I forgot to mention in my last post that the wonderful Manon de Pauw is having the opening of her show tonight. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Manon in the past few months and as well as being a talented, surprising, and multidisciplinary artist, she is also a really nice person. So her show is at Galerie de l'UQAM (1400 Berri, here in Montreal), and the opening starts at 5:30 tonight. If like me you can't attend tonight she is also doing a performance Saturday night from 10pm to midnight to coincide with Nuit Blanche. I don't find that Manon's work comes across all that well on the internet, it's best if you can see it in person, but this exerp from one of her videos is a pretty good example.

Photos from Matt's parents' cottage, taken this past summer. Happy belated Birthday Matt!

This is my sister on Christmas day. I took it with a crappy point and shoot so it's not good for much but I really love it. It makes me think of a Klimt painting.

Some image from my neighbourhood in the fall.

So then I came back to Montreal, happy with the photos I had been able to make of potatoes in Ireland, figured that really this shouldn't be that hard, and that I was doing well with this new way of working. Well, beware over-confidence! Photographing potatoes in a Canadian winter, and making them look like they belong, is not easy. Above are some of the results. Really I wasn't happy with any of them. Perhaps the top one was my favourite. And at this point my random choice of subject started to wear on me. I knew that if this project were to be anything I'd have to justify the use of potatoes and I wasn't happy with any of the reasoning that I had come up with. And so the potatoes were banished and I am now working with other subjects in the Canadian landscape. It's still a work in progress and I'm not ready to show it yet but I imagine that some time in the spring or early summer I will be able to show you the results.

Soon after taking that first potato photograph I went to Ireland where I spent most of my time photographing my grandmother and visiting with relatives. When I had some free time I decided to try working with potatoes in the environment. And the above are the results from those first attempts. Kind of a cheesy concept: potatoes in Ireland, but the idea was just to try this way of working that was completely new to me.

This photo was the beginning of my mission to make the type of images that I talked about here. Taken in the fall, I was walking down a dirt road in the country when I saw these peculiar looking rocks. Upon closer examination I realized that what I had thought were rocks were in fact potatoes. Someone had thrown a handful of potatoes into the stream! The visual trickery and the need to take a second look fascinated me. Genius I thought, potatoes will be the first subject I use in my new intervention way of working!

The dregs of the Irish Grandmother bucket.

More Irish Grandmother. I really enjoy the middle image. I feel that I got that one just right.