Shades of Relatives:
Shades of Relatives, copyrighted J. Leone 2014.
Shades from the front set on a mirror with the inverted image.
The summer of 2014 I spent up in Massachusetts on the coast. I brought along my fisheye camera. Most of my relatives still live in Mass so as a fun project I started taking fisheye shots of them. They are a good natured lot and agreed to this ridiculousness because the camera is so distortive who could actually recognize them!
When I got back to my studio, I processed the film and that started looking at them. The roundness of the shots just screamed glasses. The photo of Shades of Relatives above was my first prototype of my new Shades series. Think about the reality of someone being confined by a circle. What do you see and if you force their features into a three dimensional sphere what happens to how you perceive them? If you look carefully at the Shades, you will notice that one eye is the flipped image of the other, and looking at them into the mirror you see an upside down version. I am busily exploring what happens with these kinds of images.
Panes:
First pass on stripping the old window frame. Removal of the putty next.
I am now busily working on the next found object piece. This frame has six panes and I am doing a series called “Twilight Panes”. I have finished sanding the frame, but still have to remove all the putty around the panes and then decide what color combination I want to put on it. With these panes, I printing on transparent film to create a different kind of reality than the one I created with the colloid emulsions in Rainy Day Panes, NYC.
NOT TO BE MISSED:
Iris van Herpen
Transforming Fashion
This show is currently at the High Museum and will not, unfortunately be traveling. This young gal is so innovative and so creative making fashion out of new technologies that is like viewing life a 1000 years from now on the planet Mars. She makes elegant constructs using metal, 3-d plastic printing and other new materials to sculpt her fashion. The show is in conjunction with Groninger Museum, the Netherlands and the High Museum in Atlanta. Everyone, men, women and children are fascinated by this show. If you get down to the Atlanta area, don’t miss it and make sure you watch the video where Ms van Herpen talks about her work.
She makes the statement, which is also true of my work, when asked if the technology drove her work. Her response was, no, I see the vision and then I have to go out and find a technology that can help me get it there. (Not sure I got the quote exactly correct but that is the essence of it.)
NEXT WEEK: A recap from various conversations with people about photography. My own observations on what happens when people look back at old photographs of themselves and others and the differences between painting and photography in terms of reality.
J. Leone 