Blue Motor Mollusk

In my effort to prepare for a show in March, I have been scrambling to come up with compelling imagery for new photo weavings of engines and plants.  When I saw this engine at a Pick 'n Pull in Richmond, CA, I was struck by the bright blue color and how it hung, suspended, in the gutted out blackness beneath the car's hood like an octopus emerging upward from a great abyss.  Have you ever seen a blue engine?  I sure haven't.

I then mirror imaged the engine in photoshop and combined it with imagery of succulents. The mirror image effect is interesting to me in many ways.  Not only is the symmetry pleasing to the eye aesthetically, but the symmetry gives the engine an insect-like quality. As nature and technology are fused together, a writhing, organic life is breathed into cold machine components.  It is a marriage of stems, leaves, tubes, and bolts, giving birth to a hybrid creature which is part machine, part plant.

Photoshop test.  Click on image to enlarge.

After showing this image to my boyfriend, he gave me some very good feedback.  He thought the circular image in the middle looked too face-like.  Like a grinning caterpillar.  I agreed that it was a bit "too much".  What if I squeezed the engine image together more to fuse the two eyes into one single eye?  I did some readjusting in photoshop and the result was far superior creating a more ominious creature.  Now the engine resembled more of a squid beak as opposed to an Alice in Wonderland caterpillar.

After hours of cutting and then 10-11 hours of weaving, I was finally done with this monstrosity--the largest weaving I have ever created (30" x 60").  



THE FINAL WEAVING

"Blue Engine", 2012, Woven Photographs, 30" x 60". CLICK TO ENLARGE

"Blue Engine".  DETAIL.  Click to Enlarge.

"Blue Engine". DETAIL. Click to Enlarge.

Live Weaving at the Vagabond Ballroom

When my friend Rusty Lindgren invited me to donate art at his friend's charity event, I had the idea of doing a Live Weaving as performance art and then auctioning off the finished piece at the end.  I had always wanted to see if I could pull this sort of thing off and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment.  Also, since I am preparing for a show in March, featuring photo weavings of engine/plants, I thought this would be a good way to get the ball rolling and force myself to start coming up with images.

I spent two days prepping before the event, and rather frantically at that.  My amazing boyfriend, RJ, helped me cut the images into 1/2 inch strips and brainstorm a good weaving set-up.  We decided that the audience would be able to see the weaving best if it was up against a wall vertically, instead of my normal horizontal method of weaving on a table.  RJ had the great idea of using a door as a portable weaving platform and it worked so well that I am going to adopt it as my new method!

Weaving vertically saved my neck from having to bend down constantly.  I wove for 6.5 hours in total comfort.  Usually, when I weave on a horizontal surface, I have to take breaks every 15 minutes to stretch my back and neck.  I am thrilled to have found a new method!  See what happens when you push yourself out of your comfort zone?  You learn new things that you never would have otherwise.

This was the most fun I had ever had weaving thanks to the amazing music from the DJs, the hilarious stand-up comedy, flame dancing, free drinks, and chatty friends.

Andrew Lowe was the winning bidder for my piece and he had enough confidence in me to bid on an unfinished work.  What a guy.  And half the proceeds went to Hackers for Charity, a non-profit that offers technical support for organizations in Africa.

After another 1 1/2 hours of weaving after the auction, I was finally finished.  Such a fun night and I learned so much about what I was capable of as an artist.

SFO Overpass Weaving

DAY 1

Step one was gluing down my 8" x 10" images onto large pieces of paper so they formed one large image.  This was my old-school ghetto method which I have temporarily returned to...long story.

DAY 2

With a ruler and pen, I measured 1/4 inch strips on the backs of both pieces of paper.

Then the cutting begins.  I only cut about ten strips at a time and then I have to give my hand a break.  Cutting, weaving, coffee, cutting, weaving, coffee.  This seems to be a comfortable rhythm. 

With ten strips cut, I can begin weaving them.  The below image is my "warp" and this is what I will weave my free-floating strips into.

10 Strips Woven

20 Strips Woven

30 Strips Woven

 A productive day I'd say.  I'm spent.

"Future of Flight" Time-Lapse Video

This time-lapse video reduces 9 hours of weaving down to about 45 seconds.  I programmed by video camera to take .5 seconds of footage every 5 minutes.

"Future of Flight" weaves together aerial photography of the San Francisco Airport with an image of the universe, making the airport appear like a giant spaceship hurling through space.  For this reason, I chose John Williams's "Asteroid Field Battle", from The Empire Strikes Back, as my soundtrack.  The music is ridiculously dramatic for the subject matter, but I just can't help myself sometimes.  I find no fun in taking myself too seriously, especially when it comes to art.

