Catching up on recent aggregation

Hey, hi!

I’m consolidating my email list with my website, so my emails going forward will look a little different from the ones I’ve sent when I had shows or events to announce. Future emails may look even nicer than this once I get around to retooling my website, but that is still on the back burner at the moment.

This is a moment of seasonal transition. I’m close to wrapping up a couple of projects I’ve been working on over the past few months. In a few weeks I’ll be able to talk about some cool things that will happen in the fall. So close 🤏! I wanted to make this mailing list transition first, so the coast will be clear for those announcements. In the meantime, let’s catch up on the past few months:

We’ll call it a sabbatical

I’ve had the spring and summer semesters off from teaching, and have used that freedom to spend a lot of time making art. I went on two residencies, each of which has led to a new body of work that is in the process of polishing up for public view. I’ve also been experimenting with new processes for a private commission which will lead to more cool things that I can share a little further down the line. And there’s a big project that is currently in the installation process here in Pittsburgh:

Halophilic 2 photographs (salt + plastics + polarized light macro photography) are in the process of being installed as part of the Terminal Modernization Project at the Pittsburgh International Airport. When complete, there will be a total of 18 photographs in the restrooms of Terminal D. I’ll tell you all about it and send more photos when they have been installed and properly photographed. One of the three restrooms is complete and the others are well underway, so this should be soon!

Currently on view out there

I have pieces in two Associated Artists of Pittsburgh shows outside of our usual geographic range: on top, the 111th Annual Exhibition at the Erie Art Museum, and just below, The Industry of Art at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. Two remarkable curators (Laura Domencic in Erie and Eric Shiner in Brooklyn) made these happen in two uniquely dramatic spaces. Props to Madeline Gent and the AAP team for taking on the challenge of getting our work out beyond western PA. If the shapes of the crystals in the lower piece look a little funny to you, I have a whole story about that, which is going to need its own email.

My photographs were part of a screen-based exhibition and panel at the Inter-Society Color Council conference at RIT this summer. I produced a short video about my process as a part of that exhibition, which you can now view on YouTube.

Mark your calendar for PABF!

I’ll have a table at this year’s Pittsburgh Art Book Fair at the Carnegie Museum of Art on September 20-21. I’ll have new things to share, which I’ll tell you more about in upcoming emails. In the meantime, you can find my publications at Bottom Feeder Books and on my webshop.

And so back to school

I’m now updating syllabi for my fall classes at Point Park and Duquesne University. The DU class will be a section of History of Photography, if it hits the minimum enrollment, which is not yet a sure thing 🤞. We had an excellent section last time we ran this, and one of the texts we made the most of was Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, whose joint editorship includes Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, and Susan Meiselas—a powerful team! It’s organized into short essays covering a broad range of projects in photography. It bridges popular and fine art, journalism and social media, historical and contemporary, canon and … everything else. In a stroke of classroom-savvy genius, each essay is exactly one page spread in length, making it perfect for students to scan an essay of their choice and use it as the basis for a research project. The level of reading that you can plan a course around has changed in the past few years, and with AI dissolving the connective tissue of the learning process from one side, while our nation’s government does its best to obliterate education entirely from the other, a classroom is going to be a new kind of place to walk into this fall. I remain adjunct faculty, as I’ve been for over 20 years, so while I’m removed from most of the administrative conversation, my services as a specialized unit of just-in-time workforce continue to be in demand. I don’t plan to leave higher education for as long as I have any say in the matter. I want to see this through.

Some reads and recommends …

Lately I’ve been revisiting Annie Dillard. Her nature writing finds immanence in every normal creature she lays eyes on, and every encounter is brought to life in specific nouns and verbs. I’ve also enjoyed the unique narrating voice of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Over the summer I found my passive tv-watching cat-brain mode blown to smithereens by Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, which led me to shell out for a month of Paramount Plus in order to watch The Curse, which Fielder produced a little while back in collaboration with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone. Both of these brought many shapes of emotional enganglement into the ways we relate to reality through television (and also the kinds of compromises and betrayals that define the art world today). We can want more than what we’ve been getting from popular culture. More can be done! Oh and I saw some great photography in Toronto. And I’m just about to go see My Chemical Romance in Jersey with Griffin before we pack them off to art school at Tyler. 🙀 Hard to imagine going home to a house with no kids, but they are moving on up, and I’m proud of them.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon with more about this fall’s shows and publications! Keep fighting the good fight.