Suburbia.

This past weekend I headed out by myself to visit my Mom for Easter. It was a good time and I made some photographs I like a lot. The Kodak Scholarship application is now in, which takes a lot off my shoulders and it's full speed ahead for these finals now. The money situation may actually be semi-kind of figured out. Which means I can get my 16x20 forte warmtone and 100ft roll of epson luster or semi-matte and actually get these images on paper finally.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the reasons I make art because of the questions I've been asked recently. (I think the artist statement for my Studio I final project that I turned in for the Kodak is what initiated this thinking.) And I've had trouble with this question. Since I like to believe the art is mainly self-fulfilling, it was difficult writing an artist statement in a certain way that would most effectively get my idea across and obviously making my work more understandable for others. So it's a strange balance between my own satisfaction with my creating work but also my attempts to convey the ideas I want to. I think the more strange part of this realization was the part where I figured out what that project was about 4 months after making it, not exactly having a grasp of the concept when actually making it. I guess I brought this up for no other reason but to ramble and maybe spark some thoughts. I think it has to deal most closely with what I'm interested, which brought me into another thought about how I think I'm much more interested in the power of the ideas that can be expressed through picture making than photography itself. I guess I don't have any complete answers really, just lots of incomplete ones. But I do enjoy thinking about it, it's fun.

Here's what this weekend brought:







-Matt