Highlights of my work from the 2012 MFA in Visualization Fall Show

  

Imprints

My work demonstrates intimate realities that flow behind the façades I project into the world.  In conceptualizing these images I call upon the emotional undercurrents that clash with the carnal self; a self that enables one identity to conceal another.  Using a photographic emulsion and artificial light, I capture in silhouette the presence of my physical body.   The processes and surfaces resist my control; the resulting abstraction of the literal form articulate the otherwise concealed emotional and psychological structures.  The frustration of my inability to fully determine the outcome appear in the image as flaws, tears, fingerprints, and inadvertent patterns that communicate the dissonance between internal dialogue and outward appearance, revealing without my permission that which I had longed to hide

-R.J. Peña

Touch

    So now I've gotten comfortable enough working with the emulsion that I've begun to do more large scale works, even though using so much of the emulsion at one time kind of makes me cringe!  The last piece I completed, even though it did not turn out anything like I had planned or expected, had revealed an entirely new direction in which to take my art. 

    In this piece, titled Touch, I draw upon one of the most vivid and powerful memories: the events leading up to my first kiss.  At this point in my life, I was struggling greatly with the knowledge of  my sexuality and the fear of the consequences from my family.  At this time, my father vehemently forbid any expression of being gay, and forced me to go to therapy in order to correct the mental illness I was suffering from.  However, myself, being as strong-willed and bullheaded as he, knew that this was not going to change.  I had known my orientation from the age of 10, and had spent the previous 5 years concealing it and dealing with the emotional consequences on my own.  But this suppression had a backlash, creating an obsessive desire to find someone, to touch, to express these terrible desires that were forbidden, and yet pulling at my core as potently as the desire to survive.  When I finally found someone who was capable of returning my affections when I was 15, you cannot imagine the excitement, the relief of knowing I was not alone, that overwhelmed my senses.  Yet, even still, I was terrified of my father and what the knowledge of this discovery would do at home.  And then that summer, at a friend's birthday party in Galveston, I found myself outside with him out on the patio overlooking the ocean with a strong warm breeze washing over us and the sounds of the crashing waves drowning out everything but us in this electric moment.  At first we were just talking, each safe in our own sleeping bags, but the longer we looked into each others eyes the more irresistible the pull became, until suddenly we were holding each others arms.  Each of us were so desperate to touch one another and share this simple contact and yet so horrified at the thought.  Him with the backlash of religion and me from the strong boot of my father pressing on me. 

And then he kissed me. 

There has not been another moment in my life when the touch of another has filled me with so much thrill, so much wanting and need, than in that moment, and it is such things that I now feel the confidence in myself to express outwardly in my art. 

    Here was my process:
I laid a foundation of an oil based primer with my hands upon cloth, using my body to throw and spread the paint, leaving traces of my palms and fingers across the material.  I then used a paint roller to cover this with emulsion, almost erasing the traces with the medium I would then use to capture my body and that of Gavin, in the position that mimicked my memory.  Because the emulsion was a bit tacky, and because it could not bond properly with the oil primer, the contact with our bodies loosed in and caused it to tear where it contacted our skin, and later while processing, giant holes appeared.  The image has become a mirror or the emotional turbulence I had felt, a suppressed desire to touch, covered with a superficial appearance that was slowly degrading under the power of this primal need.

1st Pieces for "Beyond the Screen"

    I did it!  I got the wonderful Jace Kerby to model for me, and composed my first human shadow captures in my darkroom.  The piece on the left is titled "Is Someone There?" and the piece on the right is "I See You,"  and I feel as if the pieces compliment each other.  The original images are the ones with the white silhouettes, of course, since I haven't mastered the process of turning the negatives into positives in the processing, so I'm going to get the digitally inverted images printed at the same size as the original.  I know, the aesthetic will not be the same, but it's fascinating when looked at in terms of the simulacra and appropriation.  Each step in the process delivers an alternate perspective and challenges the verisimilitude of the images which preceded it, and in this light I am left wondering which presentation is authentic in its representation.  The dialogue between my thoughts and the image intensifies the intent of the subject, the emotive response, and the awareness of voyeurism.
    What strikes me about these two together is the position in which the viewer is placed in the narrative.  In Is Someone There? I feel as if I'm am the voyeur, intruding into the privacy of another who is yet unaware of my presence.  There is an apprehension that I will be caught, yet the desire to remove the screen and observe the mysteries beyond entices me.  The brush strokes and imperfections reinforce the illusion of a veil between me and the subject which becomes ethereal beneath the weight of my gaze.
    In I See You, this position is reversed:  now I feel as if I am the victim of the intrusion, threatened by the gaze of an unknown other beyond the veil.  I am struck by a desire to rip down the screen so that this unknown may be recognized and I may objectify the foe, therefore reclaiming the gaze that has been forced back upon me.  I find myself recoiling, almost ashamed, as if this perpetrator has caught me in some unseemly deed when I believed no one was looking, and I am reminded of the gaze of the Other and the need to hide myself behind the mask of a projected identity.

