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Not today Justin
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occasionally subtle
almost home
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@the-rabbit-hole-effect
Some more of my work over the Covid-19 era. I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely had moments where I was overwhelmed. There was definitely a whole lot more to think about.
When ever I dream about water, I pay attention as water is suppose to signitify emotions.
I made this composite with a water shot by Berend de Kort’s. I made the rabbit head, of course and shot myself and the bear.
Locusts.
If there was a year for it...
I think I came up with this idea not only because of the universal symbolism of locusts, but also because at a certain point this was how I was feeling. All those locusts were demands upon my attention.
I work alone at home so I am used to being on my own. Being an introvert this is the best time to get work done. But once the lockdowns started to occur, there was a phase before people adjusted where they were getting a little wonky. Suddenly everyone was home, everyone was on social media and various extroverts in my life got needy and now everyone knew where I was. At first, I too, thought i was trapped and needy, but as it turned out, it was a very minor adjustment for me more of a lack of freedom to choose, more than anything else.
I started to extend my ‘do not contact’ hours, (this is imaginary - it’s simply me going off the grid so to speak) so where they got later and later in the morning, and earlier in the evening. They are pretty much 11 am to 5 pm, but even then you might not get a hold of me because I’m working or involved with something. My relationship with my phone changed. Once I knew where my kids were, we had a trial separation.
I think, if you let it, or maybe if you are forced into it by your various neuroses, this time can teach you about yourself. I have certainly done a whole lot of self-reflection during this period. It hasn’t always been pleasant. But one thing for sure. I'll have to make sure to protect my time.
Looking at all the posts on facebook, all the conspiracies, all the causes, all the shit people are saying that they’d never dream of saying to anyone but like minded people.
I’ve gone from a pollyanna idealist type to absorbing how selfish, false, awful or arrogant a lot of people really are.
Yet as much as I try to live in a bubble, I also try to keep one ear open to all those voices I don’t agree with (or frankly, are just wrong), otherwise it’s easy to lose sight of the world you actually live in.
But don’t knock on my door. I am not home.
Domestic chaos for rabbits.
Kitchen chaos for the rabbit.
(credit: © the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com)
“Where are you? Where did you go?”
The rabbit only looks back briefly before continuing on ahead.
The fog fog not only dampens our sight and our hearing, but it transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar.
It often creeps up on us at night or early morning unsettling us and gets burned off during the day just like a dream.
Yet the child in us sees the magic of it and yearns for it.
credit: © the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com
"A fellow writer wrote today and said he is lonely. I told him lonely is where the art hides."
- Matthew Quick
Credit: the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com
(credit: the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com)
I grew up near the tracks. Heard the trains so frequently I barely noticed them.
But I had also grown up with stern warnings about being on the tracks. Stories of children playing chicken and getting their feet stuck and getting hit by trains. This made being on the tracks exciting.
There was a short cut to the lake if you crossed the tracks, but you had to know where to go. One place, behind the house of a kid I knew, the track cut through a steep ridge creating a secluded space on the tracks hidden from all views unless you too were on the tracks. Apparently poison ivy dotted along side. I had been shown it by my older sister, but I could never remember what it looked like.
It was the secret, dangerous place of children. The rails were smooth and shiny and there was the particularly tarry smell unique to railway ties that I always found oddly comforting. I would peer at the gravel rocks that the tracks and ties lay on, suspiciously waiting for them to trick me and grab at my ankle and pull me down. I had never known anyone to get hit, or to attempt to even play chicken but the threat of possible death and the threat of adults and the threat of the law was always omnipresent.
Lore had it if you lay your ear upon the track you could hear the trains coming through the tracks long before you could see them. We all tried it, but even seeing them we couldn't be sure we heard them through the tracks. I fancied the rails to be warm on my cheeks cooling from the heat of the screeching wheels even if they weren’t.
We put pennies on the tracks and waited patiently for the train to come. The trains were always bigger than you expected and frighteningly loud. I never got used to it. If we were lucky we’d find our pennies flung off the tracks flattened beyond recognition. We couldn’t spend them, but they were worth even more to us, as evidence our power to use tools flatten copper to this impressive degree.
It was a wintery day when the schools had closed due a storm. I and my older brother of about five-six years had taken the opportunity to walk to the tracks. I don’t know why we went. I don't know if we planned it or just found ourselves there. We had trudged through the field and battled the wind and pellets of snow across a field. The ice crested snow scraped off the coating off the top of my cheap boots.
On the tracks we discovered a small and somewhat chipped glass orb. And then another one. What was this?
Back when the games of marbles were still allowed on school property, I grew up watching mostly older boys, but girls too, playing incomprehensible games with marbles and other assortments of glass balls. This was serious kids stuff. It was highly competitive and from time to time there was the odd injury.
