finally.... after almost a month

"so i have not had the time to blog for the last few weeks. exams and whatnot...."

that is what I would have said if I had updated like 3 weeks ago, but it has been almost a month. I am now in the middle of an increasingly annoying job hunt. (something that can be pretty soul crushing if you let it.) I have not really been making art for a few weeks. I have taken some photographs here and there, but nothing (until yesterday) that has any direction.

brooke and I shot in our new basement for the first time last night. It was a little strange because we were shooting something with me as the model; I am not sure if I like being the model of other peoples shoots. I do not know why, but it seems to feel a lot more vain than when I shoot myself.... now i know that does not make any sense. i should probably feel more vain if i am shooting myself, but somehow being alone with the camera allows me to get past that.

in a few weeks brooke starts grad school. it is already pretty weird to have all this free time. (well, fee if you dont count looking at craigslist every 5 mins) i now am going to have a lot of free time to myself that i can use to create art, or maybe make this blog into something useful. (or nap and watch re-runs on the simpsons online... lets hope for the art one)

here is one photo from the first shoot of the summer. hope this is the beginning of something good :)

automatic writing? first try

caffine does not always make me feel like i am more awake. but sometimes i jsut feel that i have mroe caffine in me than i need to feel awake. i do not want to feel awake right now . sllep feels more real to me that the world does sometime. why is it that caffinene makes the world feel so strnage. is it something in the coffee or within me? I always edit, no matter what it is that i am doing. i try nto to edit, but sometime it is just the method that makes me edit.and sometime sit is more of a gut reaaction to the stymulas that is at hand. i am trying to write what i feel not what i think i think what i think is some tiems what i do not wn to feel.

coffee makes typeing hard, and so does automatic typing

day...

carve...
ride...
home...
plug...
sleep...
wake...
snooze...snooze...snooze...snooze...snooze...
wake...
write...
waste...
write...
done...
late...
ride...
critique...
finally...
hunger...
late...
meet...
food...
move...
write...
waste...
write...
elaborate...
leave...
cook...
short...
store...
bike...
Ben...
home...
cook...
finish...
photoclub...
potluck...
El Topo...
confused...
tired...
goodbye...
coffee...
caffeine...
write...
blog...

bye...

April 9th

I have decided to change this project a little bit. I have really enjoyed taking photographs everyday, it forces me to have to carry my camera everywhere I go. when I have my camera with me I take pictures. and when I take pictures I grow as a photographer.

the change comes in when I have been taking the pictures. I have noticed that I am not always in the most interesting places at noon, and what I am doing at noon does not always tell anything about my day (like when I dont get up till 2pm). So I have decided to make my daily picture about whatever makes my day interesting.

what made april 9th interesting? we poured bronze. it was a really cool process. watching pounds of liquid bronze pour into a fragile ceramic mold is pretty strange. watching the pour team work was like watching a choreographed dance. and in the end my bronze came out pretty great. Ill post photos later

apr08NOON

today was NOT a very good day!

it was one of those days that you feel like everything comes crashing down at once and the weight might just take you with it. I felt very locked in place with no place to go.

for all of both of our flaws (ALL of them) I am relieved that I have someone that I know I can rely on what shit goes down. I know I am not perfect in any sense and I am glad that you can understand and love me anyway

noon: apr07

didnt get out of bed until like 11:30... shower by like 12. not much else happened today. it is strange not having to be anywhere till like 2pm. it has been nice. but next semester I am going to have a MUCH more full schedule. On top of a 21 credit semester I am going to have one of those classes as an independent study. so that means I am going to have to be REALLY on task like 100% of the time.

It HAS been nice to have so much free time this term (12 credits). but I work a LOT better when I dont have free time to lay around and be lazy. so lets hope that I can deal with it all

noon: apr06

more sushi! but I am just about out of money so I am not going to be able to buy any for awhile. so I am going to have to make this one last... I dont ever really want a lot of money, but I would really like to be at the point where I have to worry about buying a $4 thing of sushi.

