mid-december

i had a random little encounter with keith johnson yesterday in the student gallery. [in truth, i had made my back to the back building in the midst of my afterimage work-day, because rumor had spread in the front building of pizza. feeling a little guilty at only taking, i looked at all the student work first, and was not left hungry--the work was good--in spite of the pizza being gone. my one-minute meeting with keith was well-worth the lack of lunch]

he asked how my thesis was going. i gave him a beefier answer than i usually give most people. as i knew he is a photographer, i launched into the technical side of what i'm doing, which is: "well i'm drawing on the walls, from projected negatives, then filming it with a 16mm moving image film, 35mm still film and doing test shots with my digital still camera. it sort of becomes a cycle of translations of images". Keith's response to me was two fold: 1) "check out this guy's work--joe fig at the bernard toale gallery--he creates these minature replica's of artists' studios and then photographs them" 2) "make sure this work isn't becoming for only a select few--namely the educated art world and/or only for yourself, otherwise it simply becomes masturbatory"

i also was able to get ahold of my 'statement of objectives' that accompanied my packet to graduate school here at VSW. [the original file was lost when my computer died a year ago, so getting this piece of paper was a finding a lost treasure.] among many ideas i proposed--3 years later, and with a mind expanded and exposed--almost all of them still ring true to what i am attempting to accomplish with my thesis work.

i'll write more of my conversation with jesse over dinner tonight [a reminder to self: breaking it down]