Visual Preparation for My Thesis Proposal

    This weekend was full of trial and error and retrial and more error, set on repeat.  There were lots of bugs to iron out with the darkroom, including but not limited to: faulty emulsion adhesion to the canvas, inconsistent fogging of the images, weird brown aberrations that appeared a few hours after fixing the emulsion, and the emulsion softening and becoming gel-like during the washing phase.  Here are a few images related to the errors:

 

    The image on the left shows the first tests I did on a few different materials.  The one in the middle is the artist's canvas I bought from Hobby Lobby, and the times of exposure on this strip was 3 seconds, 1.5 seconds, and 0 seconds..  One side is primed with some kind of gesso, probably acrylic.  A major issue we had was that the strips curled tightly upon developing and fixing.  I'm guessing this has to do with the developer affecting the acrylic primer, softening it and causing the fabric to distort.  The portion in the center that turned a weird black/brown color was where the emulsion was applied too thickly, and I believe the fixer was not able to penetrate into this area, causing a slow reaction hours after I brought it out of the darkroom.  One of the first errors I noticed was that the unexposed portion greyed significantly, which meant I had a fogging issue with one of the safelights in the darkroom.  To test this I got normal photo paper, turned off the Patterson Safelight on the desk, and exposed with the same time.  This is the test on the left.  With the Patterson Safelight off, I got no fogging. 
   Thinking the problem was solved, I stretched some rough white fabric that I purchased from Walmart (for a fraction of the price of the canvas from Hobby Lobby!) over a frame and coated it with the emulsion, and then I did two more strip testsjust to be safe.  The length of expousre was 1 second per region, up to 15 seconds.  The long strip on the left had 1 coat of emulsion, and the strip on the right had 2, just to throw in another variable.  The result had both unexpected and expected results:  Neither strip curled during processing, which was great news.  The strip with 2 coats and a deeper contrast range, which is definitely good to know, however added layer of emulsion softens immensely while washing the fixer off in water, and actually came off while I was patting it dry with a paper towel, which you can see in the middle.  One thing I was frustrated to see, is that the unexposed portion STILL managed to get severely fogged.  So I decided to do another test:  First, I put a paper towel over the opening of the overhead safelight to dilute the light even further.  Then, I coated the same Walmart fabric with 1 coat of the emulsion and developed it without exposing.  The result is the right piece of fabric in the leftmost image.  As you can see, there was a strange inconsistency in the tone of the image.  What I realized, is that before I stopped using the Patterson safelight, I had been coating strips on the desk near the light and, thinking myself frugal, was pouring the excess emulsion back into the bottle, and thereby unknowingly contaminated the whole bottle with exposed emulsion :(  However, now that I solved this, I could FINALLY move on with creating some art!

    The first images I decided to do were basically tests of different materials: glass and organic plant matter.  The glass I printed on watercolor paper and the grass I printed onto the Walmart fabric.  I had painted the emulsion of the fabric on a piece of cardboard, which gave me the happy surprise of seeing the corrugated pattern appear in the image.  Painting the emulsion with a brush also gave a nice brush texture to the image, which is cool.  The images on the right were the positive prints produced by the emulsion, and the images on the left are the digitally inverted versions of those.  I have two plans as to how to achieve this, which I will test soon.  One is a contact print, which is where I would lay the positive print over an unexposed piece of fabric and expose that directly to the light, theoretically getting a negative print of the positive image.  The other is using a small print of the positive image that is inserted into a small projector that I bought at Michaels which will project a large image of whatever is placed beneath it onto the wall.  Doing this would also, theoretically, give me the result of an inverted image. 

    Now came the question of what to do with the canvas I had inadvertently painted with fogged emulsion.  Since I knew I wasn't going to get the nice bright whites of a pure silhouette, I decided to experiment with some chemogramming, which is mixing the different processing chemicals to achieve specific effects.  I grabbed a plastic bag and some more grass and a miniature of a sculpture from a previous project and laid them onto the canvas, and then loaded a paintbrush with the fixative and splattered it onto the canvas.  After waiting a few minutes, I exposed the emulsion and developed, and just as I had hoped, the fixative had prevented to fogged emulsion from developing, and I was able to maintain some pure whites in the image.

     This is the inverted image of a print I produced last week, which I feel is more effective.  Hopefully, using either contact printing or the projector I will be able to achieve this.

The Darkroom is Complete!

Here it is!  This finished darkroom.  The final touches were stapling the internet cable along the bottom of the wall and filling in the light leak from the hole it came through and a few smaller light leaks that remained around the windows.  I discovered when light directly hit the side of the house the foam board actually became semi-translucent when your eyes adjusted to the dark, so we ended up having to put some of the ram board we bought for the floor over the foam board, and then just for good measure put some foil tape around the perimeter just to make sure absolutely no light would creep in.  I mixed the developer and fixer in two tupperware like pitchers with airtight seals, which I believe should be safe enough for the chemicals.  The one Patterson safelight that I bought isn't quite strong enough to give me enough light to work in, so I'm going to hit up a photo supply store out in Houston for a bulb that I can put into a standard lamp, which should give me the illumination I need.

 We ended up having to reverse the swing of the door into the room because it was too difficult to come in and out without disturbing the curtains, which was a light leak threat.  This way you are able to open the door, step into the light lock, close the door behind you, and then go through the curtains.

And here is my first attempt at photogramming!  For whatever reason, either proximity to the light or the intensity of the bulb, the paper seems to be ultra sensitive.  My first attempts at doing exposure strip tests at 1 second intervals produced completely black strips.  This image was created literally turning the lamp on and off almost instantaneously.  I think tomorrow I'm going to go back to Home Depot and get a much smaller bulb at the lowest wattage I can find and test that out to see if I can get a little more flexibility with the timing.  I created the image using my hand and shreds of a plastic Walmart bag, and painting the developer onto standard photo paper.  Because the paper has such a high gloss, the developer tended to pool in little puddles, which is where the white holes in the image come from.  Also, a bit of a happy accident, the words printed on the bag just happened to appear directly parallel to my arm.  There is something very appealing about that in combination with the form of a hand grasping through the silhouettes of the plastic bags...I think I'll explore some of that later.