In Her Presence

School starts up again tuesday and while I haven't done much new work recently, I thought i'd post a project or two that I hope to finish up during this coming semester. If all works according to plan, this should be my last semester of my undergraduate career (WHAT?!? WOOP!!!), and after many long, painstaking, difficult (read, easy and willy nilly) years, I will be really glad to finally have my BFA.

Anyways, here's a project I started at least 2 years ago. A long time ago, I was hanging out on the internet and stumbled across this picture.


It's a photo of Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom, taken while they were dating. This photo struck me for a bunch of reasons, but the two most prominent being: why would someone take a photo of these two? and, the chemistry between them is melting me. Yeah, to someone like me, seeing Bill Callahan and Joanna Newsom would be pretty wild and exciting, and I guess someone with a pap-sort of mind would snap this photo - but the fact that someone like that would stumble upon this couple and have the chance to take the photo just seems so unlikely. But more than anything, this picture made my heart beat fast and made me think of another photo I had seen of Bill Callahan, that was taken by Joanna Newsom. It's this one:


The first time I saw this picture, it also killed me. The look on his face is stunning; he's looking directly at her, enveloped in her shadow, the two of them trying to get some album photo out of the way, most likely not realizing how much emotion is conveyed through the snapshot they made.

So, I started searching for more photos of the two of them together, or that one took of the other. I understand that not everyone will see and feel what I do in these photos, and I know that my love for both of these musicians (especially Bill), and my heart-filled-dream-head that loves intense firey love is what draws me to these images and shows me what I want to see. But I saw it and I wanted more.

So, I started searching and found a bunch of photos - some more that Joanna had taken of Bill, but more than that, photos of the two of them playing together or photos of him playing while she was in the audience on backstage. I was interested in images of him primarily, for a thousand reasons (he's a hunk, i'm in musiclove with him, his music has governed/guided/soundtracked dozens of the most important interactions and experiences of my life, etc etc etc) Each photo I found made me feel the same way, and I realized I wanted to make a book based on them.

I started doing tracings of the photos. So far, I've only done three. These are them:






I want to print the photos full bleed, double sided. Not sure how I want to bind it yet. SMFA has an incredible printer that can do exactly what I want it to do, and will allow me to print on all different types of papers. It'd be fun to print on tracing paper, to almost exactly recreate the originals, but tracing paper is so hard to work with when binding. I don't know how it'll all pan out, but I really want to get this project done before I leave school, so I can take advantage of the facilities there. The title of the book will be In Her Presence.

Mixtape Box

Here's a book I started years ago and plan to finish for my review board this semester. One of the first books I did along with a mixtape, around the same time Aubrey was doing his awesome mixtape tent project at RISD. Anyways, I had this one mixtape that I was really into - my boyfriend at the time saw the playlist and asked me "do you always listen to such sad music?" - I listened to it often and really felt it to be representative of my emotional state at that time. My uncle had recently given me this great book about sign painting, that featured a whole bunch of fantastic alphabets. I chose something like ten different letter sets, and decided I was going to try and compose text cards for each song, using the restricted set of letters and trying my best to express something about the song through the typography. I spent forever laying these out, and then tracing them, measuring everything - and then colored them in (I think I had restrictions about what colors I could use too? This project was all about making something out of limited resources). Then I took them to staples, had them laminated, and started the box.

I think I had drawn up the box before I started the cards, but I'm not sure. The box is so far unfinished. It needs its lid, I need bookboard. There will be a flip up lid and probably a title on the top of the box. I dig this box a lot and remember it as being a really fun challenge to make - especially figuring out the sexiest way to fit the tape in. I love making boxes. And drawing up plans.

The idea behind this project is lofty and fun - each card is a song from the playlist of the tape, and the idea is that the viewer/owner of the piece would listen to the tape and be able to re-order the tracklisting to what they feel is appropriate. Dreams about having a color printer/copier set up have me thinking that the viewer would then receive some sort of print out of the cards in the order they arranged (maybe from .pdf's that would be printed out into some sort of one page book?), and a copy of the tape. I mentioned Aubrey and his project earlier because our two pieces were riding the same wave and I we hadn't talked at all while developing them. I would describe his but I don't remember it in detail enough to do it justice - but it was great, and you could record things you were playing/hearing. It's been a real pleasure having him as my mixtape friend in art for all these years now <3.