​Trapped Inside is another in the series of Inside/Outside Images that I have made over the last year. It pits an outside image of rushing water against an inside image of a bottle of hand sanitizer. The water has been copied and pasted in a way similar to the Rubber Glove Angles…but this time it is repeated more often and does not form a mandala. Furthermore, I then searched for ways to edit the background in order to pull parts of it into the foreground merging it with the bottle of hand sanitizer.
 
The hand sanitizer takes the form of one of my household inventions. The blue rocks at the bottom, and the red areas at the half way point, are colorized and emphasized so that they might appear as arms and feet on a strange little hand sanitizer creature. In addition, the top is blown up into a sphere so that it may appear as a head. The pump itself has had a recessed flat plane turned into a screen, or window, where a face peers out.
 
The face and hands, smashed up against the window of this sanitizer robot, harken back to an image I created years ago called, “Strange Things are Afoot in my Rumpus Room.” In that image, a person in a cartoon Bryan Mulroney mask is trapped in a television set.
 
So, all told, this image brings a number of divergent themes together into one artwork. Its playful because of the little robot, but it also tackles contemporary themes related to anxiety and hygiene.  While these themes are in vogue at the moment, they certainly are not limited in scope exclusively to the current pandemic.

This image is modelled after a typical greeting card with a flower as the subject, but there are a few key differences. First of all, the border is a sliver of rubber glove imagery. Second the flower arrangement points to an empty space located at a strong position within the rule of thirds, where normally there would be some poetry or text of some kind. But the wingdings font has been used, so you can’t easily read it. This helps to make obvious the compositional device being used. That is the main point of the image, which could be summed up as: Made you look. Finally, the same words are arranged around the flower. I did this to make the viewer question whether or not the flower itself has been somehow “photoshopped” in there. As such, it might deny the reality that this image is pretty much a straight-forward photograph with text and a border. A Typical greeting card…?

This image’s composition is inspired by a die where the number 5 has been rolled. However, beyond that it’s another artwork conceived in the spirit of the inside/outside theme that I have been working with. In this case, I have placed an image of a mountain scape on an egg and the title Egg Scape could also be read as “escape.” The idea being to escape the indoors and find one’s way outside. However, there are also four soap encrusted plugs serving as pips on the die…suggesting that escape may be another idea, “down the drain.” This escape from the inside theme is reinforced by the background image which is a backlit vacationing shirt…the kind one might wear on a cruise to somewhere hot. However, it’s not being worn and instead has been transformed into a decorative image of radial symmetry.
 
This time the Wingdings have been made larger so that they function more as part of the image rather than just as indecipherable writing. This is also the second image I have made that includes an egg. Eggs have interesting connotations when it comes to inside/outside. After all, there is a bird inside the egg and, presumably (at some point) it will want to eggscape  to the outside as well.

This image was created by playing around with the in-camera radial zoom blur technique, applied to chess pieces.  I do seem to enjoy playing with chess pieces in my art—moreso than actually playing chess. Although a small part of me hopes that people seeing my art work might jump to the false conclusion that I am an accomplished chess player…which is not the case.
 
My interest in chess as a subject actually goes back to my undergraduate degree when I learned that one of my favorite artists, Marcel Duchamp, was an avid chess player (I have been told he apparently was actually pretty good). After that I started making paintings of chess pieces and then other games as well. That led me to my interest in play as a philosophy of sorts around which to base my art.
 
The point here was to create an image of an amped up chess experience.  I thought it interesting to make an image where the chess board appears frozen in time just like in movies where super heroic characters can move so fast everything seems to freeze and/or blur in some way.  The funny thing is that watching a game of chess could not be less like this.  One can certainly become absorbed in a game of chess but I would not describe it as a fast-moving experience.  
 
This image also includes a Matrix like background…but the opposite colour than what is seen in the film and with wingdings embedded as the code. After doing a little research on chess notation systems I was flabbergasted by the variety of systems and their alien quality to someone like me who is not familiar with them.  This seemed like a computer code…a bunch of unintelligible alphanumeric figures that we know lurk behind our favorite applications. That plays into my interest in the difference between transparency and opacity (discussed in some earlier posts).  Of course, my code had to be wingdings and, as in previous work, it does hide a sentence.

I was actually taking some shots for the border of another image, but when I looked at them in photoshop, the resemblance to a boat was uncanny.  Therefore, I shifted gears back into the fantasy realm of inside-outside.  I had thought I would have abandoned the inside-outside theme by now…but far from it.  Now that we are fully into the third wave of the epidemic there is no better time to continue exploring the difference, sameness, and implications of this binary.
 
