all july

I spent all of July at Ox-Bow Summer School of Art, in Saugatuck, MI, taking a photo class called Made in the Dark with Aspen Mays and a video class called Cheap TV with Tyson and Scott Reeder. It was one of the best experiences of my whole life; the area was beautiful, I made a lot of work, met a lot of really amazing people, and ate delicious food. We survived the heat wave, Lake Michigan was only a canoe ride and a small hike away, and the whole place is in the middle of the woods. Just the best place in the world.

I didn't carry my 35mm around very much, but these are the majority of the two rolls I shot in the past 4 weeks. Kind of the bare bones of conveying it all.

This is the first night's sunset from the lagoon that forms one edge of campus.

This is the studio I was in for both sessions. Ox-Bow gets the leftovers from SAIC that still work but not quite well enough to use in the department.

We had a hedgehog visit us in class on the 4th of July. Also note my professor Aspen (on the far left) and my TA Eileen (crouched down) wearing Pippen and Jordan jerseys.

We took a walk down the one-lane road to campus down to the actual town of Saugatuck and then took the chain ferry across the Kalamazoo River to downtown for the parade. Our assignment was to make 5 3D images; it proved pretty difficult at an event that is based on people not standing still, but it sort of worked anyway, and we all had fun.

This was supposed to be a kid cone but had the equivalent of like, 4 scoops of cookies n cream on it. Ended up having to leave some behind but with a heat index of like 108, it was a-okay to have too much ice cream.

We did a sound-triggered flash demo with some water balloons and Joni Mitchell in the background.

This was the best dog I ever saw at Ox-Bow.

The lagoon has like 80 painted turtles and at least 3 snapping turtles. Everyone feeds them.

We made a few trips to Lake Michigan for shooting / pinhole work; this is from the night we set up a camera obscura tent for the sunset. It was fucking magical.

This is the outside of our studio; the bottom half is the printmaking studio and the top is photo/video/etc.

The end of both sessions, campus hosted open studios for the public to come see what we made and an auction with fancy snacks and things. This is a little sculpture I put on one of our window sills.

Setting up. The left table has a lot of our pinhole camera things; a few photos down is a wider shot of it.

I co-curated a show with Molly Brandt that the class ended up choosing to present as a final gallery besides our classroom; it relied on reallllly low lighting so this is the only 35mm I have of it. Blackout cloth curtain for the doorway ( ;) we ended up removing the text).

Then I went home for the night to do laundry and my mom brought home a giant pizza and breadsticks and then I saw Nora for a little chat in the morning, went to lunch, repacked, and returned to Ox-Bow.

The second session I stayed in a cabin called the White because I did work study.

Here is one of many delicious desserts, called a cherry puff. I don't even like cherries but woah. Homemade whipped cream, pastry, and cherries. Just delicious.

Studio at night with recorder versions of many top 40 hits; My Heart Will Go On was probably the best.

Then my friend Vivian gave me a stick n poke you can't even see in this :p

And then Mac took us on an off-trail hike through the woods and we found a lot of cool things including some really nice light, a swing, and a scary circle arrangement of giant sticks, plus a back path to the top of my fave dune at Ox-Bow.

So Lake Michigan is the body of water farthest, then its the lagoon closer. We went maybe an hour before nightfall so it was getting dark, hence dark photos.

I spent a lot of time in the woods alone for projects for Cheap TV, climbin on trees and stuff. Seriously incredible I didn't get a single tick while I was there because I was disturbing all kinds of webs and nests and things.

The remnants of a prop wall and starting to clean up the studio for open studio night part two.

Dinner with friends ~

I found 3 pinholes over these two weeks that we missed in class; two had fallen and were failures but this one kind of worked. Without chemicals to fix them they ended up fading in a few hours, but whatevs.

Last night sunset.

The end.

This was my final project; I was interested in the idea of a diptych made with moving images instead of still. I'm still working on audio for it~



Cheap TV has a youtube channel here. You can find other work I made on my tumblr.
And fucking go to Ox-Bow if you can.