The shot above and below were taken May 9th on my ride to work.

It’s taken through a window of what was once a very dodgy variety store on Pape a few blocks north of Danforth. I’m always surprised by the refusal of this entire road to gentrify. I’m not quite sure why this is. In the last 15 years nothing much has happened but I’m sure a whole whack of people with money have moved into the area. I don’t think everything should be subject to crazy gentrification, but this street is just sad for some reason. That said someone has laid a new floor in this place since I last shot it, removed the ceiling and in general cleared the whole thing out. Me thinks something cool will go in here.

This image also gave me another idea. I was thinking I might emulate the leaning plywood in a studio setting and see if I could start to “construct” images like the one above but with echos of famous geometric paintings in the way the panels of plywood are arranged. I may even just simply build constructions against a white studio backdrop like the one above. I simply love the way the plywood works like layers of paint.

I really like the image below, It wasn’t intentionally shot to be funny, but when I think of it in terms of Joshua Jensen Nagle’s wonderful polka dot work it makes me smile. My fascination with concrete, concrete block and emptiness is unbounded. Note the wonderful piece of crumpled material on the floor. I didn’t notice that until I processed the image.

The shot following appeals to my sense of the square geometric space again. Here the picture plane is sweetly dissected into four relatively equal panels, each with their own uniquely simply subject matter. I’m also making a dig at one of my favourite photographic pet peeves, black and white.

Friday the 3rd of May I took my sweet ass time getting to work on the bicycle. It was so amazing out. The first day of t-shirt and shorts riding. One of my stops was Bloor. Thanks goodness there’s a new Tiffany’s going in. The old one was so ghetto. The ring they’re advertising on the hoarding looks like a good buy. I love the fact that even Tiffany’s has to do construction and use hoarding. Hoarding is the great equalizer.

A very obscure self-portrait in an vacant Bloor shop. You can just make out the yellow t-shirt. I find the interlaced corner of this empty window display engaging. There’s something pin-wheel in the overlapping nature that I’d like to explore further.

I grew up there. In truth I grew up in Burlington, but I spent a lot of time in Hamilton. My grandmother lived there when I was a kid so I’d take the bus in every Saturday morning to visit her and walk the downtown. That was pre Jackson Square time.

When I got older I lived there for about 7 maybe 10 years. I worked on the strip I use to hang out on when I was a kid at a place called Book Villa that sold porn and had a baseball bat for security behind the counter. It was 24 hours. It’s no longer there. I worked at the AGH as a security guard, the McMaster Art Gallery before it was moved into it’s present location, I did construction work and I worked at HMV. I lived in a warehouse in the steel manufacturing area of town and drove my motorcycle into the building’s elevator and down the hallway into my unheated room.

The last time I was living there I had a place in Hess Village and commuted to Toronto. It’s where I started taking pictures.

James Street North is transforming. The artistic community has sort of taken over which is very sweet. It resembles the Parkdale strip of Queen. The streets are clean and there’s weirdly no Graffiti. I find that sort of suspect in itself. Either there are a lot more shelters, and Community Centres than I ever remember and way more people that rely on them, or I remember poorly. I have a sneaking suspicion that as Toronto gets more unaffordable and gentrified the less fortunate get pushed somewhere and Hamilton’s downtown core seems to be where they’ve ended up. Indeed the central area around where all the buses meet is teaming with people on a Sunday morning, but they just seem to be walking around waiting for stuff to open. It’s unsettling.

The Canadian Football Hall of Fame is still there, and I still love the building. It’s on the right hand side of the frame above. It’s got to be 50 years old and it is definitely still a cool mod building. The concrete mass that surrounds it on the two sides above is a court house of some sort. Directly behind me as I take this shot is Hamilton City Hall which is another beautiful building. Below is the wall and vacant lot beside a spectacular block of restoration work called the Lister Block. I’ve thought about this image a lot since I took it. Today I thought it would be cool to revisit this location with a glass end table and vase of finely arranged flowers. I could place them in the middle of the frame and re shoot. That thought got expanded and I found myself elaborate floral arrangements that I could drop into inaccessible and garbage strewn corners of the city and then photographing them. I Could come back to re shoot them as they wilted or became unkempt. If only I was a man of unlimited income. I’d quit the day job and start doing stuff like that.

Just a 1/2 block away from the Lister Block is the side of a building that had a nice reflection on it. I think it’s the glass from a neighboring structure. I’m standing in a very small grass parkette between the two buildings. I like the totemic nature of the reflection and the underlying colour schema of the wall is pretty cool.

Finally the wall below was in the same block as the other images. It really sums a lot of Hamilton up for me. It’s unpretentious and practical with a solid utilitarian charm but a bit rough.

After thinking about it Hamilton was impeccably clean. It seems to be prospering with the exception of around the Bus Terminal area — which is really just part of the John Street strip. I imagine if I was to go to downtown Toronto and hang around the bus terminal on a Sunday morning it would be pretty sketchy too. Hamilton’s core may be actually worse than Toronto’s because this city is completely unaffordable and Burlington and Oakville are just to damn boring. I think I’ll be happy to go back and explore some more. Hopefully I can make it out to Burlington Street and areas of the more industrial sections of town. I bet Stoney Creek is still pretty dodgy.

The following image was already the result of some fairly major fooling around. It started as a traditional photo then became something else. For the initial image below I took one, four inch ardox nail and suspended it from a fishing line in front of a white background and took a picture. I then isolated the nail on a blank white canvas in Photoshop. I copied that single nail image, rotated the copy slightly in an arbitrary manner—so that it related to the first nail in an interesting way—and moved it to a suitable location on the canvas. I kept doing this for about fifteen minutes. I also processed it a bit with curves and contrast in CS3.

Then I distorting the image in Photoshop filters to get the image below.

If you didn’t know what it was, you’d never be able to guess. I’ve worked another nail baed image that popped into my head last night. This is a more regimented and structured composition, but it’s still sort of working for me.

This all grew out of a very spontaneous and accidental place described below.

Friends of ours are having their first child soon. The momentous event is about six weeks away. We had planned a few simple gifts. A store bought one, one made by Jill and one made by me. For my piece I intended to take a photograph that the couple sent to us to announce the fact that they were pregnant and simply print it nicely and frame it for them. The photo was of a pregnancy test sticks that indicated a positive result. I thought this would be funny and sort of different for the kid to grow up with in their room. It would serve as a reminder of a time before serious parenting began and to remind everyone of the humorous nature of life in general. It was all well intentioned. The problem was the image sort of sucked as an art piece. Although as a text message it was super compelling to communicate the pregnancy, it wasn’t working as a stand alone image. I thought it would look shitty on a wall, especially a wall that the couple had put so much recent effort into getting ready for the baby.

For some reason I just started screwing around. I took that original image of the pee stick and manipulated it in Photoshop to arrive at the image below. Much like the nails above. The new image depicts the indicator areas of the pregnancy test distorted and pixalize. I did some other simple stuff to it and bumped up the contrast a bit. All in all they are pretty cheesy effects that are simple standard filters in CS5 but used in an extreme way they have cool painterly effects.

I think I’ve gotten to something they can hang on their wall that relates to this crazy time in their lives but that nobody else will understand until they explain it. In that way it’s a very personal image that can be hung in plain sight and appreciated by them for what it means and by others for it’s simple aesthetic intrest.

I like this Photoshopping effect enough to continue a series in this vein. I’ve tried a few other photographs but I’m coming to the conclusion that to get a purley abstract image I need to begin with a somewhat abstract image.

I’m happy with this distorted representation of the photograph because it’s so painterly. So much so that I might go that added step extra and print a series of these “photographs” and use them as a reference for a series of paintings.

The goal now is to continue this so I’m getting out every day.

After thinking about it for about a month and passing by it about 20 times I went back to shoot Postal Station E Dovercourt and Bloor. The draw is a combination of the flat aluminum framework, the old school 60s modern aesthetic, the porous warmth of the concrete, the tarp obscuring the interior, the reflection of Dovercourt in the glass and that I use to collect stamp. It may seem strange but these 2 pics are loaded images to me in so many ways. I also just like how they look for some reason. I cropped and processed this today on the 20th of April and shot it about a week ago. The earlier image down at the bottom of the post was done about three weeks ago. It’s crazy how the angle and framing is the same. I really do have a weird way of repeating things almost perfectly.

This weekend was definitely spring like. It’s the 7th today and I managed a few shots I like. Nothing too out of my wheelhouse here but some shots that might have some staying power.

Wallace Emerson Community Centre – Taken through one of the widows in the gymnasium complex which is the north building. The paper cut outs caught the light of spring nicely. I also like the awkward positioning of the coat rack and interior widows. You can see a slight reflection in the bottom left hand corner created by the exterior widow I rest the camera lens on to take the photograph.

Grand Touring Automobiles on Dupont Outbuilding – Situated between the car dealership and the Faema building at the corner of Dupont and Christie is a beautiful old school building. I’m not sure what it was before the dealership was there, but it looks turn of the century. It looks like the dealership now uses it for special events. It’s empty inside except for a desk and some advertising posters for the cars. This is a view form outside through an east window looking across through the interior space with the dealership proper shown outside the window. A painting of a Bentley on the floor captures the artificial light from the ceiling above nicely. I like this image, but I am extremely indifferent to cars. They are definitely useful sometimes to get from point A to point B, but other than that I find them to embody a lot of what’s wrong with the world. Particularly; pollution, war for oil; arrogance, superiority and other extremely embarrassing aspects of masculinity.

Postal Station E Dovercourt and Bloor – Now Closed. Can the postage stamp be that far off from following in the steps of the penny? I can’t remember the last time I posted a letter or retrieved an important one from the mailbox. The Canadian Postal Service can’t survive for much longer can they?

I’ll be more diligent as I collect these, however I’ve forgotten where this one is. The coolest thing about it was the fact that this is where the Google Car stopped and stopped taking pictures. I wonder if the driver just got freaked out?