Furthermore, the image struck me as very playful.  The idea is that one’s chess pieces might be carried off to some other realm, late at night after the game is over.  After all, these chess pieces died in battle...which should make them deserving of a Viking burial at sea!  In fact, they were sacrificed…and sacrifices have a place in many religions in addition to Norse mythology. Maybe there is an element of sacrifice involved in our responses to the pandemic, which is the source of my inside-outside theme.  If we think of sacrifice as a noble, or a even spiritual endeavour, then maybe giving things up by staying indoors becomes more than just a duty to public health…maybe adopting an inside-outside state of mind can be personally transformative?
 
…or maybe it’s just fun to imagine our toys coming alive at night.

Edward Weston’s famous images of peppers were photographed beautifully…but the peppers themselves were also a big reason for the success of these images.  He searched carefully for just the right peppers to photograph.  Back then produce was not so uniformly shaped as it is now.  In the past I have given students an assignment where they try to mimic the image of a master photographer…many have tried to make a Weston pepper. It can’t be done using the Frankenfood we now find in the grocery store where all the peppers look the same.   They are uniform copies of some template pepper. Shadows of the pepper within Plato’s cave perhaps.
This image started out with the idea of making a Weston-like pepper, in a surreal context and using photoshop to make the pepper more interesting in shape. However, as I progressed through several iterations, the idea changed. The final image I was left with at the end of the week has little resemblance to the original idea.  I am a careful planner of my art but there are always changes as you go. Nevertheless, there usually are not as many changes as took place with this image.  
In the end, I decided the pepper would be flying through space, so I photographed it by panning, with a flash on rear curtain sync., and I dragged the shutter to expose the background (sorry to non-photographer readers for the technical stuff). The point is that the left side of the image, up to half way across the pepper, is mostly a straight photograph.  On the other hand the right side is a composite of an exploding/melting/mutating pepper.   The left is real…the right is fake (and its clearly fake). That’s the idea: Weston was a member of the f-64 group and they believed in straight photography: clear, relatively un-manipulated images.   This image was made “After” Edward Weston…where most of us don’t concern ourselves with the purity of the image any more.  We live in a world that is so simulated and fake  we have little choice but to accept all the fakes and copies around us as real….there is nothing else.
Therefore, the title, “After Edward Weston” is a reference to the image, “After Walker Evans” by Sherrie Levine. In both cases we do not mean the image is a "homage to" as is usually indicated by the word "After" before an artists name. Levine rephotographed an image by another master photographer, Walker Evans, in order to debunk modern ideas about genius and originality and to bring to the fore postmodern concepts more related to appropriation, and the social nature of artistic creation.  I am doing something similar—I am washing my hands of a concern for straight photography, which was a modern infatuation, and instead I am embracing the simulacra. Fakes and copies are the reality of our shared post-modern existence. 
What happened "After" Edwards Weston made his photographs…well, real peppers were replaced with Frankenfood and supposedly "real" analogue photographs were replaced with digitally manipulated ones. I am not on a crusade against this. I think, for better or for worse,  most people seem to be fine with living in this new simulated world.   I’m not too worried about it.

The image has been posted...but the blog entry will be coming soon.  Please check back again in a day or two.

A still life is an image of primarily small inanimate objects that can be moved around easily and typically consists of food items, flowers, household objects, etc.  By this definition, some  of my work might be considered still life. However, many of my images include a hand with a rubber glove on it interacting with the still life in some way. The inclusion of a hand potentially helps the image resist categorization as a still life. This image has a hand in it as well, but it is not wearing a rubber glove, and it is instead submerged into the still life objects. Furthermore, this image contains subject matter (a hand holding a raw egg) that is possibly off putting.  The title here has the same effect as the phase, “don’t think of an elephant”.  Of course, as soon as you say it, you are thinking of an elephant. In this case, the image may as well have a rubber glove in it.  In fact, the viewer might even wish that it did after seeing the title.  That’s my goal anyway.
 
Many of the themes of play, humor, obsessive compulsive triggers, etc. continue in this work.  Like most of the rubber glove images it plays with that boundary between what something means at any given moment in time vs what it could mean if we allow our ideas to intermingle or go astray.  What does the viewer want this image to mean?  Are they concerned with what the artist intended?  Are they trying to keep it from meaning something in particular?  I think there is something sublime when meaning rests just out of reach because that’s where it sits most comfortably. I suspect I am not the only artist who feels this way. 
 
