April 7th Meeting with Jesseca

     Jesseca said my photographic imagery was improving, becoming less literal, the framing more interesting, and the imagery more evocative.  She liked the different voices of film, pinhole film, and paper negative pinhole, and said some of my paper negative pinhole images were really successful.  She said I am very interested in the culture/ nature thing, and also interested in architecture.  She said I am definitely trying to say something that’s very important to me, and I need to dig deeper to find out what that SOMETHING is.  She said that I seem like a very organized detail oriented person, so she thought it was interesting that I seem to be so drawn to these places of disorder and neglect.  She asked if I am trying to rescue these places from oblivion, capture evidence of life lived, bear witness, pay homage’s, unearth their stories, WHAT?  She suggested I look up in the town records of who had owned that old barn, and what transpired to abandon the place to ruinous neglect.  I told her I had already thought I must since I’ve spent so much time there.

     She liked the two variations I showed her of my house explosion sculptures.  She liked that I was creating an environment to photograph my sculptures in, and I should do that some more.  She said it helps to bring the viewer deeper into a created world.  She said I had to watch out though for clues that bump the viewer back to the real world.

     Of my collages, she said she thought it was great that I was trying new and experimental things, but the pieces in my collages all looked like separate pieces that all spoke different languages.  She pulled out a book on Kiefer and said, “Look at how by his limiting his palette he is able to make all these materials speak harmoniously and cohesively.”  She suggested printing several of the same image and work on all of them at the same time.  She said to try and work in the beginning with just black & white & grayscale (spray paint botanicals if I use them, use white on black, and black on white, etc.), and to think the whole time of a complete image rather than separate parts and pieces.