Check them out here.

I have resumed drawing things that I have lost, and here is a digital drawing of my wayward Temple Bar t-shirt, purchased in Ireland on possibly the same day I lost another shirt. View a larger version of the image, as well as the rest of the series, here.

But with a new site design in the can, here we are, back in blogness. Ain’t it grand?

It must have slipped out of my pocket when I fell.

[Craiglist PostingID: 1002315065]

This is part of an ongoing project in which I make drawings of things that I have lost.

The summer of 2006 I lost the second disc of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue — films Four (Honour thy father and thy mother), Five (Thou shalt not kill) and Six (Thou shalt not commit adultery); each of the hour-long films explores one of the Ten Commandments.  I never found the wayward disc, and evenutally reported it missing.

This is part of a continuing series of drawings of things that I have lost, mislaid, and left behind.

 [From The Phantom Freighter, Hardy Boys Mystery Stories No. 26]

[Beatriz] Punta Cana, Dominican Republic; from the series Generations. Photograph by Mariliana Arvelo.

[Viscosity (No. 1)] 2003-04. Photograph by Esther Teichmann.

From the series [In Water] by Ethan Aaro Jones.

[My Father] Naples, Florida, 2006.  Photograph by Doug Dubois.

[Untitled #9 (Surfers)] 2003.  Photograph by Catherine Opie.

He has the ability to imagine himself a minor incident in the lives of others. It is not an abstract thing. Alex-Li Tandem would not know quite what you meant by ‘abstract’ – he is twelve. He simply knows that if he imagines swimming in the sea, well, while most children will think immediately of the cinematic shark below them, Alex, in his mind, is with the lifeguard. He can see himself as that smudge on the horizon, his head mistaken for a bobbing buoy, his wild arms hidden by the roll of the surf. He can see the lifeguard, a bronzed and languid American, standing on the sand with his arms folded, deciding there’s nothing out there. Alex sees the lifeguard wander off down the beach in search of those half-bare German girls from yesterday and a cold drink. The lifeguard buys a Coke from a passing vendor. The shark severs Alex’s right calf from his body. The lifeguard sidles up to Tanya, the pretty one. The shark drags Alex in a bloody semicircle through the water. The lifeguard speaks kindly to her ugly friend with the flat chest, hoping for brownie points. Some vertebrae snap. Did you see that? A seal! says Tanya, mistaking Alex’s desperate hand for the turn of a glossy flipper. And then he’s gone. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a seal? No, it’s me, drowning. This is how things go for Alex-Li. He deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves.

Excerpt from The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

[Rising] 1998.  [enlarge] Photograph by David Hilliard.

Hesselberg and Bruah both playfully twist and turn the human form, puppeteering in a way, manipulating this thingness of tangled arms and legs.  Both photographers obscure or cut out any defining features of their subjects.  Faceless, these beings are at most male or female, but empty of any more specific identity.

Identity is dictated, hidden, and revealed by these beings’ surroundings, which are powerful.  A vague social anxiety permeates the air.

(Below, from top to bottom: Susanna Hesselberg, Jessica Bruah, Susanna Hesselberg)

Hesselberg’s figures are molded optical illusions — whether they’re staged sculptural/performance pieces, or pinpointed photographic decisive moments (as when a cloud of smoke or tossed paper wad take on the role of a man’s head).  There’s a Wonderland sense that anything can happen, though any delight or forboding message comes across as only a whisper alongside the spellbinding visuals, in which things and people merge.  (Below: Photographs by Susanna Hesselberg)

Brauh has more specifically identified a tone in facelessness — a kind of domestic anxiety in dollhouse dressings.  This is a home life wherein a viewer can’t tell the difference between people and manequins.  Headless, faceless, and often askew, these hapless house-bound women and men are overcome by dishes and drapery, and succumb to laundry and bubblewrap.  It’s a familiar madhouse — the dissarray amid domestic chores — but one where coathangers dance in anarchy.  There is a muted comic tone, except for that slight by persistent fear that things could go horribly wrong with a single slip up or drop of the toilet-paper roll.  (Below: Photographs by Jessica Bruah)

But while his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative high jinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.

