Cloud and Dandelions, intervention images that I made a year or two ago.

Recently I bought Lay Flat 02: Meta. It's a beautiful little book and the images and essays included are both very strong. I would suggest two things though. One: that the essays failed to mention what is often the unmentionable these days, and that is that much of this reflection on the medium of photography recently done by photographers may be brought on by the fact that we are at a crossroads, in that place where film meets digital, and that this change on the ground, and the need to learn new tools, and the transition that photographers are going through in their working process has lead them to reflect back on the materiality of the medium itself. And two: that although the artists included were interesting and quite a good representation of the work out there I would suggest that including these additional artists would have made it stronger: Michael Love's "Self Portrait with Rifle", Michael Flomen, Chris McCaw, John Cyr, and Curtis Mann. Also if you are interested in this kind of thing you may want to check out the Victoria and Albert's exhibit (in London, England) on till February: "Shadow Catchers: Camera-Less Photography".

In June, while I was away in Ireland, I had work in a group show in New York. Here is an installation shot from the Visual Arts Gallery, of the section curated by Kate Greenberg. My work is on the far right (2 "Domestic Interventions" images) right beside a video by William Lamson.

This week I did a tour of the Belgo Building (372 st catherine's street west, montreal) and saw a lot of very strong work photographic and otherwise:
Marisa Portolese at Lilian Rodriguez Gallery, till Oct 23rd
Robyn Cumming at Push Gallery, till Oct 16th
Nicolas Baier at Rene Blouin Gallery, till Oct 9th
Liliana Berezowsky at Circa, till Oct 10th (amazing sculptures)

All on the 4th floor except for Blouin which is on the 5th, catch these shows before they come down!

Compacts in Westmount Square.

Westmount Square is a Mies van der Rohe building and as such it is an imposing and cold modernist structure that is also a symbol of wealth in Montreal (it is an expensive place to live). I wanted to show this little collection of mirrors surrounded by marble with the idea that it's not the kind of place you go without checking yourself in the mirror a few times, a place where image is everything. I don't know if it really worked out, it's a bit flat, and not so dynamic an image in the end, but I'm glad I made it.

Eyeshadow and Lipstick. The most formal of this series thus far. Exploring the decorative nature of makeup.

Swimsuits, from the Feminine Interventions series

The two print sale/auctions that I am part of are finishing soon:

First there is the Daniel Cooney Fine Art auction in which I have a print from my Domestic Interventions series and that ends this Thursday, Feb 4th, so go visit and bid often!

Then there is the print sale that is raising money for Haitian Relief (specifically for Doctors Without Borders, who will get 100% of the profits), this sale will end Feb 10th and there are still many great prints available. In this sale we have raised just under $10 000! Quite amazing, and I am so proud to be a part of it!

Bobby pins

This one really needs to be seen in person (30x30 inch print). It doesn't translate so well in small jpg.

Heels

After making the Nylons image a peer of mine turned me on to the work of the Brasilian artist Ernesto Neto. His installations are amazing!

Nylons

At the end of the summer my intervention work started to take a new turn and that all began with this image. I became interested in materials associated with femininity, beauty and how women use so many products for the purpose of beauty enhancement. And so I started working with these kinds of materials in order to reexamine and understand them. My constructions remained formal in composition and this decorative element made sense to me since I was dealing with the largest industry of decoration. I'll share more images from the "Feminine Interventions" series this week.

For today: Derick Melander's use of belts.

So back to the Domestic Interventions. The top two were my first attempts at using clothespins and J cloths in the series. I wasn't really satisfied with either image and that brought me to a new stage of combining disparate elements. In the bottom image I used J cloths and clothespins as well as pie plates. The beautiful floating circles that seem reminiscent of mythical suns transcend the materials and will hopefully bring me to other stranger combinations.

Bread ties

This was one that I had a hard time with. I collected bread ties for a few months (with the help of many people) and photographed them over and over again. The things on their own are just so amazing that I couldn't seem to do them justice. This image was the last one I did and definitely the most successful. Backlit and through the mesh of a tennis court fence seemed to bring them to another level, beyond the simple plastic beauty of the individual objects.

Today's inspirational artist is Katie Baum whose series Chasing Memory is really wonderful, especially the donut shot.

Also if you are in Montreal be sure to check out Raymonde April's shows. In fact she is having three shows this month, Equivalences 1 at Galerie Donald Browne, and Equivalence 2 at Les Territoires, both of which just opened last night and are located across the hall from each other on the 5th floor of the Belgo Building, and then Equivalences 3+4 which will open at Occurrence on the 30th of January. It's beautiful work full of surprising images, and unexpected sequencing.

Plates

Today is the beginning of another Daniel Cooney Fine Art Emerging Artists' Auction, and the above image is in it. So be sure to visit the iGavel auction site and bid often! The bidding is open until Feb 4th. Here is the link to bid for my image.

And the inspirational artist for today is Tara Donovan; whose use of everyday materials is astounding and exquisite. I would really love to see her work in person.

Pie plates and Food Colouring

I like how this one reminds me of a painter's palette, the basic tool of a classic artist. I find that a lot of the images in this series reference painting. I often thought of the outdoor spaces that I chose as a canvas on which draw with my collections of domestic materials. I took most images from above and when you see the prints on a wall the images look quite flat and canvas-like. The earth as plane on which to create.

For today the young artist Allison Grant. I heard about her work while making this series and at first was somewhat disappointed by the fact that she chose a similar subject (domestic materials in the landscape), but then I realized that our approaches and resulting images were very different and so I didn't loose heart!

Doilies among the Queen Anne's Lace

Check out this amazing installation by Peter Root.

Straws 2

Today the classic: John Pfahl.

My Button collection filling the cracks

And for today: Robin Rhode, an artist who uses drawing and figures and lots of visual puns.

All of our Tupperware

More from the Domestic Interventions series made in the summer of 2009. In the coming days and week I will share with you some artists (other than those I have mentioned before: Orozco, Laviada, Lamson, Goldsworthy, and Infante-Arana & Gorunova) whose work inspired me to try my hand at interventions. Today the amazing work of Andrea Galvani.

Straws 1

So finally I will share with you some new stuff that I've been doing in the last 8 months. At the beginning of the summer I again started working with materials to make interventions in the landscape. This time I just had fun and used domestic materials that we all know and tried to make them funny, interesting and new again. In this one of straws I love the distortion of scale, the vibrant green of the parsley weed, and the way that the straws look like they are having a meeting!