The shot below is taken from  a Google Camera that I’m pretty sure is on snowmobile. If you do the traditional Street View on this portion of the map in Norway you can see the Snowmobiles in front and behind of the camera vehicle. This is a shot off to the side of a very desolate but very “highway like” 20 or 30 lane snowmobile track. Very cool.

I’ve seen a lot of internet/web based art projects. I’ve seen a lot where they just troll around and take Google Maps Street View images and relate them together. There’s something about it that’s attracting me now. It’s weird but I think I’d enjoy this type of work. Simply documenting for documentations sake. Mapping the world in a whole new way.

It makes me think that I could create a project that reverses the scope of these current Google projects. I could simply pick a square metre of land and map that out in macro. You could zoom into the crazy detail of soil and ground like you do in street view, but I’m not quite sure how to create “roads”. Maybe I could create my own.

This is in Japan on the tip of an Island called Ishigaki. I can make the photos actually look pretty good. I’ll keep exploring and posting. I think this one is another of Japan. As I mentioned, I was getting lost.

I love the composition in the following shot from Alaska. It’s not the easiest thing to find a compelling vantage point and a suitably interesting subject that fits with my general aesthetic. This is my favourite to date. Although the little dirt pile from Japan is pretty well arranged.

I have a system for finding these. Basically I look at the Google map of the world then drag the Streetview icon onto the page which then shows in which countries and areas Streetview has been done. In general you have to stay away from mainland U.S.A.  This would have been the first market to get shot by Google and the quality of the images reflects this. A favourite area is Finland. I’ve always been curious about Finnish culture so it seems natural to explore. For this image I just looked for costal areas and for the distinctive blue network of lines that is Streetview. Then I dropped the little man icon as far to the north as I can go, usually at the end of a particular photographic route. That’s how I found this rather desolate wind farm at lands end Norway.

Taiwan is a more recent interest. I was staying away from cities but now find it very similar to exploring on foot here in Toronto. This opens a world of possibilities. The image below I found on a series of roads that run along the path pof various rivers in the city. This is a break wall between the river and the street, I’m not sure who the little house is for, but my guess is it might just be a rain shed for local fishermen who worked the river. It could also be some sort of observation booth for when the water levels rise.

Kunagami District in Japan looks beautiful. The roads that traverse the coast are beautiful and seem relatively quite and almost rural. There are tons of tunnels through mountains in this region as well. I love this incursion of road into nature and that the engineers actually figured out it would look amazing if they left the rocky outcropping at the side of the highway.

This is on Cape Collinson on Hong Kong Island. This road actually ends at the entrance to a barbed wired high fenced correctional facility. I liked this image because of the two forks of the pathway climbing the side of the mountain and the rocky outcropping in the background. This in combination with the knowledge of the prison just a short way off adds to the interest for me.

I spent a while exploring Singapore. The following shots are what I think of as digital signatures from the Google Car drivers of Singapore. The only way you can find these Google Streetview images is to zoom in on the Singapore section and when you pull the Streetview icon across onto the map you look for single dots of blue Streetview legend. Each of these dots seems to be labeled with a photographers name and when you take a look at each spot it shows a different single photo view rather than the traveling camera views from the top of cars. I think these are the Google photographers fooling around and leaving their marks on the maps. Whatever they are I find them fascinating. The image below captures my imagination because the women are strangely dissected by the camera’s capture methods. These ghostly images are very cool.

The couple on the beach had the signature for Charles Momeny and I particularly liked this composition and the vouyeristic nature of the shot itself. 

More recently I’ve been traveling through Bulgaria. Here’s a nice sort of Holiday Inn Art Sale sort of image.

and someplace in Russia

I started with the image below. I just grabbed a pin image from the internet and then cut it out of the background.

Then I replicated it about 3000 times and placed each replicated image around my canvas in Photoshop. It was sort of like painting, but all the time I was doing it I was feeling sort of uneasy about the process. It seemed rather obsessive and perhaps even a little unbalanced to spend hours doing this, but then again I like the results. To get a better idea you can see a bigger image if you click on it.

For some reason I was going to call it “You Are Here” or something humorous like that, but then I started imagining it as a three dimensional image and it began to take shape as a hypothetical map of brain. So it becomes Google Map of my Brain. I’m sure they’ll be doing this some day. The strange thing is I wanted to do something way back when with an actual picture of my brain. The image below is an MRI of my cranium. When I first saw the image it looked so strange that I wanted to covert it into a series of giant interlocking pillows and make a floor standing sculpture.

I think I’ll do more shit like this. I’ll also try and print this multiple pin image. The actual piece is huge. It’s 66 x 66 inches, and you can see the imperfections in my process more.

This started with the ideas for another project called Tarps and then just sort of morphed into a project that becomes more math than I ever thought I’d be interested again. I like to think of Squared as based in the photographic but tied to painting, colour theory, and sculpture.

Squared Squares or Squaring the Square is a mathematical problem. Basically the premis is to create a square made of different squares, none of which can be the same size. I discovered this—not because I knew about the problem but—because I simply wanted to achieve the Squared Squares thing and I didn’t know how to do it.  I stumbled upon the Global Constraint Catalogue simply by searching for squared squares. I’m very happy I did. I haven’t read through the details on that site but I did come across a diagram that visualized what I was thinking about.

The above image from the Global Constraints Catalogue depicts the simplest proof for Squaring the Square where 21 different size squares are used to create a perfect larger square. Below I’ve converted the diagram above into a Sketch Up digram just because I’m feeling guilty for stealing someone else’s work.

The first part of my plan is to figure out how this math proof works so I can create the simple Square of Squares without just copying it.

My Square of Squares is 3D, because I started seeing it this way as more of a sculpture. I’ve since discovered that a Cube of Cubes is actually impossible. This became clear to me when I understood the simple idea of a proof by infinite decent. It will be cool to see if I can understand why, but I digress. The above structure is the premis for Squared.

I’d like to create a larger work like the 3D rendering above and below. It will end up two dimensional more like the first illustration, made of 21 different pieces that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I’ve been mulling the idea of making these pieces out of stretcher frames with wood panel facings to paint on. I was going to make them out of stretched canvas but the added material of the canvas stretched around the frame would no doubt through my measurements off and make the Squared Square more difficult to achieve accurately.

Picture twenty one panels fitted together to make the larger square. Each of these stretcher panels would either be 1″,  1.5″, 2″ or 3″ thick.  I would paint each of the panels either a different grey shade or a different colour. More likely it will be colour based as I’m more interested in colour photography than in black and white. I’d then take photos of each of the panels, so twenty one pictures. Maybe 22 if I take an image of the assembled Square of Squares.

I see it clearly. In a gallery space—perhaps even Bau-Xi Photo if they agree—I would assemble the larger Squared Square on a wall. It would be 112″ x 112″ or roughly 9 feet x 9 feet square. It should be pretty cool. Meanwhile I’ve taken the different twenty two photographs and printed them on the same size square paper, maybe they get printed 24″ x 24″. The goal is to simply frame and hang these side by side around the gallery or on a single wall of the space. Each would like identical except for the actual tone or colour of the image and each would relate back to the larger wall sculpture/panel painting.

This fascination started with the last show Wandering. In that show I shot with the square in my head and cropped down all my images from the typical in camera frame ratio of 2:3 to be square 1:1 ratios. This allowed me to see differently and now I’m really liking the square frame. That’s the impetuous for this project but I’m now thinking more about other aspects of photography or at least other aspects of photography and how it pertains to my practice.

The squares loosely represent pixels to me. I think this is because I’ve been more and more preoccupied with the debate and discussion about digital photography vs analog photography. The colour is another thing I’ve been thinking about and again relates to various conversations I’ve been involved, overheard or read about the nature of photography and the value of colour or black & white printing. There’s also a real nod to my favourite painters Joseph Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Claude Tousignant and others. Add to that a general attraction for the work of Johannes Itten. Then there’s the aspect of painting, taking pictures of paintings and the blurred lines between the two that I love.  Finally there’s a real sense fo creating something to be photographed here that I think is a natural direction to take based on the work in Wandering. Wandering was found art, Squared will be made art.

Take photos of me holding photos taken by photographers who died taking the photos.

The something is yet to be determined. A cool idea might be to take single images in a semi-stop motion way but produce high quality results and print them large to hang on the “rack” By large, I ‘m suggesting torso size or suit jacket size. The movement of the conveyor will therefore emulate a film projector and be showing an actual movie but not a “motion picture” Actually, Motion Picture might be a better title though conveyor is pretty cool.

Another idea might be to actually work with a dry cleaners and approach patrons as they leave with their clothing to get their photographs taken, then use those photographs of people as the “something” that would replace clothing on the conveyor.

In large white letters—four to six feet tall—paint the exposed sides of buildings or walls with text. I could either solicit approval from business and building owners or even petition the city for locations to execute. The city route would take years, the building owner route makes sense.

The idea would be to explore different ideas through font. It’s sort of a play on graphic design, but I think it relates more to other text based work, semiotics and philosophy. That’s not to suggest these are completely serious works. I hope there’s a chance that many people could decode these simple messages and that some of the work would elicit thought in a straightforward manner.

The trick will be to utilize language and symbol and not just revert to the cheap parlour tricks

Helvetica in Arial or Arial in Helvetica

White, Grey, Black

English in French, French in English

SUBTRAC      T

DISTANCE in both perspective and aerial perspective done in sky blue

UNFINISHE

- uppercase, LOWERCASE

straight

Sans Serif in Serif

Serif in Sans Serif

Semaphore in Semaphore

GRAFFITI  in some lettering the city uses

VERTIGO from above looking down the letters

pruh-nouns (Pronounce)

I think it was Sunday, the day after the opening that I came up with the idea for my next show at Bau-Xi, which I hope to mount and open in January of 2014.

