways the “simple” approach would have been a combination of Sue’s recent sculpture and my photography. We really wanted this to be a collaboration, though, and over the course of the year we worked together on a collection of photographs documenting her use of her body (in particular her head) as a canvas. Thousands of photographs were taken (over 7,000 in a single three month period!), forming the source material for the pieces that we’ll be hanging. Sue laid out the tableaus, I shot the hell out of them, and then we worked together to figure out what images to use and how.

Portraiture is one of the oldest of artistic disciplines, often providing an “objective” (or at least objectifying) view of the individual. These images examine an artist, Susan Gilbert, at work, capturing her use of her own head as canvas. Some of the photographs are disconcerting both in their underlying subject, and in their focus and presentation. Some are overtly political in their content, while all comment on how we see those around us and respond to change. No single image is the “true portrait” of the artist; they are all fragments of a whole, distorted by the cultural lens through which they are viewed.

The show includes the biggest photographic prints we’ve ever made (the largest is 60″x40″) and it’s quite something to see the work (and Sue’s head) that huge! We also have a diptych of collages that are 6 feet tall and together over 8 feet wide, so we definitely decided to “Go big or go home!”.

We’ll hang the show next Saturday (8 Feb) and the show will open on the 12th. There will be a reception at the gallery on Sunday, 16 Feb, from 7-8:30pm, where you’ll be able to publicly question our sanity while eating nummy snacks!

You try to live your life like you used to, and the “used to” isn’t there.

It’s gone.

Gulp.

This is an incredible five minute piece combining beautiful still photography, video, and audio, that in a few short minutes captures the depth of love and the tragedy of loss in the life of Tom Rose, who is struggling to cope with the loss of his wife of 63 years. It is a form of multi-media poetry, powerfully distilling decades of life and experience into a frame or a sob.

Be warned – it’s not an easy watch. It is, in the end, a scary dark patch in all of our lives, and the lives of those we love and care for; a price we pay for the joy of being together is the pain of being apart.

Big props to Maisie Crow for such a fine piece of work. Every part of it is quite something, and together the pieces pack an enormous emotional wallop. And thanks to FlakPhoto for bringing it to my attention.

In just over a week the voting populous in the state of Minnesota will have the opportunity to vote on two vicious and mean-spirited amendments to the state constitution. One purports to “defend” marriage by amending the state constitution to preemptively disallow legalization of gay marriage, something that isn’t actually legal in Minnesota at the moment. The other is a remarkably restrictive “voter ID” amendment that purports to “solve” a fraud problem in a state with some of the cleanest election record in the U.S., while in fact disenfranchising numerous of the elderly, low-income citizens, young people, the disabled, and citizens of color. (See The League of Women Voters for details.)

If these issues concern you, if gays kind of creep you out or you’re worried about voter fraud, that’s fine – we can agree to disagree. But do you really believe your concerns warrant amending the state constitution? The people driving both these proposals are the philosophical descendants of those who fought (and, sadly, still fight) to limit the rights of those who aren’t “like us”. Is that how you wish to be remembered?

How, in fact, do we wish to be remembered?

The top image is from Wikipedia and the bottom is from the Library of Congress. The middle photo is mine, taken here in Morris, Minnesota.

You’re obviously welcome to distribute this freely in whatever fashion seems appropriate.

Being a well-trained father, I did exactly that:

Subject: HOLY MOTHER OF FRAK YOUR FAMOUS
DAD.

DADADAD.

YOUR GODDAMN PHOTO.

FROM THE FIRST BLOWOUT.

IS.

THE.

PHOTO.

FOR.

DOOMTREE.

ON WIKIPEDIA.

WAT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomtree

At least it is RIGHT NOW

(We’ll blame his failure to use the correct version of “you’re” in the subject on his abject excitement.)

Jeez O’Criminey Pete! – It’s true! If you head on over there, the picture of five rappers that they’re using is indeed one of mine from our first Blowout nearly two years ago now. That’s even Thomas’s arm and hand sticking out of the green sweatshirt sleeve in the foreground :-) (This link points to today’s version of the page in case they come to their senses and swap in a different picture down the road.)

There are certainly better photographers and photographs of the crew out there, so I’m a little surprised. I suspect my liberal Creative Commons licensing has a lot to do with it, as I’m pretty Wikipedia/Wikimedia friendly in that regard. Still, it’s super cool to see people using my photo this way.

I should also make it clear that it almost certainly wasn’t someone at Doomtree that made this choice. Wikipedia strongly discourages/disallows people creating or editing content about themselves, so I’m guessing this choice was made by someone outside of the crew.

I should also point out that the content of the entry is pretty thin and kinda sad. I think some folks should get on that – we gotta make sure there’s good text to distract people from the lousy picture up at the top :-)

Thanks to Thomas for the pointer!

The U.S. Department of Energy is featuring a small set of six U.S. colleges and universities that they feel are doing cool things to help us move into a more sustainable future. The second video to be “aired”? The University of Minnesota, Morris :-)

Our computing folks are getting involved in this by building tools that will help provide community members with current (hopefully nearly real-time) information on both energy consumption and production. Down the road we’re hoping to give people some predictive assistance, suggesting possible times when discretionary high-load jobs would take best advantage of things like our wind turbines.

Most (all?) of the photos from Fashion Trashion (about two minutes in) were also taken by yours truly. Thanks to Jess for inviting me to take photos at these extremely cool events.

I spent most of a day last week thinning apples from our two apple trees. These poor things had struggled in the shade of the boulevard trees for most of their lives, but as we’ve lost most of our boulevard trees in the last few years, these apple trees have come into the sun and finally started producing fruit. This year one of them in particular set a ton of fruit, so while I bagged apples, I also thinned, at least where I could easily reach.

In the end I bagged around 150 apples, and probably thinned off at least twice that in little baby apples. Now we wait for a wonderful crop of nummy apples in the fall!

In quasi-related news, this afternoon Thomas and I embark on a monster road trip through New England. The purpose of this adventure is college visits, and we’ll visit 11 colleges in 30 days: Kalamazoo (Michigan), Ithaca (NY), Hamilton (NY), Bates (Maine), Hampshire (Massachusetts), Marlboro (Vermont), Vassar (NY), Drew (New Jersey), Swarthmore (Pennsylvania), Yale (Connecticut), and Brown (Rhode Island). Whew!

This will be the last college tour, so hopefully he’ll have a pretty good idea of where he wants to apply after we get home.

The real reason for the trip, though, is to allow me to catch several states I’ve never visited (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). After this trip I will have visited all but two of the 50 states: Hawaii and South Carolina. South Carolina is annoying because I’ve driving within 20-30 miles of South Carolina at least twice, but never actually made it. Hmph.

The trip might provide some photo opportunities, so I might actually post a little in July :-)

As mentioned earlier, I submitted three pieces to this year’s Horzontal Grandeur show hosted by the Stevens County History Museum. I’m happy to say that two of the three were accepted (above and below).

There will be an opening reception on Friday, 8 July 2011, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm, and it would be super cool to see a lot of people there! Sadly, I won’t actually be one of those people, as Tom and I will be leaving day after tomorrow for a month-long road trip through New England, visiting 10 colleges in 30 days. The ever fabulous Weather Grrrl should be able to attend, however, so you can visit with her and talk about art. :-)