My four weeks of winter break have been almost completely used up. I’ve spent most of my time in the studio, working on prints for my show at Dwelling Spaces, which opens this Friday. In addition… the holidays happened, it snowed a ridiculous amount in Tulsa, and my power washer broke again. I got through all of it though, and I have eight new prints! I’m currently waiting for my camera batteries to charge so I can photograph all of them. I’ll likely post all of the photos on Friday, right before the opening.

WARNING, TECHNICAL CONTENT. There were a lot of technical issues that I ran into when printing these and I can’t exactly say that I’ve figured it out yet. All of the prints in this series were made from oiled photocopies and films that were handpainted with ink on acetate. The handpainted ink on acetate/mylar is a gold standard in my repetroire of techniques, so nothing new there. I’ve used oiled photocopies as films before at MICA with great success, but whaddya know, there were a few obstacles when I used them here, in my own studio. First, a lot of the photocopies I used weren’t very dense in toner. Honestly, I have no idea how to correct this on a photocopier, though I imagine there is probably a way. I did my fair share of playing around at Kinkos FedEx Office, with no solution in sight. Yes, I did ask the person working at the FedEx and no, they had no idea and didn’t seem very interested in helping the weirdo who was making a lot of copies of what appearred to be nonsense. If anyone could offer an answer I’d very much appreciate it. Second, when I exposed these photocopy films, I was getting a lot of unwanted paper texture. I know that some paper texture is to be expected, but there was so much that it was obstructing the image and making it look like a misprint instead of an intentional choice. Third, underexposing the screens gave a more crisp image and less paper texture. It even excentuated the high-contrast photocopy look that I like so much. The downside to this, is what I think has been causing all of my troubles with reclaiming (power washer problems aside). I’ve had very persistantly clogged screens all across the board since I’ve started this series. With my strict time restrants and the unchanging cold weather, I haven’t tried terribly hard to remove these stains. Some extra elbow grease here and there, but no serious effort. I’m pretty sure I can get the screens back to pristine condition by using haze remover and being diligent with the power washer. Same thing happened a few years ago when I was still at MICA and that worked pretty well for me. It does, however, take a very long time to get out all of the stains and considering it is barely above freezing and there is still snow on the ground, I’m not going to tackle that right now. Anyway… what I’m really trying to stay is that I’m still working on finding the balance in using photocopies as films.

Listening to the Transference preview on NPR for the second or third time. Oh Spoon, you never fail to impress me.