The present show Wandering consists of images of discovered subjects. The plan for Made will be to subtly create temporal works that couldn’t really be mistaken for found subjects like the subjects in Wandering. I’ll build or create the scenes and then photograph them to preserve and display, the actual pieces would be left to survive or disappear, or be dismantled.

The work in Made will be part street art, sculpture, performance and photography. I think the following list will adapt and change until I have about seventeen concepts that are relatively different from each other. Each will have to stand on it’s own as an exploration that I could build on over time. The other goal will be to make everything work together as a group of photographs that’s dynamic  and visual compelling. To get to that final list in the next month or so I’ll expand, add, and remove things from the following inventory over the next few months.  Hopefully I’ll also get a chance to try and execute a few of these in the near future as well. I imagine some just will not work well and I wont be able to tell until I try to execute.

1. Tarps –  I have a fascination with tarps. In particular the woven plastic variety. I’ve thought about doing various projects with them but the most resonant and the one I think has the most staying power is pretty simple. I’ll purchase as many basic colour tarps as possible. I imagine I’ll end up with; blue, orange, white, silver and green tarps. I”d prefer eight foot squares but I don’t want to incur the cost of having them custom made so I might have to get them a little larger and possibly rectangular rather than square. I plan to either hang these tarps after a particularly serious snowfall, or lie them on the fresh snow in a vacant lot somewhere. The goal is simply to get the colorful tarp square isolated within a framed, vibrant white background. This particular piece has an added dimension for me. I could easily just draw this, or create it in illustrator or Photoshop  but I want to create the composition with tarps and snow for some reason. In a way with Tarps I’ll be creating a very simple, minimal, abstract image in a fairly complicated and involved manner. I see these as physical sculptures that represent very minimal paintings.

So it’s Monday a few weeks after I originally wrote this part of the post on Tarps and I have yet to find the perfect tarpaulins. I’ve also realized a more practical way of executing these pieces. I’ll simply build a whack of square stretched canvas frames. I could make them in a myriad of sizes, but all square. The goal would be to create two pieces. One would be the photographs. No matter what size the square stretched canvases are, each of the image will easy translate to a 36 x 36 square print. The actual painted pieces could easily be planned and created to interlock into one big square wall piece of painting.

The following is an image I found today that represents the square of squares idea I was thinking about. This is from an amazing math site called the Global Constraint Catalogue I’m going to do my best to understand how they figured this out, but this is what the larger “square” piece from the Monday revelation would look like although I’ll be working with twenty one different colour panels. I’d like to see if I could make the twenty one colours represent something other than just the minimum number of squares for squaring the square. So now I look for a colour system in history that relied upon 21 colours. I may just create my own colour wheel with 21 blocks on it if I can’t find anything relating to 21 in Josef Albers theory of colour.

There’s a derivative of Tarps I’ve recently thought about that I’ll probably try to do as well. It could be an easier lift. For this derivative shoot I would ask the guy who has moved into the industrial spot on our street if I can use the exterior of his building. He’s place is called Factory and he has the occasional party.  Anyway I’ll just simply ask him if I could use the front widows of the building. it’s a nice brick facade with five largish industrial widows. I’d simply take the tarps of different colours and configure them to cover those windows to varying degrees. Some might be covered completely, some might be organically and naturally draped so some of the underlying widow could be seen. I’d then fame the windows in the viewfinder in various manners to create pieces that would represent diptychs, or triptychs of the tarped windows.

2. Boxes – I hope to use the tarps from the first concept in this piece but I’m not trying to  connect the two pieces. I’d shoot Boxes in the spring or summer. While exploring for Wandering I happened upon a series of utility boxes in the green space wedged between the Lakeshore and the Gardiner Expressway. These probably hold switching devices, light controls or something utility related. Whatever their purpose they aren’t high voltage or anything and don’t appear to be touchy or they wouldn’t be fully accessible to pedestrians. The plan is to cover the various boxes with tarps in such a way that they simple become colorful geometric shapes surrounded by landscaped natural stuff. I’m hoping they’ll look bizarre enough to be engaging and and that they will retain measure of aesthetic attraction for me. If this doesn’t work I’ll simply opt for a self portrait in a field of me wrapped in one of the tarps. I may need to get assistance for these “self portraits”. I’m not entirely sure I could manage wrapping myself up the way I want to while maintains safety level that’s comfortable. I’ll also have to get a remote control shutter release for the camera so I can take a true self portrait in this manner.

3. White – is a result of some images I found on line. While trying to explain Tarps above I came across a bunch of sites that described creating shelter structures in the woods. Specifically there was one site that showed how to create a simple protective draping out of a white tarp hung over a taught line and then stretched via the corners to various trees where it was tied down. It immediately struck me that the white tarp became a shape in the photographic frame that appeared alien to the scene and therefore more resembled a Photoshopped subtraction of colour in the photo than an actual physical structure within the setting of the photo. The image I create will hopefully amplify this effectively  Again I’m using a physical manipulation of space to appear like a digital manipulation of the space. If I’m trying to say anything I’m working on early themes and suggesting that there’s something of value in the effort even if the results are attainable by some other easier method. IN a way this embraces my ideas on inconvenience being more attractive to me than comfort or convenience.

4. Leaves - This plan is for next fall when I would be to head to my neighborhood Campbell Park and rake leaves. Not for the sake of actually bagging them up but just to take pictures of the resultant shapes. In my head I picture raking a big pile into an elliptical shape that when viewed from a bit of distance appears as a complete and well shaped circle that hovers within a field of deep green grass. I figure if I get up early enough om some nice and cold fall day when it’s dark and rake until sunlight nobody would be awake to bother me. The idea of someone coming along and seeing the weirdly eccentric and anally arranged leaf pile also interests me. Hopefully it will make someone smile, or at least scratch their head.

5. Paths – This is another one of those ideas that’s been percolating with me for four or five years. I once took an unassuming photograph of a small worn path in a patch of grass. The image has stayed with me and I often think about it and that path. For this proposed piece I’d find a vacant field. It might be worth my while to locate something like a clearing in a forest or a clearing or meadow of tall grass. I’d then figure out what sort of line might enhance the composition and create that line in the field by walking back and forth over a predetermined path for hours and hours. This piece would also have an inherent meditative aspect to it. I think I’d really like the repetitive route and the slow trampling of the path. I see this as a meandering route through the heart of a meadow, but I’ve also thought about more absurd paths. A circular route that by it’s nature is endless. A circle around a tree would also be interesting yet harder to capture with the camera. In writing this it might be interests to create such a circular path around a tree, but have it actually branch off “behind” the tree out of the frame or view of the camera. there’s an absurdity here I like that correlates to The Task that I performed for Nuit Blanche.

6. Cone – With an average size bag or bags of gravel I’d create a conical pile. I think I’d have to experiment with it to figure out how to create the structure, but I’d want to make something a bit stretched so it would fighting against gravity to be built. Maybe I’d have to build some sort of retaining cage, plexi-glass housing or at the very least some sort of internal structure to allow the conical mound to be built taller and slimmer than if it was dumped out the back of a truck. I see this on a sidewalk or a paved road somewhere. Maybe it’s on a paved road like that goes nowhere and isn’t used anymore in the country. Those cul de sacs you see from the 401 on the way to Barrie come to mind. Dirt roads that really provide access to houses but are not through routes and end in a circular nothingness. Maybe it’s in the  path of some access way to a now defunct quarry

7. Clearing – These images would be related to Leaves and Paths above. In a large long grass field I’d create different sized clearings. I figure I could do this with a scythe, hedge trimmers or in a more detailed and controlled manner with a pair of scissors. The clearings could be simply small areas of grass cut to different heights, or areas of grass sculpted to create contours of different heights. Rather than cut a chunky circle out of a field, I could cut a well formed half-sphere. I could do this in farmers field. It could be done in corn or some other crop. The ideal would be to select a smaller area of a wheat field and carve out the spheres sculpting the wheat into a topographical sculpture. For this I’d need to get a small plot of land for myself for this purpose. That could be an added dimension that I’ve actually grown the material I use to sculpt.

8. Foliage – This came to me while at my brother’s place on lake Huron. It’s a very idyllic and quiet place.

In dense deciduous overgrowth, carve a path to allow light to travel from one area to another. Take pictures of the sculpted holes. This could be in a single tree’s leaf canopy or the canopy of multiple trees. The goal would be to create a straight pathway to the open air and sunlight. I’m not sure that the foliage could be shaped in such a way that –without being detrimental to the tree– the carved open path in the canopy focuses beams of light onto the floor of the forest in places. It might actually be easier to do with PVC conduit that reaches beyond the canopy and is angled in such a way to allow sunlight at a certain time of day to be focused down it’s length ending in circles on the forest floor. There might be easier ways to do this using tarps with holes cut out of them suspended over the forest floor that I could fool around with and manipulate the natural light.

9. Nails – At one time I was working on a new concept for a performance or installation piece for Hamilton’s annual Supercrawl. I never ended up submitting my proposal but it focused on Stelco or the steel industry. The common Ardox nail was developed there. The Ardox is still the nail of choice in the construction industry. But I digress. The fact is that the image of a three or four inch Ardox nail has stuck with me for over a year. It’s my Twitter account identifying image. It can be seen on my Facebook page.

For this piece I would take a thirty pound box of four inch Ardox spiral nails and dump it in the middle of a concrete floor somewhere to be photographed. I’d sculpt the pile or simply spread the contents out over the floor, spacing each nail in such a way that it didn’t impinge on any neighboring nails space. I could completely cover the floor in this manner or alternately create a pathway that mimics a river bed. I like the geometric idea of covering the whole floor’s surface because it reminds me somewhat of an Agnes Martin painting.

10. Topiary - Construct weird unfamiliar shapes out of wire mesh, or whatever is used in topiary construction and grow the plants in over the course of the year. In writing this I think the idea is unattainable. I’m fairly certain that I’ll need to grow the plants for a few years to get to the point where I can trim them to the realise the shapes I’m thinking about in the type of density I’m imagining.