Time-Lapse Video of Weaving

I set up a video camera on a tripod and programmed the camera to take .5 seconds of footage every 5 minutes, while I worked.  Nine hours of weaving was condensed down to 40 seconds of time-lapse video.   The weaving process itself generally takes me about 8-10 hours, but when including every step of cutting, gluing, etc my weavings take about 40 hours total.  To see the entire process, from start to finish, check out Photographic Weaving: The Process.





In this piece, titled "Distribution Structure", I wove together aerial photography of the freeway interchange in Emeryville/Oakland, CA with images of circuit boards. This weaving explores ideas of the macro & micro. From an airplane, a city looks much like a circuit board, and circuit boards look like miniature cities unto themselves.  However, not only do these two things appear similar, they also function in a very similar way.  The way that cars move across freeways is not so different from how information moves through circuit boards, the internet, and technology in general.  Freeways have made travel over long distances incredibly easy, creating a link between distant cities that connects friends, family and commerce, in much of the same way that the internet has connected people all over the globe.

Genesis of the Freeway Weavings Concept

I created my very first photographic weaving in high school.  The weaving combines imagery of both my Jeep Cherokee engine and my backyard garden, exploring how nature inspires the technological designs around us.  The left side of the weaving is predominantly garden imagery with just a few squares of engine woven in here and there. In the middle, the engine and garden begin to interweave together with birds of paradise blossoming into engine tubes.  The right hand side of the weaving is almost entirely engine imagery with just a few squares of pink flowers peeking through.  I created the weaving during a high school mentorship, with Santa Barbara artist Rafael Perea de la Cabada, which culminated in a show at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.  My good friend Sarah Patterson is now the owner of this piece which asserts itself in quite a lengthy manner on her living room wall.

"The Garden".  2000.  Photographic Weaving.  CLICK TO ENLARGE.

"The Garden". DETAIL.

"The Garden". DETAIL.

"The Garden". DETAIL.

Ever since that project, I had wanted to return to weaving but wasn't sure what kind of imagery to use and, to be perfectly honest, I was a bit intimidated to try the difficult task of weaving again.  One day, nine years later, feeling frustrated by a bad case of artist's block, I took some old pictures and decided to make a weaving out of them, just to get my weaving juices flowing again.  They were pictures I had taken in college of food coloring in milk.  I made two collages of the same size, cut one collage vertically and the other one horizontally, and wove them together.  It turned out great!  My friend Emily Sheffield is now the proud owner of this weaving and it hangs, framed, in her law firm office.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE. "Birth of Color".  Photographic Weaving. 18" x 24".

So here I was, nine years later, hooked on weaving again.  I began brainstorming different concepts that I could weave together.  I wanted to weave together the macro and the micro, two things that appear similar from both from far away and from close-up, but WHAT?  One idea I had was how cities look like circuit boards from an airplane, and circuit boards look like miniature cities unto themselves.

My Google Earth search for interesting city imagery led me to a visual miracle: freeway overpasses!  These concrete megaliths slither over the landscape like monumental snake pits. Strands of road soar through the air, interlacing like gigantic, hovering Celtic knots, so perfect and massive in form they seem to be woven by the hands of God himself.  Each overpass is a unique work of art: some are circular, some are giant Xs, some are clover shaped, cross-shaped, and some are just a jumble of big loops.  I then embarked on a compulsive hunt for the biggest, coolest overpass. 

I had moved on, in my mind, away from circuit boards and toward my new obsession with overpasses.  I decided to do a little test.  I printed out two black & white images of different L.A. overpasses and wove the two together.  The result, however, was neither conceptually nor visually interesting, so I spruced up the weaving with some acrylic paint, pink and green highlighter, and a sharpie pen.  THe visual effect was exciting, however, I still felt as though something was missing conceptually.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE.  "Weaving Traffic", 2010.  (Highway 5 & 2 interchange woven with Highway 105 & 405 interchange). Photographs, acrylic paint, highlighter, sharpie pen. 11" x 17".

Then it occurred to me that I could weave circuit board imagery into the city-scape AROUND the freeway overpasses!  This way, the final image would appear from a distance like a simple freeway overpass surrounded by urban sprawl, but up close it would be hard to differentiate what was building and what was circuit board component.

The connection, conceptually, between freeway overpasses and circuit boards became stronger in my mind as I remembered that the "Information Super Highway" is a metaphor commonly used for the internet.  Cars moving on freeways can be seen as a metaphor for how information moves through circuit boards, the internet, and technology in general.  Freeway overpasses make travel over long distances easy, creating a connection between LA and San Francisco for friends, family and commerce, much in the same way that the internet has connected people all over the globe.  Not only was this idea visually interesting, but it was conceptually interesting as well.  I was pumped.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE. "Untitled", 2010.  Photographic Weaving. 20" x 48" (Images of circuit boards woven with bird's-eye view of CA-101, I-5, I-10, I-60 Junction in Los Angeles).

My first freeway/circuit board weaving (above) was a complete success and I received rave reviews from friends and family.  I decided to create a series of these large weavings, my goal being about 8-10 weavings.  My next subject was the CA-101 & I-92 junction in San Mateo, right before getting on the San Mateo Bridge. 

