Good Fortune

Here are a couple good fortunes from Chinese Fortune cookies this week:

1) Your present plans are going to succeed.

2) You do not have to know where you are going to be headed in the right direction.

Oh yes, I'll take these two good fortunes! I need to post it in giant sized fonts on my studio walls. What wonderful affirmations, huh?

The images you see here are from my friend's yard. I went over to her house a few weeks ago and did a photo shoot of her chickens. I never realized how difficult it is to photograph them as the are always in constant motion and they are low to the ground!

In the shed is a bunch of memorabilia related to trains. So are the signs on the back wall of the yard.

I love the stove; it is so nostaglic! The nailheads with the number on them are railroad tie nails. Way back then, the nails were imprinted with the year they were placed in the railroad tie (I learned that tidbit from Kim Mason a few years back as I bought a pair of earrings that she made from the nailheads). That way they knew how long it had been there and would replace as needed depending on its age. After a while, they stopped doing it that way (probably too hard to manage) and went to a system where all the nails get changed at the same time.

Lupe, the black chicken followed us around. She's a very curious creature that just loves to hang with the crowd; the rest of the chickens were more concerned with eating!

So, there you have it! I took tons of photos but I'm being good in sparing you from having to view more than what I've posted here. Enjoy!

Last Hours

Something to ponder... how would you spend your time if your knew that you had less than twentyfour hours to live?

No, really, how would you spend that time?

Would you eat everything that you're not supposed to eat? Would you tie one on in a big way? would you withdraw all your money and spend it foolishly? Would you be terrified?

It's something that we really don't think about and it's a concept that is very hard to examine in its truest sense. It has been said over and over again to live each moment as though it were your last. The words roll off the tongue fairly easy, but I think under ordinary circumstances, we can only think about it on an intellectual level.

I dunno...I think I know what I would do, but will I do it should I know without a shadow of a doubt that I had less than twentyfour hours?

The image posted here is a game board of sorts; tic tac toe it looks like to me. Taken at the house we stayed in when we were in Angel Fire this past weekend.

TTN Hawaiian Days

What did I do this weekend? Went up to Angel Fire to photograph an event for TTN's (Twin Tip Nation) "No Drama Hawaiian Days". The folks from Plastic Clothing and Maui Wowi Smoothies were also there. Everybody got to be silly, wear funny clothing, play volleyball at 10,000 feet in ski boots (ouch but fun) and drink delicious smoothies made by Maui Wowi. Oh yeah, and ski. Well, I didn't ski much as I was busy being a photographer.

It couldn't have been a more perfect picture perfect day (note how BLUE the sky is in the photos which, by the way were not color enhanced or touched up in Photoshop).

Since I took a lot of images (how unusual for me), I thought I would break them down into a series. This is the first installation. Yet to come: some free style skiing on the box, the volleyball games, and the limbo contest!

Emiliana

This is a mixed media piece I just completed. Both images are photographs I had taken. The one of grandma was taken on print film (black and white Ilford film) on an old Nikon FE camera. It is probably the only picture I took of grandma since she didn't like the fuss that went with sitting for a pose. It was a candid shot as she sat at her kitchen table (any of my family members who had hung out in that kitchen hoping for some maruai-banana pancakes knows that it is a dimly lit kitchen). I took this picture in the late '70's.

The calla lilies are fakes; they were part of the wedding decoration for a friend's wedding a couple of years ago. I think they were pens with the flowers attached. I bunched them up like that and converted the color file to black and white and ran it through some Photoshop filters.

The images were then printed on a copy center printer (carbon base instead of inkjet) and then transferred on to the media board. From there, it was painted and texture was added, etc. Click on the image for a closer look of the textures that are there. What makes this image unique is that it is a merge of print film and digital where the time span between both images is about three decades!

Cradle Project

The Abandoned Nest

The pearls are the abondoned orphans; a symbol of their purity and their souls Fabric scraps woven into the wire

There is nothing like a deadline to motivate anyone.

Title of this piece is "The Abandoned Nest". Materials used are chicken wire, pearls, fabric scraps and a maile vine (which is a vine that grows in the mountains of Hawaii that is picked and made into very special occasion leis; this one was sent to me from my sister in Hilo honoring completion of a second bachelor's degree last May). The fabric scraps were from my aunt and my mother's collection from clothing they had made for my cousins and my siblings and myself. These scraps have been around for a good forty to fifty years.

