feather2pixels

One of my big summer projects was An Interview With the Author Monica Zarazua.

It’s a screenprinted motion picture on thirty-eight wood tiles made for a group show at Joyce Gordon Gallery in Oak-land.  That show explored intersections between the literary and visual arts and my intent for the piece was to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, creating an imaginary space for the non-imaginary author of the show’s short stories to inhabit. Here is a pdf of the show catalog beautifully put together by Xiomara Castro.

The images used in the project, which proceeds left, right, up, and down the gallery wall, were collected from photos and video recordings produced for this work.  Here’s a shitty video about one day in that process!

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/70608039?byline=0&amp;color=ff0179″ width=”500″ height=”367″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/70608039″>Underwater photoshoot for a screenprint project.</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user16153940″>Jon Fischer</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p> <p>A four minute video filmed during the making of the visual art piece &quot;Interview with the Writer Monica Zarazua&quot; by Jon Fischer. On this day of production, Fischer enlisted several adventurous friends to improvise dozens of simple movements and sequences filmed using HD video underwater in a 59&deg;F pool. <br /> <br /> To develop the final art piece, individual images selected from single frames in the source footage were collected and reassembled to form intertwined fantastical stories that draw on motifs such as color, text, space, and movement. The result resembles something in between a period silent movie, a comic strip, and the pre-cinema locomotion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.<br /> <br /> The piece creates a story for the storyteller to inhabit. Presenting a complex structure of overlapping narratives that is generated from simple recordings of people in motion, the project explores a fluid relationship between fiction and non-fiction, in which each creates the other. <br /> <br /> Filmed by Jon Fischer and Nowell Valeri in 2013.</p>,/imframe]

I never actually posted the final painting of Camp Director Claire, made by the devoted tweens of the San Francisco Boys Chorus, and stretched on four 50-inch wood slats.  So here it is.  Our masterpiece features a screenprinted background, gilded rays, and a main image made of about 2 gallons of housepaint.

First dance, first fistfight, first girlfriend: having logged many seminal moments of my life at summer camp, it was with a commitment to the memorable that I recently executed my duties as art director for one week of San Francisco Boys Chorus away camp.

It’s never really possible to know what kind of impact you are making on eleven year olds, but my basic plan was to win them over slowly by focusing on a precise five day project. Something that would keep kids busy with their hands and look really cool when it was done. Since the goal was to construct set pieces and props for EB’s parallel kid operas, we ended up painting a 50×50 inch Resistance-style portrait of Camp Director Claire. In her creation class, EB helped the boys work the painting into their story.

We began with a photoshoot.

I digitally processed one of the better images into seven discrete layers:

Over the course of five camp days, I projected each layer independently for kids to outline and paint on canvas hung from the wall. Registration marks were used to line everything up.

Then we stretched the canvas on a frame, ready for the show.

So it was pretty cool. And I got the kids to call me Jono. The painting looked very fine from a distance and I think the boys were into the program. Of course we did a bunch of other stuff. We made signs and banners. One day I chopped up a bit of branch from an apple tree and we made medallions. Located in Sonoma County at a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school on the banks of the Russian River, the setting was a nicer than summer camps I remember but the food a lot worse. A huge thanks to EB, Camp Director Claire, and Jess the counselor.