Book by it's Cover

Product Details

"Book by it's Cover"

Mixed Media on emergency fire hose and found signage

38 x 67inches ( 97 x117cm)

2018

This piece was created at the Jardin Orange Residency in Shenzhen, China.

Much of the material I used at the residency was found materials from abandoned building in the Tanglang neighborhood. I made several pieces on these strips of emergency firehose. The kind you find in a red glass box in schools and office buildings on a giant roll.

      The portrait is a man from the Tanglang neighborhood, a city worker. I would set up this make shift photo studio on the street and with the help of a translator ask random people if I could take their picture. It was a very different way of photographing for me. The encounters were very brief. Lasting 2-3 minutes and getting a few frames and that was it. They were so brief that most likely, without the photograph neither the subject or I would even remember them. The thing I found interesting about this process was how the intention to create something changed the moment. The expectation that something would be created from this brief collaboration pulled the moment out of it's timeline of and set it aside. Maybe, simply because it had purpose.