http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:Freekmagnet&section=today deviantART RSS for by:Freekmagnet en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 04 Dec 2009 03:19:31 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19845319/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19845319/ Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:43:33 PDT
At the time, small printing set ups the produced one-off books were still prohibitively expensive, and the print quality was not all that. Freekmagnet was printed on an inkjet printer and spiral bound with the help of my friend at [link] . We printed up 40 initial copies and all of them sold. I hosted a book release party at the Auto 3321 Gallery in Oakland, California where all of the pieces and the writing were exhibited. Some of the images made it up to a juried show in Portland, Oregon, and I had a small showing in Ventura, California the following year.

Currently, I am been prepping for the printing of the second edition which I will probably do through Blurb books. The second edition will include some of the out takes from the first edition. Since I seem to have misplaced the original scans from the first edition, I have had to rescan the negatives. This is just as well, because my Photoshop skills have improved since I last scanned and processed them.

There’s a part of me that misses working on this series. At the time, I worked almost part time, came home and made props and did photo shoots with my old Speed Graphic. Now, my work on Freekmagnet’s descendent, La Loteria, is done digitally. I use a digital SLR and the backgrounds are often painted in afterwards on the computer. I guess times change and life moves on, but when I look back at these, they bring back good memories. I hope that I will have the opportunity to work on this series again in the future.

The first edition of Freekmagnet can be viewed at my website. [link]

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19569246/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19569246/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:50:25 PDT
It's good making new friends!

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19507815/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19507815/ Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:20:05 PDT
I'm pretty happy about it. I'd never really planned to do anything with my Holga shots, but lo and behold, I'm going to be hanging 9 of them in a show!

Overall my recent Holga diversion has been a good thing. I shot a roll last week and turned another old one I found laying around in to be processed. We'll see how it goes. The old roll I shot on a newer Holga and I wasn't happy with the results from that camera. I've since found my old Holga which I like, but it's pretty beat up and pretty much completely held together with tape. I'll get some good shots, I'm sure. It's also been a nice diversion finding some good Holga-ists on DA. Nice, refreshing, fun stuff.

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19353046/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/19353046/ Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:09:54 PDT
I've always liked playing around with Holgas. Their simplicity provides a needed relief from the precision of the modern digital cameras and the old view cameras that I am used to using. The sort of impressionistic look of the end result is nice, and seems to bring back the excitement to taking a pictures of the most mundane of things.

I've been spending time scanning these old negatives and even went as far as shooting a roll or two over the week. I can't wait to see the results.

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/18763140/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/18763140/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:09:45 PDT
Lately I've been moving towards the straight up photo manipulation route, which works for me. My new studio is a lot smaller than my old one, so I don't have as much space to build sets. Not to mention the time it takes to build them; as it is, I've been doing most of my photo editing on my laptop while riding the bus to work.

I'm still toying with the overall design of the card set. For this batch, I've chosen to take "the best design is no design" approach and have kept it clean and simple. Maybe it's my reaction to the overwrought pieces I have to do for my clients at work.

Although I'm still in the "I'm not sure" stage of this work, I've been pretty happy with it overall. It's a long way from the old days of working part time, building sets and shooting Tmax on my Speed Graphic. Living in a rural area has been a big change, too. For one thing, finding folks to sit for portraits has been a little bit of a challenge. It's not like living in The Bay Area where every third person is practically ready to jump at the opportunity to dress up and get their picture taken for what ever art project you can think of.

GoGallery has been going pretty well. We've had 2 or 3 openings this year and they all have been a real blast. Great turnout, great work, great fun.

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/17575021/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/17575021/ Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:36:30 PDT
To a certain extent, this undeclared "War on Graffiti" is not unlike our "War on Drugs", our president's "War on Terror", and most recently his "War on Iraq" for the simple reasons that they are unending states of self perpetuating conflict that destroy those that they are intended to protect, and that in the end, these battles do not resolve with a clearly defined victor.

These photos were taken to document the carnage of another pointless crusade.

The year was 2002. September 11 happened just a few months before and George W. Bush was talking tough about Iraq. I had a digital camera at the time, and I walked around photographing graffiti marked walls. In the end, I photographed and printed over 75 images and exhibited 24 of them at The Lanesplitter Pub in Berkeley, CA in 2003. The first image in this series, War on Graffiti #3, was featured on the cover of the now defunct Urban View Magazine, and an interview followed on the second page. The interview can be found here: http://www.metroactive.com/urbanview/09.25.02/box-0239.html

]]> ~Freekmagnet http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/17274784/ http://Freekmagnet.deviantart.com/journal/17274784/ Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:42:21 PDT
These new images are closer to one of my previous projects, Freekmagnet. Freekmagnet is a collection of 24 black and white images that I bound as a collection and sold as a book at my art shows. All in all, I printed and sold about 40 copies. Toward the end of putting together Freekmagnet, I'd turned to some of the images found in Loteria as a resource. There I began titling some of my images in Spanish, which led to this series.

Shortly after the completion of Freekmagnet in 2005, I met the woman who would become the one I live with today. In the summer of 2006, I moved from my hometown of Oakland, CA to Fillmore, a small agricultural town in Southern California. Being one who played Loteria as a child, Amelia has been a big inspiration for this new body of work. Her enthusiasm, support, and assistance have been invaluable to this project; in fact, she painted the backdrop and found some of the pieces used in some of these images.

Between our day jobs and our art projects, Amelia and I run our small art space, GOGALLERY, out of the basement of our home in Fillmore, CA.

Jeremy

http://freekmagnet.com
http://gogallery.org

]]> ~Freekmagnet