Moons

I, like many others, have long been fascinated by the beauty of our moon. This fascination does not limit itself to its many faces protagonizing the night skies; my interest digs within the history of what humans believed they were witnessing and the many interpretations of its gravitational pull on our tides, often giving me the impression that we remain incredibly superstitious animals. So during the summer months of the year 2005, I set out to pursue the moon in the dimly darkened night skies of Scandinavia. After weeks of test-shoots and studying quick-changing weather patterns during short intervals of darkness as allowed by this time of the year at such high latitudes, it looked like I would have to take to the sea and shoot from the ferry between Sweden and Finland on the only full-moon nights (due to cloudy forecasts everywhere else). Finally, feeling almost beaten by odds which I felt I should have myself beaten, there it was: big and red and rising slowly above a river in Härjedalen, over the town called Älvros (River Rose). I stopped the car, set-up my gear and began to shoot. Out of my obsession, I became possessed and thus began my pursuit of the moon across the sky. This trip lasted three nights. The video piece is the result of this journey. It turned into a trance-like meditation. 

The drawings of Luna are excerpts of my sketchbook that summer. Each sketch was intended to guide the viewer through the mental process I underwent in order to turn my footage into an installation where the viewer might be afforded the opportunity to experience a little of what I experienced. I'm not sure if this kind of thing ever succeeds, but I hope that those who visited the piece managed to form their own relationship to this depiction of something which we have all seen, gazed and at some point wondered about.

More by Orestes Grediaga can be found on his website :

here

x, B.

The Header

Inspiration comes at you like the falling boulder in the Indiana Jones ride at Disney Land.  There's that lightning and the bumpy car and you don't know what is going on but you have to do something about it.  Anything..  So you walk outside and look around which ultimately makes the feeling worse especially as clouds roll in overhead.  Over the beaches and the vast oceans and it's quiet and peaceful and everything just feels so weird.  This is always how inspiration approaches me.  But if I don't do anything about it, it just drifts off as if that huge boulder didn't even squish me at all 20 minutes ago and then everything just feels off... For days.  Today this sort of happened minus some intensity.  So I took out my bamboo tablet and opened up photoshop and sat on my computer for three hours trying to make a new header image for figureno.1.  I probably deleted 200 items that were just horrible and tried applying them to the actual blog only to fail miserably with the coding.

So, I just tried to mimic Ann's handwriting and wah-la.  It's a nice contrast because it's handwritten and then we have all this clean cut type text on the actual blog itself.   

Here are a few of the images I made... This was one of the options that I should have taken more time on (hence the off centerness of the entire image):