I’ve been shooting my animation all morning, and am almost done with that part. Nothing makes you want to sit in a chair more though than shooting stop-motion on your hands and knees on floorboards in almost winter. Except perhaps kneeling on a concrete floor. That would suck.
And considering there’s still nine minutes left before I have to panic because I’m not ready to leave for work, I thought I’d make a blog post. This’ll be pretty much just pictures. The first shot is a couple of the monoprints I made to print the linocuts for the animation on. I’m really, really, really happy with how these turned out. It looks so much better than my original plan of keying in photographs to add colour to the animation.
The rest of the photographs are from a print that is in progress — different theories of the universe printed in different styles and colours on top of one another. I’ve since added two collograph prints to these, and I have some lithography, screenprinting and embossing to go. I’ll expand more on the idea in a later post.
A few months ago, two different people emailed and ask me to donate some of my Firefly/Serenity badges to the Can’t Stop The Serenity charity screenings. As of last year, Joss Whedon fans all around the world started holding screenings of Serenity on Joss’ birthday in order to raise money for his favourite charity, Equality Now. I wanted to do this, but hesitated a bit over my rather large workload and the fact that, a) I don’t have many badges made up and in stock, and b) They’re low price items that people can (and have, over and over again) easily buy from me. I didn’t know if they would do that well at an auction.
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.†It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints†route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)
It was a bit of a kick in the pants for me. Some perspective.
I emailed back the people who’d requested things, and upped the ante a little.
I won’t be donating badges. Instead, sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to make up a small edition of handcoloured linocut prints for auction and sale. They’ll be of my girl Kaywinnet Lee Frye with her parasol, of course. Some will go to Austin, Texas, and some will go to Sydney, Australia. I’ll also add some to my Etsy store will all profits donated to Equality Now, and I’d like to send one each to Joss and Jewel.
I don’t quite know how to finish this post, so I’ll add this little video. It’s one of my favourites.
The assignment for one of my classes this sememster was to think about “the self” and create two print-based works in response to that. I may have mentioned it before, but I’m basically running the “science meets art” route, and am looking at spheres and circles to represent myself. I chose the sphere when I read a joke in a science book about how physicists tend to think of everything in the universe as a sphere in order to solve any problem — the idea is to think about only the essential elements, because the tendency is to focus on the minor details if you don’t dismiss them as irrelevant.
So, of course, I took the essential elements and made them into a complicated thing. (more…)
