A few new portraits

I've been working for a long time on making my collodion outfit really workable for doing portraits.  As a creative form, I've admired many portraits, but I admit they've not been something I really was compelled to make myself.  But I do love the look of a tintype portrait.

Here are some plates I did a few weeks ago, experimenting with some new lenses, trying varying crops and lighting schemes.

Linda Sears

This was the best of the bunch.  I like the closeness of it.  The light is more frontal, with an open window for fill (you can see it in her glasses).  I was worried that the head being cut off at the top would be distracting, but I don't really even notice it.  The light backdrop is my slide-projector screen.

Linda Sears

Another one of my wife, this one closer in, about a tight as I'm able to manage, and I'm happy with that.  The close crop effectively eliminates the backdrop, making her hair the real framing for her face.  This one is with a smaller light for a fill, making her cheek on the right come out of the darkness.

Erdal Paksoy

Erdal, my brother-in-law.  I had him sit in a wingback chair, to get good head support for the long exposures.  I think his look is very pensive.

Jules Sears

Jules, wife of Erdal and sister to Linda.  I was really happy with this one, her look is intense but natural and the shoulder-tilt is effective.

Bryan Wing

Bryan is a student at Collin College who wanted to learn wet plate, we have a project idea we are working on-  tintypes of competitive beard-growing contenstants.  Should be fun!

Me

I can't rightfully put others in front of the camera if I'm not willing to go there myself, so, a quick self-portrait in my darkroom apron.

For a first few efforts, I think this is some success!  But there are more kinks to work out and things to perfect.  Onward and upward.

Shadows and Ether at the Bath House Cultural Center

Dallas area fellow Collodion artist Frank Lopez has curated a show of Collodion artists, most of whom live and work in the DFW area, including a few of his own students.

Four of my works are in the show- Swerve and Abductor Pollicis from the "On the Nature of Things" Odium Theologicum, which was originally in the "Excellent Specimens" show, as well as Pretiosissimi Sanguinis.

The show runs April 27 - May 18 at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E Lawther Drive, Dallas.

Juror's Prize Winner- Methods (Alternative) at Kiernan Gallery, Feb 2013

So, I'm a little slow on updating the website.  I'll have to get better about that.

This was a pleasant surprise- a few months ago I entered several pieces for consideration in the show Methods (Alternative) at Kiernan Gallery - which was juried by one of the great Alt Process mavens- Christopher James.   My work, CYCL, was selected as the Juror's Prize Award Winner.  The very next email I got after the one telling me I had been awarded this honor, was from Mr James himself, who had some other very good news for me...  that I'm not at liberty to divulge just yet.  But, I am very happy about it.

Here is the interview posted on the gallery blog.

Nice to get a little attention!

On the Nature of Things- new work from Summer 2012.  Not even titled yet!

On the Nature of Things- the complete suite (so far)

Abductor Pollicis, 2012  23"x30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

The words text and texture share a common latin root- TEXO- to weave; to braid together; to construct with elaborate care.

SYN. see LIE, 2012  22" x 30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

This surprising, yet intuitively clear bond of meaning, serves as the central metaphor for this suite of photographs. Language and sensation- the textual and the textural- are processes of pattern perception. Meanings are woven from words just as lived experience is interlaced with bodily feeling. To me, the hand-made, physical photographic image is the ideal way to express how concepts have a tactile presence because they are woven, because they are stitched together from what Barthes calls a “tissue of signs.”

 

the Catholic, 2012  22" x 30"  Inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

The title, On the Nature of Things, is derived from an epic philosophical poem written in the 1^st century BC by the Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus, as an attempt to dispel superstitious beliefs in the supernatural and the consequent fears of death, by articulating a philosophy of the natural world then known as Atomism.  Over 2000 years ago, this philosophy uncannily presaged much of the work of contemporary scientists working in the fields of quantum physics. 

Atomism, 2012   22"x 30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

 

The work was controversial when it was first written, more so when it was re-found and translated during the Renaissance, and it stands today as an eloquent testament to the dangers of dogmatic fundamentalism.  

Egyptians Jerusalem, 2012  22"x30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

 

With this work, I am making a statement about the beauty of mutable meanings.  Just as our minds and bodies are composed of atoms that were recently (and will soon be again) elsewhere in the universe, our concepts and thoughts will spread, evolve, and recombine in an infinitely complex, woven pattern, with no pre-set goal or meaning.  

Crease, 2012  22"x 30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

This is the central message of all existentialist, post-structural, and post-modern thought.  This idea brings anxiety to the mind of a fundamentalist; it brings peace to mine.  

