Fragments

May 20, 2020

Screenshot of Fragments

Collaborator Michael Zhang and I were scheduled to show our work Fragments at the Ruby at Duke University on March as soon as everything shut down due to the Coronavirus. Because of the abrupt nature of the situation, the work hasn’t quite been completed yet (it’s mostly complete, it just needed a few minor adjustments) and was unfortunately not displayed.

Fragments is a combination of photography/generative media work. Buildings started to fall and rise at a pace that left me unable to grasp a concrete sense of place in my new hometown of Durham, NC. Using Atget as a springboard – his sense of placemaking through walking in a rapidly changing 19th century Paris – I collected images as I explored walking routes where demolitions and active construction sites were situated. With a growing archive of images that correspond to specific walks, Michael and I then came up with a set of rules to subject the images to. In essence, each image becomes intermixed with other photographs made during the same day before fading into a different day in the same city. The continuous slippage, the avoidance of the fixed image is a nod to the idea that the idea of Durham as a place – as I experience it.

May 20 Digest

May 20, 2020

It goes without saying that the world has significantly changed since my last digest. I went through a period where reading anything other than the news was difficult. That gave way to a period where I became more deeply acquainted with the fact that life would be different now, and that a more reclusive day-to-day existence was the new norm for many people, including myself. At that point, reading the news became difficult.

I’ve given much thought about how to respond to the current situation through art. I couldn’t come up with, and I still do not have an answer. I’ve been making pictures still, slowly, when I feel like it, with some themes in mind. There’s no pressure to “produce” at the moment. This is perhaps a good thing.

To my mind, the climate crisis is still the crisis of our time. The pandemic only serves to amplify and clarify the forces that have resulted in this situation to begin with. The runaway, lasting exploitation of the land and the resulting structural inequalities only become more clear. Rampant disinformation campaigns, dehumanization campaigns, the bad-faith politicization of data, of the politicization of logical, low-risk high reward preventative measures (from composting to mask-wearing) etc. – all are connected to the climate crisis. The climate crisis, amazingly, burns a bit more invisibly, a bit more abstractly, a bit more slowly than a pandemic does.

Additionally, there is still the question of how this pandemic itself can actually be attributed to the forces that have caused climate change (i.e. rampant expansion).

So I have returned to taking cues from exploring music, philosophy and environmental writing, as I had before. This time has only reminded me that there is a trove of rich cultural output to explore and that I will never have enough time for all of it.

Listen:

Read:

March 5 Digest

March 5, 2020

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The Living Dune Feb 21-March 22

February 21, 2020

We Can’t Do This Alone (64 Photograph Grid), 120″x80″ 2017-2020

My friend and collaborator Ben Alper and I have a pop-up show up at 140 W Franklin St. Suite 160 in downtown Chapel Hill, NC from Feb 21 through March 22.

Jockey’s Ridge in Nag’s Head has changed in shape over thousands of years and continues to move incrementally southward to this day, threatening nearby homes and roads. There have been large scale and costly attempts to stem this natural process, which highlights the often fraught relationship between human behavior and the “natural” environment.

In photographing Jockey’s Ridge, Ben Alper and Peter Hoffman sought to heighten the camera’s predisposition toward distortion, as a means of addressing the kind of intervention present (albeit invisibly) at the site. Whether that manifests through artificial or colored light, spatial confusion, performative gestures or the literal or metaphorical depiction of others, the resulting images foreground photographic decisions that ultimately implicate a human presence in this fragile landscape.

Their photographs will be displayed at 140 W. Franklin Street, Suite 160 from February 21 – March 22nd.

Exhibit Hours

Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7 pm

Saturdays and Sundays from 12-6 pm

The 140 W. Franklin Street space is powered by Arts Everywhere, Chapel Hill Community Arts and Culture, and Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership.

https://www.unc.edu/event/the-living-dune/2020-02-21/

Glass Corner Features

January 7, 2020

Hi, happy 2020! Recently some nice websites (below) have been showing excerpts from my Glass Corner Artist’s Book. The book itself is here. More pictures here.

Glass Corner on BOOOOOOOM
Glass Corner on Collater.al