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.