Hellooo, sorry about the long lapse between posts but this time I actually have been fairly busy. Recently I've been working at the video store around the corner, doing this freelance animation thing which I'm super glad is over because I've never done animation before and I felt incredibly out of my depth, and I started working for Aurora Robson again (the artist I interned for last summer.) So yeah, I've been a busy bee.
This post will be highlighting my final for my book class, it's titled "The Preservation" and I really tried to combine elements from the Family Series of my Thesis with what I learned in book class. It's a Coptic bound book and I used a variety of methods and materials to get it to look and feel right. In this book I was really interested in texture both physically and aesthetically, some of the pages have collaged or layered elements to them next to flat printed images. I wasn't as concerned with the placement of images on the page, I wanted it to seem somewhat random.
The printed images often look 3D, as I xeroxed leaves, flowers, photographs and other objects directly onto the page. I also played a lot with my printer, printing on top of already printed things, feeding different types of paper and making photograms with the xerox machine in it, sometimes altering the size and scale of what I was xeroxing. Another element that tied it very strongly to my Thesis is that I actually took digital photographs of quite a few of my little Family collages, these photographs were often purposely blurry, and extremely close up, to only see part of the collage, I used these images as pages in the book.
The book deals with memory, family and personal history. It also simultaneously explores the history of photography and image making. One part I particularly like is that I took and old family photo, scanned it, played around in photoshop and inverted the black and white, I then printed it out on regular computer paper and oiled it to make it transparent. I took that "negative" and made a Cyanotype with it. I then took a digital picture of that Cyanotype and printed it out on a piece of paper to use as a page in this book. It's the process that I'm very interested in, of course I want the end product to look interesting but in the process I've used one of the oldest forms of image making in conjunction with some of the newest forms of image making. I also find it interesting that Bookmaking itself, along with Printmaking, have such a rich and old history, that many do not even think about day to day.
I do realize that in using actual flowers and putting the oiled images in the book, it will eventually look, smell and feel different over time, things will get browned and washed out but in I actually really like it. It's called The Preservation because I feel like I'm preserving the past, preserving history and like photography itself preserving moments in time. I had a ton of fun assembling this book and I feel that it is really what I was trying to get at with my Thesis, a sort of conclusion that sums everything up succinctly.
