Industry and Product

This collection of images seeks a broader view of disposed human objects as they come to rest in locations of decay. Surrounding these objects is the landscape they live in with particular details of industry, or in some cases, of activity past. These landscapes possess a harsh character of consumption and waste, and it is this process of obsolescence within personal objects, that connects the trash to its environment. At some point the raw materials necessary to produce these objects could have very well traveled on the same train line, right past these locations that they have come to rest in, having lived an entire human life in between.

Jenova 7 - Dusted Jazz Volume One

Under his musical guise of Jenova 7, Clark graduate and Los Angeles based independent filmmaker Michael J. Sirois recently released Dusted Jazz Volume One. In just five short tracks, Jenova 7 packs a sense of plot and composition that one would expect out of a full length album. Clear themes of dissonance develop and are carried by a decisive homage to jazz form, while making a strong contribution to the trip-hop genre to which he stakes his claim.

The first track, “Dark Water Jazz,” begins with the aged crackle of a phonograph coupled with a simple piano sample. Immediately as a listener you are put into a place of abstraction, that of the acoustic jazz piano in its slow and developing loop. Slowly the piano rises into a light dissipation only to lead you into being slammed by the drop of slow, heavy percussion – the trip-hop signature. Faint ghostly hints at a vocal sample surface, but seem to serve more as compositional depth than a frontal or literal representation. This first track introduces the dark and raw layer cake that is the EP, full of rhythmic twists and barely discernible backgrounds.

After having spoken with Sirois over the phone, the cinematic composition of the tracks is clear in comparison to the last album he released, Soul For Sale, which included twenty four tracks. He described his past album as containing a greater number of “happier tracks,” and this current EP as being a much more “focused and consistent concept. The last one, if you had to say anything, was more commercial and accesible, where this new one, even though it has been doing much better in terms of sales and downloads, it’s not as accesible, it’s much darker. The fourth track, “A Touch Of Evil” is pretty hard to get into for a lot of people.”

The approach of abstraction for any pertinent artist can be one of the most challenging issues of production. What marks a shift in this EP from Sirois’ last album is the depth created by his attention to abstracting finer details. Not only is the full composition of tracks more cohesive, but the individual elements within each of them have an added dimension of abstraction. Particularly, with regards to abstraction as a production approach, Sirois commented that “On a few tracks I used samples of things that weren’t instruments, but I edited them together so that they make sense as an instrument.”

In the final track, “Life Is Just A Ride,” an echoing flourish of music box notes introduces a sample of comedian Bill Hicks. Accompanied by funky saxophone and heavy shaker, Hicks’ words drive in his comparison of life to a ride. “The world is like a ride at an amusement park and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s just how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down and round and round and it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun for a while.” Blended into the instrumentation this quote seems to be an honest and perhaps critical confrontation of death, viewed through the lens of satire, and appropriately concludes Sirois’ decisive EP.

The EP is offered as a free download from the Dusted Wax Kingdom label, and can be accessed through the Jenova 7 Bandcamp page jenova7.bandcamp.com

Dollface Please

Fruit Stalemate

Television

If you sit in front of a screen all day, you wont get any exercise and you will get lost in a sea of delusion. The spectacle will swallow you into an abyss, pacified by the image. As you look into the screen in the center of this picture, do not be seduced by its aesthetics, good or bad. It is just an image. 

Abandon

As I have been coming to understand my own work of all media better, I realize the importance of walking and finding marginalized spaces. The locations where human possessions come to rest and be forgotten seem to draw me to them most. It is the act of traversing these spaces and reading narratives into the objects that inhabit them that drives me to them. The objects of decay reach out to connect with the people that once owned them.

This collection of images is intended to capture the decay and destruction of one of the locations that continues to bring me back to it inexplicably for its objects of rejection.

Queer Theory at the Roundabout

Kids In The Street

This collection of images is intended to portray movement and transition, both of location and subject. I specifically focused on youth in the street, trying to capture moments of play, as they occur in their environment. Childhood seems to be full of the most intense life transitions, physically the most active phase too. I also tried to pay an eye to ‘in between’ spaces, my relation to them being on the exterior of these places and the people in them.

Badass Betty

Grab and Look

Self Portrait: 9.8.2011

Pie pa bella

Graffiti Glimpse - Worcester

“

Not only was graffiti writing an invention of kids, but they also created and developed it in the face of adults’ laws, arrests, beatings, and organized removal efforts. No other art movement in human history has so thoroughly confounded the deeply held concepts of public and private property; no other art movement has so thoroughly made itself a public-policy issue. Long before it developed into an art, graffiti was---and remains---a crime. To make the work that appears in this book, artists risked imprisonment and physical injury. And nearly every single artwork featured in this book, whether in New York City or elsewhere, has been destroyed.

---

Graffiti certaintly benefited from its arranged marriage with hip-hop as one of its four elements (DJ, please cue the debate about whether graffiti is a part of hip-hop, and loop it endlessly), but that association also caused one of graffiti’s great social accomplishments---one it made independent of the other elements of hip-hop---to go largely overlooked. While viewers saw rappers DJs, and break dancers in person, they did not often see graffiti writers---only their work. Rapping, DJing, and break dancing were unquestionably the creation of black and latino youths, so faceless pseudonyms of graffiti writing were popularly assumed to be the same. As legendary graffiti writer T-KID 170 bluntly puts it, ‘It’s a myth that all writers were black or Hispanic. It’s bullshit. The truth of the matter is that graffiti was multiracial. Black, Hispanic, white---you didn’t care, and the guys who did it came in all colors.’

”

-THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN GRAFFITI-
(ROGER GASTMAN AND CALEB NEELON)

The images i have included are intended to express the continuous layering that graffiti inhabited areas contain. Their depth traces the lives of those that write in them.