I feel like it might just people the people that I surround myself with, but is it possible that we are a generation that does not want to huge house with a large SUV and everything handed to us? I want to work for my money and enjoy my life for that reason.....

does anyone else feel this way?

noon: apr05

drove home this weekend. we tried to get out early but we didnt really get going until like noon...

I have an inability to leave on time. no matter what time i plan on leaving, i always like about an hour late. is this some sort of compulsion? or do i have have no drive to leave what i am doing when i am comfortable....

noon: apr04

we had breakfast this morning at a local diner. after a night of drinking and way too much sugar (we made smores and fire pies in my fireplace) it was nice to relax with friends and have a cheap meal with crappy diner coffee.

i forget how much i like diner food. scrambled eggs, toast potatoes and some watered down coffee... YUM. the only better thing is when its at like 4am and you still have not gotten any sleep. thats the main thing that i miss in traverse, all night diners. clay and i spent some time at little chef here in mount pleasant a few days ago at like 6am and it was pretty nice. i have not done that in too long....

bonus photo

the night before we were cruzing our local meijer as a gang of crazy punks looking for hell and marshmallows. we found it, but we were held up by clay's injury. he was our motorized friend for the night

noon: apr03

spent the weekend at home hanging out with friends. we were at bubba's for veggi burgers. they make their own with avocado and other veggies. i started taking photos of random things including this one.

for a long time i have had a problem understanding what to do with these random photos that i like. this blog has been a great release for these photographs, but it is still a strange problem. this photograph is of no conceptual value, that is, i have no intent in showing it to the public in any form.

i still enjoy taking photos throughout the day. even if i do not know what to do with them...

noon: apr02

i have spent most of the day working on a set of journals for my aesthetics class. i really do like this class, but the amount of work is kind of ridiculous.

i spent my night and day inside at my desk. all i have had to eat at this point was a ton of banana chips. it will be nice to get these over with so that i will have one less thing to think about before the end of the school year.

at this point i only really have 3 large projects left to deal with. in sculpture i have a steel leg to create and a stone head. (not to mention our bronze, but that is almost done, just waiting for the pour). in photography i have only to finish my "nice to know you" project (more on that later)

noon: apr01

spent lunchtime with brooke making silly faces into the camera together. she was trying to open her eye so that I would take a picture of it. but i think this one came out much better than any of the open eye ones did.

i have noticed for a while now that i have a huge bias to making my images really heavy on one side or the other. it has something to do with really liking the light, dead, empty, negative space on the opposite side. there is just something about it that makes the subject so much more interesting and important. its not that i ever think anything that i photograph is important :) its just that when we photograph anything it is saying "this was important enough at the moment that someone wanted to document it"....

it feels good to notice tendencies in my work. i would like to think that i am building a sort of set of characteristics that people will recognize as mine. (sometimes called personal aesthetic)

here is hoping that i find more!

noon: mar31

so this is the house down the street from us. it is one of the strangest houses that i have seen in a long time. first of all the yard is a MESS. there is random stuff EVERYWHERE! plastic bags, dead potted plants, boxes etc. the glass front door is in splinters and has not been fixed for a long time.

but the one thing that sets this place apart is that when it gets even a little nice out the cats start to come out... the first time that i saw it there was like 3 in the yard making sweet kitty love, a few on the porch. the strangest part was the cats on the roof. plus as we walked by they all stopped what they were doing and stare at us as we walked by.

i almost want to call animal control, but i am not sure i want to break up this kitty bordello. they need someplace to do their dirty business.......

bonus picture because i have not posted in too long.

laying in bed early in the morning playing with brooke's glasses. not much more to say other than i REALLY like my new lens (canon 28-150). really great colors.