11. Lights. Take a dark street and a relatively obscured home or building with a solitary front facade window. The idea is to pile interiors lamps into the window and let their light spill out into the darkness and then capture. Hopefully the image will be intensely bright and somewhat blasted at it’s core and then fade off into complete blackness in every direction. This idea might be better served by heading out into the country with a small generator and a bunch of lights. I could then set up the mass of lights in a confined space. I see these as floor lamps of adjustable heights. I’d photograph these from a fair distance away where the light has little to no effect.

12. Cups -  Somewhere to be determined in the city. Spend a few weeks visiting a certain location and then walking around the vicinity and collecting empty coffee or drink cups. It will take a few weeks to get enough to be dramatic and I’ll have to find a place to store the bags of cups prior to executing the shoot.

After I’ve got four or five garbage bags of cups I can take them to a predetermined spot and pile them and arrange in what looks like a haphazard manner in some weird doorway, or beside some lonesome bench somewhere. The idea is to create this unreal pile of trash created by an unidentified and fictitious person. This might be too staged.

13. Packaging – I worked on this for about an hour several months ago and produced a work that was sort of interesting. I took the exterior box from a common tube of toothpaste and sliced into sections like a loaf of bread them rearranges those sections so each was slightly offset from the other and photographed. While writing this it might be more compelling to cut the packing via laser into a series of shapes, maybe circles, then discard any excess packaging and “rebuild” the package like a jigsaw that instead of interlocking joins together with suggested space. This is definitely an interior piece and as such deviates slightly from the other concepts. It also involves a fairly complex technology and by virtue of this is removed from the simpler concepts in this grouping. This one might be better left for a show that focuses on similar projects. I could see developing a series of these studio shots taken on white or black backgrounds.

14. Balloons – This is an idea that just came out of nowhere. I’ll live with it for a bit and see if has merit. It might be too cute to be of any worth. I can see it being relatively humorous but the trick will be to keep it from being too contrived. I imagine the loading dock overhang at the old Outside Music office on Carlaw in the east end of the city. This was  was relatively low-fi when I knew it fifteen years ago.  On the dock I could fill a few hundred helium balloons and let them rise, constrained by the overhang of the dock itself. The bland and industrial location would contrast nicely with the lighthearted and celebratory balloons. Alternately I could completely fill a squash court or build enclosures to contain the spaces behind windows in various buildings and shoot these in such a way that an illusion is created of a house or building  being completely filled with to overflowing with balloons.

15. Books – This would be a bit similar to the secondary premise for Balloons.

In doorways at my house, completely fill up each space where the doorway should be with a wall of books, spine out so all you see are the page edges crammed into the door jams. The whole piece should suggest a feeling of being trapped or confined. Maybe a sense of mystery and intrigue at the reasoning for the walls, or again perhaps it will suggest that the room beyond is complete rammed with books. Again, as I write this I’m now thinking this is a partner image to the balloons concept. It could be expanded with other household articles. Maybe I pile the doorways full of clothes, or maybe the coffee cups can be arranged in openings. I could manage a multitude of articles to convey the same or different things. Books, balloons, clothing, coffee cups, water bottles, newspapers, old electronics, etc.

16. Holes – Simply dig a perfect cylindrical hole in clay or in dirt using water to form the sides and prevent them from caving in like you might build a sand castle. Picture the reverse of a sandcastle carved out of a dirt field before construction begins. It could end up being a concave sculpture that resembles a tiered landscape.

This is one of those ideas that has stayed with me since the creation of The Task for Nuit Blanche. I see this as a performance piece filmed. I start with a near pile of implements and proceeds like I’m creating an archaeological dig. The end goal though is to create the space, not to discover stuff. It might turn out however to be about discovering stuff as well. Urban archaeology.

17. Blind - Another spur of the moment concept. I figured this one out while writing the older ideas above.

Using heavy gauge fishing line or some other reasonably hidden support method I plan to hang window blinds in mid air as if suspended and closing off the light to an invisible building. I think I could rig these on fishing line that’s suspended from the underside of the pedestrian bridge by my house.

18. Falling - I just had a dream that gave me another a idea. In October 2013, after the leaves have dropped from the trees in High Park. Take coloured paper and create paper leaves that will biodegrade. Make these multiple colours, or one very vivid and uncharacteristic fall leaf colour like white, or maybe blue. Whatever the decision, place the “fake” leaves under trees in what would will look like a surreal second fall. This could a two part project. One part could be the leaves photographed in different locations in the park. Go into the location early, Maybe 4 or 5:00 and create the pieces. Shoot them when the sun comes up. The other part could be to wait until people start to populate the park and take pictures of them interacting with the leaves, or maybe even a video. Maybe someone will come along and re-arrange them or rake them up.

A better less “cute” idea might be to make circular leaves, or geometric shaped leaves, so it doesn’t look like I’m trying to “copy” the leaf shape. Maybe 3 dimensional paper sculptures? I series of different sized-sized cubes all in black?

Artist in Attendance: January 12, 2:00 p.m. until 4:00 p.m. After that I can arrange to be at the gallery by appointment over the 2 week run. If you want to see the work prior to the opening or the exhibition dates please contact Rosie Prata or Julie Piotrowski at Bau-Xi Photo via e-mail at info@bau-xiphoto.com or by calling 416-977-0400.

The Bau-Xi Photo exhibition catalogue can be viewed by clicking here. Prices can be seen online at Bau-Xi Photo.

Descriptions and a brief explanation of how each photo happened can be found here.

Wandering is the personification of an ongoing love affair with urbanity in all its glory. With this series of images – shot in downtown Toronto – the artist continues to explore our relationship with the utilitarian by manipulating the context in which we see it and by protracting our interaction with it. Wandering: File under formalism, minimalism, found art, photography, math, OCD, hiking, humour, and colour.

If you’re interested in attending the opening there’s a Facebook event page with more info.

The following is an interview I did with Chris Shepherd about the show.

Opening – Dundas West Roncesvalles

Q. Wandering – what’s the significance of the title?
A. Wandering is what I do. I wander the city endlessly and take pictures. I visit places over and over again to do this, often returning to locations that resonate with me year after year after year. Wandering relaxes me and allows me to familiarize myself with a specific setting. It’s also an amazing way to find things. You can’t do that in a car or on a bicycle. I explore when I walk. Walking also slows things down incredibly and gives me time to think. After a while I see differently and I’m more likely to notice the subtleties of a location and hopefully I’m able to capture them in a way that means something to me. Typically this process takes a few days to happen. It’s why most of my work is focused in Toronto. When I travel anywhere else it’s hard to get into that state of familiarity to achieve the same thing. I consider myself a pedestrian first and foremost. There’s a great French noun that seems relevant– flâneur– it comes from the verb flâner meaning “to stroll”. The wiki definition of that term is fascinating. I also really like the term urban pastoral to describe the images in this series.

From a different angle Wandering reflects my recent mental state. Lately I’ve been wandering from my art practice and into middle age. Wandering describes the somewhat confounding mental shift I’ve experienced in my photographic practice. I’m constantly thinking of projects but they’re increasingly more photo-based than traditional photographs. I conceptualize but I don’t execute. Wandering is rooted in a weird atmospheric mix of indecision and uncertainty. This exhibition was a journey and was challenging to produce psychologically. In the end I allowed myself to wander away from the rigid conceptualization and overall themes that I’ve fixated on over the past five years to arrive at the body of this work.

Electrical Panel – Bohemian Embassy Queen Street

Q. Where does this infatuation with pedestrian banality originate?
A. I like terms like banality, boredom, and pedestrian. I don’t associate them with the negative that others tend to instill them with. I’m an observer, and instead of observing the spectacular or the sublime I find interest in the everyday. There are enough people looking at the extraordinary. It took years to write my tiny artistic statement and I think it’s pretty funny that when distilled to the very core that statement becomes my Twitter description; “I enjoy looking at things that other people are not that interested in”. I have to slightly qualify that by saying “I enjoy looking at things that the majority of people don’t find interesting”. Out of the billions of people in the world there’s probably a few million who see the word in a similar way and for whom my work might resonate.

Hydro Pole – Don Valley Pathway

Q. Where are the people?
A. People interest me as a vehicle for my art to be viewed and in direct relation to it and not as a subject matter for it. Besides, I’m not that good at thinking about people in the context of my aesthetic right now. Maybe that will change, but for now I’m drawn to solitude and contemplation. The potential for people. It’s hard to express yourself and your interests honestly with others around. My interest lies in the serenity and the solitude I find in things and places. I’m not anti-social but I love being by myself in the city. People think it’s impossible to find peace here — I would strongly disagree. In the summer I’m often up at 5:00 a.m. on weekends and will have finished a good three hours of walking before a lot of people wake up.

Despite the fact that there are no people in my images, their presence can’t be escaped. I’m more interested in the notion of people and how a place resonates with their presence when no one is around. It’s not about ghost, but impressions. At one point I was working on a theory that –described loosely– postulated that a place only existed in a way that I found interesting because people had visited there and would visit there again. If you look at all my work almost everything I shoot is in a stasis between human interactions. It’s waiting for something to happen either tomorrow or in twenty years time. I’m interested in that potential of place.

Sandro Martini and Fan – Grenville at Bay

Q. About the square — what’s with the uniformity of the presentation and the subject?
A. My first camera was a Hawkeye Brownie that took 2 – 1/2 in square –120– film. It was B&W and I produced abysmally poor images taken on a primary school trip to African Lion Safari, I was probably about nine or ten. After that I grew up shooting 35 mm film. I’d save money and buy the most advanced consumer SLR of the day. My father did the same. As I got interested in producing work I got more advanced cameras but I always wanted to use a medium format. The 6 x 6 Hasselblad was the aspirational goal. After shooting so much 35 mm digital over the past ten years I’ve started to resent the prohibitive nature or of the 2:3 frame ratio and started began to visualize things in a frame aspect ratio of 1:1. Of course my camera shoots 2:3 ratio but as soon as I started thinking square it’s all I shot and composed in. I now constantly look at possible subjects and through the viewfinder with the intention of cropping to a square frame. I don’t think I can escape from the square file and frame thing. Now my dream is a full frame square sensor camera. I guess I could work on a Hasselblad 6×6 with a digital back but I’d prefer the comfort and familiarity of an SLR type rig. Maybe someday. That said I’m completely comfortable with my cropping scenario and my existing camera.

