2009 Portfolio Samples

*CLICK ON ANY OF THE IMAGES FOR HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOS*

Cardboard Cutout Installation Series is an examination of the in-between, or liminal spaces such as train stations, bus stops, subway terminals, etc. Spaces where one generally goes only to get somewhere else. However, liminality also represents chaos. Human beings in a liminal state are stripped of their social identity – they’ve fallen through the cracks, or simply disappear into the scenery as portrayed in the illusion of the strategically placed cardboard cutouts. These are also places where those from the edges of society will often seek shelter turning these spaces into places, but these places are also points on the edge – between what geographer Edward Relph refers to as existential insideness and outsideness.

1. Liminal Portrait 1

Photograph (Archival Ink Print) of

Ink-Jet Print Mounted on Cardboard Photograph size: 12”x18”; Installation Size: 21”x74”

2009

2. Liminal Portrait 2

Photograph (Archival Ink Print) of Ink-Jet Print Mounted on Cardboard

Photograph size: 12”x18”; Installation Size: 20”x78”

2009

3. Liminal Portrait 6

Photograph (Archival Ink Print) of Ink-Jet Print Mounted on Cardboard

Photograph size: 12”x18”; Installation Size: 24”x78”

2009

4. Liminal Portrait 8

Photograph (Archival Ink Print) of Ink-Jet Print Mounted on Cardboard

Photograph size: 12”x18”; Installation Size: 23”x78”

2009

Strip Mall Landscape Series­ investigates the ecological transformation from space to place. In Space and Place, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “Place is security, space is freedom… planners would like to evoke a sense of place”. These photographs were taken at strip malls in that were recently built over portions of preservation or conservation land. The displaced subjects are token decorations – traces of the freedom of nature that once flourished in this space where the retail constructions now stand.

5. Kohl’s (Formerly Part of Mystic River Reservation, Malden, MA)

Photograph (Archival Ink Print)

8”x12”

2009

6. Target (Formerly Part of Mystic River Reservation, Everett, MA)

Photograph (Archival Ink Print)

8”x12”

2009

7. Market Basket Supermarket (Formerly Part of Muller Conservation Area, Burlington, MA)

Photograph (Archival Ink Print)

8”x12”

2009

8. Old Navy (Formerly Part of Muller Conservation Area, Burlington, MA) – Strip Mall Landscape Series

Photograph (Archival Ink Print)

8”x12”

2009

New Irish Travellers Series represents crossroads in ambiguous times for immigrants in Ireland, who were the first to lose their jobs due to the global economic recession. These composites focus on displacement and a longing for placeless in a land that was never home to begin with. The subjects are unemployed immigrants from cities like Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Gort, and are digitally displaced into the picturesque countryside – shown wandering from village to village much like the traditional Irish Travellers of the margins of society.

9. The Brazilians…Formerly of Gort

Digital Composite (Archival Ink-Jet Print)

8”x14”

2009

10. The Nigerians…Formerly of Galway

Digital Composite (Archival Ink-Jet Print)

8”x14”

2009

Happy Endings Series goes beyond the understanding that the ‘real world’ doesn’t work the way romantic comedies end up 99.9% of the time. What lies at the heart of this series is the sudden altered sense of emotional and temporal placeness that occurs when relationships end. All of the shared memories take on new, painful (or possibly cathartic) emotions, as the end of the relationship begets the period of estrangement. These works converge the two points of a failed relationship: the point when the first exhilarating kiss or meeting takes place, and the point when the two partners vanish from each other’s life. All that is left are memories of times people generally would want to forget.

11.“The World Forgetting, By The World Forgot”

Digital Image, Still from the film Serendipity

(Archival Ink-Jet Print)

9”x15”

2008

12. “I Walked Out The Door. There’s No Memory Left”

Digital Image, Still from the film Bridget Jones’ Diary

(Archival Ink-Jet Print)

9”x15”

2008

13. “Come Back And Make Up A Good-bye At Least. Let’s Pretend We Had One”

Digital Image, Still from the film As Good As It Gets

(Archival Ink-Jet Print)

9”x15”

2008

14. “I Loved You On This Day. I Love This Memory”

Video (Final Cut Pro, Photoshop)

Clip from the film You’ve Got Mail

46 Seconds

2008

Mediamnesia Series – First 100 Days comprises 100 different prints, each a composite of over 50 webshots of news websites for each day of Barack Obama’s ‘First 100 Days’ in office. It represents the bombardment and subsequent obscuring of information from competing editorializing news organizations from every point in the political spectrum. This was also included as part of the Mediamnesia Series, as it documents how stories are forgotten or buried from one day to the next.

