Working Process - From the Sketchbook

A little bit disconcerting

Resume

I despise job hunting.

Bent

A lonely 'Drowning' made her own Page

(Being unaware of the gender of books I made an educated guess.)
www.facebook.com/pages/Drowning-not-waving-artist-book/180694568690942

Absence of Memory (200?)

“The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull’s head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the center of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.” –Borges



A house, to which one expects to return but does not, becomes a relic.

I stepped out of the door one day for what I expected would be a moment and did not return for weeks. Never did return intact. The impetus for this absence is a fascinating, devastating, poignant and decidedly tragic story, which I will not relate here.
You can, however, see it in the walls.

It isn’t much of a house. It is a delicate wreck of a house. And I was rebuilding it. I built a number of rooms very quickly. Beautiful rooms, hopeful rooms, not just patch and plaster but exceptional rooms-painted gardens, a ceiling spiral of stars, book pages covering the walls. Other walls aged, layer over layer of paint and crackling, icons visible, etched like hieroglyphics-a rabbit, an eye. Floors worked into a chessboard grid with book pages, illustrated, illuminated, heavily shellacked onto the surface so I could walk across without disturbing them. Neither need nor occasion to turn a page.

Upon my return I looked at my home as if it belonged to a stranger. I live a solitary existence so the things I had left, as I had left them, were all that remained to speak for me. Casually misplaced, awry, askew and adrift, arranged, displayed, collected.
Collecting dust.

I do not remember having put it all together, though I know I had done. So I decided to let the rooms have their say. Memory of who I once was. Parts of the best parts of me.

The house, my home, mirrors me. Tragedy in reverse.
It had fallen apart before I found it.
I am falling it back together.

And so it ends

The set has been struck. 'Spirit photograph: Departure'

good-bye.

The truth about mirrors

Spirit photograph - Interiors


Working with mirrors is more a matter of luck than anything else. This one was a gift-first try. But I cannot count how many negatives I have shot over the years that have me, posing dramatically in gown or straight jacket, next to a mirror majestically reflecting a light socket or bit of ceiling fan.

Spirit Photographs

(after Mumler)

Holding Hands


There is a book 'The Perfect Medium: Photography and theOccult' with a tremendous selection of spirit photographs. (Best one, Mary Todd in widows weeds with the ghost of her beloved Abe Lincoln). They are absurd but people believed them because there was the perception of photography as truth, and they had faith. So do I, in my own way, which is why I spent yesterday pushing all the furniture in the green room into the hall and made a theater. Today I set the stage.

Puppet


No Exit


Time out of joint


Curtain Call

The unconscious Line-Up

The line up.
Today was to be cleaning day which is why I am sitting on the floor playing with pictures. I pieced together the last three I did, out of sequence, and I think they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. It was not intentional. I like to think I am conscious of what I am doing but I am not infrequently wrong on that point.

Eclipse

(Staring at the sun with my heart in my throat.)

This page is from a different book.

As it turns out I am not infrequently wrong.
And I have no idea what comes next.

Apology

I cannot recall if I ever mailed a copy of this letter.
It reads:

'Dear C-

There is no excuse for my not having written in so long. I wrote letter after letter and never mailed them,
disgusted with the fact that they were the same story over and over again.
My constantly predicted decline; each time I spiral down I find myself looking up.
Being the method of your own destruction is not only tiring but so very, very common.
I still work, I still hope. I miss you, and I find myself with a steady ---- (*letter torn) of ideas for which you would be the ideal model. The latest of which is --- (*) illustration of a common plea:
I do not want to die terrified,
I do not want to die weeping,
I do not want to die holding the heart of someone I love in my hands.
I see a woman prostrate before the opened pages of a newspaper upon which has been placed a cow heart.
I would use a human heart but aside from the legal ramifications they are just too small.
------- (*crossed out)
Love,
Z'

Palimpsest

Trying to find the story inside.

I know it's in here.

Ring in the new...

'When all else is lost, the future still remains.'
-Bovee



Year's End - 'Ghosted by numbers' 2011

The fourth year of Year's End series.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurensimonutti/sets/72157628672510059/