the randomlings of ville.

The Wood Transfers.

2010-04-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

I'm certainly working on something but it is very uncertain where I should take it. A hard decision. Let me tell you about this photograph. I wanted to make nature grow inside of me for a short while in that undisclosed little space that we hold in our minds and bodies, where we realize that we are not in a human vacuum but are a part of a cycle. Things die and live from death. Trees lead lives but they are not the same, yet there are so many similarities even with our external forms. Organic forms are constant and everywhere. They replicate and they never die - the forms never die.

Sometimes it gets worse, the vacuum that is, sometimes we pretend that our silly identities set us apart even from humans. After some digging I have always found that no matter what the background of a person is, there is the same core motivation or crisis inside - brewing in wait. Bankers are not much different from artists, not really. Not if you have the proverbial testis (Excuse me, ladies... Ovaries? No?) to put your self-guided notions of ego and identity aside. We are all made of the organic forms - that never die.

So that's where I'm going with these pictures, or some of the other ones that will follow/fork out of these.

The 1st Movement (8 Minutes). Mono Lake, CA, USA.

2009-11-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

Charles van Schaick

2009-10-07T14:06:00.001-07:00

I have a new found passion in old portrait photography and my all time favourite has always been the rather unknown, Charles van Schaick, whose photography was used for a book named Wisconsin Death Trip which was later turned into a dramatized documentary. I recommend both. I'd love to rant about democracy and some deep seeded ideas about Martin Heidegger right now but am too hungry. So I will stick you with an array of beautiful photographs. Your welcome!

Russian Roulette

2009-07-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

I have been a secret fan of Pascal Comelade for approximately two years and five months.

Now it is no longer a secret.

The Personal Injuries Archive

2009-07-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

For the past year since landing to Los Angeles, I've been working on a series of work called The Personal Injuries Archive. It began in a damp, dark, and cold city named Glasgow in Scotland. I had a strange love affair with despair when I lived there, finding myself in a constant state of disbelief and fatigue. I didn't sleep much and when I did, I would sleep for almost two days straight, waking up at random hours.

The series began manifesting itself during those strange hours when I would be awake and feel completely disconnected from what everyone else were doing. It kind of trickled down onto my sketchbooks and my writings. I watched a lot of Peter Greenaway's early short movies and was immersed in his talent for cataloging which he acquired and fostered during his years working for the British Central Office of Information, editing films concerning the trivialities that create a national landscape. The premise for my series would formulate into an escape from a daunting feeling of disconcert of self. I was beginning to hate myself quite deeply. I too would become interested in cataloging what I like to describe as "emotional self-sabotage".

I began to understand that I had a tendency to afflict mental harm to myself and be completely aware of it. In a sense, I felt like I had built a entire framework for sabotaging myself emotionally and mentally. In large part it was due to my environment and going through some serious personal problems, and indeed the city that I never felt welcome in. I was alone. My sub-conscious had decided to begin communicating aspects of myself that needed attention, and slowly my consciousness began taking the hints. The series began forming and I decided that I would create it as soon as I could find the right place and the right time to do so. This sounds like a simple notion but I assure you, it is not easy to make your head silent when you have cause, direction, motivation, and inspiration to create something that absolutely needed to be created.

I moved to Los Angeles in August 2008 and immediately began working on "The Archive". I experimented and I went back-and-forth with introducing new ideas with the ideas I had had rumbling in my head in Glasgow. It eventually evolved and changed. The concept of cataloging took a turn into intimacy, and I found numerous undertones to the original idea which seemed so straight-forward to me at first. I've learned that the sabotaging that we inflict upon ourselves creates an alternate reality in our minds. It's slightly different from what is happening around us. We look at people and make up their words, the meaning behind their words - we essentially just make them up. We look at ourselves, we make up our purpose and make up our motivations. We hardly listen or look at anything, at least not too hard. There's so much noise in the frame work that we create around our being, that we can't see through it. The only way for a person like this to relate with another is to transfer the framework, to recognise the same structures, and to share the same mutilations caused by the storm of struggling to become oneself. The trouble is trying to realize if the mutilations are real, or if they made up? Made up like those things you suppress and find out only if you really concentrate in being honest with yourself.

First entry

2009-07-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Let me just start by saying, I think the word "blog"... Reminds me of that Robin Williams movie with a green blob bouncing around the house. I never saw the movie but it seemed like the kind of movie where you get the full idea from the trailer, eliminating the trouble to actually watch the movie. I'm going to call this a "journal" instead. Much more sophisticated. OK, I think that's a sufficiently egotistic intro for this thing that only I will read. I doubt I'll ever promote this (too embarrassing). Anyway, I'll try to put a lot of art that I find intriguing into this, and maybe some miscellaneous, light-hearted things that I observe during breathing (so, no underwater stories).

I think I'll dedicate this entry to a South-African artist named William Kentridge, whose work I stumbled across recently in San Fransisco's MOMA. Apparently the MoMa in San Fran is written in all caps because they want to be separate from New York's fine and distinguished Museum of Modern Art. We (I and my wife, Alexandria) went there during a little excursion we had up north. To my shock and dismay their photography dept. was closed to the public during that day, so I was getting ready to endure four stories of rectangle paintings and other nonsense, that I can never get into, not even with a reference letter, or a guide who exclaims the genius of the green block and the yellow pentacle. I am an asshole that way, and numerous other ways too.

William Kentridge works in drawings and animation, with some extremely innovative animatronics. I implore anyone, who has the chance to go see his work live to do so. Seeing it on a computer screen just doesn't do it justice, and most of it can't really be transferred onto a website with sufficient impact and dimension. He is a political artist but retains a sense of personal intimacy that anyone and everyone can relate to. In many ways finding his work in the MoMa (I'll write it however I want to) was a very emotional experience for me. You see, it has been a long time since I've seen something that actually affected me in a museum or an exhibition. It was the first time I've shed a tear in a museum.