paper art!

by: Peter Callesen

tv stills

Today I monitored my family's television watching habits with my camera.

While my little sister watches TV on the computer...


my brother plays games on the TV.


ooh, kissing scene.


OOOH SPECIAL EFFECTS!


this sequence was just too fun.





my dad and brother don't even wince.

knitting graffitti

So my best friend just sent me this link, and she's planning on knit-graffitti-ing it up on her college campus.











I'm super excited to see what she does with the idea! (also got some images from knittaplease, and their flickr, both of which you should totally check out.)

P.S. Yes, that is the Great Wall of China.

altered books

For my winter term project, I'm going to do some sort of altered book project (haven't really decided too much about it yet...). It's going to be some cross between an emphasis on poetry, and art.

here the emphasis is on poetry:






this one is starting to combine a narrative and artwork the way i want to:



here the focus is primarily on the art:












Here's how the professionals do it. This is the Humument, by Tom Phillips. It manages to be beautiful and carry a narrative about Toge all the way through 370 pages.






sources: the first four were found here, the next four were done by Joy Bathie, the next five found here, and the website for the last four is here.

Justine Kurland

"Creating a beautiful work is about creating a beautiful work." -Justine Kurland

And her work certainly is beautiful!

I particularly like her photographs because of her utopian ideals. Her images portray beauty and happiness simply and don't feel staged. They have an almost fairy-tale simplicity about them, and I find myself unable to look away. The composition is perfect in all of them.

Not only are her images amazing, she's a very admirable woman. I was also impressed by her ability to find models so easily. I can't imagine how finding ten or more women with small children to pose naked could be easy. She also manages to be a professional photographer with a small child, which can be very difficult.

Frankly, I'm more than impressed, both with her images and her presentation.

mapping project

For this project I chose to map windows; in particular, the windows of my dorm. While taking these pictures, however, I realized that the windows not only let you see in and out, but seemed to be mixing the inside and outside worlds. On a flat piece of photography paper, there is no inside or outside, there is just an image. In the real world, there are plants and hoses inside and entire houses outside. The outside affected the shadows on the windows and the glass let through light. I also found it interesting how I saw it as almost a battle between the wild and the domestic. The house gets two points for capturing some of the wild's flowers and an entire hose, and has invaded with lawn ornaments! The outdoors retaliates by splaying threatening shadows of branches across the house.

emulation project

For this project I decided to emulate Lorna Simpson's Public Sex exhibit. She took pictures of landscapes and blew them up very large, and then beside the photo put a small card with a scene or a couple of lines explaining what the viewer is looking at. The theme was places one could have sex publicly. I was fascinated by this, because that overarching theme completely changed the way I looked at her photos.

I decided to take a slightly different theme of death. We pass by so many places on a daily basis that have stories, and I wanted to show some of them. I blew the photos up as large as my paper would allow, and attempted to tint them slightly to get the feel of Lorna Simpson's work.

quince project

I never had a quinceañera. My normal answer to the question of "Why?" is a puzzled look, and then an "I don't know!" with a silly grin and my arms stretched out wide. The real answer is, I was never Cuban enough.

At fifteen, I had a dog's understanding of Spanish; basic commands and cooing was most of my vocabulary. Everything that happened to me, happened to me right then. Tenses were unknown, and the dreaded subjunctive didn't even exist. I knew how to say things like, "Do you want some more ice cream?" and "You're so bad!" I didn't actually realize how bad my Spanish really was until I came here, and was placed out of the entire first year of Spanish. I learned four tenses in a week. Students from the middle of nowhere with thick southern accents knew ten times the amount of Spanish I did. It was, and still is, embarrassing. I'm taking that class pass/fail, and just trying to keep up.

It's "my" language. I should know it, but I don't. I missed out on the language, and the culture, and I've always found my last name to be a burden. People can't pronounce it properly, and when they can, they expect me to be someone I'm not. My culture extends just as far as a soft spot for flan and guava pastries.

So I never had a quinceañera. How could I? I was too queer, too klutzy, too anti-social, and too white. I didn't want to wear the tiara and think about how much I didn't belong. I didn't want to have to make small talk in my broken Spanish to relatives I'd never met before. I didn't want one of my cousins to be my escort. My blond, blue-eyed mother was the one who wanted me to have a quinceañera. My dad didn't care. My mom likes frilly things, and pink, and flowers. I just like dresses. One time when we were shopping, I came across the most gorgeous dress I had ever seen, on sale. I was fourteen, and my mother was still laboring under the delusion that my quince was going to happen. She let me get it. It sat in my closet for years.

The dress still fits. And if the shoe fits, wear it, isn't that what they always say? So I wore my dress, because I lied when I said I didn't want to have a quinceañera. I did, desperately. I wanted to own it, to own my blood and my culture and my language. Instead, three years too late on a random Sunday in November, I gave myself the kind of quinceañera I wish I had: just friends, cake, and laughter.

J. Wesley Brown

link.