The Real American Gothic

Gas mask, shovel and pie, oh my.

Sinister Humor

I asked my friend to bring up some of his favorite props from his performance art to create a sort of cyberpunk / steam punk look for our shoot. Not only did he bring some great stuff (that I supplemented with a few of my own pieces), but he brought this cool woman with him who was willing to do some studio play. We had a great time and they both brought so much creativity and humor to the process. It's such a pleasure to work with such fun-loving people who have a sense of sinister humor. Totally what I was looking for. More from this night coming in future posts.

Wrapping - Cellophane

I started working on some new wrappings recently. Cellophane makes people look kind of creepy and dead. It wasn't intentional, but I like what it eludes to in a Commodified Human context. It only happens to be that my model was female that night...I'm not going for a "dead girls are hot" kind of vibe, just more a contextual relationship with the other human commodity images.
I see a landscape coming with 5 or 6 bodies in cellophane (men and women), littering the space. Some desolate place where the trash we create is put out of sight but continues to encroach on the natural world. The overall destruction on our identity through corporate greed and whacked American cultural values is killing us all.

The Work is Transforming

Someone has been playing with the Bio Lab Installation. That makes me absolutely ecstatic! It's pretty exciting to think about how these images will change as the installation continues on. I feel like the 3 bears in a good "someones been sleeping in my bed" kind of way. I hope to catch several different stages of this work as it transitions. So go to the gallery and play! I love surprises.

Into the Woods Installation piece from recent exhibiton

I just returned from the opening for Into the Woods at the Huff Gallery. Here are a few views from the installation of this piece. Into the Woods, 2009, Installation, Digital Transparencies and Light

Interactive Bio Lab Installation

This is one of the installation pieces from the Into the Woods show at the Huff gallery. Visitors to the gallery can create hybrids and layered landscapes from a collection of photographic transparencies that I created. Come play Wednesday night!

Exibit Opening at Huff Gallery June 10 4-6pm

Into the Woods Photographic Prints and Installation by Mary Yates
I have always had a secret desire to become lost in the deep woods at night. To hear the rustling of animals, smell the fertile earth, and to feel my heart quicken as perhaps I catch a brief glimpse of the hidden world that exists beyond my safety and touches the place where magic is born. The thought makes me feel giddy, alive and even a bit apprehensive. With all my senses engaged and not knowing the outcome, I could venture forth and really feel what it is like to be human and truly alive with limited defenses and no connection to the safety of a warm home with locked doors.

The ways we have distanced ourselves from nature is truly heartbreaking. We all now live in our shoebox cages and most of us visit nature only when we need “sport” or “recreation”. As urban sprawl encroaches on more and more wild lands these magical spaces are disappearing at an alarming rate. We are so fearful of the woods and the wild beasts that roam that we have insulated ourselves in subdivisions and strip malls. We call the wildlife management service when a “nuisance” animal encroaches on our tidy little plastic world and spray chemicals on our lawns to create uniformity that feels safe because we have lost our way and become fearful. I believe that this disconnection to our wild lands is one of the most devastating signs of how unhealthy our planet has become.

Through this work, I hope that people will realize that the woods are a treasure, a place of magic and beauty, and essential to our success as a species. I hope that visitors to this exhibit will experience, in a small way, how it might feel to be immersed in a living world where we can revive our connection to our to our planet and our responsibility to her.

The images were gathered in Kentucky at Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm (part of the River Fields conservation easement) and at Bernheim Forest.

Please visit River Fields at www.riverfields.org or the Nature Conservancy at www.nature.org for more information about how you can help protect our land and natural resources.

Opening Reception Wednesday, June 10th 6-10pm at the Huff Gallery at Spalding University

Under Wraps

www.whyisthiswrapped.com

More Wrapping - Center for Women and Families - National Crime Victims' Rights Week

In continuance of my Commodification project, I am working with the Center for Women and Families on awareness raising for National Crime Victims' Awareness Week. This was a performance and photo shoot on the banks of the Ohio River in Louisville, KY. Ron Jasin is my second shooter for the images that I am in. Check out more information on the Center for Women and Families project, visit www.whyisthiswrapped.com

Microscopic Self Portrait

As a child I remember watching Carl Sagan on PBS take all the elemental ingredients of life and put them together in a big slurry of potential. The result was not life, but a sticky mess of iron, protein, carbon and other key elements. It was the first time I remember thinking “What are we?” I believe reflection on that question is one of the fundamental commonalities that all human beings experience.
In this piece I am contemplating the science and nature of my existence, from what I had for dinner last night to the corpuscles that feed my vision and the nerve endings that provide me the sensory experience of pleasure and pain. All these small pieces somehow converge to create a depiction of me, but they are really just iron, protein, carbon, etc. The piece is an extreme form of navel-gazing and while the sums of my parts are represented, they do not accurately portray the whole. In a world where we are used to following recipes and formulas, it defies logic.

American Gothic

Another image with masks and slightly different coloring. I can't wait to see these printed out large. Someone commented that these mask image reminded them of a modern antique version of American Gothic. Maybe, but I like to think of it as a hybrid between the Chinese and Russian myths of the woman of the snow or frost. It has a more fairytale feel to me. I also want to give thanks to Terry Wunderlich for the super masks.

