photo
October 30, 2010
Krista, Toronto, June 2010. Taken with the Double Shot camera, Fuji S-200 film.
Posted by jodi on October 30, 2010 at 7.24pm
a visit to a frank lloyd wright home in dousman, wisconsin
October 22, 2010
During our recent trip to Milwaukee to visit the Coolest People Ever, Michael took us to see the home of his friend and business partner, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s actually half a house, begun in 1954 and left unfinished in 1956 when the original owners ran out of money. Dave and Liz were gracious enough to open their home to us and show us all of the amazing built in features and the repair work they’re currently doing. We sat bathed in sunlight on chairs custom designed by Wright for the home, explored the basement and peeped into the crawl space where you can see the raw cliff face that was blasted away to make space for the house (and a salamander! living in a hole in the basement floor!), leaned out over the balcony railing gazing way, way down at the rocky hillside the house perches over, heard about the mathematically complex layout of the house, saw a model created from the original house plans of what the master bedroom wing will look like, and stood in the spot where the bedrooms will someday be (when the rest of the house gets built).
I had planned to take plenty of photos but ended up feeling kind of funny about it, because it’s someone’s home. Here are a few I snapped with the little Harinezumi; I took a few film shots outside the house with a couple of different cameras, but y’all will have to wait a bit to see them.
Here’s a shot looking up in the living room, where you can see the wall of built in cabinets and, beyond that, the clerestory windows.
Looking from the living room out into the entrance foyer. Liz talked about eventually putting down carpet in the house, but I love the look of the concrete floors. Up the stairs to the right there’s a little office with its own porch balcony overlooking the living room (of which I did not get a picture). If this was my house, that’s one area that would be cluttered with plants, the one thing that can’t be secreted away into all of those fabulous built in storage closets (you know, to make it look like you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and don’t own any stuff or create any clutter).
I wish I’d taken a photo of the Green Bay Packers blanket thrown over the back of the Wright-designed couch. It was nice to see, because while the place didn’t really have a showroom vibe about it, there weren’t really all that many things that stood out like that as the kind of stuff you’d hide when the camera crews come.
Just to the left of the stairs leading to the foyer, the Predicta Corona television. These are the tvs that Michael and Dave build (see more Predicta designs here).
Peter and Michael in the living room. Oh, look, there’s that Packers blanket.
Looking out the living room windows, over the balcony railing.
You can see a good photo of the exterior of the house here (at the top of the page; scroll down for a little blurb about the house) at this Wright tour page.
Posted by jodi on October 22, 2010 at 1.38pm
great lakes tourist
October 20, 2010
First time wading in Lake Michigan. Hell no I didn’t swim. It was cold, y’all.
Posted by jodi on October 20, 2010 at 5.26pm
photo
October 18, 2010
One of a small series of lovely hand painted posters for Aikido classes, seen recently on Adelaide Street in London Ontario. Taken with the Harinezumi digital.
Posted by jodi on October 18, 2010 at 4.29pm
old susie
October 12, 2010
In the spring of 1992 my dad moved to a rickety old falling-down farmhouse (so falling-down, in fact, that after he moved out the house was given over to the local fire department for training practice, as it wasn’t fit for occupancy). There was an old orange cat already living on the property, sixteen years old and never domesticated according to the farmer across the road, the son of the falling-down house’s original occupants. The neighbour said “I castrated that cat myself!” (along with the hogs), and “you’ll never get near that cat” (is it any wonder?). To which my dad replied, “well, I was petting that cat this morning”, because my dad is: a) kind of a smartarse and b) some kind of magic man when it comes to the kitties. In fact my dad is a bona fide crazy cat lady who, since befriending Old Susie, has had anywhere from seven to fourteen cats living with him at any given time (it’s nine right now, I think).
By the first winter Old Susie, the wild cat who had fended for himself for sixteen years, was curling up on a corner of the couch just like a regular house cat, albeit one who was all solid muscle and sharp claws who would slash at your arm if you dared to stop petting. When my dad moved to a new farm the following year, he brought Susie along.
Susie, spring 1994. Shot with the Brownie Hawkeye and Ilford HP-5 Plus film.
This and another (even worse) shot on the same roll are the only pictures of Susie. That little cross-shaped piece of stone by the porch stoop is a broken piece of grave marker that my cousin Chris and I dug out of a rock pile in a creek running behind the site of an old church that used to stand on Highway 4 near my hometown. The dilapidated church had been taken over by Franciscan monks who were fixing it up and living there and I remember when I was in high school we’d occasionally see them in town in their brown cassocks and then there was some kind of conflict with the diocese and the monks left and the church was torn down. I later left that stone in the backyard of a house in London to mark the grave of a kitten that died. You see how easy that is, just dig out the old photos and instantly you turn into an old person with a semicoherent string of boring old tangential stories? It’s like Tony Soprano said: remember-whens are the lowest form of conversation.
