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.

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. :-)

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.

In the meantime, we have had a ton of snow this winter. Just sayin’

As mentioned earlier, I submitted a number of photos for consideration in a call for art for UMM’s new Welcome Center. Much to my delight two photos were in fact chosen, being I think the first two pieces of mine to ever be purchased as art (as opposed to illustration or journalism). The first is the train panorama above, and the second is the turbine shot below.

Michael Eble (the curator for UMM’s HFA Gallery) also asked if he could exhibit four other photos (below) that I submitted in the 2010 Celebration exhibition in the HFA Gallery! They’re hanging now (in the upper level down at the end). There will be special showings during Founders Weekend, September 23–26 and Homecoming Weekend, October 8–10, and the exhibit closes on 16 October.

I forgot to mention that yesterday we got to visit “Salem Sue”, a ginormous statue of a holstein cow just off of I-94. Here’s hoping that wasn’t the highlight of the trip :-).

After dinner last night in Medora, we drove along part of the loop road in the park, ending out at Buck Hill, the highest point in Roosevelt National Park, where we got to watch the sun set. On the drive there and back we saw gobs of prairie dogs (a given around here), numerous bison, wild horses, and some deer.

That night a bison wandered through our campground around 11:30pm, even pausing to drink from the water faucet right across from our camp site. Reminded me of camping trips to the Wichita Mountains 30 years ago, where bison and cattle were regular night time visitors.

Sunrise was at 5:03am, and we were up and moving before 7 as a result. After some fruit and conversation, Tom decided to hang in the campground while I went off to take pictures and hike around some.

I went down to the Lower Paddock Creek trailhead, where I encountered two large male bison who weren’t much interested in getting off the (one lane gravel) road for me. One in particularly clearly felt that our little Honda Fit wouldn’t stand a chance in a fair fight, and I was inclined to agree. I started backing down this little road, and halfway down encountered a big SUV heading the other way. I explained the situation to them, and they asked me to pull over a bit, and they’d just pass me and go have a look. Once they’d gone past, I decided to follow them in case they had better luck intimidating bison with their much bigger vehicle.

When we got there, the really stubborn fellow had already moved off the road, and the new folks were able to use their SUV to bully the other guy off as well. I took full advantage and swung into the trailhead parking area and headed out to get at least a little hiking in. When I came back out some 45 minutes later, they’d ambled down a bit, but had happily (for me) remained off the road. The photo above is the cranky one taking a bit of a dust bath – here’s hoping it improved his spirits!

After my safe return, we had a somewhat comical bought of tent folding and packing, and then an excellent breakfast at the Elkhorn Cafe in Medora. From there we began the drive across the great expanses of eastern Montana. I’d forgotten (or never realized?) how much “badland” landscape there is there – I’d always thought of it as much more flat prairie. The only other time I’ve driven across that part of the state it was farther north on US 2; perhaps the landscape is quite different up there?

We travelled most of the day on Montana 200, which large stretches of very little in the way of people or buildings. Towns like Lindsay are really just 8 or a dozen families at a crossroads a heck of a long way from anywhere. Tom did a lot of excellent driving, not all of it in the best of conditions (rain, a detour, semis passing in the rain on narrow roads, etc.), which was really nice.

The nice folks at the Days Inn where we’re staying in Great Falls recommended Bert and Ernie’s for dinner, and they were spot on. The food was wonderful, and our waiter was easily among the best I’ve ever had.

And, on that happy note, to bed. Tomorrow we drive to Glacier National Park. The weather looks wet and gurpy, so I’m not sure how things will play out. Fingers crossed!