Category: Uncategorized

Julie Van Der Vaart – Untitled 3 from Beyond Time series (2017)

I am v. into the way there’s a sense with what’s visible of these four frames that the motion the viewer is offered glimpses of is not unlike a flipbook animation. (My impression is that the subject is moving from laying on their side to kneeling with their back arched–not an especially comfortable movement to enact…)

The more I look at it though, it’s as if the subject is not only moving, the camera is moving in relationship to the subject while still preserving a sense of continuous motion. It’s really effing cool effect.

Girls Delta – Untitled feat. Rio Kakizaki (2017)

Parallax refers to the way different viewpoints change the way something is seen.

This image is staged so the viewer is allowed access to a personal/private moment under the guise of experiencing someone elses POV.

With mirrored reflections–it’s almost always an either/or situation: either the subject sees their reflection ideally or things are cheated to favor the cameras access to the ideal reflection.

Given the position of the mirror above, this is cheated to privilege the camera. In other words, despite the fiction it purports–i.e. that Kakizaki is curiously checking out her own genitalia in the mirror–it is unlikely that given the position and placement of everything that she’s got any sort of instructional view.

Thus, to the extent that this image might give someone permission to embrace curiosity about their body, I think it’s useful.

To the extent that it shrouds its voyeurism by co-opting a woman’s curiosity about her own body, it’s critically and conceptually underdeveloped and lazily executed.

Arne van der Meer – three times nothing | camera failure. (2017)

I love so much about these: the way those striations along the right most edge of each are not consistent across all three frames; the areas in the corners where there’s that light leak like effect that’s half-tin type edging, half inversion of those black spots you get on old mirrors and the way there’s something visible in the frames (almost like a cloudy x-ray or an underexposed document of trees in a forest–if you squint a little and treat it as if you’re laying on your back watching clouds drift in the sky overhead, or some sort of monster in the shadows) on either side but just darkness in the central panel.

….

In the process of packing up my life and moving away from the city where I’ve lived for ~ 15 years, there’s been a lot of soul searching.

A couple months ago, I had a dream which I haven’t been able to completely shake: I was walking through an old neighborhood, an autumnal chill in the night air. I smelled the skunk weed before I saw another person approaching me.

He was tall with long hair and a thick bristle of a goatee. He seemed oblivious to me–except for the fact that he was holding his left hand at his side and slightly behind him as we neared each other in an effort to shield it from view with his body.

With a start, I recognized where I was and who I was seeing. It was November 22nd, 2001: Thanksgiving–and the person I was seeing was me at the age of 24. Faced with the prospect of eating Thanksgiving dinner with both my mother and younger brother, I’d rolled a joint and informed everyone I was going for a walk and then proceeded to bogart it in an effort to get stoned to a level that involved at least some degree of dissociation.

I remembered the walk, remembered hiding the joint as I was watching myself doing but I didn’t remember the person I’d encountered.

As I drew closer, I realized that this was just such an opportunity as the ones I always create for myself as thought exercises: if you could give advice to your younger self, what would you tell them? (Of course, bearing in mind that them listening to you is one thing but them believing you enough to actually put stock in what you were telling them? Rather another entirely…)

I said: In 2018, you’ll be living in Brooklyn in a beautiful apartment with fantastic light, blond wood floors and lots of plants. Also: you’re a woman–the sooner you get a handle on that the easier your life will be.

He looked at me and sort of recoiled.

I woke up with the feeling that it was less dream and more of a evanescent memory.

…

Ludwig Wittgenstein held that understanding was impossible without the equal and opposite possibility of being misunderstood.

The advice I gave myself in my dream wasn’t actually the advice I’ve always thought to give my younger self. It’s always been some admonishment along the lines of Wittgenstein: don’t be afraid to fail because failure is the necessary first step in the quest to master anything worthy of mastering. (And for fuck’s sake: the cost of those three Polaroids with nothing on them was at least $2.50 a frame.)

It’s common sense such that pointing it out seems cliche–and cliches are easily dismissed.