Out of all the many different types of glass balls kids were trying to collect, the most common were the “crystals”. A manufacturing plant of asbestos-fibre products now long closed, was just a little ways farther down the tracks along the lake. We had all heard of it, but few of us had actually seen it. Or if we had, it probably escaped our attention for being a rather dull ordinary and irrelevant adult monster sort of building. But it either received or sent shipments with the crystals as packing material. Or so the story went. Or maybe we made that up.
The crystals had currency. They were the lowest end of marble food chain that could be used to shoot for more valued marbles. I seem to remember that maybe it went something like this: you were offered five or maybe ten chances to hit a more valuable marble with your crystals. If you hit it you won it, and kept your crystals. If not you lost everything.
And on the tracks that day, my brother and I had found the motherload of crystals.
They were everywhere. As many as we could possibly want. We reckoned that they must have spilled off a train car somehow. It never occurred to us how such a thing might have happened. For it was like someone gave us the permission to print money. We were dumbfounded. And then we were dizzy with excitement. It was ours if we acted quickly.
We trekked back home through the snow in a hurry to get a duffle bag and spent the afternoon collecting them, giddy with conspiratory joy, my stronger older brother heaving the weight of them back. That duffle bag filled as full as he could lift them, bulging with childhood money. There was a double darkness to the secret joy to it, having been both on the tracks and having this unfair advantage being showered on you as a result of it. Like stealing stolen money from bank robbers.
By the time I got old enough to learn the marble games, they had been outlawed forever by the school administrators, whether for marble gambling or the throwing and resulting injuries, I don’t know. I don’t know if my brother took advantage, but I never got to reap the benefit of them. I remember the bag, the joy of discovery and that wintery day more than anything else.
Years later the tracks and the lake came to mean different things for me; escape from parents into the poetic moroseness of a teenaged mind; the endless lines disappearing into nothing; the slate grey of the relentless water; the boys at the beach who’s attention we hoped to attract, the naked couple we spotted having sex on the rocks one day. And like many things in your childhood the mother load of crystals disappeared along with the hoards of other toys, fading away along side childhood memories into unknowingness.
Recently I was recounting the story for my even older sister. She told me she has them. She had used them with her students many years later. I imagined they were packed away in her basement somewhere. I forgot to ask her if she kept them in the old canvas duffle bag.
© the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com
© the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com
© the-rabbit-hole-effect.tumblr.com
I started with forgetting everything I knew about photography. Or trying to, anyway.
Forget the rule of thirds, forget leading the viewer into the frame, forget foreground, forget creating a sense of depth. Forget trying so hard. Shoot fast. Allow yourself the experience of cringing at the results.
Because everything with that is part of the idealism that causes us to bury our heads in the sand and not see what is in front of us. Make it beautiful. Make it more wonderful than it actually is. This is the Facebook generation where if you are not whining and bitching, you are living the perfect life with your perfect kids.
Instead, focus on the ugliness. The ugly of the industry behind the field, the garbage, the bleak and mundane. Don't turn away. You don't have a model? Be the model. You can’t shoot at magic hour? Tough. Don’t tell me you can’t shoot midday.
This quest for beauty, for the interesting, for the things that are remarkable; instead of this inspiring me to try harder, to push myself, to grow, it has instead stunted me. This idealism is what has stunted me. Nothing the way it is will ever be good enough. And as long as it isn’t no one will ever be able to tell you aren’t good enough.
Well, what if good enough is not the point? What if the point is not to take professionally aligned images.
This is what I lost. What art actually is. It’s not that 14mm lens that is now as I write on a Purolator truck headed to my house as much as I obsessively claim it is (oh, it is, it IS, come quick!) in my head. It’s not that lovely two to one ratio lighting. It’s not converging lines and angles and perfect timing. Oh, I still will aim for a beautiful shot or two, but that is not all art is. It’s not all photography is.
This image is a key image for me as representing the start of this project. The field with the ugliness of industry in the background, and fleck of garbage lying in the dried mud ruts to mess everything up. The rabbit which you might see in a field that has to share its home with the garbage and the blight humans have made of it. But it’s not a natural rabbit. No. An absurd rabbit. A human shooting a selfie hiding in a rabbit head, sporting a dress of field flowers that will never grow on this patch of land at least in the foreseeable future.
I had ridden there with the rabbit head tied to a basket on my bike. Shot this one on my iphone. Cars honk at me as they go by. This is probably what I’ll become known for in this town: that crazy woman with the rabbit head.
I confront you, Idealism, I confront you!
Hide.
You can see rabbits any time. but they especially like to come out in the evening.