Mare Tranquiliatus, 2012   22"x 30"  inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

I work in an antiquated, hand-made photographic process called Wet Plate Collodion, because I think it is uniquely suited to expressing these ideas.  Every image made with this process is a balance of the orderly organization of information through the glass lens of the camera, with the unpredictable and unavoidable chemical and physical randomness in the plate that records the image. 

CYCL,  2012   22"x30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

By photographing degraded reference texts, plaster molds, and other materials that record the physical actions taken upon them, my goal is to make images of undeniable and unashamed beauty, that speak of the deep connection between ideas and their physical manifestation.

Ruminate, 2012  22"x30" Inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

Fascia, 2012  22"x30" inkjet print from Wet Collodion negative

 All images at 22" x 30" are in editions of 5, 11"x14" in edition of 10

Video portrait of me on Youplusdallas.com

Oh, this is simultaneously thrilling and horribly embarrassing.  (I really have to get over my uncomfortableness with self-promotion!)

The experience was actually quite fun- Heather Child, Seth Thorpe, and Brandon Carmichael from Youplusdallas.com came to my studio a few weeks ago and did this piece.  They were fantastic, we all had a great time doing it.

I'd LOVE to be able to post the video embedded, but I'm going to have to figure a way around Google's limitations on that....

Here is the link.  Please enjoy!

http://www.youplusdallas.com/stories/meet-photographer-scott-hilton#

On the Nature of Things, March 10 2012 500X Gallery

One of the trappings contemporary art that I try to avoid (like career advancement, ha ha) is the tendency of artist to make their process very opaque.  Work is presented and discussed as if the ideas emerged whole, exactly as you see them in their current state.  Artists, gallerists and curators all have an investment in this opacity because it helps to make the work seem somehow purer, and the artist more heroic.  To reveal that the thinking process behind the work is sometimes messy and convoluted, is to raise questions of NOT being a genius.

I believe this has a lot to do with the scourge of over-vocabularized artist statements.

My whole impetus to do this blog was as a way to get over the desire to hide behind an opaque wall of language.  I can do it as well as the next MFA-holder, but I also hate it. 

I've noted that my creative processes go in a certain rhythm of tension and release- at times tight, at other times loose.  Understanding which time is which can be challenging, and requires a sensitivity to my own particular needs and abilities, as I am working.  But my pattern of conceptualization seems to go something like this-

• I do things.  I make things, aimlessly.  I mess around and fuck up and get mad and berate myself for not having a clean idea.
• I chill out, and notice patterns in what I am doing, thinking about, and making.
• I have a "flash" realization of the underlying structure of what I have been doing.
• I go back into making things, but with a clearer sense of purpose and direction.

It's not always that clean and clear but as I look back, even to my undergraduate days, it's the same pattern happening over and over.  Not all the "flash" realizations are good, and sometimes the crap I am making along the way is just crap.

I had been planning on doing a landscape-based project using my portable darkroom, but a nasty gust of wind tippled my whole operation over last fall, and I had to face the fact that I just was not ready for that (though I am still tinkering with the portable operation and hope to have another version running this May).

So- it was back into the studio for me.  So, I started photographing books and pushpins and other random materials.  Shooting things in this kind of "frontal" style has been something I've done for twenty years or more, almost like doing copy-work.  It's not wholly inappropriate, as the Wet Collodion process was common as a graphic-arts reproduction technique for well into the 20th century, long after dry plate and flexible film had usurped it as the field-photographic method of choice, for very good reasons.

Shortly after I shot this image of the screen-door material, I got all excited about the idea of working with scotch tape, glass, an other semi-transparent materials, but in a way that they "recorded" the impressions of my working with them, by leaving fingerprints on the materials that would show up in the image.  Using powdered graphite, I had fun making this one-

This was all happy and everything, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  But I still had no idea what was to tie all this together.  It made sense on some level, but my thinking on it was basically like a manipulating a bag of marbles.  Books, fingerprints, copywork, transparency... jumblejumblejumble.

The "flash" came to me when I realized that the terms text and texture were too similar to not be related, somehow.  Mr. Google was pretty quick with an answer-

TEXO- latin, to weave; plait (together); construct with elaborate care.

Holy Shit!

Writing and language is a weaving of meaning...   Roland Barthes from The Death of the Author- "the book itself is only a tissue of signs"...  a woven fabric is the most luxurious of textures, and a beautiful way to define the very concept of texture and the sense of touch in general... my whole attraction to the wet collodion process is deeply tied to the fact that it can only be done with elaborate care...

It's hard to express how this conception hit me... I felt it physically.  It immediately made sense to me why this had made sense even when I didn't understand it- the physical photographic image is the most ideal way to express how concepts have a tactile presence because they are woven...

This realization really sent me off, and I'm still running on the energy of that single, bomb-like flash of thought.

The title of the show, On the Nature of Things, is another matter altogether and deserving of it's own post.