Sometimes I teach...

Over New Years 2009-10 I helped to write the curriculum for and staff a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip for 29 American artists. These are a couple of video clips of me teaching courtesy of one of my participants Ellie.

On old Collision Machine installation...

Photo courtesy of Dan Hertzberg via facebook.

And the build goes on.

This is my portion of the space.

This is part of the space that I'm renting out on a permanent basis. It has 2-3 wide desk bays for office and creative space. It's a 60' long space 11' wide, 16' ceilings with a huge window at the end.

And the view from the back corner. This is from a 750 sq ft space that is renting as a single unit in the back.

Building and Building and Building... Ad infenitum.

Yes, the build goes on. In case you were wondering where I've been or why you haven't heard from me (and I know you're all desperate for my attention) I lost my lease on the studio in Williamsburg back in April and I recently moved into new digs in Dumbo.

The new space is awesome! It's 2400 sq. ft. with 16 ft ceilings column free. I moved my entire studio in a weekend and then left town for 10 days. I came back to my entire world under a few badly assembled drop cloths and a thick layer of white dust.

And a truck parked in the space and no lights and mold on the ceiling and leaking windows and no bathrooms and a roll gate without a front door.

And the build goes on.

It turns out that building a couple of bathrooms is just slightly more difficult than passing a kidney stone the size of an apple.

Four tries and they still fucked it up. Finally they just gave up and started building what I can only descrobe as an Dr. Seuss set of plumbing. No erector set, no tinker toy construction, no high school meth lab has ever given a man cause to do that innocent pieces of galvanized steel and rubber.

And somehow I agree to build the bathroom if they'll just fix the plumbing one last time.

 The build goes on.

A couple of days into me building the deck for the bathroom. The pipes for the plumbing are all above ground. A little help from Carrie and Steven of a Sunday afternoon.

A week and ten thousand years... The walls go up. Well, some of them.

M. Deurline and Mrs Caroline T. help me sling some drywall! Genuine progress is made.

Tuesday. I am broken. I surrender my DIY spirit and hire contractors to get  80 ft of  16' high wall up. Totally worth it.

Alice in a Black and White Wonderland

This is from last weekend's Box Project shoot. One of my favorite collaborations to date, the masks and mushroom were designed by Launa Eddy and Daniel Olshansky of http://www.thecompoundeye.com. That's Metteliva rockin' out as Alice. I met all three of them at this crazy art salon in a dilapidated tenement building on the LES a few weeks back courtesy of Adam Aleksander of www.UnprecedentedEvents.com. It was one of those perfect evenings where everyone you meet is cool and creative and so far two awesome collaborations have come out of it. Keep checking back 'cause the next one's even better!

A quick outtake from the shoot.

You know that feeling you get when you photograph your high school girlfriend and her husband?

Jenny and Will are two of my oldest friends and I love them dearly, so these are some of my favorite portraits. They are a step outside my usual style. No elaborately created set, no surreal costuming or props. In fact all I did was bring a little more light out onto the back porch while we sat around in Tucson (the place I'm from and Jenny never left) drinking a sampler of strange foreign beers. I love them, among other reasons, because their life is simple, happy, and as far as I can tell, exactly the way they want it.

Life here is by turns intense, beautiful, stressful, bizarre, fabulous (with a hand gesture) and full of passion, but rarely do I find the kind of perfect contentment I feel when I spend an evening visiting with Jenny and Will.

Katia

And I'm still not entirely sure how I got talked into these...