It's snowing right now

...and that's just wrong. What's even wronger (is that a word?) is that we went shopping at the local mall yesterday ("local" around here means 35 miles away) and many of the stores are playing Christmas music already. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. One holiday at a time please!

As the residency gets closer and my nervousness increases, I'm trying to coalesce my ideas for the particular projects I'm working on so that I can put together a decent artist's statement. My statements tend to be overlong, rambling essays, so I reallly need to make this one more consice. Right now there are two main projects I'm pursuing: one, the mannequins, seems to be progressing nicely and I pretty much know what direction I want to head towards. The other, the Gettysburg Landscape project, is in its infancy. The panoramas on glass, or whatever I end up showing in January, are just sketches really: sketches that I have no idea how I'm going to display! They need to be spaced slightly away from the wall, which means that they'll either have to be suspended somehow or I'll have to build some sort of base for them and put them on a pedestal (which as we all know, are scarce in the AIB building). Anyhoo, I digress. Here are some quick notes on the two series which will hopefully help me build a statement that makes sense:

Mannequins

• from the rural American tradition of 19th century portrait photography
• possibly represents a series of "missing family portraits" for myself, since I have little family communication and very few pictures of family members
• mannequins treated as "real," however with full knowledge of their artificial quality
• represents the artificiality of memory, and photography's inability to be an accurate record of memory
• comments on nostalgia through process and subject matter (reflective nostalgia)
• painting on tintypes acts as palimpsest - erases information underneath to assign further layers of time and thought
• addition of artificial flowers and hair placed in authentic 19th century wood & plaster frames further complicates the separation of reality and artificiality
• notions of fetish in early portraiture
• related artists: Morton Bartlett, Mark Ostermann, Jayne Hinds Bidaut, 19th century tintype parlor photographers

Landscapes

• interest in landscape as a record of human and natural history - on grand scale and also personal history
• the idea of "place" as importance to the human condition
• landscape as memory (using Gettysburg, a landscape noted for its history and near my old hometown, as an example)
• using a type of panorama format to investigate issues of space and composition in landscape art
• images printed on glass to allow for layering of images (histories and memories) and also to connect to photographic techniques used during the Civil War
• interest in maps and mapping, possible element to be introduced to series
• comments on nostalgia through process and subject matter (reflective nostalgia)
• related artists: Matthew Brady, Masumi Hayashi, Sally Mann

That's what I've got so far. Thoughts?