Anyway, back to my point about deadlines. This was my submission for the Cradle Project (click on the link to find out more about this incredible and worthy project) which I had known about a year ago and I had decided then that I wanted to submit something. Ideas abound until the time comes to actually start working on it. I finally got around to forming the wire structure last fall and rusticating it. Then, I got so attached to the rust, that I couldn't get myself to weave something through the wire. Various materials were experimented with and nothing looked right. There have been many rolling deadlines for the call for art for the Cradle Project, and at last March 1st was nearing which was the deadline for submission if you wanted your work to appear in the companion publication for the exhibit.

I finished it on Feb. 29 and barely had time to photograph it. The images aren't the best as I was outside and it was a wee bit breezy.

Dropping it off at the warehouse was amazing; it was buzzing with activity and an army of efficient volunteers. Cradle submssions were everywhere from local artists, artists arcoss the country and around the world. The exhibition will be here in Albuquerque on June 7th and there will be an on-line auction throughout the month of June. Seeing everyone else's interpretations of cradles is enough to put anyone over the edge with excitement.

If you live in town or within driving distance, I urge you to mark your calendar for the exhibition. Allegedly, there should be 1,000 cradles on exhibit and for sale on the on-line auction. I believe the venue will be three floors in a bank building downtown (instead of the abandoned warehouse cited on the website; it got sold to the movie studios).

Natalie, the creator and vision behind all of this, has done a tremendous job on conceptualizing it and rounding up the most amazing core of volunteers. It is an event NOT to be missed! If you can't see it in person, make sure you check out the on-line auction in June.

Very Large Array (VLA)

VLA=Very Large Array. You know, of Jodie Foster fame in the movie, "Contact". As I had promised a few posts back (Silver City post), these are the images I spoke of. We drove down to Silver City the VERY scenic way. It was so worth it; the terrain that we had crossed through was so diverse; not to mention every single aspect of weather condition. Anyway, from the I-25, we head west on the 60 and go through Magdelena. West of that, before Datil on the San Augustin Plains, resides these giant radio telescopes. There are 27 giant dish antennas and you can visit it seven days a week from 8:30 a.m. to sunset. Normally, it is a self guided tour.

However, since I did know someone who worked there, I asked if we could get a 'behind the scenes' kind of tour. What a thrill! I could've easily spent more time there as I really am a science nerd (secret is out now). I always have a ton of questions!

The images here are in no particular order, but you might be able to make sense of them.

When these dishes need tweaking and fixing, they get taken in to that giant shed. All of these arrays have a railroad track by them and that big red machine comes and tugs them over to the giant shed. The folks who take care of these dishes can also climb up the stairs that are on them and there is a little room right below the dish part where they do some other kind of tweaking (really technical terms here, huh?). Can I say that I got to do that? Can I say that I got to crawl up into the dish part and sit in the middle looking up? Oh my gosh, what a thrill. It would've been better if there wasn't this biting cold wind whipping across the plains that day. I didn't take my gloves with me and my fingers felt like they were getting frostbitten!

The scientists and organization that oversee this project is called the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NARAO). You can also find them on the web at: http://www.nrao.edu/. Check out the link; it's a pretty informative site (I'm showing my nerdiness here; I think it's a pretty cool site).

If you live in New Mexico and you haven't made the trek down there, I highly recommend it! Perhaps at a warmer time of the year, though!

Glass Negative Nun

Isn't she amazing? I went up to Santa Fe (well, El Dorado to be exact) to visit Laura who is a collector/sellor of art epherma. Nope, she doesn't do email (doesn't even own a computer), so there is no link or website to provide. If you want her contact information, just email me through my profile and I'll send it to you. Raine and I have been buying these negatives from her over the past year and a half. We've become self-appointed gaurdians of this mysterious stash of images that are from one of the eight photo studios in Albuquerque at the turn of the 20th century. We'd like to think that it is from a studio that was run by a woman, called the Cobb Studio. However, there is nothing to substantiate it save for perhaps the same kinds of props used in images that are from the Cobb Studio (which makes it inconclusive). There are no inventory markings that indicate which studio these negatives came from. And, I must confess, I'm not done doing my homework as to the exact name of this photographic process. That will come in due time...there are many unanswered questions. There is something about looking at all these images taken from the cross section of life during that time frame. Who are these people? In this case, it's apparent that what we have here is more than likely someone who just took her final vows or just became a novitiate (the period of being a novice in a religious order). I've been waiting for over a year for Laura to release this last batch of images to the world; particularly this one. But, really they are all enigmatic. Maybe someday we will be able to exhibit these images so that others can see what a diverse and interesting cultural community Albuquerque was at the turn of the 20th century.