I'm so happy to announce that at the end of February 2022, I'll have a solo exhibition of my 4 a.m. work at the Concordia University Gallery in St. Paul! I'll have a lot more about this over the next few weeks and months, so keep checking back for more details.
Here's a handful of images from the last few weeks of prep work:
Early October: I sat down in the faculty office space at the University of Minnesota for a few hours of planning.
Notes, image lists, and gallery maps to be working with.
After I put together a 3-page list ranking most of my 4 a.m. images back in August (something I'll never show publicly), then I started thinking of ways to use the gallery space: did I want to just show my best 4 a.m. photos? Did I want to highlight different mini-series within the larger 4 a.m. series? I currently have 4 different possible mock-ups of the gallery layout.
More recently, I gathered all my 4 a.m. files in one place and made 5 large contact sheets of images:
Nearly 120 images from my 4 a.m. series cut out and ready to sort.
(I made the contact sheets on some old CVA paper - nostalgia!)
Then last weekend I really started planning in earnest. I had my stack of images ready to sort in a big open quiet area at Hamline University:
It almost sounds silly, but it took hours of work (and pacing back and forth) to get to this point.
The upper left are images I wanted to print large and have framed, the lower left are images I'd frame in some "normal" sized wooden frames (13x19 images framed 22x28ish), the upper middle are images I'd be putting in 24" black metal frames, the lower middle are images I'd like to print larger (24x30 overall) and have behind glass, the upper right is a mini "social justice" series around George Floyd's murder and the Mpls riots, and the lower right are alternatives. All-in-all, that was 120 images cut down to 45-55 for the exhibition.
The work continued at home: our dining room table looked like this for about 5 days.
Then a few days ago, I headed to the DSB on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota. This is a big printing room right across the hall from where I worked and taught from 2005 to 2011, so it was a bit sentimental to be back:
Looking east in the DSB.
Looking west back to the printer I was using in the corner.
Waiting on my first image to print: 24" wide and 32" long.
Large prints.
More prints.
My biggest print coming out: this one was 44" long.
Starting to wrap-up after 4 hours.
There are about 16 large prints wrapped up in there, all ready
to be secured between 2 pieces of foam core for the ride home.
That brings us to today. The prints are "drying" in my studio, and I hope to start framing in about 10 days.
I've had pieces in that gallery before, and if you are interested in seeing the space I have to fill, here are 3 posts that show it from a few years ago:
- Photos from
the "Rise" exhibition - A single
panoramic image from that same show
- Some images from
"The Art of Teaching" which shows the vertical height in parts of that gallery
Stay tuned for more! There's a LOT of work that still needs to happen in the next 8 weeks! In the meantime, keep the evening of February 24, 2022 open if you are a local...
