Stephanie Thomas and abandoned blogs

I have been doing a research project based on blogs that have been inactive for long periods of time. I suppose it started when my deceased friend’s facebook page popped up in the “people you may know” box. I was morbidly fascinated by this. There is this whole artificial world where hundreds of thousands people still appear to be alive. They may not update their page, or add new pictures, but it is still a smiling face peering out at you from one world to another. And not even a cyber-world to reality, but the afterlife to the living-world.
My curiosity was sparked.
I was curious to see how many I could actually find. It started off as pure curiosity but ended up an obsession. I read countless, outdated blog entries, and viewed hundreds of myspace pages. Myspace made it easy for me, most everyone that had deceased had public comments about how they would be missed. The blogs were more difficult. I learned in one of my classes how to view the information about a webpage. I knew that there had to be a way to track the activity. I was right and with the help from a computer programming friend, who happens to have a hobby in hacking, we were able to compile a list of abandoned blogs.
There was one blog that I read about eight months ago by a girl named Stephanie Thomas. This blog haunted me, in a good way. Her sense of reality seemed to be skewed. The sky was not a sky to her. It was another world that was “clean, clear, bright, organized, and spacious”. She described her world as “saturated”. And, after only one entry, her blog is over. It ends with her saying that she was going on a journey, and would keep whoever she was talking to updated, but she never posted anything else. After much research, I discovered that she had died while trespassing in a county dump in Montana. It turns out that she planned to camp there one night, but was attacked by a mountain lion.
Due to her tragic death I hesitated to contact her family. But, I was still obsessed with her blog. Eventually, I tracked down her uncle. I told him what I was doing, and he was greatful that her story can live on. He sent me a collection of images of her home, her “piles”, her family, and, as he says, the most important one of her visiting her mother’s house for the first time in twenty years or so. He says that is when her life changed. “There was a marked difference in her from when she climbed through the window and when she climbed out”. He thinks it may be because she remembered something from her past. He says that he can’t blame her for wanted to find a “cleaner” place.  No matter what it was, Stephanie Thomas leaves us with a glimpse into her surreal reality with many questions unanswered.

Because I want you to read the story as I had the first time, without pictures, I suggest that you click on the Lorretta Lux photograph above to link to Stephanie Thomas’  blog first and then come back to view the photos that her uncle sent to me.
Best wishes to her helpful Uncle and to Stephanie- I hope that you have found your void.

click on thumbnail to enlarge

and make sure to click on the “HERE” tab at the top of the page when you are done.

Some of my Final Images

This is a sampling of images that will be on display at The Brewer’s Art, December 22nd to January 22nd. The Brewers Art is located at 1106 N. Charles St. in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore.

Photographs traditionally document an event, person, or place. I am trying not to document but create an abstract real life image. I am interested not in photographing the body, but in photographing form. These are a study of light, texture, and color.

Shows downstairs…

I went to the gallery behind Doris Cafe. At first, I was immediately attracted to the warmly lit bedroom-set in the far corner of a dark and cold space. I circled the gallery anticipating the fake bedroom and getting more and more excited the closer I got. But, it was a big disappointment. The political nature of it being Dick Cheney’s hotel room and his specifications annoyed me. I would have preferred it to have no political connotations or really no message at all. I quickly realized that the warm lighting was just to replicate a hotel room. The installation in a different space would have a completely different meaning and aesthetic than it does in that particular gallery.
I was however, very attracted to the video of a circling camera centrally located on the floor of a living room. The camera would pass by a dog sleeping on the couch, a cockatoo perched on the back of the sofa, a llama eating the leaves from a house plant, and so on. Ducks would run by, cats played in the curtains, goats knocked things over and a cow chewed on something. At first I was reminded of that live-feed of puppies on the internet but then I noticed that there was a distinctly different feeling than the warm and fuzziness of puppies. The steadiness of the rotating camera created a disconnection between that environment and the viewer. I began to think of this as how it would be if humans instantly disappeared. It was strange to see a well-lived in living room overrun by barn animals. I liked how it aggravated me when the camera didn’t stop and pause on a particular animal that was doing something of interest. Or, when there was a loud thump off camera, it would not cut to explain what that noise was. You had to patiently wait to see a change in the room.
I also really enjoy that sparkly room in the Pinkard Gallery. I think it is called, I am Oz. I don’t particularly care for the images that are projected on the the glitter infested surfaces but I am very, very, happy when I am in the room. It is not the most soothing environment, it is actually kind of chaotic- there are three projections on three glittery surfaces, things on the floor and many strips of fabric are hanging throughout the room. But, for me, it seems to instantly release large amounts of serotonin and adrenaline everytime I pass by it.