15. First 100 Days (February 15, 2009)

Digital Composite (Digital Pigment Print) #27 of 100

14”x16”

2009

16. First 100 Days (March 22, 2009)

Digital Composite (Digital Pigment Print) #62 of 100

14”x16”

2009

Mediamnesia Series focuses on the influence mass media has over how we receive and remember (or forget) news events. The Small Change video explores how the promise of change is nothing new, as it has been used in every presidential inaugural address since the 1960. The manipulation of the voices is displays how eerily ubiquitous and interchangeable the word is used as a promise at the beginning of each new administration.

The first Ongoing… composite began toward the end of 2008, when the media was paying very little attention to the War in Afghanistan. Though not nearly approaching the number of soldiers dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq, soldiers were still being killed in that region. This composite of 600 portraits of the fallen at the time (now 932 and counting) served as a reminder to the war that media forgot, and how sadly, with over 300 soldiers dying in 2009 their attention is back fully on Afghanistan. That is why in 2009 I started work on an even more ambitious composite consisting of currently 4351 portraits of those lost in Iraq, as the news media has begun to forget the ward in that region.

Br ak ng N ws is a multi-layered and deeply multi-themed video that, on the surface, subverts of contemporary media’s oversaturation, subliminal messaging, and lightning-pace snippets of no-attention-span news. More significant is the use of the video without the distraction of narration. It offers the viewer to experience the medium quite differently than that of the passive spectator of corporate brodcasts.

17. Small Change (Nine Presidential Inaugurations)

Video (Final Cut Pro)

1 Minute 26 Seconds

2009

18. Ongoing… 4351 Dead U.S. Soldiers in Iraq

Digital Composite (Lambda Print)

19”x23”

2009-Ongoing

19. Ongoing…

943 Dead U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan

Digital Composite (Lambda Print)

19”x23”

2008-Ongoing

20. Br ak ng N ws

Video (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Digieffects Artefact, Photoshop & Illustrator)

2 Minutes 40 Seconds (Full Version: 7 Minutes 49 Seconds)

2007

Back in Boston

Here are some random photos I took when I returned to Boston:

Digital Prints

I’ve been working on creating little post cards of digitally altered photos I’ve taken. Here are a few examples:

(rearranged subtitles from the film Breathless)

Postdigital Landscapes

Photos taken in and around Ballyvaughan, Ireland in April 2009.

Click on photos for larger images:

Project Room Exhibition – Ballyvaughan

It has been a while since I’ve made a post here… it has been no-stop since the beginning of March. But I’m just about three weeks from finishing up here for the year and I hope to be able to make more posts in the coming weeks. I have quite a bit of material to post… photos, stories, artwork. 

Here are some photos from a solo show I had at “The Project Room Gallery” in Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare a couple of weeks ago:

            

New Webmerges

Here are some examples of how the ‘webmerges’ have progressed as I record every day’s news for the first 100 days of Obama’s presidency. The original image from last month had about 60-70 images overlaid at equal opacity and without any adjustments to color or saturation. With these new ones, the number of merged images are the same, but I’ve started to play around with the opacity and saturation much more to bring forward images and headlines more effectively. All of the screenshots are from the dozens of sites and blogs that I visit on a daily basis, even the right wing sites like Drudge and World Net Daily (keeping friends close; enemies closer). That certainly offers an interesting visual and textual juxtaposition to material from more progressive sites that fall in line with many of my political and ethical leanings.

This intentional manipulation may be effective from a political and social view, but I am just now starting to focus on really working the formal and aesthetic quality of the overall image. I am increasingly working with image/text patterns along with color balance.

*Please note that the color may be a bit too saturated because it needed to be set that way for printing on the archival paper*

First of Several Exhibitions for the Spring

I realized that with all of the gaps between posts and the ‘soul-searching’ or political rambling in the posts that I actually write, I’ve neglected to show any of the artistic progress that’s been made. This has been a year of many creative roadblocks and trial and error dead-ends and happy accidents. Though as the new semester begins, I feel I’ve really turned a corner.

The more I looked toward reconciling political propaganda with aesthetics, the less interested I became in exploring political issues through art. It turned into preaching about something that affects me on some level, mostly moral. However, it didn’t feel right because I was narrowly focused on single causes or issues and nearly all of them have far less of an impact on me than a cab driver from Iraq detained in GITMO for six years, or a family member of a fallen soldier. 

I decided to give up working on political pieces and show the last of anything overtly political in a show that opened at the Burren College of Art Gallery last week called Standing Back. It’s sort of a mid-year review of what’s being made by the graduate students here and a chance to ‘stand back’ and assess where we are at, and what direction we see ourselves headed for the next three months. 