Excerpt from “Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok,” New York Times, September 14, 2008.

Think Globally, Act Locally by William Lamson [Watch the video]

Vital Capacity by William Lamson.  [Watch the video]

Duel by William Lamson. [Watch the video]

I particularly like the sense of the sterile (science) experiment in these experimental (art) films, and the execution — whatever the variables, be they bananas, needles, or balloons — comes to reveal a unique mix of whimsy and tragedy.  There are real, if anonymous, people, earnestly participating in these tests, and an undercurrent of quiet, societal violence and self-induced torture runs alongside the goofiness of these stages. Other pieces play with this what-will-happen attitude, with less alarming — even charming — results.  Either way, it is difficult not to grin while being pulled into continuous viewings of Lamson’s curious research.

[Mobil Sign] and [White Sign] Images by Derek Stroup

Derek Stroup’s digital manipulations are simple but just so smart.  I like his billboards, candy, and money images quite a bit, but his website has some wonderful drawings and paintings as well.

[Candy #5] and [$1US] Images by Derek Stroup

It is perhaps only in this light, clouded by memory, that a merchandise-driven, outsourced, overseas-animated program could inspire this.  I remember thinking at the time that the show was mostly there to showcase all the cool things the masks could do, for when I played with the toys.  That the program M.A.S.K. was in some ways little more than a commercial seems so readily apparent, now.  The fog of marketing has cleared.

But of course, it hasn’t.  Maybe only the toys have changed; of course I’m still the exuberant target of clever salesmanship.

Maybe most curious of all, though, is being so passionately fond of it all.  The texture that was absent in the cartoons themselves is provided by the reflections upon them, layering themselves, youtubes on top of ebay purchases on top of reminiscent conversations with peers on top of the recollection of somehow arranging it so that I was allowed to set up a little t.v. in the bathroom, so I could watch M.A.S.K. from the bathtub.

I always think it’s interesting to see what happens when artists go about something as natural and everyday-photographer as taking photos of their children.

The first time I saw Abelardo Morrell’s childhood images, I recognized the serene black and white, the cleverness of form and light.  Despite the very different subject matter, all that made Morrell’s familiar camera obscura and book photographs a wonder — it was all still in there, in these family portraits.  But, there is something different going on when one’s own family is the subject.  You can see it here.

There is perhaps nothing more personal than a photographer lending his so-often-shared view of the world to images of his children.

[Julian and Brady Sitting by Abelardo Morrell]

Fasten’s images aren’t so far off from your backyard snapshots.  But there is something that much more deliberate about them; they’re square and distant and framed.  There is certainly this sense of just what she says in her statement… the watching of this person as he negotiates the bit of world he has to explore in front of him (but within the watchful eyes of his caretaker).  The image of Zach alone on a swing could have come across as deeply melancholy, but no, I feel like we know mom isn’t far away.

Granted, Fasten’s Zach pictures aren’t all taken quite from this perspective of protective distance.  The breathtaking image Hair [below, top] is wondrous and bold, and not so different from the porcelain youths of Loretta Lux‘s photo-paintings [as in The Blue Dress, below, bottom].

But Fasten’s child is not some photographic statue.  That’s an unfiltered blast of light, revealing real skin and hair, and a clutter of out-of-focus beach-goers trotting about the background.

This balance between intimacy and distance, though, I think is particularly noteworthy.  It is probably a space only a parent could inhabit.

And maybe it’s the haircut or the sweaters, but there’s this wonderful timeless everychild in Morrell and Fasten’s kids and how they are portrayed.  I am certain I had that haircut once, or lack thereof, my hair bushy and unkempt.  I feel like I know how that sweater feels, and you probably do to.

Maybe most remarkable, the images really convey the persistent shortness of being so young.  It’s marvelous.

And again, maybe its the haircut.  But I can’t help think of young Danny in The Shining, looking at these young people.  Innocent but not innocuously so.  Inhabiting shortness.  Navigating the perimeter of the boundaries our parents have set, and brushing up against the dangers of going a step too far.