A new year non-linear look back at sets from the last 12 months of “The Window”, with alt lead images (click thumbnails for originals):
“One-Frame Films — titled, untitled, entitled, maltitled”. Woke to acrid smoke at 3 am. A truck had exploded in flames just outside. It was the only vehicle parked on the entire street. On the bricks the next day were hard flat drops of melted aluminum. The police wouldn’t say what caused the blaze. Fathomless fires everywhere these days.
“In Praise of Fails” - Every winter (10 years+) I get out of the city and do my seasonal weatherworks using found wind, snow, ice, branches, and so on to create 30’ color-fields on a frozen lake. They take many hours, but last less than one when completed. (I am currently awaiting Gaia to grace me with the right conditions again—the sighing ice, the burning wind, the canvas of snow…thus this photo retrospective).
“Happiness Like Motion - even still, 492,126 miles per hour”. Her careful sense of fashion caught my attention. I love her white corsage and rose Mary Janes.
“The Geometries of Taylor Swifties” - Lines & triangles & fans oh my”. Fans of the phenom lined up around 5pm to get in to a TS oeuvre party, which let out about 2 am. That particular night on the street there were shrieks instead of the usual shouts, and mom-croons* instead of fisticuffs.
“The Girl. The Vampire. The Murder. The End.” Another set of “one-photo films”. The person above escaped from anime to find and marry a human. She is an influencer and kickboxer in her world, and so she’s hoping to meet and get engaged to someone similar in this dimension, like fisticuffer Jake Paul — he once had his hair cut into the shape of a rooster, so she believes he’ll like the eye on her nose.
“All the Hills Echo Haha Hehe - images of innocence” - The alt photo for the multitasking-woman (thumbnail below) doesn’t show the beautiful public/private moment—the child breastfeeding—so I selected a different pic from this set, the man who rides his pirate birds around with a broken leg.
“Nuns to Gnostics - Buddha, Baphomet, Jah, Jesus, Yahweh, Waheguru” - The alternate for the lead photo of the Wiccan wearing the wooden crown (below) is only slightly different from the original, so above is the second alt. The man is getting wrapped with the shel yad on his arm and with the shel rosh on his forehead.
“AI For an Eye - aka A.I. D.I.Y” - Aphantasia is the inability to imagine visually**. So when reading a novel with spooky descriptions someone with the condition might not get frightened at all, but break fingernails gripping the armrest in terror when seeing the movie version. People with the condition can still draw though, by observation or relying on verbal or written descriptions— basically just like how A.I. doesn’t “imagine” but can create an image. Since a sub-theme of this project is photography itself, I used Firefly to do some “text photography” to depict scenes (some missed, some imagined) from the real settings and conditions of The Window. The prompt for the lead and alt image above was “photorealistic man in clown costume walking on stilts on bricks, seen from 20 feet above.” The resultant images made me break a fingernail or two.
“Up the Long Slide - even jack black” - Along with the overhead God (or Drone) p.o.v., the tessellating bricks give all the shots from The Window a cohesive visual rhyme scheme***. The above image shows a different dude from the original lead shot, but he’s on the same work crew and it’s the same day. (Also: strange that it seems so rare now to see people— in photos or in person— not in performative mode.)
“Grand Theft Photo - Prince-ly appropriation” - Speaking of performative mode, I could do a 1000-photo set of people holding their leg up in the same position for 15 minutes for “caught-in-action” walking selfies, posing in elaborate gowns with ice-cream and pizzas for wedding photos, touretting for Tik Tok, renegading for IG, voguing for fashion shoots and on and on but never anon. Anyway, above is someone who hired her own paparazzi.
“Never Hold Snow - an ode” - A visual poem (for the aphantasians), and a text poem (for the anti-aphantasians). Something as simple as holding snow, as an ode for one who can’t.
Not everything is possible but nothing is inconsequential. Things burn down, or melt away just like that …. Honor and inhabit every moment.
NOTES:
*defined as swaying to music, possibly using emotive hand gestures, turns, non-technical hip movements, clapping above the head, and some “wooh-woohs”.
**people born blind do not necessarily have aphantasia — they can imagine or dream textures or spatial layouts. (Imagine that, dreaming of the feeling of sharp and sub-zero exploded metal slicing your fingertips, but never of the blackened remains the orange flames that melted it.)
There is also a typographical visual type of imagination, where people don’t see the described object in their mind’s eye, but see it as a printed word. A pomegranate is not a tartly sweet and juicy ruby fruit whose seeds burst in your mouth, but just an eleven-letter word in sans-serif font .
***and one eventual wall arrangement of the photos at exhibition will echo the brick’s tessellating pattern
Last year’s lookback, “Berst of 2023” which includes The Window Tarot, The Drake equation, Protest/Antitest, Yes Horses They Fly…: LINK
BONUS PHOTO: (to mirror the very first photo - person, hose, hard work to do). The working person.