Two of my pieces were included. One is a piece from an idea that’s been festering for a while. Before I left for Ireland last year, I recorded hundreds of hours of television news broadcasts as material to work with once I learned how to use video editing software. It took a while to teach myself at least the basics, but now I know a great deal about how to edit, alter, distort, superimpose — all perfect for this piece titled BR K NG N WS:

(The quality on YouTube is terrible, but it looks really nice on the monitor in the gallery.)

The most exciting part about working with this piece is the multi-layered themes. It’s the underlying meanings within the content that is open to so many different interpretations. Of course, the image of Osama Bin Laden certainly strikes a chord. But to me the image itself is ancillary to the overall composition. There are significant political contexts within the almost unbearably slow progression, but that is not quite what I am trying to achieve. This is mostly due to issues surrounding understanding this particular political context. One would have to try to find the date that this news story ‘broke’, September 7, 2007, and put together the fact that in the video that was released to the public, Bin Laden did not mention any acts of terror or violence against the United States. The gist of the message was denouncing capitalism and corporatism, and to urge people to convert to Islam..

I’m not denying that this is an innocuous message and that Bin Laden is not a sociopathic maniac. However, in the actual non-distorted broadcast, Fox News did not disclose the theme of Bin Laden’s message. Instead, they dwelled on the fact that it was a few days before the 6th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US and that this message could be a “sign that another attack may be on the way to mark the anniversary”. 

The image of Bin Laden is spliced and superimposed over a subsequent story broadcast seconds later about the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperative summit held in Australia, which drew massive protests from anti-corporate-conglomerate groups, anti-bush protestors, and fair-wage coalitions. There was no mention of the protests on that Fox News broadcast — only that Bush was in Australia for an economic summit. Of course, one would have to analyze the contorted logo on this video to see that it actually was the APEC summit in Australia in September of 2007, and have some savant-like memory if they even saw the broadcast that day — not to mention the critical skills (and a skeptical perspective) to put all of these contexts together. 

If I wanted to dig deep into the fact that some corporate media channels are very biased and make a commentary about the subtleness of politically motivated omissions, I would show the full videos of the broadcasts and weave it all together in some way that may or may not be considered ‘art’. Instead, my goal was to slow everything down to a near-standstill. 

In my mind, slowing the video by 1/200 of the original speed undercuts the objective of media’s overpowering contribution to a culture of accelerated information to the point where five second snippets or thirty second stories are all we know in many cases. On many corporate news broadcasts (Nancy Grace on CNN, in particular) a cycle of images are flashed on the screen for five seconds at a time. However, over the course of a five minute segment, you’ll see the same image flashed on the screen up to thirty times. It feels like a form of subliminal messaging, drilling the imagery into the viewer’s head. 

Along with the pace of the video, I worked on ways to distort the sound and video in a way that it feels like the video is breaking down in some way. In fact, I got the idea for digitally distorting the image by focusing on the images on the screen after my cable box went on the fritz back home last year. I decided to really amp up the distortion through a few audio/video editing and animation computer programs to the point there parts are fragmented beyond recognition. This is my response  – not only to the distortion of reality through certain media agendas approaches to news broadcasting — but to the abbreviated and cut-up segments of news in a time where much of the public’s attention span has been so diminished to the point where news stories have to be limited in duration. But which came first, the media or the distracted mind? This is the crux of my overall thematic investigation explored through a variety of artistic expressions. 

Regardless on how this video is viewed, my goal is to give the viewer the opportunity to look deeper into the layers to find their own meaning. I see it as a piece about the effects of media and accelerated information on the mind in the guise of some form of political statement. We’re having a critique about the piece next week and it will be interesting to see what others think. 

Feel free to share your thoughts on the work either by leaving a comment or emailing me at lfreud_odix@yahoo.com.

Tomorrow I will post the other piece that is in the show and say a few words about that (hopefully not as much as I’ve said about this one)

Change and Moderation – Part 3

The housing bubble in Ireland was larger (relatively) than the one we experienced in the US. Even here in Ballyvaughan, home prices leaped tenfold between 1994 and 2004. Developments were still popping up everywhere when I toured the West coast in September of last year. Yet, when I revisited many of these sites earlier this month, I noticed that almost all of the work of these developments had been halted. Many of these projects resemble the partially collapsed centuries-old castles and outposts across the coast, simply sitting there frozen in time – at least for now.

I can see why many of the people here, just as shell-shocked as back in the States, are hesitant to welcome the rapid change that many Obama supporters have been expecting. It is safe to say that an Obama administration will certainly ease the fears and concerns of those with a perspective similar to the German student and the French couple I spoke with. Those days are over for now – that is, until the collective psyche forgets the lessons learned from the Bush Administration years down the road (boy, what a pessimist I am).