I found these negatives, processed but never printed, rolled up and squashed flat with duct tape goo on them, shoved into an old pickled egg jar along with hundreds of cowrie shells salvaged from old shell necklaces, scraps of woven trim that I got from the fire sale after the big fire at Exeter Public School and later used on my first piece of SCA garb, some old guitar strings, a bag of silver jump rings, a bottle of Spotone and a large spool of linen bookbinding thread. It’s a wonder there were still pictures to be found on them at all.
Posted by jodi on October 12, 2010 at 10.55am
wfcu atm installation
October 10, 2010
In the automated teller kiosk at the Windsor Family Credit Union main branch (Drouillard Rd. and Tecumseh Rd.), there’s a plexiglas covered display board in which someone installs collages of photocopied news articles and ephemera. We don’t use the bank machine much so I’m not sure how often the installation changes, but it’s different every time we visit.
Posted by jodi on October 10, 2010 at 10.17am
another studio video
October 5, 2010
Tracing, tracing, tracing, drawing a circle within each tiny hole in a complicated bit of textile, then painting inside each tiny circle later with colour. And then perhaps printing or drawing or painting over the whole thing later, subsequent layers burying and obliterating earlier work. Tedious work. Listening to me lament why did I choose this one? It has so many tiny holes! Peter asked, half in jest, why don’t you just spray paint it? Or put powdered graphite through it?
Oh. Well. Spray paint just won’t DO, it’s just too fast, too immediate. Powdered graphite, or iron oxide powder? I could do that, but it would have to be done by hand, meticulously, every mark a decision unto itself, then the sealing layer would have to be applied by hand too, gradually, capturing every bit of powder with a tiny brush, each little coloured circle counted, measured, touched. I can’t work any other way than this slow, deliberate, laboured mark-making. I’m sure that has something to do with why I so rarely finish anything. But so much of my work is ABOUT work, and about the quiet magnitude of the labour of one pair of hands, slowly building up something big out of a collection of tiny repetitive movements. Like a factory. Like knitting. Like filling up a space with tiny little tick marks, or dots, or circles drawn in holes in lace, filling up time with labour for the sake of labouring.
This is the walnut ink I made. It’s terribly bleedy on this Japanese paper, and better suited to a denser sheet. I’ll do some drawings with it later on Rives BFK, the rag paper I used for my colour test while the ink was boiling. For now, though, I like that this is messy, with the ink spreading outside the pencil lines, dots bleeding together in places, brown stains leaking right through the paper onto other parts of the folded sheet. It’s a first layer anyway, it’ll all get covered up.
Posted by jodi on October 5, 2010 at 10.00pm
studio video!
October 4, 2010
I haven’t made one of these in a while.
Starting a drawing on a brand new sheet of Tokuatsu (kozo fibre) paper, 36 by 78 inches: the same paper, and the same size, as On Crossing and the two maps from The Wardrobe Project. This drawing in progress will be sent to Jessica, in order that she may respond to it and return it, thus beginning a new collaboration following on the success of our last project together (On Crossing). For this first bit of drawing I’m going to use the walnut ink I made a couple of weeks ago from black walnuts I collected from a grove of trees I used to play in as a kid.
Posted by jodi on October 4, 2010 at 7.40pm
in which i think i might be getting better at this
October 3, 2010
Fibre: Blue-faced Leicester
Source: Spunky Eclectic
Colourway: Cockstand
Yield: 170 metres of two-ply, 13 wraps per inch
Cleo likes it.
Now to design something that will use it all up.
Posted by jodi on October 3, 2010 at 4.51pm
deep water
October 2, 2010
I finished this sweet little vest just as the first heat wave of summer hit, so now is the first time I’ve been able to wear it and take some photos.
The details:
Pattern: Watershed by Amy Swenson
Yarn: a wool-alpaca-nylon blend that was – need I even say it? – recycled from a secondhand sweater.
Mods: none, baby. Knitted exactly as written.
Verdict: LOVE.
It’s cute hanging open too, but as I biked to the university library to crash a staff party in it, I pinned it shut at the front so as not to have it bunching up in my armpits under my bag strap. The glittery PVC puffy heart pin was a gift from the ever fabulous Krista, proprietor of Pixie Fashions.
The back:
Here’s hoping we enjoy a few more days of transitional temperatures before winter comes. I’m not ready yet to put this pretty thing away in my closet until spring.
Posted by jodi on October 2, 2010 at 4.09pm
