Pandemic Papers

Pandemic Papers is an experimental archive. The project logs my feelings within the context of the headlines, painted on the Sunday editions of my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. The project consists of over 40 paintings ranging in size from 8’ x 10’ to 1’ x 1’ created from November 2019, when COVID first appeared in Wuhan, to July 2021, when San Francisco finally retired its emergency order (hopefully?). Pandemic Papers gave me a way to store and recall my own personal experience of the pandemic despite my long term memory loss due to my brain injury.

The pandemic changed a lot about our lives and world so it makes sense that it would also lead to a major shift in my work. This is the first time in my practice I turned to painting as the critical tool for understanding the world. I have long been resistant to the medium but when used in relationship with the weekly churn of the newspaper it gave me a new way of finding where, when, who and how I was within that timeless time.

Genealogy

Genealogy is a hand-made book made using a reclaimed binder and transparencies. Starting at the back of the book I drew images on one side of each transparency with each new image created in direct reference to the image/s that came before it. Looking at any page the transparences allow you to see backward and forward in the stack only a few pages as soon they disappear behind the hazy of the plastic sheets themselves. Flipping thru the book from the beginning takes you back in time and back thru a lineage of ancestors.

Norfolk Artist Residency

In November of 2019 BlinkPop was invited to the Norfolk Artist Residency, hosted in a large barn in semi-rural Massachusetts. While there they focused on experimentation in a large scale installation using twine and paper party decorations. They built up large forms in a central installation, played with incorporating studio infrastructure, used the packaging from the decoration to create translucent volumetric drawings, and documented both the construction and the choreographed death of each of the pieces.

AI Acne

MATERIAL

AI Acne is a set of 22 8.5 x 11 inch watercolor paintings on hydrophobic graph paper. The paintings have transparent overlays printed with green ink. Each green circle in the overlays corresponds to a widely used facial recognition algorithm’s 12% confidence that there is a whole face present at the location. Despite humans easily recognizing faces in these paintings 12% was the highest confidence reported by the algorithm.

CONCEPTUAL

More often than not when I’m interacting with friends, co-workers, family, content creators, or politicians its thru screens. This is a simple reality of the late 2010’s, of my geographical and social position, of my race and gender and class and age. What am I seeing when a face is reduced to mathematical representation on a screen? What is the facial detection algorithm seeing? How is representation different for humans and computers?

EXHIBITIONS

The piece was first exhibited at SYSTEM FAILURE at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco in 2019, then again at Beyond Embodiment at at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA in 2020.

Home:\Studio\M

This collage series was an experiment playing with paper file folders. This now rarely needed object is still the originator of the skeuomorph file folder in operating system interface design. This series plays with the relationship between storage and information, collapse-ability and productive mess. Each collage is titled in a file addressing style which includes information on physical location where it was made (building, room, and specific wall) as well as properties of the folder used (hex color code and associated color name). For example: Home:\Studio\M\NM327°\EB313B “Alizarin”

Street Spore

Spore was BlinkPopShift’s first street art piece. It was installed on July 28th 2019 in Clarion alley on a wooden power pole amidst the long tradition of mural work at the cite. The sculpture was wade from paper, glue, and a handful of zip-ties to grip the light weight body around the pole. The piece lasted about 2 months before it was turn down.

Making of:

BIG IMPORTANT EMOTION

Big Important Emotion, a 2 sculpture pair, are a pair of brown paper sculptures. Evolving from 2017’s series Unscannables, 3D paper collage sculptures exploring the line between what is possible in physical objects and surfaces and what can be seen and represented virtually, the Big Important Emotion diptych erupted at a moment of high stress and vulnerability in the artists life. All color and pattern striped were away They were made of peeled paper board, with all color and pattern striped away, and took on all the raw sharp defense so prevalent in moments of upheaval. This piece is now in the High Sierra Hermitage Collection.

Tape Faces

Visually Similar

This piece was the artists first piece utilizing AI. Each collage was constructed from images Google’s Visually Similar Algorithm considers similar to the previous collage. The first collage was seeded with an image of Swell/Say (2007)

Example of results when images of Swell/Say (a large yellow textile sculpture) is added to visually similar