the hobbla

ok one last animation for now.... i guess clayton got into fight at work with a huge guy named chett. yeah chett with TWO T's. cool guy right? no, he has to pick on the nicest pancake house owner in the whole town... now how is that fair?!? so chett throws clayton right into the giant fishtank (clayton has collected these fish on his vacation to peru for the past 20 years, thats a lot of smuggling fish in your swimming trunks) and clayton hurt his ankle pretty bad...


ok CHETT! now you are a MAN! feel better!?!?!?

antohyn shows us the way

this one is for anthony. again at mejier to get s'more shit (as the grandoise list puts it... ill post that later) but this time anthony wanted to show the world how elastic his face can get. on a scale of 1-13 ill give it a "quite elastic"

how do you think it rates?

lickin animation

hanging out at home. buying s'more stuff late at night at meijer. brooke had to show us how to lick our lips.... just in case

noon: mar30

got sushi again. i waited in line for like 10 mins waiting for people to order and have their food made. all i wanted was to have some spicy sauce added to the food i already had. after waiting so long the chef told me that i should have just cut i line.

i dont know, i feel like it would be rude to cut in line. but i waited for way too long for something that only took like 15secs.

what would you say in that situation? "excuse me while i cut in line. mine is more important."

noon: mar29

mar29NOON
Originally uploaded by Trefur

spent my mid-day doing one of my final dips for the bronze pour that we have coming up. i am pretty excited, seeing as i have put probably close to 100 hours into concept, drawings, carving wax, setting up a pour system, dipping and covering this green goo in sand and finally cutting it apart and fixing any damage. but when i finish i will have a beautiful (hopefully) bronze sculpture. it is exciting because i am finally using a "high art" medium. not that i have not been proud of my work till now (this is not even close to my favorite thing i have done) but this one will be very shiny and polished looking.

ill post photos of the finished product. and if we are lucky some of the bronze pour. hot molten bronze pouring into a fragile cremic shell? how could that not be cool?

annmarie

over exposed photo of my sister taken from my crappy cell phone

noon: mar28

didnt get out of bed until like 1 pm... i dont really mind being in bed so long. i really needed to catch up on some rest.

so i guess i should explain this noon thing...

this is not some "i am going to take a photograph EXACTLY at noon every day" kind of thing. i just think it will be interesting to document where i am around midday everyday. so if you look at the metadata for these, some of them are not really taken anywhere near 12. but i think of these as more of a documentation of what what happening, not where i am only if i have a camera. plus its nice to have an excuse to take at least one photo a day :)

noon: mar27

went to get sushi again with brooke. is there a medical condition where the infected eat too much sushi? if so i think it must be spread through the spicy sauce cause it way too freakin good to pass on.

i kind of feel like a sushi version of a zombie.... except for the whole eating brains part



maybe SOME brains, if it had spicy sauce on it

sushistash

oh wait!!!! I found her never mind. you can all stop looking in found the one for me!

macro wedding?

so i recently decided that i need to get married, so i bought a ring. (and started taking macro photos. i just got a reverser ring. what a crazy invention!) so if you know of anyone let me know. or if you want to talk about cheap macro photography you know that too.

noon: mar26

sitting at my computer today editing a small portfolio for a studio visit that i have today with oriana fox. she was supposed to run through a small portion of my work and give me some feed back. it ended up being much different than it was supposed to be. we just went to the traverse city pie company and got a free veggie sandwich, then to a german movie called the wave

noon: mar25

ben.... ran into my friend ben while eating sushi with brooke. ben made us follow him around campus searching for a man that does not exist. that ended up being a flash mob of sorts. we walked into the cafe and all dropped something at the same time and spent 5 mins in slo-mo picking it up. we all snapped out of it at the same time and got up and left

(spicy tofu and seaweed sushi is great!)

sexist maintenance man you say?

