Robert Gibbons' Tumbler

benhasten:

Self portrait

Jody Ake

“There is this weird… it is weird that my two friends died and two days later I should have died but I didn’t. That is what made me become interested in art more as something more than a means to pick up chicks and party the way that I did in college.

It took me years to cope with stuff.

When I was still an undergrad I started dabbling with self portraits. When I got into graduate school things were conceptually more intense. I was still dealing with all of this crap that happened to me and why I survived and my friends didn’t. I started working purely with self portraits and I would assume these different historical or fictional characters based on other artists’ self portraits. From the Dutch painting era of the fifteen hundreds on up but they all dealt with mortality. They are all talking about the self as artist, as the creator and your own mortality.”

Via Interview with an Artist

“‘the historical process, wet plate collodion, is not a happy cheery one’ according to Jody, which, he explains, emerged from the ‘industrial age and was used to document death and post mortem babies. It was the last visual record of people going off to war. The history of photography is imbedded in the dark history of America and the civil war….the bloodiest….’”

Via Judy Sigunick