…

For some reason all of this lead me to make an effort to empathize with myself at previous points in my life. The sort of see if I could with what I knew at any one point, have had any sort of clue where I would end up.

What I realized is not that my faculty for logic is too bereft to predict where I was heading but that frequently my expectations have a tendency to suffer from a disconcerting impoverishment of imagination–and by that I mean that where I have ended up has always been nothing like I expected but better for that fact.

Which leads me to think that the only way to really fail is through a refusal of doing.

Source: polaroidsandthoughts

Natalia Nobile – [↑] Untitled (2017); [↖] Untitled (2017); [↗] Untitled (2018); [↗] Untitled (2016); [+] Untitled (2017); [→] Untitled (2017); [↙] Untitled (2017); [↘] Untitled (2016); [↓] Untitled (2017)

I don’t necessarily like all Nobile’s work. I’ve been wanting to share some of her work for a while, I just haven’t had the time to really sift through her work until this afternoon.

I sat off drafting this post with the notion of talking about parallels between her work and other similar image makers. However, I realized at a certain point that at face value her images are compelling because of their immediacy.

What we are being shown is clear enough–it’s the why we are being shown it that remains ambiguous. But why we’re being shown what we’re seeing is less of a preoccupation than questions like are those Frida Kahlo panties? Cyrano or Elephant? Is the woman straddling the bedpost posing; additionally, is this pose supposed to suggest something vaguely masturbatory? Are those cannabis plants?

In the picture of the woman in the pink body suit on the bicycle looking back over her shoulder while feigning the fastening of her helmet struck me as having exquisite color rendition. Same with the are those pot plants one.

But organizing them together in this way showed the extent to which Nobile is using color with subtlety and style. It also shows that although you don’t necessarily realize it that color not only ties her images together within themselves, it actually ties her work together just as well as a signature.

#1850

No matter it’s accidental and/or intentional pretenses, this project is at it’s most basic level a sex blog. Yes, I deploy smut as the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of commentary go down; but, arriving at the point of embarking on such an undertaking requires an obscene amount of privilege, i.e. gainful employment to pay for food, shelter and clothing, enough to pay for a reliable devices that have access to high speed Internet broadband–not to mention enough free time to dedicate approximately 25 hours a week to a project that provides little if any income.

With all these advantages in mind, I make a point of dedicating every 50th post here to contextualizing the proceedings within the context of the sad state of affairs that is this present nightmare in the desert of the real.

I’ve been inexcusably remiss in keeping up with the news, over the last month or so. It’s less that I’m suffering 24/7 news on-demand fatigue or progressive pessimism and more that I’ve been preparing to move ¼ of the way around the world. (I arrived last week and while I’m nowhere near settled in, things have at least stabilized enough where I think I can probably keep things here running smoothly for the next month or so. After that, we’ll see. I’m not sure working FT and going to school FT are going to leave much time for blogging. But we’ll see…)

The stories that have commanded my attention since the last current events post are as follows:

At least two prominent trans activists have reported rejections, threats and stonewalling from the US State Department regarding the issuance of gender affirming documentation. For the specifics: head over to TeenVOGUE (which continues to have some of the most on point coverage of any resistance outlet).

Last weekend saw the 2nd Anniversary of far-right white supremacists gathering in Charlottesville, VA. Protestors outnumbered racists by exponential numbers. However, bear in mind that there are numerous reports of the police giving preferential treatment to white supremacists. Also, several weeks back there was a big story about how Berkeley, California’s Police Department essentially doxxed Antifa members.

And in an overlooked bit of news: the US Senate voted unanimously to pass a resolution proclaiming that: “the press is not the enemy of the people”–as Dump continues to scream loudly and often about how any media critical of him, his administration or his policies is ‘fake news’.

I’d like to say I am hopeful that perhaps the winds are shifting. However, despite the thick, choking black smoke ensuing from the Dump White House, I think there’s likely been too many people on Faux News screaming NO FIRE, NO FIRE for any of the current or upcoming trials or even the eventual culmination of Mueller’s investigation are going to substantively change things.