I’m also thinking about circular cropping abut still working this out. I think it has the potential to unlock a new world of image making for me, a world that questions the atypical presentation of art and the nature of the gallery. My theory is that it might transform the photographs into more or less sculptural works. This whole circular thing is based on the work of Kenneth Nowland or what I remember of his work. I remember him as someone who challenged and pushed against the limitations of the traditional frame.

Abacus Office – Dundas Street West

Q. These images seem a little more whimsical than Waiting and Learning. Was that intentional?
A. Completely. I’ve always appreciated humour. I really like the idea of contemporary art with a somewhat sharp sense of humour or the absurd. I think that’s why lately I enjoy work by people like Alex Kisilevich, John Sasaki, and Robyn Cummings –to name a few. I’ve also always liked the work of Tom Friedman for a long time. Hopefully my new work is funny and thoughtful without trying too hard. I’m a relatively melancholy person who loves a good laugh. I’m not really after belly laughs, but I do hope the work elicits a smile here and there. It’s relatively dark humour, but it’s still humour. Hopefully I’ve avoided irony.

Brush – Gardiner Expressway

Q. What’s your physical process.
A. I carry my camera everywhere but it doesn’t always make it out of my bag. My process is very focused on the image and composition and the work is about developing things in my head after seeing something that resonates with me. I do a lot of bus and streetcar riding but also a tremendous amount of walking and cruising around on a bicycle. I hate driving — not because of the act of driving– but because I can’t concentrate on what I see without being a bad driver. The bus is amazing because while you travel around the city you just see so much. I’ll pass the same place for days or months and then I start to think about it all the time. I’ll then make a conscious effort to revisit that location with the explicit intention of taking pictures. I go back until I’ve got what I feel is a strong piece. For some of the images in Wandering I revisited a location five or six times. Sometimes I don’t get anything I like over multiple visits and it takes years to capture what I’ve imagined is the picture. Again it’s about familiarity.

After I’ve got something I live with it. I put it up on my website and keep going back to look at it and write about it. If I grow tired of something I delete it and tend not to think of the image again. If I’m happy with an idea or image after a few weeks I work to expand on the concept.

I shoot on a Canon 5D Mark II and it’s plenty of camera for me. I use available lighting and tend not to use a tripod anymore. In photoshop I crop, curve, level, sharpen and saturate slightly to get the true colour I remember from the shoot. I find the Canon sensor is a bit understated for colour saturation but at the same time I’m careful not to overstate the colours in processing.

Shiatsu – Roncesvalles and Grafton

Q. What’s your relationship to the city?
A. I love it. I want to grow old in it and watch it change and expand. It pains me when people so blatantly show their dislike for it like our current mayor. He’s done more to destroy this city than anyone in his position has done in the past. I also think that cities in general –Toronto included– get a bum deal. After all, this city is a safe, vibrant, caring place to be. People outside the city are so ill informed about the actual nature of urbanity. I grew up in the suburbs, and a friend once captured a belief that I still hold. You live in the city or the country but why live in between? Don’t get me wrong, the city can be a drag at times, but I wouldn’t swap it for anything right now. I also mean no disrespect to the suburban, I’m just saying it’s not for me.

Seriously, the city is painted as unfriendly, cold, callous, dangerous and expensive. I’d argue these ideas are simply misconceptions. The city is arguably expensive, but I’m comfortable investing in culture than square footage any day. Our house is too big for us, but we’re also very lucky to even have a house. We couldn’t afford one in today’s market where we are. We have some furniture and we have art. We could get a bigger place in the suburbs but I wasn’t cut out to be “suburban”. I don’t need more space or more stuff.

I could go on an on, but the biggest reason I prefer the city is it’s socialist or humanist nature. Since I’ve lived in the city my sense of community and neighborliness has increased exponentially from my twenty years in the suburbs.

This Month Only – Dupont at Franklin

Q. Do you shoot film?
A. I shot film for about twenty years. As soon as digital came along I was in heaven. I’m not a photo purist. I respect technical ability in anyone, but it’s not my interest. I’m more interested in feeling that the image I want when I take it is captured. I dislike the uncertainty of film and the temperamental nature of processing. The time lag is also somewhat separating for me. I hate waiting to work an image. I also dislike darkroom work. I was never good at it and always had an aversion to the chemicals. Add to that the fact that I could never produce a final product that I was happy with when I was a kid and I never bothered to fully invest in the practice to get better. I really do just like shooting and thinking about finished images. Digital works great for me and I’m fairly competent in Photoshop with simple manipulation. I have a 4 x 5 that a friend gave me to use, and so far I’ve been thinking about it and know I’ll shoot 4 x 5 before I’m done, but right now it’s just not top of my list.

I’m also not interested in perfect clarity. I’m fine with a bit a noise, or a slight focus problem. I’ve recently come to appreciate the quote that “sharpness is a bourgeoisie concept”. I can’t claim to take that statement by Henri Cartier-Bresson completely serious though, because I’m middle class and I’m dealing in a cultural commodity. I’m also pretty anal with my images and I do like a degree of clarity.

Hose and Graffitti – Bay Street

Q. Is there a spiritual aspect to your work or an underlying philosophy?
A. Hopefully my work is about simplification and purity of vision. I like to associate it with words like; math, Zen, fixation, peace, serenity and compulsiveness. I really do love the mundane, still, image. Minimalism and formalism are definitely at my works core. In particular I’ve always been drawn to what I’ll call minimal and formalist painting like that of of Ellsworth Kelly, Joseph Albers, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt. There are a bunch of others, but those are the names I know the best.

In a way I’m trying to slow things down, I think the cliche “stop and to smell the roses” is great, only my roses tend to be a bit dirty and — more often than not– smell like motor oil or garbage and no one really looks at them.

RBC – Ossington and College

Q. How do you get access to some of the interior locations?
A. Usually I don’t. For this show’s fifteen images I never accessed anything that anyone couldn’t have by walking by. Even the interior shots are taken from outside those spaces through the glass. Gaining access is a real downer for me and more often than not it disappoints and frustrates me. Given that I’m also uncomfortable taking advantage of a situation or going where I’m not suppose to go it makes it difficult. I hate confrontation and try to avoid it at all costs. My earlier shows based on the subway or school systems relied on legal permissions and I didn’t want that to be an aspect of this body of work. Someday it would be awesome to be successful enough that I could get someone to do the work of getting me access to places. For now though I don’t need it.

Hoarding and Tree – West Elm East of Jefferson

Q. What inspires you?
A. Early on it would have been other image makers. The painters, the writers and to some degree photographers. I tend to see less photography now that I’m seriously producing it. I find it difficult to get passed the idea of original thought and there are so many photographers doing such good work the odds of me originating an idea executed by another photographer is rather frustrating. I’m working to realise you can’t work in a vacuum but to help me avoid those feelings of disappointment I prefer to look at painting, sculpture, performance and drawing instead of photography. At one point I would say film and literature inspired me, but lately I’ve almost completely stopped looking at movies and reading. By avoiding a lot of photography, if I do come up with something and execute it then happen to see similar work I’m OK. I’ve executed and who cares that there are similar projects out there.

I do think that the work of some amazing photographers has become part of my subconscious and without ever seeing it again it informs how I see the world. I would never be shooting what I’m shooting if I hadn’t seen or read about these artists. My list of big names would include; Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Lyne Cohen, Edward Burtynsky, Robert Polidori, and Andreas Gursky to name a few.

Currently I’m inspired by almost anything I see.

Post Office – Millwood and Malcolm

Q. Do you have a favourite image from the series?
A. No. There are four or five of the fifteen I think about all the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re my favourites. I also think about the images I didn’t include that could possibly have made the cut for January. I got input from the gallery on the final selection because I felt a bit too close to the work. I have no trouble editing down to a certain level but then I like help to figure out what someone –who’s not me– likes or doesn’t like. For this show we didn’t include a few pictures I felt were pretty good, but I agreed somewhat with someone else’s comments and I really needed to cut a few. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the images we didn’t include anymore, but I really appreciate the external opinion. I don’t necessarily get criticism on any honest level. It would be nice to hang out at a show and be a fly on the wall. If people don’t like the work they tend to clam up and not say anything. Sometimes that’s disappointing. I like talking about myself and the work. I kid myself that I’d even like to do that if someone really dislikes the images. Truth is I don’t have the thickest skin yet. I’m self conscious about my work.

Despite this though I really should say that my favourite image is Sandro Martini and Fan – Grenville at Bay. This isn’t because I want it hanging in my house any more than the others, but because there’s a bit of a narrative to it. That photograph helped me break out of a fairly serious slump. It was also the image that took the most work in this series to produce because I had to track down the artist who’s work is prominently featured in the image through his Toronto gallery to get his permission to include it in my show. Sandro Martini ended up being very gracious and approved very quickly. When I look at this image I think of how nice a gesture that was. He could have been a complete dick. He seemed genuinely OK with it. It means a lot to me. If he hadn’t approved I would have never printed the image.

StorageMart – Research Road

Q. When was the work for Wandering shot?
A. The earliest image is from the beginning of 2012, but the majority of work here was shot in the summer and fall of 2012. Once I put my head down and decided to book a show I needed work to fill the walls. This forced me back to the street and back to looking. In the past I’ve created the work and then booked a show, but I was dragging my ass so badly that I seriously thought I was going to give it all up. I realized then I love being an artists and really want to continue. I didn’t want to fail because of a mental glitch. Sometimes a goal is a good way to get your ass in gear especially when it’s sort of self-inflicted. I would also never let my gallery down. They’ve been pretty amazing to me. I’m happy with this work, and it never would have happened if I didn’t really look at myself and realize I was in serious danger of fucking up an opportunity that millions of people never get. That quite simply I’m lucky to have the opportunity to be an artist. I really believe that it’s a totally privilege and not a right. I bet I get in trouble for saying that.