I think the perspectives of folks like Gerri are more relevant for thinking about change and moderation. He was in the thick of the ‘dot com bubble’ in the late 90s and the ‘housing bubble’ from this decade. Yet, he prudently was able to see through the hysteria. He’s an avid fan of horse racing, and his strategy for years to, as he says, “get out while you’re hot” was applied to many of his investments. He didn’t want to get caught up in the bubble long enough to be stuck in the middle when it bursts. I think this approach is very judicious, and I know how emotions can take over when it comes to rushes from speculation and risky ventures. (If I ever go to a casino, I always take only $50 or $100 and leave my bankcard behind, because I know how much the heat of the moment can take over).

The point of focusing so much on Gerri’s philosophy is that this crisis emerged under the watch of the supposedly levelheaded, centrist Fianna Fáil government. The Irish Financial Services Regulation Authority is supposed to oversee all mortgages to ensure banks were not lending to buyers that would clearly not be able to sustain their payments. Once the ‘Regulator’ began precipitously loosening the rules of borrowing over the past several years, banks began to offer clients increasingly unsustainable mortgages. This led to the situation we have now – not dissimilar to what went on with the sub-prime mortgages in the US.

Of course, regulation is not the only reason Ireland is in such a crisis. I will stop short of boring anyone (further) with talk of bank solvency, budget issues, and the international credit crunch – all contributing to the state of the Irish economy.

What is important to take away from this – and as Gerri points out – is that these were all economic policies introduced or supported by a government not all that different from that of the framework of Barack Obama’s economic team. Gerri and I both fear that the economic policies of the Obama administration. His fears are based on witnessing the economic policies lead to the downfall of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ under a centrist government. My fears are based on Obama’s appointees’ histories favoring tax cuts and higher interest rates.

However, on this landmark day of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, it is time to not only focus on just how this presidency will affect us all, but what we can do to ensure this presidency will substantially affect the direction of America. Yes, there are very grave concerns about the state of the economy and how it may prevent President Obama (feels so good to say that) from achieving all or even most of his goals. And yes I do have reservations about the fiscally liberal backgrounds of many of his economic appointees. However, to those who think that one man cannot change the path of a nation (including maybe myself a couple of months back), and especially to those people who think that an Obama administration will not be all that different than the Bush administration, I have a few things to address before I finish my rant.

An Obama administration will be light years away from the Bush administration. The stimulus package introduced by Obama alone – putting millions of people to work, dealing with energy efficiency, breaking our dependence on foreign oil, seriously dealing with global warming – would be something unheard of in the Bush administration. Obama’s policies on education and health care are fundamentally different – night and day compared to Bush’s policies.

However, the problem that Obama faces is something greater than partisan politics and any sort of inability to ‘reach across the isle’. The real problem is lobbyists representing multi-billion-dollar corporations (pharmaceutical, insurance, coal, oil, defense contracting, etc) with significant power and influence over Washington. It will take an army of millions of proponents of ‘real change’ to match up against such an enormous roadblock in the advancement of progressive policies. What Obama has that can work toward breaking down that stranglehold is an email list of over ten million of us who supported him during his campaign, not to mention the number who have joined his cause since. 

President Obama cannot create the change that we all hope for on his own. In fact, I don’t think he can do it by even by surrounding himself with all of the best advisors.  It will take the mobilization of all of us to help Obama and his allies in Congress to pass legislation that will pave the way for that real change. In his own eloquent and determined words from today’s Inauguration speech, “for as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.”

The Obama presidency will start out on the same path as FDR’s first term in office. Roosevelt was not a particularly progressive president at the start of his administration.  It was the pressure from the people that pushed him toward such change that led to the recovery of our nation during another time of turmoil. This is our opportunity to influence change through action. Obama clearly wants this to happen – this was the theme of his speech today. However, he does not want to press for the change so soon and in such a dramatic fashion. Once we all stand behind him in solidarity, change will be inevitable. Ten million strong is certainly not a bad start.

Change and Moderation – Part 2 (Finally)

Since arriving in Ireland this part August, I’ve been trying to talk with as many people as possible. I’ve mostly been looking for any perspectives they have on US foreign policy. (Many of my conversations have taken a different turn recently, as the themes of my work have generally shifted away from politics over the past couple of months).  In talking with people from Europe and the UK, I’ve noticed two things: They were very well aware all of the political developments in the US, they were generally liberal in their beliefs, and they had an interesting outlook on the prospects of change in America – especially our foreign policy.

