Wolverines invade Richfield, PA.

Here are a couple of finished drawings from my Circle Hunt project. The old post office above is in Richfield, Pennsylvannia. The cave below where the beaver is hiding out is in Hinckley Reservation in Hinckley, Ohio.

A few words about the Carrie Walker project...

    Due to a number of e-mails I received in the late 90's at my e-mail address carriewalker@hotmail.com, I knew there were other Carrie Walkers in the world. The e-mails were personal letters to Carrie Walker but they weren't  for me. I would always reply to these e-mails, sometimes honestly, "Sorry, wrong Carrie Walker, try an underslash or something." On other occasions, I would pretend I really was the Carrie Walker they wanted, "I broke it off with Kevin. Florida was a drag, I'll never go back." In response to these masquerades, I would get another e-mail... "this doesn't sound like Carrie."

    I grew up believing my name to be uniquely me and mine. With the advent of the Internet and my subsequent research into other Carrie Walkers, it has become clear that I am not my name. Searching for some sort of commonality between us, I find there aren’t any shared qualities beyond name and gender. There is one aspect of these women that, while not ubiquitous, does predominate - the photos of us are not candid but posed. They are already portraits. Creating an online profile is a process of creating a self-portrait. While each of us may attempt to exert some influence over how we are received via our own websites, Facebook or other online postings, our portraits continue to be painted for us by others. By the bad photos of us our friends post on their online albums, by our employers who want the world to know how we can help them, by the documenters of any committee or convention we’ve participated in.
   
    For this body of work, I have been collecting photos from the Internet of every Carrie Walker I can find. I then crop and enlarge each photo so I have an image of each face approximately life size. From the resulting image, which is often pixelated and distorted from being enlarged, I make a drawing. Upon completion, I immediately post each drawing on my website. Consequently, future Google image searches for “carrie walker” may result in not just the original image but also my drawn version. In this way, the work immediately enters the public realm and engages with an audience which in all likelihood is not looking for an art experience. Both the searcher and the searched become participants in the project. While the work develops a life of its own online, the drawings themselves remain as remnants or documents of the project.

    Will some Carrie Walkers feel their privacy has been invaded by such an action? This is one of many questions I hope to raise. Many people seem to be unconcerned with notions of privacy; posting, apparently without reservation, huge amounts of personal information. Are they aware that to some generations ideas of surveillance are associated with fascistic, totalitarian regimes? Do they see only the advantages of social networking mechanisms? We may presume that the information we post is only of interest to our friends and family or employers but as many people know this information is also being collected by advertisers. What other surreptitious audiences are looking at these elaborate portraits we’ve made of ourselves? Through this series of portraits I hope to draw attention to these notions of privacy, identity and self-portraiture.

And, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the BC Arts Council.

Carrie Walker project completed (for now).

Phew! This series of sixty portraits of women who share my name was completed this morning with this lovely lady. Her username on peekyou.com... imadirtyslut0000001.

Some fish are bound to croak.

The number of fish at the studio is increasing but sometimes the number sinks. Or floats, depending how you look at it. I named him Lucio posthumously.

The story behind Fire Work...

American artist and filmmaker Anna Hoover has graciously filmed and edited this video about my upcoming show Fire Work at Trench Gallery. Music by Jason Zumpano!