Log – Don Valley Pathway

Q. What’s next?
A. I have a list of projects that I’ve been compiling on my website. It started out as a notebook on my phone, but I eliminated about 90% of the ideas because I felt they were sort of lame. There are about 100 post on my site that go through a range of ideas and about fifty percent of those are involving photography. There are six or seven photography projects that I’ll definitely pursue, but I need to finish the studio in the basement first. I’m more interested lately in retreating from the streets a bit and focusing on some weirder projects that are photo based.

As for more traditional projects I’m still very interested in expanding on the Learning series of educational architectural picture. for that matter anything I’ve done already I’d like to continue to develop and shoot. That includes the subway. I’d love to get into the London underground for a month or so. I’d also like to expand on the hospital images I’ve shot and maybe get access to any other more institutional places. I’m fascinated with the older architecture somewhat ubiquitous in the public institutional world.

Q. What’s your favourite colour?
A. Orange

To join an infrequent e-mail blast for chrisshepherd.net please fill this form in. It’s simple. I promise not to send stuff out very often, maybe an update every month or two pointing out new stuff or news that might be pertinent. Thanks for your interest. – Chris

Opening – Dundas West Roncesvalles

The more I live with this photograph the more it becomes one of my favourites. It’s also took me months to shoot, if you can believe that.  I had initially left this un-cropped in a standard landscape ratio. It was OK in that 2:3 ratio but something bugged me about it. After a while of staring at the shot I figure out that when the frame of the picture was rectangular it battled with the portrait oriented rectangle of the opening. It wasn’t until I made it square like all the other images in this series that the image was a success.

On the east side of Roncesvalle if you’re heading south, just before the lights that separate Roncesvalles proper from Dundas West there’s a driveway that takes you back to the most decrepit auto shop you can imagine. It’s like something out of another century. The gravel in the photo is the driveway back to this shack. The opening itself is the side wall of an apartment and strip mall building. I’m standing in the ramp that just to the left of the frame leads down to the underground parking. I’m not quite sure what this little openings purpose is. It might actually be a thoughtful modification to the building to allow light to pass through and naturally illuminate the area where I’m standing which is shaded by the overhang of the actual building.

It’s the absurdity of the opening,  the colours and shapes of the walls and the yellow post and how they sit within and around the rectangular space of that opening that I love more and more. It just feels good.

Sandro Martini and Fan – Grenville at Bay

This image was  taken on what became a pivotal day of wandering. I’d been unable to capture anything I liked day after day. Nothing I was shooting was striking me as interesting or printable until I came upon this.

The photograph captures the architectural space being constructed inside a new condo building. The lower floors on the Grenville Street side end of the Murano building make up a glass room to be used at some unspecified date in the future as a restaurant. Inside this space the Italian fresco painter Sandro Martini has installed an ambitious, commissioned, public art series of abstract panels on the walls and on floor level glass partition walls. At the time that I took this image the room was bereft of everything except this fan, a table, small fire extinguisher, news paper (on the floor) and Martini’s paintings. My guess is that the fan was used to dry the paint required to join the preprinted wall panels together that make up the finished installation piece.

This photograph was taken by resting the lens ring on the exterior of the buildings glass wall/window and shooting through into the expanse of what will be the restaurant. There are a bunch of things I like about this image.

First the composition conforms to a structure that recurs frequently in my work. Here the picture plane is broken into three relatively equal horizontal strips creating an internal triptych. This compositional style attached itself to me through a series of horizon photographs I shot about six or seven hers ago on the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. in those photographs the three horizontal strips of composition were typically made up of beach, water and sky.

The colours and complexity of the fresco painting contrast with the monochromatic surroundings and simplicity of the walls and the grey of the concrete floor.

As a critic once remarked it’s a simple expository shot. I like the term expository. A big part of the point here is to simply document what I see and describe why I think it’s interesting. Lately I’ve been thinking my work relates more and more to Bernd & Hilla Becher and their obsessive documentation of the commonplace. my work could be considered fine art, journalism, cataloging or simple straightforward observation.

Electrical Panel – Bohemian Embassy Queen Street

Like a few other photographs in this series I was never inside this space. I took the photograph through the glass facade.

I spent small patches of my life doing construction work. I did this for income, to help my father build a cottage and to renovate my home. I’m still doing this sort of work but sporadically as I get lazier and lazier. I’ve done electrical work, plumbing, framing, flooring, roofing and concrete foundation and footing work. I can’t consider myself very good at any of it, although I can swing a hammer very confidently. It does however give me an appreciation for skilled trades. I’m also interested in the complete foreign nature of this work to lots of people. They’ve never done it and therefore never had any chance to even comprehend it. My brother is the same as me only he has taken it to the next level and is basically capable of any job no matter what the size. He’s also very talented it and design in general and all of his skill comes from trial and error. My father was the catalyst for all this hands on type work. He built and renovated all his life and would have much happier if he’d been a cabinet maker or framer than an accountant.

I took this picture because I think the Bohemian Embassy is hideous and this is one of the only things of aesthetic interest I could salvage out of the architectural mess. Seriously, where have all the architects gone and where are the builders with vision? It’s all so transparently budget! This place is a glorified strip mall. It couldn’t be more ironically named. Maybe I’m too harsh but we seem to be extremely capable of building completely unremarkable buildings in this city. The condo craze is awesome for bringing people into the core of the city, I’m all about density. The sad truth however is that their moving into shitty, boring buildings constructed to save as much money as possible with no regard for actual design or aesthetic. I don’t however think the builders are to blame for all the negative I feel about these places. This electrical panel’s immaculately organized schematic and the reserved yet capably executed drywall mudding make me smile. By far the best thing about a remarkably unimaginative structrure.

Hydro Pole – Don Valley Pathway

For a few days in 2012 I took the 25 km bicycle route to the office. I even took time on these trips to stop and wander around which stretched the trip time well over 2 hours. It was great. This image was taken the same week I shot “Log – Don Valley Pathway” and contains much of the same humour.

There are a series of these hydro poles in an area just off the path north of Todmorden Mills and west of the Don River. I’m sure at one point they served as some sort of support for actual hydro lines but now they stand idle, the odd one festooned by a modest bird house. This composition made me laugh. The hydro pole stands in for the trunk of the tree in the background. This immediately reminded my of my childhood.

When we were small my parents were huge into secular Christmas. We had plywood cutouts for the front lawn, spot lights, Christmas lights and a huge tree with an obscene amount of gifts. Part of the annual preparation was for each kid to take a synthetic tree that consisted of a piece of doweling with angled holes drilled into it and glorified pipe cleaners that were draped with short pieces of tinsel. You built your tree and it sat in your room. Once it was assembled you wrapped the gifts you’d purchased for other family members and put them under the tree in your room until Christmas eve when they would be transported downstairs into the family room and under the tree with everyone else’s gifts.

This is what this tree and pole seemed to be recalling for me.

The incredible swath of darkness around the base of the pole interest me as well. It was early in the morning and the sun was very low.

Shiatsu – Rocesvalles

When I describe my images as Zen, this is an almost perfect example.

On Roncesvalles about a block north of Queen on the east side of the road is a non de script commercial strip mall on the bottom of a low rise apartment building. It’s not overly ambitious and all of the business here is very low key. This suite is for rent and use to be a Shiatsu clinic. The only reason I know that is by going back into the living history of Google Street View. I can take a trip back a few years and find this place.

I was instantly struck by the immaculate cleanliness of the interior and the subtle and calming lilac paint job. I shot this through the window which was also clean. The place is so immaculate that the colour and definition appears incredibly softened in comparison to my other ages shot through widows. It really does become a kind of hard lined abstract painting, and indeed I might try and paint this image or make a 3-D maquette of it and then photograph that construction and really try and make it look lie a painting.

I went back three or four times to the place. At one time I had a run in with the owner who had a bit of a shit fit with me taking pictures of it. I was very pleasant but she was obviously not a happy sort so I quickly went on my way. I’m not sure of the place is still vacant.

This Month Only – Perth at DuPont

This taken at the side of the scariest bar in my neighborhood. The signage actually reads “This Month Only” and the sidewalk in front usually has 3 or 4 very sketchy looking people hanging around smoking. It’s the kind of place where the bartender is about 90 without a hint of it being on purpose. I’ve never been in for a drink, but then again I never liked Labatt’s Blue.

There’s nothing aesthetically interesting about the place, or there wasn’t until they did some “renovations” inside and piled the garbage up here beside the building. I couldn’t have arranged the stuff to be more perfect. The colors, textures and lines of this natural tableau still freak me out when I look at this.

Here’s a perfect example of a place I pass by hundreds of times, and on one particular day for perhaps only a few hours it’s transformed by accident into something I find extraordinary. 

Log – Don Valley Pathway

Log was discovered while riding my bicycle north on the Don Valley Pathway. That’s the amazing pedestrian/cycle route that follows the path of the DVP up from Lakeshore to well passed where I took this shot just south of the Brickworks on the east side of the river. If you ever get the time and feel like discovering a very special part of the city, this is a wonderful outing. I’m so fortunate to be able to travel on this route to work every day during the spring, summer and fall. It’s a long trip but I plan to take it every day I can in 2013 because it’s so spectacular. This route to work on my bicycle takes about 90 minutes and cover approximately 25 km. I consider it a privilege to be able to take this route to work. most people commute by car to and from the city on journeys that often take this long.