One last point.  In virtually all of my work I am the only human being in the image.  It’s been decades since someone else was included. However, since this image includes a hand without a rubber glove on it…it seemed important that it be someone else’s hand.

Specimens are things that we collect as an example. However, the world has also come to suggest that the example is a particularly good one that is deserving of being collected. In this image, I have created a part natural and part artificial leaf. With spring just around the corner, I was contemplating what kind of photography I might do outside in the near future. However, that time is not upon us yet so I am still stuck with the house plants and other household objects. This one is a combination of a shower head with some calcification and a leaf from the lemon tree. The shower seemed appropriate because…well, “April showers bring May flowers.”  But the goal was to make an alien-plant that defies the duality of natural vs. artificial…or, things that belong outside vs. things that belong inside.
 
The rubber glove was a natural addition because I imagine one might wear gloves when handling particularly unique, valuable, or delicate specimens.  However, I thought that maybe it should be torn suggesting that some difficult work was involved in collecting this object. It’s also covered in soap. Rubber gloves, as objects used to protect oneself from germs, relate to obsessive compulsive themes; therefore, I am surprised I have not put soap on them before.   However, I also imagine that there may be some decontamination procedures involved in collecting robot-leaf specimens.
 
As I have mentioned before, I like to use borders because to me they represent rules and limits  which relates them to the idea of play in some ways. I decided to put wingdings in the boarder again because they are playful as well…and, once again, the viewer can choose to interact with the work by deciphering the writing. This time I was much more careful about how the wingdings lined up in relation to the corners and edges—emphasizing their formal function.   On the other hand, I didn’t have anything particularly important that I needed to be written so it seemed their role in terms of content was reduced. Maybe it’s because I mentioned Picasso in my last image, but this made me reflect on the synthetic phase of Cubism where Picasso and Braque were, more or less, just playing with the cubist themes and languages in decorative and formal ways and not really advancing the concept much further. Perhaps this image marks the synthetic phase of my Wingdings art. Now, in my synthetic period, the Wingdings have devolved into a purely decorative element; therefore, they no longer add meaning to the image.

Many of the images I have created lately have been heavily symmetrical, so this time I decided to make something balanced asymmetrically.  Since my original “Sporange” comic panel was about the “missing symmetricator,” I thought I would follow up on that theme with another comic.  I also was inspired by the stone tiles behind my stove which look to me like an abstract painting…a mix between the painterly abstraction of Jackson Pollock and the hard edge images of Piet Mondrian.  Mondrian in particular was obsessed with creating a perfect frontal and asymmetrical balance within his images, so that seemed a great fit.  However, while I like abstract art well enough, I have never made an image which falls into the category of total abstraction. Therefore, I decided I would make the image, but immerse it within a narrative context. Naturally, since I previously established that Sporange is my super hero identity, this image would be in my secret identity as a mild mannered artist experiencing a crisis of conscience about abstract art.
 
The balance was fun to play with as there are figural and text elements both of which strongly attract attention. Then there are the images in the gallery themselves and how they fit in. Color balance was important but also repeating squares around the picture plane to relate everything back to the Mondrian-style image.  However, my favorite touch was warping the pepper and making it red so it would look like the big “M” in “meanwhile,” thus creating a counterpoint on the other side of the comic panel. 
 
Formal elements aside, this image once again references Roy Lichtenstein, who was interested in comics as pop imagery. However, he was also interested in their technical components which is why he painstakingly enlarged them printer-dot by printer-dot in his paintings. This is not unlike the concern I think Chuck Close had in some of his work to reproduce the way layers of film make images but with layers of paint. However, I am more interested in the relationship to Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills”. Sherman gave us one still from a movie that did not exist. However, because entertainment media are so ubiquitous, repetitive, and predictable we can make up the rest of the story in our heads. I think Lichtenstein’s images have the same affect; therefore I am also trying to take advantage of this phenomena. Finally, I would like to give a nod to Chris Crans.  Years ago he made an image depicting a museum/gallery setting titled,  “One Mao Away From a Man With a Tea Cosy On His Head” which was hilarious. Ever since I have been looking for a reason to make humorous image in a similar setting.

Finally, there is a little timeline of art history on display here.  On the far left we have a realistic image refencing the time when art’s main purpose was to depict the word.  Then there is an abstract image which comes from the modern art period where the concern was making art for art’s sake.  Finally, there is a pepper on a platform which has been duct tapped to the wall. I felt duct tapping a banana (or any other fruit/vegetable) would be too obvious so I taped the pedestal instead…as a reference to post modernism where the concerns in art tend to be narrative, multiple, and often metacognitive in relation to the entire endeavour.