By now, most of you know I recently exhibited my latest body of work Luminiferous: Adventures in Metal at the Wilson Hall Gallery on the University of Alabama in Huntsville campus this past March.
As a visiting artist I also taught a digital image transfer workshop with the students in Jose Bentancourts‘ Experimental Photography Class. I introduced the class to alcohol gel transfers and DASS supersauce transfers to wood, metal foils and glass.
I like to encourage students to bring in substrates of their choice for transfers images onto as shown in the above photograph.
You know you’re doing something right when you can generate excitement in sharing your process! And it was such a pleasure to get students excited about image transfer. A lot of great results came from the workshop as you can see below.
In addition to exhibiting and teaching, I was also lecturing…three lectures to be exact.
One lecture was to Jose Betancourts‘ Documentary Photography class. This talk was very detailed specific and entirely about my involvement with the Haitian Art Company and the multiple trips (one of which was 2 months!!) I made to Haiti during my 7 years of service to the gallery in Key West. As one would expect, this experience had an enormous influence on my life as artist and creative professional.
The business gave me unique access to Haitian artists and allowed me to experience the culture in a way that is unavailable to the average person. The photographs I have taken in Haiti reflect a bond I have with my subjects and contain emotional power attained only through the crossing of cultural boundaries. Obviously I highlighted my images of Haiti, developed in the style of 19th century photographs and talked extensively about my travels with artist Franz Zephirin who was determined to show me ‘the real Haiti’. We traveled to Cap Haitien and specifically to his grandmother’s voodoo compound where I was graciously given permission to record the events of a seasonal voodoo ritual. Ceremony of the Serviteur was shown in it’s entirety during this talk.