Small Victories

Today I sent a few photographs off to Canada to be considered for inclusion in Small Victories, a Booooooom project that will culminate in an exhibition of 4x6 photos in Hong Kong. Getting three simple prints made yesterday was a bit of an ordeal. After walking all the way through the store in brand new shoes that were cutting into my heels I discovered that all of the photo machines at Walmart were broken. So I went to Walgreens where a woman on a Rascal electric scooter was monopolizing one machine while the other was being updated by a repair man in his 70s who was following directions being fed to him via cell phone. Anyway, I got the prints made and sent them and hopefully I'll be in that show.

Pin

For your information, today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, an annual event in which everyone around the world is encouraged to make some lensless photographs. It is pretty late now (I spent most of the day fixing my shower*) so I probably won't get out today to do any photographing. However, I did enter a pinhole photography contest and exhibition which is opening today at the Center for Alternative Photography in Goa, India. My shots didn't win any of the prizes, or even make it into the final jurying session, but that's OK. I'm still being exhibited in India which is pretty awesome. Next year, if I get it together, I'm hoping to lead a pinhole photography workshop.

*My shower has been leaking at the cold handle for several months. I've been meaning to fix it but I thought it might be a fairly big job and I didn't want to start on it unless I knew I'd have enough time to finish. This morning, the cold water refused to shut off regardless of how hard I turned the handle, so I couldn't put the job off any longer. The shower fixtures are really old and I was under the impression that the replacement parts were unavailable, so I expected to have to replace almost everything. Pipes, fixture, handles, head, everything. Just to make sure, I pulled the cold water cartridge out and took it to Lowes. When comparing it to the cartridges in the store, I discovered one that looked like it would be a pretty good match so I bought a pair of them. Once installed, everything seemed fine so I turned on the water main. It didn't work. Water just kept pouring out of the shower head. I tried a bunch of other things, like adding a second washer to the shut off, but nothing was working. Just before I started tearing out the old pipes, I happened to turn the handle all the way in the wrong direction. The water stopped flowing. It seems that the new cartridge was opposite from the old one and just needed to be turned the other way to shut it off. So basically, I spent four hours working on this shower when I actually fixed the problem in the first ten minutes and just didn't realize it. Still, I feel pretty good about doing it all by myself based only on knowledge I learned from watching a lot of home improvement shows over the years. Viva la Television!

Stepping Forward

OK. Pretty much all the prints for my upcoming thesis show are finished, so I've been thinking about what I might be working on next. I won't have the resources of the print studio at school, and I'm on a budget, so it seems like it will be a good idea to limit the number of ink colors I'll need to buy. My plan is to work in a monochromatic color palette so I'll really only have to buy black and white ink and then mix shades of gray in between them. Today I made a test print using five shades of gray. I think it looks alright for an experiment, but I'll probably have to use more layers to make the images a little higher fidelity.

Newbie

Instead of doing laundry, like I was planning to do, I spent most of the night revamping my website with some of my new prints. In the coming weeks I'll be rescanning some of them so they all look as good as possible. If you have any problems getting the page to work, please let me know. I only really tested it on firefox.

Say the K - Not the P

I wish all the prints I've been working on would have come together as easily as this one did. Everything lined up perfectly on each layer and, in the end, this is among my favorites.

Thesis Pieces

I'm posting about this again because some of the dates have changed since the last time I talked about it. My final thesis show is scheduled for May 17 through 24. There will be a reception on Friday, May 21 and I hope all 6 people I know come. I ordered some postcards a few days ago so if you want a written invitation email me your mailing address and I send one to you.

Earlier today I posted a new show at Captive Werewolf. It has been hard for me to find the time to seek out new artists that I'd like to exhibit over there so if you want to have a show, or if you want to curate a show, send me a proposal. It doesn't have to be anything formal.

In other news, my "avatar" over at Deviant Art has been changed to a Team Jacob animated gif. I don't know how or why that happened.

GSU Annual

I finished hanging the annual GSU Student show today, including a few late arrivals that were generously let in after the submission deadline.

Artists exhibiting include: Tom Bass, Sharon Burrink, Rick Cammarata, Samantha Canada, Jon Casserilla, Mike Chandler, Christopher Clark, Quentin Crockett, Sherril Denault, Tor Dettwiler, Janet Engle-Julian, Abdullah Fadhli, Raida Khamis, Brenda Farris, Erick Garcia, Tiffany Gholar, Hector Hernandez, Karen Keorpes, Brooke Nicholson, Sarah Ogren, Russ Laska, Dan Lee, Diana Lynch, Stephanie Monroe, Becki Moffet-Moore, Aleksa Moss, Jaclyn Reidy, Christina Schmitt, Candace Schutt, Jeremy Spence, Paul Stevenson, Jessica Van Swol, and Lori White. There's a reception planned for next Wednesday if you are in the area.