Canvas Home
With little notice, Agnes and I moved from DeKalb, Illinois to Greeley, Colorado last week. She will be teaching in the Art Department at University of Northern Colorado for at least the next academic year while establishing a new digital fabrications lab for the school. The move was by no means easy for either of us, but being able to take my studio practice with me on the road gave me an advantage in transition.
Before climbing into the moving truck for our road trip across Iowa and Nebraska, I took pictures of the house where I lived from July 2014 to August 2016.
The amount of architectural detail made the last-minute walkthrough with my phone camera an overwhelming task. The majority of those pictures from my phone are borderline nonsensical; poorly lit, crooked, desperate, but somewhere in the frame inevitably capturing a visual element which at some point I thought was significant about the house.
The 150-odd photos from that morning I ended up leaving with on my phone are now part of a 3-year catalog exhibiting different interior and exterior spaces. 95% of the catalog on my hard drive is the same kind of nonsense and derivative of the same impulse to own something more concrete than a memory.
I’m in the midst of investigating why documentation of my surroundings is so important to my practice. The hoarding of photographs conflicts with my lack of sentimentality — Of all my worldly possessions, my childhood memories fit into a single box. Before moving last week I spent hours combing over my studio archives and throwing things away that I couldn’t assign significance to which is something I’ve done every time I’ve moved since 2011.
A friend of mine recently started her PhD in Visual Anthropology at Temple University. Before she moved to Philadelphia, she recommended I read Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method Written by John Collier Jr. and Malcolm Collier. The Colliers address both the physical objectivity of a photograph, and the paradox of a photograph statically representing time, when time itself is completely dynamic. Visual Anthroplogy’s focus on visual and cultural interpretation of images has made me consider both the content of my own photographs and my initiative to take and store them. I’m still working my way through the book, and have started forming a list of questions to ask myself:
-What about my surroundings direct me to take photographs?
-What is the role and limitation of photography in understanding a space?
-What visual or conceptual patterns arise in my catalog?
-Why is the evidence of human activity important in this photography?
-How much do I want to understand objectively about the content of my photography?
-Is the objectivity of this photography a hinderance to creative process?
More questions will surface the further I read into the text and the more I explore Colorado. For this entry, I looked through my catalog and will share some of the photos I took from my phone during the past year of living in Illinois.
More photos can be found at my vsco. Listen to Arthur Russell- Canvas Home here.
