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.

Building the Darkroom

This week I gathered materials to convert the spare bedroom in the house to a darkroom.  The biggest challenge for this project was going to be sealing off all the windows to prevent light leakage and constructing some sort of entry/exit mechanism to lightproof the area around the door.

So first we cleared most of the furniture and clutter our of the room and off the walls, leaving the desk so I would have somewhere to put the trays of chemicals I will need to use for the photograms.

Sealing the windows was actually fairly easy.  All we needed to do was buy some insulated weatherproof board, cut it slightly bigger than the height and width of the window, screw it into the drywall, and caulk around the edges.  That created a good enough seal to keep out the light.  For this window in particular, we will later be installing a standard bathroom vent type device to ensure good ventilation.  For that, we would need to keep the window slightly cracked at all times (which is why we got the weatherproof board, and cut a small hole in the bottom of the foam board so that the vent can suck air through the space in between the board and the window.  Since the mechanism for the vent will be outside and going over the window, we should be able to seal the edges in a similar way to prevent light leaks.

For the door, we bought some PVC pipe and blackout curtain material that we made two makeshift quarter-circle drapes out of.  To mark where the drapes were going to go, we held a Sharpie against the door and let it mark the ceiling as we opened and closed it to see the area the door would need to travel.  We ended up having to break the pvc pipe in a few places to get the curve we wanted, so to hold the pieces together we threaded some rope through the pipe and then rolled the curtain over to lock it in place.  We then screwed the pipe into the ceiling with drywall lock screws and attachments and attached the sides of the curtains to the drywall by screwing them into some spare pieces of board we had laying around.  Against the bottom of the door we attached a weatherproofing strip so that no light could leak in through the bottom of the door, where a large hole had been chewed by a mouse at some point or another.

This is the desk that we left in the room to use as a worktable.  The three plastic bins near the wall are what I will be using to store the chemicals and paintbrushes while I'm working.  To the left of the table you can see a large roll of thick brown cardboard.  I'm going to use this to protect the floor by laying out overlapping strips along the ground and stabilizing it by taping it down with blue painter's tape.  The cardboard was relatively cheap so it will be fairly inexpensive to replace and easy to keep clean.

There are a few remaining things to be done, such as the red lighting arrangement and storage for the chemicals, but those will have to wait until my shipments of these materials arrives next week.  Once the floor and vent are installed and all my materials arrive I'll be ready to start making some art!

Plans for a Darkroom

    I spent most of last week searching for and pricing materials to convert the spare bedroom in our house into a darkroom.  The facilities offered at A&M won't be suitable for the type of work that I wish to do mainly because I'm doing large scale photogram prints with non-standard developing practices, which is what the darkrooms at the university are set up for.

EXTRA-SENSITIVITY EMULSION

    Because of the scale at which  will need to complete my work, it'll be much cheaper, and honestly give me a lot more flexibility,  to make my own photo paper.  The product above is a high sensitivity photo emulsion that can be painted onto any porous surface, or even non-porous surface as long as a foundation of some sort is painted on first.  By using this, I can turn any medium into material for my photograms, and do any scale I wish at a much cheaper cost.  That being said, a quart of the liquid is $148.00, and the 2 quarts I'll be purchasing make up more than half of my projected cost for converting the room to a darkroom.   The other chemicals I'll be using are as follows:

Kodak Dektol Developer :$8.50

Kodak Fixer : $7.50
Bleach : $10.00

Fortunately, the remaining chemical components are nowhere near as expensive.
    For the medium on which I will paint the emulsion, I'm going to first do tests on this type of paper:

 

Heavy Duty Mulberry Paper

I can purchase a roll of this at 47" x 6 yards for around $70 dollars, and the dimensions are perfect to allow me to experiment with scale and composition.  I have projected the total cost for the materials and conversion of the space to a darkroom to run me about $467.00, which is less than my original estimated price of about $700.00, and this makes me happy!

This is an example Floris Neusüss's work, which is similar to the style I'm going for. I'm very interested in using the silhouette as a method of presenting loss, or lack, in terms of Lacanian theory.  In presenting these forms I'm hoping to make the viewer feel the loss of something which once existed, and push them to fill the void with their own fantasies, in essence, bringing a physical form to the metaphorical "screen" upon which we project our desires.  I also wish to abstract the forms by painting on the developer and fixer and printing them on the textured paper so that the silhouettes are degraded.  This ties in with my own desires of tearing through the screen, changing the way we perceive reality by distorting familiar forms, in many ways similar to the methods of Surrealists in that the distortion they present us with is actually closer to reality than the presentation of straight reality.

In Search of the Gaze

 I have become very interested in the concept of the Gaze and the reverse gaze between the subject and object, and the screen upon which we project our desires that is created at the intersection of the two.  We are subconsciously aware of the presence of the Other that surrounds us, and as our minds seek to label and identify, to keep ourselves isolated in the safe and orderly realm of the symbolic, we can be suddenly reminded that we exist as a visible entity, and that our desires are merely a stain upon the screen that separates our individuality from the lack.

  

For whatever reason, we feel shame at the realization of our existence.  Even the term "stain" coined in the theories of Lacan has negative connotations associated with it.  Why is it that we feel the need to hide from the Gaze that the Other imposes on us.  Why must we separate ourselves from the womb of the universe that we, despite how much we scream and yell of our individuality amongst our peers, are inseparably a part of?  There is an insatiable need to force the predilections of our identity upon the Gaze of the Other, but what is actually being seen?  Will the reality of our identity be too traumatic for us to realize?

 There are so many questions I want to explore on this subject, and I feel that the photogram is the perfect medium for me to conduct my research.  It captures the metaphorical "Stain" directly onto a visible medium in ways that we are not used to seeing, almost like it presents its own perspective.  There is a distortion as well in the way the image is processed that is very attractive to me: the randomness of the aberrations inherent in the technique, the pull of curiosity to see into the image, to explore and understand the image before me.  It's almost like a physical manifestation of the invisible screen which holds the world we wish to see. 

In the case of the photogram, it removes the bias of our personal desires and blurs the form, leaving us staring into the lack of an image that is completely open to being filled with our personal projections.  I take from the realm of the Surrealists the concept that a distortion or breaking of reality brings us closer to its truth than an absolute representation, and I'm hoping that working in this medium will allow me to present the presence of our bodies in a way that invites us to consider looking through the screen and uncovering what lies within the Gaze of the Other.