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!

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. :-)

Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.

A lot of her work these days is sculpture, but she is submitting one art book: “30 days of November”. The pages are all “tea sheets”, one from each day in November, 2008. For 2.5 years she’s been documenting every time she’s had a cuppa in a variety of ways, one of which is tipping out the leaves onto a 4×3 inch sheet of paper, which then leaves a stain. The “front” side of each page is the “stain” side, and she then embellished the backs in a number of different ways.

I’ve taken some other photos of the process (10.10am, The aftermath, and Pekoe), and it’s really cool to see a book made out of these. The “triptych” above is what she’s actually submitted for consideration. The shot below didn’t end up in the submission shot, but I liked the way the light worked so I posted it on Flickr anyway.

The other pieces she’s submitting are all metal sculpture, three in aluminum, and one in bronze. One of the cool things about the one to the right is that the top part is made using hair. Sue’s been collecting her hair for quite a while, and she finds that it naturally balls up in interesting ways. Here she’s packed a ball of hair in damp sand and poured in molten aluminum to capture the texture.

The other aluminum pieces were made by carving polystyrene foam, which the molten aluminum replaces. The bronze piece at the bottom was made using a silica mold, and then treated in all kinds of crazy ways to get a patina she was happy with.