(Excerpts from) The Situation Room, a photograph taken by White House photographer Pete Souza in the White House Situation Room at 4:06 pm on May 1, 2011 - during the Bin Laden raid.
As I enter my final eight months of the Parsons MFA program, I'm knee deep in research and experimentation. It's not the prettiest time, not a lot of beautiful things are being made. But it's wildly fun. I love research. I spend my free time just engrossed in research. It's fascinating. I spend so much time making these visual research journals and documenting the nitty gritty, the details. There are thousand things that I am so intrigued by, which means my work has to deal with all of it.
But as per my new year blog post, I'm keeping this up to date with the experimentations. Since most of my experimentations are video installation, I'll keep it confined to these still images. These odd excerpts are from photojournalists, collaged together to help me understand the gestures within American politics.
How does an American politician move around the world? How do they dress? Their collar, their handshake, their string of pearls? How is this tradition a note of what American is?
I spend a significant amount of time writing about this work, determining where these objects will move to next, but it often means that I ask myself more questions than I find answers for. I've got notebooks filled with pages of questions. It's awesome.
These experimentations have included photoshop, performance, collecting images and footage, listening to hours of speeches. It's been research, rearranging, representing, critiquing. I've been primarily looking at this most recent administration to gather the the most up to date information. It's been a pretty wild experience and I'm cherishing these moments.
Okay, back to the research. See you in August at the exhibition!
Fake it til you make it politics - Doesn't every pretend politician need an American flag pin shaped like a heart?
C-Span moments before President George W. Bush arrived to give a speech concerning the Virginia Tech shooting