I remember particularly remember a conversation a couple of months back I had with a French couple. I met them on a daytrip in Galway and they looked like they were in their 60s. At one point, one of them recalled the May 1968 student protests and general strike in France that led to extraordinary social change. Yet they were very skeptical of the reality of a drastically different, bottom-up transformation of the American political landscape over a two, four, or even eight year period. I couldn’t understand why they would think that a form of grassroots change festering in the United States should be handled with caution.

But I realized after really getting deep into the conversation with them that this apprehension stemmed from a fear of the Bush administration, and they harkened back to Bush’s famous quote, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”. They were very well aware of the backlash of the U.S. public for French opposition to the Iraq War and had been coincidentally traveling to California during certain chains and service providers’ embarrassing attempt to boycott French goods or products that had the word ‘French’ in them (‘freedom fries’ just tasted different than ‘french fries’). Even in such a liberal city as San Francisco, this French couple were treated with what they called “subtle disdain”.

When I traveled to Paris last month, I noticed a few slightly tense moments with Parisians – particularly related to the language barrier. However, being an American traveling in Paris was not nearly the experience I expected. Putting things in perspective, most of the interactions were with service providers. I was fortunate enough to have a companion who spoke a fair amount of French, and as long as I made the effort to at least attempt to speak just a few words of the native tongue, they were willing to reply in English. On the whole, I was very impressed with how I was treated as an American in France (even though I was in Paris and it was for only a few days), and it’s a shame that the French tourists I bonded with had a relatively difficult time traveling in the States.

I received a similar reaction from talking to a German student on a bus to Galway. He was not as fearful personally as the French couple was of the direction in which the Bush administration was going in 2002-2003. He spoke mostly of the perspective of the European news sources that kept him informed of the developments U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different type of information from what we were fed by American news organizations complicit with the Bush Doctrine.

This was the same viewpoint I heard from many British and Irish people when I brought up the subject of change in the U.S. under the Bush administration. They were viewing a different kind of news than we were (and they still are, as I can see clearly when I flip on RTE News or BBC News). In fact, while we were watching the statue of Sadaam being toppled on CNN, they were seeing a split screen on CNN International, with one half showing the statue falling and the jubilation of the Iraqi people, and the other half showing Iraqi civilians in hospitals with injuries sustained from the coalition bombings.

I’ve had many conversations with a local resident here in Ballyvaughan named Gerri. He’s in his early seventies and we met at the gym where he was rehabilitating an injured shoulder sustained when one of his cows bolted on him. He loves America – he even says he’s always loved the British. Hearing his thoughts on the UK made me do a bit of a double take. However, he is certainly not uninformed in the least. He served as a water treatment engineer for County Clare and is now happily retired, as he invested very wisely on some IPOs in the late 90s.

Gerri shares the same point of view on change as many of the other people I have chatted with in my travels. His perspective comes from witnessing first hand the rise and fall their economy. It was known as the  ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland’s astonishingly rapidly growing economy, leading it to rise from poverty and emigration in the 1990s to have the fourth largest GDP per capita in the world by 2007. 

Things took a turn for the worse very quickly, as Ireland has been one of the hardest hit by the recession. The question here now is whether it can keep from falling into a depression. 

No, part 3 will not take another two and a half months…

Top 25 Albums of 2008

25. She & Him

 Volume One

 

24. The Impossible Shapes

 9

 

23. Plants and Animals

 Parc Avenue

 

22. Tapes ‘n Tapes

 Walk It Off

21. Conor Oberst

 Conor Oberst

 

20. Jenny Lewis

 Acid Tongue

 

19. Deerhunter

 Microcastle

 

18. Silver Jews

 Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

 

17. David Byrne & Brian Eno

 Everything That Happens Today Will Happen

 

16. Department of Eagles

 In Ear Park 

 

15. Destroyer

 Trouble In Dreams

 

 14. Islands

 Arm’s Way

 

13. Blitzen Trapper

 Furr

 

12. Bowerbirds

 Hymns For A Dark Horse

 

11. Stephen Malkmus

 Real Emotional Trash

10. The Walkmen

 You And Me

 

 

 

 9. The Hold Steady

 Stay Positive

 

8. Deerhoof

 Offend Maggie

7. TV on the Radio

 Dear Science

 

6. Bon Iver

 For Emma, Forever Ago

 

5. Fleet Foxes

 Fleet Foxes

 

 4. Beach House

 Devotion

 

3. Bonnie “Prince” Billy

 Lie Down In The Light

 

2. Wolf Parade

 At Mount Zoomer

 

1. Of Montreal

 Skeletal Lamping