This photograph is taken of an off ramp that might serve as access to the Pathway if it wasn’t gated off. You could drive down this if you traveled across the valley floor from West to East. That’s sort of hard to describe without a map. I don’t think the road is ever used for actual vehicles. It may have been at one time but it’s not now. The asphalt  is old but in good shape. You can see this place when traveling on the subway as it moves from Castle Frank to Broadview  looking out the north windows of the train.

I assume a few kids found this log, dragged it across the road and left it. This is not really dangerous, just funny. Taken on a rare beautiful late summer day. It was such a pleasure to find. I almost wonder of the perpetrators might have been artists. If they weren’t it’s a great example of unintentional found art. I’d love to explain to the perpetrators of this why I was so pleasantly freaked out when I stumbled upon it. Even if they were a little drunk when they created the scene I love how it works on so many levels.

First it’s a blatantly absurd tableau in a rather idyllic setting in what could be considered the heart of the city. Part of the attraction is the positively perfect sense of danger where there is no danger.

Another intriguing aspect of this is the log itself. It’s possibly the largest and most perfect piece of driftwood I’ve ever seen.

Abacus Office – Dundas Street West

The abandoned condominium office could be a complete series in itself. I’ve taken pictures for years all over the cities downtown core and west end that features these forgotten and forlorn marketing structures that have served their purpose and wait in limbo to be leveled so the foundations of the new structure can be built. It’s hard to imagine these interiors were once the main marketing thrust of these crazy places. In this particular room, left of the frame there’s a hole blasted through the drywall. It looks like someone just simply attacked the wall with a hammer to make a passageway between the rooms, once the structure had served it’s usefulness. To me this speaks of the falsity of Condo marketing. They sell lifestyle to those who may not be fully aware of it. They’re are in the business of cool and I sometimes forget who they are trying to attract.

The abacus building will be really quite modest in size but it does interesting so much better than things like the Bohemian Embassy. It’s not a comment on the quality of this particular building. I really like this building’s plans if I’m being honest and I think the people who bought places in here will be well served with them while the building itself adds to the aesthetic of the neighbourhood without being too tall to really detract from it.

I particularly like the left and forgotten, knock-off Saarinen – Knoll Tulip Table. Even these knock-offs are probably going to set you back $1000.00, which although much better than the $3500.00 for a real one is pretty expensive for a prop.

A few weeks after writing this completely uninformed little blurb above about the Abacus Office, The Toronto Standard has published an article on the developer Antonio Azevedo. He sounds very cool. I like the building even more now.

Brush – Gardiner Expressway

I’m fascinated by the unused land that surrounds municipal infrastructure. It started by exploring the cloverleaf of green space that is contained within the ramps an access roads that make up the DVP and Eglington interchange which I’ve explored a bunch of times.

On the north side of Lakeshore between Parklawn and Royal York there’s an abundance of this sort of space. It’s unused for the most part. This image was taken of a stretch of incline that rises to the Gardiner Expressway. The guardrail, signage and bush all help to make up this relatively absurd still life of the forgotten greenery of the city. I’m sure there’s a larger project in this subject matter.

Hose and Graffiti – Bay Street

What a prefect little grouping of oddities. I’m a sucker for cinder block and the white splotch of the covered up graffiti, the orange text that’s still vibrant, the green mesh tarps and casually coiled black hose are all balanced nicely by the electrical panels on one side and the column and wall detail contour on the other.

There’s also such a sense of order here. On a typical construction site everything is kept very neatly, I know because I use to be responsible for the cleaning of such places because I was the lowest construction grunt on a site.

Here in lies another fascination that I’ve yet to fully explore. Once again this photograph is taken through glass on a Sunday morning when no construction crews were around to chase me away. Ever since I took pictures of the construction of the Diamond and Schmitt Hudson building at King and Spadina through the glass, and the excavation site where the Tiff building now stands on King, I’ve wanted to explore construction more. In particular I’d like to shoot the excavation sites for large towers. There’s something intriguing about the empty hole with retaining supports that serves as the very beginning of the construction process. It’s such a huge undertaking. I’ve made lame attempts to get access to these type of locations, but I’ve always been so half assed about it that it’s never amounted to anything. I sometimes dream about being a documenter in a huge project like this. Being able to follow it through and gain access to every aspect of the construction along the way. I could serve a useful purpose for the contractors and building owners as well I could get a bunch of images for an exhibition.

I’m also a sucker for cinder block. It’s a very practical construction material. My understanding is that it’s much cheaper than poured concrete. There’s something about the uniformity of the block, the colour and the texture. It’s raw but somewhat refined. I think this interest in construction and block was part of the motivation for my Nuit Blanche project in 2010 where I moved about 16 tonnes of cinder block piece by piece from one spot to another then back again in The task.

RBC – College and Ossington

Like many of the other images I shoot this image was years in the making. I’ve lived in the west end of the city now for about 10 years. Over that time I’ve become an avid walker, and sometimes end up in this neighbourhood  It’s now beginning to change and become a little more gentrified but there’s still a large older population here and this bank obviously serves some of them. I’ve stood on this corner to catch the Ossington bus north or the Dundas West streetcar west uncounted times. Every time it seems like it’s one of the longest waits in the city for either. It’s probably my imagination but I also think it’s the city being unaware of their changing demographic and how to service them. Anyway, I’ve stared at this building a lot over the years.

Brutalist Bench – Charles Street

This is one of those locations where I haven’t actually visited often. I’ve been twice. The area is going through astounding transformation to the east with new high-end condo buildings. This is also pretty close to the now defunct Jarvis bicycle lanes, a sad Rob Ford story if there ever was one.

Brutalist architecture intrigues me. The Robarts Library on the University of Toronto campus, The old Bata Shoe head office on Eglington that has now been torn down, the Manulife Centre at Bay and Bloor to name a few. I don’t really like them but they interest me with their echoes of cold war European style.

The bench, leaves and pigeons are somewhat idyllic in contrast to the functional hydro building behind but even the hard, concrete patterning of the buildings facade is somewhat mellowed by the elements. Everything here is old. They certainly don’t have many benches like that hanging around the city any longer. I could imagine being 20 years older and sitting on this bench for hours.

StorageMart – Research Road

I wandered this area for weeks in the fall. There’s a ton of fairly light industrial use buildings, a lot of auto body shops, and now a plethora of new mass retail strip malls. I passed this building a bunch of time before I took some photographs. There’s something distinctly Canadian about this image in a mixed up way. There’s the direct reference to the Canadian flag in the actual structure of the composition, but there’s also something disturbingly nationalistic about self-storage.

When I grew up in the suburbs there were storage facilities like these all over the place. I also see so many of these places with their stereo-typically ”notice me” colours” on the outskirts of small towns like Collingwood and Seaforth. It astounds me that so many people have so much stuff that they need to store things to make room in their house. There’s also the aspect of storing things to hide them, hoarding, or transitional space  Often these places are used when renovating, or when actually moving from place to place. I can’t help but think though that 90% of the stuff sorted in these places is garbage accumulated over years of acquiring. I feel sort of lucky that we save very little. It just isn’t practical with a small home. Even things I’ve got loaded in the basement right now are 90% garbage that I just can’t get rid of easily. It’s amazing how much garbage we transport and store over the course of a lifetime. I think it’s sort of the mark of a spoiled society.

Post Office – Millwood and Malcolm

There will be a new condo building here in the next five years. Right now the existing post office was closed and stripped down to the metal studs. Another shot through the doorway glass of this building.

Post offices resonate with me on several levels. My father gave me his crazed stamp collection from the 30s and 40s when I was a kid and I collected stamps for a few years when I was in my early teens. I used to buy every new stamp that came out for a few years. I’d buy plate blocks and put them in a 70s style Back’s Photo album.

There’s also the fact that I was the generation that saw the introduction of e-mail and cellular phones. The downward spiral of the post office and it’s roll in day to day life. I’m not sure about anyone else but now I associate the mail with endless junk marketing, some bills and internet product delivery. The day of getting actual correspondence in the mail is long gone.

Finally there’s a distinct construction and contracting element to this image. I still make walls out of 2×4 timber and never really worked with metal stud walls too much except on industrial type sites. It’s still a little foreign and interesting to me.

Hoarding and Tree – West Elm East of Jefferson

In Liberty Village there’s still a lot of conversion happening. Older office and industrial buildings being gutted and reconfigured for condo usage. It’s amazing that I use to hang around here when it was nothing but artist studios and industrial space. No one would think to live here except artists trying to save a buck and hang in their studios. It still flabbergasts me that a lifestyle that was born out of economic necessity became a contemporary marketing and lifestyle aspiration! This whole area now has thousands of young professionals living in what they feel is a bohemian manner but with all mod cons.

There’s a bunch of things I like about this image. The tree itself is desperately out of place amidst the hoarding and scaffolding of the facade renovation.  The triptych-like split of the horizontal lines made up of the turquoise, blue and turquoise strips of the construction. The sadly bent and empty bicycle post. Lastly the area on the blue tarp where some bird or group of bids has left it’s mark from sitting on the tree branch and whiling away the hours despite the construction.

Deconstruction is about waste, technology, built-in obsolesce, transformation, reconstruction and reuse.

I plan to take obsolete items, trash and other stuff and take it apart. I’ll then take the component pieces and arrange them into patterns — spirals, labyrinths, squares, etc. so that they create aesthetically interesting and colourful compositions. I can then take photographs of these parts and blow them up to obscene proportions.

I think my old iphone, ipod, USB stick, and other similarly complex items would work well. I may need a soldering iron. I could also do the same thing with small appliances; toasters, blenders, etc.

Other material that could work are household and personal consumables. Things like twin-blade cartridges for my razor. If I was to get access to a laser cutter I could maybe take a blade and slice it up like a loaf of bread then photograph those slices neatly arranged in a line with my macro lens and print. Some sort of crazy cutting implement would make almost anything fair game.