Dirty Soft

Another image from the recent set. I am constantly amazed at how wonderful my friends are for playing along with my crazy ideas. I'm so lucky to have this energy in my photographs. I think there is a real advantage to a playful approach to staging photos, everyone brings something unexpected to the experience. We play together, we create and I get to indulge my voyeuristic nature. Lucky me! Thanks guys!

Another Image from the Saturday Shoot

Another image from the shoot the other night. A friend whose work I admire suggested I play a little with colors, so I left a hint of the feather and eye color on this image and also used the ochre of the feathers to dirty the image up. Thanks for the suggestion and I'm curious what you all think. I believe the other image has a more sinister quality where this is more tranquil, but still out of the ordinary. More to come!

Recent Studio Work

I had some friends over last Saturday night for drinks and some casual head shot portraits evolved into some more complex play in the studio. I'm so happy with the new pieces and have started processing them in this dirty, antique-looking style. There is something in the aesthetic of old photographs that really appeals to me and I try to bring that into my work. Since I can't be in the darkroom printing tintypes right now, I like working with this digital conversion that is reminiscent of cracked old photos found in the corner of an attic. I like the creepy quality the mask gives to the woman and the stoic look of the man.

I understand that there is a certain morbidity to my work and have struggled with the appeal of main-stream single image photographs. As much fun as it is to make a beautiful image and to have people respond to the "pretty", I think that embracing my shadow self is truly where my most creative and exciting possibilities reside.

A few samples of this work will be forthcoming, as well as a couple of images that are from my commodified humans project.

A closer shot

This is a closeup of my eyebrow hair.

New Microscope Camera

So I just got a cheepo microscopic camera. It's pretty cool and I'm looking forward to really doing something fun with bugs and plant specimens. So far I've had fairly good results with the images I captured of myself but it is difficult to keep focused and must be very close to whatever you are shooting. It also does video capture - I haven't even begin to wrap my mind around how I might use that. Still the obsessive geek in me spent about 40 minutes looking at my pores in the preview mode. I can't do anything large print wise with it because of the 1.3mp limitation, but still really good and might be truly fun for working in small things like tintypes or in grid installations. Nifty new toy!

Here's the long-awaited art sale info:

Last Minute Holiday Art Sale
Sunday, December 21st
11am - 3pm
881 Clarks Lane

Artists Participating Include:
Ron Jasin
Suzane Edds
Gary Bell
Scott Scarboro
Terry Wunderlich
Michelle Amos
Mary Yates
and more!

Join us for some holiday cheer and a lot of cool, affordable art!

Don't forget, we are giving away gifts from the artists! Come get some art!

KFW / LMDC Project Gets Some Press

About a year ago I was selected to be a partner artist with sculptor Joyce Ogden for a special project with the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections to create a community art work for the exit lobby of the jail. We recently got some nice press about the project and some of the other components that have evolved in the process of working in the jail in the Courier Journal. Check the article by Dianne Heilenman

New Chemistry Experiements

I've been in the darkroom. So much fun!!! I've been playing with gum printing and emulsion coating on a nice, sturdy watercolor paper. I think the best part is that even though I have used these processes before, I have to rediscover them each time. That's the one thing that I truly love about the darkroom, the sense of magic and wonder I feel when something actually works.

Ron built a UV exposure unit for his screen printing and I'm finding it very useful for my alternative processes. It's so much handier to have a powerful source of UV light than the sun, particularly since it's very overcast in Kentucky right now. Gear is such a geeky thing to love, but I like chemistry experiments and playing with dangerous light. It makes me feel a little more alive.

My friend Ethel was my gracious model for these images that I'm doing the gum and emulsion prints with. She was a total trooper hiking through the woods with me and getting in awkward positions for my human connection to nature photography. I truly love the interaction with the model, it's a true collaboration. The shot above wouldn't have happened if she hadn't suggested putting the sticky thistle pod into the shot. I'd been carrying that thing for about an hour, dropping it multiple times, and starting to resent picking it up. It was a perfect contrast to the lush ferns and the beautiful tones and soft texture of her hand.

Rollins

I saw Henry Rollins last night here in L'ville. He spoke for well over two hours. Not only was he brilliant and funny, but he gave me pause to think about some larger issues that have been troubling me. He shared some great stories about his travels around the world and how isolated people have become. Instead of being afraid of new cultures his approach is to hold out his big tattooed arm and just say "Hi, I'm Henry, what's up?" His experience is usually good with this approach and he has managed to travel through Pakistan, Laos and many other countries and feel welcome and truly get to know the other people. He is the example of the beautiful American vs. the typical ugly American tourist we ususally hear about. If we could all work towards being more open with eachother, even our neighbors, we would could perhaps evolve to a higher state of being. In other ways, Rollins also inspired me to think about how eveyone hates their jobs and is dissatisfied with the drudgery we all feel in our day to day routines. Eveything is based in fear, that's why people don't just get out there and do what they love. How would we transform the world if we all just said no to the BS and said yes to living. Rollins seems to truly live his life at 100% - sucking the marrow out of his expeirience on the planet. That's very punk rock and a great lesson in not racing toward death like we're all out of control. We are the masters of our lives and experiences.