so I am at work right now, hanging out waiting for people to need help in the darkroom/lighting studio, I was just sitting here minding my own business when all of the sudden I heard a BANG BANG BANG. now, the heater always makes some kind of noise when its warming this frigid classroom but this was ridiculous. it seriously sounded like someone was on top smashing something to pieces with a sledgehammer. so I went and talked to the office and they called school maintenance.

enter 30 mins later, a nice middle-aged man walks into the room in setup in and asked me a few questions about the sound. the only problem is that it stopped like 20 mins ago. no problem this happens all the time. and all is going great until he starts talking about other places that have problems that they can never seem to reproduce while he is there... and I quote:

"epically the women over in [some other building, cant remember]. I go over there all the time and there is never any sound"

COMEON man, this is 2009! I am pretty sure that you dont need to be a sexist in order to fix broken/loud heat pipes... but I could be wrong






im not

noon: mar24

Here is where I was at noon today. I was walking into my apartment after a run at the sac (gym). basically its just a door

strange times.....

I feel weird. I am sitting at my childhood dinner table studying an art theories that is known for being incomprehensible. the guy actually leaves large sections of page blank for reasons I dont care to understand. it is 2am and I am in traverse city, I have to be back in mount pleasant to be to work by 9am. I have too many chemicals running through my body at the moment to feel tired. but exhaustion always floats just beneath the surface of a chemical induced awareness.

I have spent the last 3 hours reading terribly boring work and playing sega.... plus I have had too many sunchips so I feel kinda sick. I think we should leave pretty soon, but I really dont want to drive...... oh well, one more day without sleep could not hurt

and the hunt continues...

news on the search. I ran into old benny at the coffee again shop today (only this time he didnt know). he seemed to have a new friend along for the ride. I have no idea who this new guy is but he seems to shop at the same sunglasses hut.

This seems to be the only clue that I have. Maybe I should check around town see if I can pull up any dirt on either of these two creatures....

as for me? I feel GREAT! I went to for a run and then yoga yesterday. I feel SO relaxed. My stress load is much less now. I finished the Lomenez account last week and ever since I feel the great burden lifting. Just hope that these sickos dont bring me down into the gutters too much....

new post

I wanted to make a new post.... so here it is

NEW POST

with a photo about laughing

benjamin the felon

ben_cf
Originally uploaded by Trefur

on a recent trip back home I was innocently enjoying a cup of coffee at a local book store when I noticed this man. now understand, I am an open-minded person I have friends from all walks of life. but when I met this man I was hit by the most horrible feeling I have ever felt. I am SURE this man is a convicted felon of some sorts. I tried to speak with him, but he was very reserved. all I got from him was his name... benjamin. it is just a matter of time before I discover who this man is.

"shuffle" conspiracy

I am concerned... I have a feeling that the itunes/ipod "shuffle" is not so random. I have had a growing feeling deep inside myself that my ipod knows me and plays songs that it knows will make me happy. I went for a run tonight and for some reason two white strips songs from the same album came on, this is NOT the first time this has happened. now I dont understand numbers often, but I feel like it is pretty uncommon for that to happen on an ipod with 10,000 songs...


something must be up

PMU: photo mediation unit

I have a sculpture on display at the cmu art gallery right now. It is a very heavy backpack that has a head brace and a camera mount attached to it. The camera is forced to sit directly in front of my face as I try to document the areas around me. I wanted something that would make documenting a situation much more difficult than it should be, showing off how a camera can make a situation much more awkward.

Here are some pictures from the gallery:
























The pictures were really hard to focus and compose. But I liked how a lot of them turned out. If you want to see the rest of them check out the PMU set on my flickr

The backpack is still at the gallery so Ill make sure to get some pictures when I get it back.

New Blog what what?

To anyone who may be interested... I am starting this blog as a personal space to store and exhibit my artwork. 

I am a photographer living (for now) smack in the middle of Michigan. Going to school to earn a degree in art... I spend my time riding bikes (when its nice) taking pictures and making thing.

I am about to start puttin stuff up.....