Animation project

Performance Art Piece

Red Sweater Forks

I did this a while ago. I like it, so I am posting it.

Piece inspired by “Beautiful Losers”

Kianga Ford and her wonderings..

Even through she had scripted set paths to follow, it was still much like wandering. Her voice became one with your subconscious and her stories meandered much like your/ my head does. (I don’t want to speak for everyone.) It wandered from thought to thought, occasionally surfacing to point out a visual landmark and ground you back to her story.
I remember our teacher asking us in class to think about why or why not we would consider this art. I don’t know if it was an inside joke of MICA, due to the fact that every professor asks us this question… I will assume it was a joke, but will answer it as if it was not. First of all, I have a hard time not seeing her storytelling, her sense-of-place process, and her audio support (which could stand on its own.. at least the composition for Baltimore….), not be a piece of art. It is creativity. Not to mention her plastic clouds and room of “solace”…

When I entered The Contemporary Museum, I saw a detached paragraph of a story projected onto two large black squares. “This is a true story told to me at a bar…”. I immediately and somewhat reluctantly compared it to Mel Bochner’s exhibit Language is Not Transparent (exhibit 1966-73, essay by Jessica Prinz, 1996) and then to Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey(1967) . My teacher for Art Matters is obsessed with this genre of art culture and we are now forced to learn more about it than, I think, any of us would really care to. With that said, I do have to say, how much more I appreciate the word. Language. A system of meaningless symbols and intonations combined to create something, or nothing.
I find Kianga Ford’s exhibit to be a successful extension of that movement, but, completely unrelated to that movement. Much like Smithson’s essay, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey where he light-heartedly critiques a town much like you would at a pretentious New York City art exhibit, she takes Baltimore’s landmarks and turns them into reference points of her comparatively detached stories.
Her projected partial stories on the black squares has a definite relation to Bochner’s series of index cards where he mathematically stamped the phrase “Language is Not Translucent” repeatedly on top of itself to the point where the stamped phrase becomes opaque and not legible, inherently contradicted the phrase. Her black-square contained,traveling, detached, sometimes opaque paragraphs denote the same sentiment.

The “tour” that I did was the south route; it took you to and along the inner harbor. I have to admit, that I chose that route because my workplace said that I must get a new pair of shoes. As I walked in my 10 year old maroon velvet chinese slippers , I saw the imagery that she was shouting (traffic) in my ear. “…a woman that could only be explained as wearing asphalt gray..” I, myself, was wearing an assortment of grays and also saw a melange of women donning the same color scheme. I got ahead of the audio track as a neared the inner harbor. I thought that it was because I had crossed the Legg Mason courtyard, but two and a half minutes later, she referenced that same path. I turned my ipod off as i entered Urban Outfitters and kept it off for the duration of my unsuccessful 2 hour shopping trip. As I was returning home for work, I picked up where I had left off. Ford told of two sisters, one vain, and one too apathetic to be pretty. I wandered home, wondering what one I related to the most. After all, I chose this route so that I could go shopping, but returned only with a pair of work shoes from Payless Shoe Source that i purchased only to avoid being fired, due to the fact that all my other shoes have holes in the soles.

intentional navigation project

click here to see some of my photos.  view them how you wish.

A work of art that I find complete…

Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.

The visuals are stunning. Colors, movement, and cadence
And he is an excellent storyteller.