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE. "Untitled", 2010.  Photographic Weaving. 24" x 40". (Images of circuit boards woven with CA-101 & I-92 junction in San Mateo)

The rest is history!  Check out my other "Photographic Weavings" postings to see more current projects.

San Francisco Airport (IN SPACE!)

San Francisco Int'l Airport in Google Earth

The Start of the Concept

Whenever I drive to the San Francisco Airport, I am struck by the complex network of freeway overpasses which I must travel over and under to get from the 101 to the terminals.  When picking up a friend, who hasn't yet arrived, I am forced to then loop back around and make my ascent back up through the Escher-esque maze of elevated streets. I look forward to these loops and try to slow down as much as possible to fully soak in the woven, concrete web surrounding me, much to the dismay of the hurried taxis in my rear view window.

I recalled this driving experience a couple weeks ago and eagerly searched for the overpass on Google Earth so I might judge its worth as a potential weaving.  What I saw induced one helluva satisfied gasp.  The freeway overpass was stunning from the air with its wriggling, gray tentacles arching this way and that in a strange sort of elegance.  A concrete fountain, frozen mid-spray.  An asphalt fern with twisted fronds.  So much movement and life!

But would these organic, curving shapes look good once woven with the right angles and straight lines of a circuit board?  I had my doubts.

The more I struggled with the circuit board compatibility issue, the more interested I became in the airport itself.  The octagonal center has a spaceship quality and resembles the Star Wars Millennium Falcon or the Star Trek USS Enterprise. 

SFO "spaceship" as seen in Google Earth

The little airplanes cling to the airport terminals like white flowers on silver branches which shoot off from the central "ship" like sun rays.  If this airport were a spaceship, I'd imagine its overpass "flagella" being used to propel itself through space like a massive, high-tech squid.  Quite structurally compelling, for an airport.


Combining Ideas

  In Photoshop, I experimented with how the airport might look woven with a circuit board, but the result was too busy and very aesthetically jarring.  Plus, the circuit board imagery seems to work best with the blocky grid of suburban/urban sprawl, and there was just blank wide open runway surrounding the airport.  I then thought, "What about putting this 'spaceship' in SPACE!"  Of course!  I had been so preoccupied by circuit boards that this idea was a major breakthrough.

Photoshop Test.  Image Credit:  NASA and U.S. Geological Survey.

I took the image of the universe and, in Photoshop, combined it with the SFO aerial photography image and knew instantly that I had hit on a magical combination.  These types of rough Photoshop tests not only give me a gist for what the final weaving might look like, but they also help me make important compositional decisions before I begin weaving.

Detail of Photoshop Test

Back From the Printer with my 30" x 50" Prints

This is the first time I have had large prints made for my weavings.  Previously, I was getting 8 x 10's printed at Walgreens, puzzling them together, and gluing them.  It saved me a little bit of money, but I started to realize that it wasn't worth the headache or my time.  Plus, I felt like working with two large prints would give my work a more professional look.

30" x 50" print of the San Francisco International Airport.  Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.

30" x 50" print of the universe, before it gets cut into 133 half inch strips.  Image courtesy of NASA.
 

The Dreaded Cutting Stage

This stage of the process is the most mind-numbing, hand cramping, and eye straining.  After measuring the back side of both prints into 3/4 inch strips, I take scissors to the prints. 

After measuring the prints, on the back side, into 3/4 inch strips, I begin cutting with scissors.

"Oh universe, how I hate the thought of cutting you up. But your life as a weaving will be so much more fulfilling. Know that as I slice into your starry depths, I do so out of love not malice. You are a martyr for the creative process, and I shall remember you always." -A Poem to a Photographic Print

Weaving

After two arduous 2-3 hour weaving sessions, I am halfway done.

Three hours later, I'm finished weaving!

The finished weaving.  All that's left to do is to glue down the strips (another 5 hour or so project).

Gluing Down the Strips

This is an important step of the process because without gluing it all down, the strips are loose and can shift around becoming dislodged and out of order.  Using a small brush, I lift up each strip and dab some glue beneath it to secure it.  The gluing process took about 8 hours.

Filming a Time-Lapse of the Weaving Process 

  

I programmed the camera to take .5 seconds of video every 5 minutes.  As I work, I hear little dings as the camera records snippets of me weaving.  These cheery chirps provide me with a strange sense of companionship as I toil away, and they also give me a comforting reassurance that there is a witness to this crazy process and that it will be recorded.  

My time-lapse video set-up.

Time-Lapse Video: "Future Of Flight"

Images of the Final Weaving

"Future of Flight", 2011.  30" x 50". Photographic Weaving. CLICK TO ENLARGE.

"Future of Flight". DETAIL.

"Future of Flight". DETAIL.

"Future of Flight". DETAIL.