ionetics

Unreliable and possibly off-topic

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Saturday, October 22, 2005

The good, the bad and the ugly


The good:
A Glasgow outing with my mum to see our bums, and R's, in clinical blow-up display at Catriona Grant's stark, post-classical photographic exhibition, The Examination Room. Catriona spoke articulately about how this series of exquisitely composed institutional landscapes, taken on large format 10x8 inch negatives on an old analogue camera, used double exposure and long exposure times at particular times of day to replicate certian recurring features:
ghostly portraits of nude women in an abandoned institutional building, speaking of history and aggregrated time accrued in an outworn, decaying institutional space,
reflections from fragile eggshell or composite walls
cubicles doors into multi-dimensional spaces incorporating time as well as depth

Today Catriona mentioned that she'd tried both professional female models and non-professional males as subjects for The Examination Room but found each lacking in their own way. The professional models were too at ease with their nakedness and the men too active and ungainly, rather than emanating the passivity and dignity that the naive models seemed to assume during observation.

The bad:
My digital camera is screwed up, and I've no idea how to get it fixed. Its lens stays open and won't close despite re-charging, its display paralysed.

The ugly:
Anoushka, le chat aux Quiffes des Oreilles, has become yet ever the lap-cat, especially since I returned from the Land of Freem and Moxy last week. However, her tender attentions were less than welcome last night when these were accompanied by the rotten smell of carnivorous faeces. Between us, me and the kids used rhinoreceptors to locate this to a dreadlock on her fluffy britches, round the back end in places she prefers us not to touch. DoDo, who borders on OCD regarding germs, was incapable of dealing with such infectious matter. But after a family meeting, DoDo held her down at the front end while I, equipped with paper towels and kitchen scissors, excised a stinking dread and consigned this to the bin. Yeuch.