Saturna Holography Synthesis 2 - A Breakup

After some delay we finally made it back to Saturna to visit Al and continue our holography experiments. Although the results were better this time, there still seem to be some fundamental flaws in our sandbox setup; likely our sand isn't clean enough. Nonetheless it was an opportunity to try a new single beam reflection setup and a different type of holographic film. 

I tried very hard to inhale all of the magic of our time together there. Eleven hours in the lab. The rest spent sitting around stoned, chatting or listening to music. We ate oatmeal and soup and drank coffee. On the second day we drove to East Point — as is ritual by now — and were very lucky to see two grey whales just thirty or forty meters from us. Ecstasy! Then all of a sudden they would dive down and we'd lose track of them. We ran around up and down the trails in search of their slick arched backs penetrating the surface of the straight. Or a big burst from a blow hole. It was childish and beautiful - a warm memory I think I'll keep forever. 

This was a special trip with a big final intention: to dismantle the lab Sid and I built on Saturna and bring it back to Vancouver in order to have more consistent access to the holographic process. We both still have much to learn but it's the pleasure of the process that pulls me towards it. It's so easy to become lost in the glow of the laser light in the darkened room. Especially when we are waiting in silence and stillness for the room and objects to settle, essentially meditating, in a room together. In that context it's impossible to forget the spiritual and social dimension of holography. 

Love to Al, Sid and Madeleine

Sid's bouncing trick to see wether or not a battery still has charge

Al watching back digital scans of the 16mmm footage we shot during our last visit

The lamp shade is again our starting point - although we finally realize that the fabric moves too much to be captured

Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean, clean...

Record everything

First view and then we ran down!

I've never been this close before

Whale tail

Record everything

Never forget frog night

The fresnel array which I bought at Tokyo Hands with a mirror backing turned out to be our greatest success

Lost in the glow - this is what I am meditating next to for several minutes while waiting for the room to settle

Record everything

Al's hunger for experimental video resurfaced through black television screens and these fresnel holos

Record everything

Our final hologram: a CD. Can't remember what album it was. Something Al didn't care for.

Photomural references moodboard

 

Photomural in the making / joy of chemistry and light

Behind the scenes production of Essential Pleasures New Happiness Photomural on 1265 Howe st. 

Essential Pleasures New Happiness 2024
Photomural featuring prints by Rebecca Brewer, Deon Feng, Sidney Gordon, Simon Grefiel, Natasha Katedralis, Tiziana La Melia, Thomas Nugent, Felix Rapp, Emile Rubino, Gerri York, Katayoon Yousefbigloo

Opening Event 6pm - 9pm, Oct 26 – Feb 8, 2025

The darkroom is a good place to gossip, talk about the city, discuss grant applications,  exchange accounting tips, listen to industrial music and meditate to the sound of water flowing through the washing tray. The darkroom is “cheaper than therapy.” Just kidding! The darkroom is just a stuffy, dusty, windowless room. Some imbue it with a form of liquid intelligence, but at times, the whole endeavor just feels clumsy if not slightly dumb and anachronistic. In any case, when in a quest for Essential Pleasures and New Happiness, it’s easier to persevere when you’re not alone in the dark.

Over the last few months, the eleven artists involved in the making of this communal photomural developed their own approaches to making images with light, sensitized materials and chemistry. Some built makeshift rigs for shooting lasers through negatives or developed ways to make contact prints from laptop screens. Others enlarged and collaged from negatives found in abandoned satellite fields or taken to fulfill highschool projects. Felix Rapp gently guided and hosted this happy mess in the cramped photo lab that came into existence through his residency at Malaspina Printmakers.

For many, the printmaking part of photography is perhaps the least democratic/the most obscure part of the ‘medium.’ Crowded like moths to a flame under the dim light of the enlarger, we looked for ways to establish contact between objects and surfaces, and between our different practices. We didn’t want to be precious but still had to be organized. Some found new things for themselves along the way while others were just happy to momentarily forget themselves in the process. From the heat of summer and into the fall, we came in and out of the darkroom, always happy and exhausted when pushing the glass doors that give onto Howe Street. Often, we were surprised to find that it was already night and that the rain was still falling on the fountains of downtown Vancouver.

Text by Emile Rubino & Felix Rapp

I am a camera

This is a music playlist that Francesca & I put together for the launch of issue two of our magazine Le Chauffage which revolved around the now antiquated format of the photo essay. All the tracks in the playlist are about photography, too.

An excerpt from the letter from the editors written by Emile Rubino explains:

The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form.

Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. 

Video by Al Razutis of our walk through the woods to observe the northern lights over the Georgia Straight. Love the ending very suspenseful.

Many of the close friends who I made when I was in my late teens - early twenties shared in a creative bond. The earliest of which is Antosh Cimoszko with whom I bloomed into my interest in photography. After school we'd combine our meagre photo equipment (cameras / flashes / stands) and take portraits of each other in the spare room of my parent's house. Or we'd get into his beat-up civic and drive out to a non-suburban location to practice shooting with our 35mm cameras. If it wasn't for Antosh my interest wouldn't have been stoked into an obsession. The older I get the less embarrassed I am of these years of photo naivety. Maybe for this blog I'll dig up some of those drug store scans.

When I moved to Vancouver I made more friends like this. We'd go to night clubs or to see DJ's downtown and do drugs together. We were all doing creative things of some variety - most of them inspired by things going on commercially: product design, fashion, graphic design, music. All of them went on to develop careers in their respective interests. I'm the only one who stuck to being an 'artist'. In other words, they all enjoy stability and good pay while I hang onto a day job to keep my creativity going. 

As we started to grow apart there was a sense from those friends that I didn't respect what they did because it was oriented around money. This was partly true because in art school most of the critiques leveraged against the commercial side of photography was that it was somehow more ignorant or manipulative than uses of photography by contemporary artists. Commercialism is an easy target in art school environment where I think I felt self-righteous in my pursuit. That contemporary art had something to offer the public which could not be bought...  That culture and politic was outside of the market. 

Ofcourse now that I write it down it sounds even more ridiculous. Yet I see the same pattern at the art school I teach at now. Those students who just want make animations, design sneakers or draw manga are always considered not serious enough. They're perceived as lacking self-referential edge of contemporary art or a political / conceptual angle. It's belittling and alienating to people who come to art school either with the misunderstanding that it is a vocational school or who just simply like making stuff. 

After 6 years of art school (BFA / MFA) I still struggle with the boundaries of what is and isn't serious art. For those of us who are into photography, those lines are often drawn between things we do for money and things we do as art. Photography is probably the only viable skill you learn at art school that leads to some work. I've always kept those two things very separate because one is good (intellectual pursuit) and the other bad ($$ pursuit). It's thanks to artists like Roe Ethridge or Eileen Quinlan that I feel inclined now to unlearn those distinctions. Not just because there is a freedom to letting go of that difference but because of all those friends who I judged for being commercially ambitious while I did the hard work of being critical towards the world. 

Antosh and I came together again last year to shoot this Comme des Garcons fragrance collaboration with the streetwear company he works for.