Both ideas revolve around thoughts of waste and the North American disinterest of big business to be environmentally conscience. It’s also a simple extension of my central thesis simply stated, “looking at things that others aren’t interested to look at.” There’s an added element of my brother Peter who was always interested in taking things apart and rebuildig them. For me though this is not about funtionality. It’s more like sculpture. It’s also found art that existed all the time. I’m just reconfiguring stuff.

The most important piece has solidified in my mind and it’s the razor blade sliced into 5 or 6 pieces then photographed.

More and more I think about sculpture.

Here’s a 15 minute version that illustrates one possible approach.

Deconstruction indirectly comments on the annoying digital vs analog debate in photography and film. Here, instead of using Photoshop to easily and accurately create the Deconstructed then Reconstructed images I desire, the process will be done manually.  Painstaking physical manipulation to create an effect that others could easily do with little or no effort via a digital process. These physically constructed shots will then be captured digitally which further obscures the process creating an ironic tension.

Related to this I’ve been thinking of a statement that reads something like; “Do you dislike digital because it’s the inferior to analog, or because you’re afraid now that with millions of image makers publishing on-line you’re mediocre talents will be discovered and you will be eclipsed?

This stance is not a denial of analog, but an annoyance at those individuals who take the elitist position that digital sucks. I find these folks annoying in their arrogance and denial of a new generation of image makers who will quickly eclipse them.

Do Mathematicians, Physicists, Chemists and other intellectuals of that ilk still use chalk and blackboard? I have a sneaking suspicion they’ve progressed. I originally thought of this as a project photographing different blackboards with complicated proofs scrawled on them. Specifically, blackboards in the middle of rooms with nobody around. In my head these blackboards are surrounded by utilitarian, institutional 1950s decor as well. As I write this however I figured out a more realistic way to achieve something aesthetically interesting and a but less romantic.

In University graduate faculties across the globe there are some pretty smart people working on some pretty amazingly interesting and groundbreaking things. I’d like to document –in a series a photographs –some of the “figuring” of those people.

There may very well still be someone –or some group of academics– that are still working on blackboards so the original spark of an idea could maybe be realized in an image or two. I imagine now though that more common classroom things are items like; easel and paper, white boards, overhead projections, projections of computer desktops, pencil and paper, and maybe ipad, iphone and other electronic devices.

I’d like to take photographs of people thinking about their work, or actually bent over, and document some part of their work. Maybe these are simple images of a person standing beside an illustration of their work. Sort of showing it off, “look what I’ve done”.

I think it will look interesting, get me into a form of documentation that borders more on journalism and allow me to work with interesting, different thinkers. In a way I want to see if they think like I do, or feel like I do when I get an idea or figure out a way to execute something better. I’m also trying to figure out if others are sort of like me. I’m not comparing myself to very smart people who are actually producing work, but the emotions that go behind it.

I’ve always compared my process and the small moments of epiphany that I have every day with the feeling I had when I understood and could write down a proof in one of my high school math, biology, chemistry or physics classes. It’s the same feeling I have when I figure out a concept, or dream about an image, or take a picture that pleases me. It’s about moment of true understanding, and that moment is where one stage of the process stops and another begins. I realize as I write this that I love that feeling and the actual execution of something after that is difficult because the eureka moment was all I really wanted.

It’s why I like the idea of conceptual art, or at least the conceptualization part of conceptual art. It’s why I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever produce anything ever again, or just spend the rest of my life thinking of things to produce.

We have one piece of glassware that I never use. It would work nicely for this purpose. It’s a very simple, straight-laced highball glass.

The plan is to get eight or ten glasess etched in a very plain and functional font –probably Helvetica  I’d use single words to facilitate conversation and thought. Then have a party and as the guests leave give them their glass. It’s kind of like a Martha Stewart Art Project.

This is inspired by a glass I remembered from my parents. When I was a kid we were never suppose to sue these glasses because we could break them. They were etched with ESL. I never really thought about those glasses but I imagine they were a gift to my parents for their wedding. Either that or they were handed down from my Grandmother or Great Aunt on my Father’s side.

I always liked this glass wear when I was a kid but now as an adult I prefer heavy, substantial larger glasses. That could be because I associate nice glassware with a discomfort that comes with being a child around nice things.

Possible Working List;
Truth
Pain
Solitude
Magic
Lost
Art
Imposter
Escape
Dream
Ennui
Original
Average

Alternate list of words relating to each other and my art practice;
Average
Mediocre
Pedestrian
Typical
Normal
Banal
Unassuming

The coloured tarps I’m talking about are typically blue however I’ve seen black, green, silver, white and orange in use at different times around the city. Lately I discovered you can get them in a few other colours like red and yellow and that I can have them custom made out of different materials. I’d like to get six or seven tarps that cover a spectrum of secondary colours.

The genesis of the idea was to wrap myself up cocoon like in these tarps and to take self-portraits while laying swaddled on the ground, sitting on a rock or in some other such pose. I’d use a remote control with the camera on a tripods or some other support. This might be hard to do without help. Managing the camera in the snow could be tricky as well. The optimal situation would be a new snow some day in a local park, super early in the morning before anyone’s disturbed the snow cover. I think I could shoot looking down from a bridge or some other such structure, but again, I think I need help to do this. Wrapping myself up even would be hard, let alone executing everything else. The camera could be attached to a long pole that could then be hoisted in the air to get a vantage point which would reduce any distortion in the perspective.

Simpler than this would be to shoot 10 ft square tarps stretched over an area of snow or supported in the air to flap in the breeze in a snow field. The resultant image could be obtained by simply creating something in illustrator or Photoshop, but that’s not the point. I see a room with 7 or 8 large square photographs that are taken of coloured tarps on fields of fresh snow from above somehow without shadow. The same could be done with circular tarps.

The closest images on the web to describe what I’m attempting are for camping. These are typically protective set ups. You can see the clean lines of these structures and although these images are taken in typical camping situations, I think you can see what I’m trying to accomplish. These actually describe a derivative of the Coloured Tarp project that I’m now stoked on as well. I can create Photoshop like holes in landscape spaces using various tarp structures.  Again, this image depicts a complex physical manipulation of the visual space to create scenarios that could easily be accomplished in Photoshop.

Each corner of the tarp could be controlled by fishing line, so the snow doesn’t get disturbed. It could also be attached by white string to a white structure of poles and hoisted in the air. Images could be taken of the formalist square or even circular tarps. A derivative of this would be to support the coloured tarps from their upper corners and let them wave in the breeze like flags. The images could be taken either, intentionally out of focus or at slow shutter speeds to blur the final images. I could also do inanimate shapes. I could find existing man-made object/structures and cover them with the coloured tarps. This could create abstract, painterly like compositions. Playing with photography and sculpture to create a homage to minimalist, formalist painting.

This is a further exploration of the painting thing. Humorous in way.  The idea of re-enacted scenarios via awkward and complicated logistics to create simple compositions that the viewer could mistake for paintings rather than photographs . It also has the obvious association with Christo’s work, but I think this is more about photography rather than sculpture.

This could be done anywhere and at anytime of day or night, in any season. The square or round tarps will look very cool wherever I can stretch them to their uniform shapes, let them flap in the breeze, shoot up at them against a white or blue sky, shoot them suspended above the surface of a lake, against a field of snow, against a wall of greenery, etc. The more I think about this the more limitless this project could be. Exciting.

There are two objects that have stuck in my head; the white little table that comes in take-out pizza packaging to keep the roof of the box from screwing up the cheesy goodness, and a set of old school 1960s style white metal extendable curtain rods.  Today I was thinking that maybe white Styrofoam take-out food containers could work as well. Thinking about it further, there are tons of other things that would work and are typically white like;  a ream of paper or crumpled up paper, cotton balls, t-shirt, underwear, string or thread, salt, flour, milk, bowls and plates, bar of soap, etc. I could even try –miracle of all miracles–using a different lens. I very, very rarely take the 16-35 off my camera, however I’m thinking I could do some macro stuff out of focus for this series.

As for the exhibition I’d like to cover the floor in white material, use white floating frames and mount the work on Stonehenge gator-board that will be white.

I’m not quite sure what this about but the thought of having these pictures of things you can barely see hung in a room that’s blindingly white would be cool.

I think these are indirectly about Tom Friedman. I’ve always liked his work, but only ever seen it in a book. In the Taschen book about him it explains that one of his very early pieces –for art school I think– involved painting his studio all white and removing perspective and depth in an actual space. I’m probably mangeling the description of his work. I looked at that book about 20 years ago, although in hindsight it has a lot to do with what I’m interested in now.

The strangest thing about this was the vivid and casual nature of the images. It was as if I was consciously planning it in my sleep and I was aware this was happening. I’m sort of shocked that I remember it. The other strange thing is that when I was relaxing with my coffee at the computer this morning I opened a Tweet link that took me to a project that related to some of my newly realized concept.

Reflections is a studio shoot. The plan is to create a central sculptural piece and shoot it from several different angles. The central form would be an angular construction resembling a flower vase. I would create the piece from chunks of mirrored glass. These would be polygons with different sizes and configurations. I see the final structure as being a drug induced and uncomfortable disco ball where the pieces of the surface are rough and abrupt instead of uniform and organized. In general all the pieces of the sculpture would be apparently haphazard.

This sculpture would be suspended or somehow isolated in the air and small coloured sheets or pieces of material would be positioned so that that each is reflected in one of the facets of the crystallized sculpture. This would create a weird 3 dimensional colour mosaic which I would subsequently shoot.

The colours could be all slightly different shades of one particular colour. Yellow comes to mind first and foremost. White would be good and so would black but there are endless possibilities.

Shoot with a very large aperture and short depth of field with no flash to render the background reflected colours in a visible and more understate light.

Alternate idea is to get a hunk of tree branch chromed and use it and other similar natural substrates as the reflective surface but only use a white background so the shapes can be detected but the effect is the objects would appear “invisible” when photographed. To do this I might have to make a metal cast of a branch then have that cast chromed.

Both concepts seem to be exploring photography and sculpture.