L’ora del tramonto

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

(The violet hour)

The Architect’s medium

The architectural artist’s fundamental medium is not buildings, nor its forms and masses, but nor is it space, nor light, nor materials, nor any other of the thematic preoccupations of contemporary modernism. As simply as we can say that the plastic artist’s medium is imagery, and the writer’s medium is language, we can simply say that the architectural artist’s medium is activity. “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of human interaction and movement,” to paraphrase Le Corbusier.

– Quoted from The Diagram of Everything

Rome, Italy | Spring, 2011

 

 

 

Los cerezos

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
(I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees)

Pablo Neruda

I exist

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Jean Paul Sartre

Hotel Regent, Rome | Italy

Burning wings

Few know this kind of dizzy glee:
an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.

Ouyang Jianghe

Reflexions Masterclass, Rome | Italy

Rookie error

Melbourne, en route to Rome.

Cold morning light, the beleaguered mid-Fall sun sliding its reluctant way into partial view. I watch my mother put on a brave face, hand raised (fingers splayed), after a sleepless night on the eve of yet another departure. I touch my fingers to the glass as the car pulls away from her, half conscious of the parody we make – her in the tightly wrapped bathrobe, me and my over stuffed bags.

Heart strings thrumming as I feel that strange regret. The one where the scene laid out before me loses its line of sight and I am left helplessly committing the heaviness, the poignancy to memory, empty-handed.

Cameras in the trunk.

How it ends

My pieces of 2010.

Some video, some stop-motion, some slideshow, some highs, some lows, some revelations:

ICP and beyond – My year at the International Centre of Photography, New  York

Pre-Games – When friends come over for the party before the party

In the early AM – Heading downtown in a cab, late one night/early one morning with Ling

Sneak peek – A cracked window on how I like to “work”

Escape to Fort Myers – Brief respite from New York in Florida

Insomnia – No sleep in April

Loss – I lost someone

Getting personal – Understanding what it means to be separate

From England to Australia – Journeying away on wobbly post-ICP legs

x Ying + Ling

 

The Great Disconnect

In a time of a disintegrating sense of community and the diminishing family nucleus, I wonder if the public personal space of the internet has found a unique role to serve: A modern conduit for human connection.

The further we shrink into our “self-reliant” biospheres of meals-for-one, studio apartments, stranger neighbours and the “foreign” corner-store owner, the more dependent we become on the often silent, yet omnipresent company of Skype contacts and Facebook friends. That urge to share lives and to be communal has moved to a virtual dimension, crossing geographical boundaries and the equally distancing local and lifestyle divide.

A binary bridge across the Great Disconnect.

The community of my heart is far-flung. Communication technologies have spoilt me for choice (I want to be friends with her and her and her and him and him and her and him too… so what if they live in Azerbaijan) and the proliferation of travel options hasn’t helped either. Because of this, I am an addict. My time spent online and in post offices declaring love to those on distant shores definitely outweighs my time spent with the kids next door.

Perhaps the answer to my posture problems and failing eyesight is a simple matter of finding local playmates…. But first, I suppose I need to decide where “local” actually is…

Perpignan – Paris – Rome | September 2010

A sense of loss

“Your idea of love is rather primitive. It is not a series of sensations, independent of each other…”

I realised how every time I had fallen in love it had been like that: a sudden emotion, roused by a face, a gesture or a kiss, which I remember only as incoherent moments of excitement. ‘It is something different,’ said Anne. ‘There are such things as lasting affection, sweetness, a sense of loss… but I suppose you wouldn’t understand.’

~ Françoise Sagan from the novel “Bonjour Tristesse”

Prefigurations and Prophecies

“He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald from “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button”