The Process of Tristan Emmons

Tristan Emmons slowly warms up as the conversation digs into the territory of his unique thought process. He spends a lot of time wording out safe ideas that are easy to understand. But it’s his unique ideas that I’m after. He tells me about an assignment given him by his Iolani woodworking teacher, Dave Roberts. The task is safe enough: make a walking stick. But Tristan’s walking stick isn’t a walking stick. I have a hard time imagining it functioning as a walking stick. Tristan’s focused on the interaction of the hand and the handle, and in his creation, he focuses our attention there. In a very natural way, Tristan is looking deeper into his subjects, and finding inspiration in places that many of us don’t often look.

A subtle and sturdy confidence is bedrock in Tristan’s character, even if he’s shy in talking about himself. I asked him to describe his process, from the genesis of an idea to the finished piece, and he says, “I don’t really have control over my mind, the ideas just pop in. I don’t know what sets it off.” His process is interactive. He admires creatives who can pre-design an entire project in their mind, then set out to accomplish this, but in his work, he begins work with only the nugget of an idea. As he begins working with the idea, the next step reveals itself. Sometimes the ideas come in rapid succession, sometimes he waits.

He says, “I’m not good enough to say, ‘I want to make this’, I can’t force an idea – can’t come up with it on the spot. I have to wait for it to happen”. There’s the idea in here that the inspiration is external, or perhaps is buried internally, somehow beyond his awareness. The process of making the piece is also the process of discovering the idea. It’s the final idea that’s important, not the personality that is expressing it… not Tristan. And here’s something very interesting. For the process to work, Tristan employs an honest humility, “I deal with what I have rather than trying to make something out of what I don’t have.”

Tristan has been creating sculptures for less than three years. He is in the beginning of his creative career. He began with functional objects: skateboards and hand planes. He’s shaping surfboards, using the same interactive process to guide his shapes that he uses to finish his sculptures. What he describes as “the artistic stuff” is differentiated by his intention to express an idea rather than a function. On Saturday, May 25^th, I invite you to come to the 6^th Kaimuki Culture Gallery Pop-Up and help celebrate youth, potential, and the formative stages of the creative process.

Building Community

“Art and music should lift you up.”

There is a drive in Nathan Emmans to contribute music to the world that lifts us to a higher form of our selves. His creative impulse is a gift to him, and in his view, making himself the vessel of that higher creative force and delivering it to his extended communities is the most important use he can make of his life. But you have to put this dedication to his artistry in contrast to his efforts. This is not a guy content to serenade bonfires at the beach, having faith that life will show the way if he only focuses on his art. Nathan gets after it.

I asked Nate to share with me his take on the Honolulu Music scene, and his answer shared his reluctance to be negative. I’ve seen a lot of this before, but with Nate it’s a bit different. It took me a while to understand, but he stays positive in his conversation, in his music, and in all his interactions because he believes that is how he will become the best possible man he can be. He spoke to me in overtones and generalities about how music scenes can by driven by cliques. About how a musicians style and social circles can drive a musicians opportunities within that community, and that when his determination to get his music heard met with a lack of available opportunity, he began creating new opportunities.

Competition can be a good thing, but it can be limiting as well. In Nathan’s view, there are some players in the HNL music scene that feel that they have to cling to they’re opportunities. They cling to their supporters, their venues, or they’re networks, and they don’t bring others in. Nathan understands this behavior as a manifestation the idea that opportunity for musicians on O’ahu is finite. But Nathan approached the community with a different idea, that by building a cooperative network of musicians, he and they could create more opportunities for each other.

So Nathan, who most often performs as The Art of Whimsy, began finding dark stages in Honolulu. And there are a staggering number of dark stages. He began promoting and performing with several bands, sharing the stage with other local, ambitious and talented acts coming up in Honolulu. I’ve been to several of his group shows. His enthusiastic positivity is infectious, and the community that he’s helped build reflects the joy that he has in making music. These are musicians who are earnestly improving their skills for the sheer joy of the music they’re playing; musicians who are building a community where they can do it. All the while, there’s Whimsy: husband, father, musician; working non stop, finding venues, building relationships with musicians, creating a community from the ground up.

Whimsy began building a music community in Honolulu because he was dedicated to creating music. But the two activities are one and the same when you hear him speak of his motivation to write songs that lift people up. He’s one of the hardest working community builders I’ve seen. He is a promoter, but more than that, he finds and creates opportunities for new bands and musicians to perform. These bands and the fans that support them have grown into an interconnected support network that moves to new venues and listens to new music as it comes into the fold. To hear him sing is to listen to a man that’s dedicated to expressing higher principles to aspire to, and to feel the community he participates in is to see a group of people dedicating to breaking the limits of ambition.

Kaimuki Culture Gallery v5.0: The Food

Last Saturday, April 27th, marked the fifth Kaimuki Culture Gallery Pop-Up event I’ve produced since last June. Producing the events always presents a variety of challenges, but my favorite hurdle to overcome this time was the process of designing the pupus (that’s hawaiian for appetizers for those not in the islands). The first four gallery pop-ups were catered by Salt Kitchen and Bar, just up the road from the the home of the Culture Gallery Pop-Up, The Black Cat Salon + Spa. Salt’s staff is awesome, and they’ve been incredibly supportive. They are very, very good at what they do… maybe even too good. The beginning of this year was award season for Salt, which was repeatedly recognized for it’s menu and cocktails.

Salt has always maintained a quiet allegiance to locally produced food. They don’t brag about it, but they know it’s important to source as much as they can from local farms. As I began to contemplate how to get food at the event as Salt focuses on their increased business, I decided to stick with the idea of using local foods as much as possible. Over the past 3 months I’ve been building alliances with several farmers, CSA groups, and personal chef’s. In the future, I will strive to bring together the products from the farm with trained chef’s to produce food that highlights the culinary possibilities of local foods. For this event though, I had to come up with the menu on my own.

Nick Milan is a friend that coordinates the various programs conducted at the Family and Education Training Center of Hawai’i (FETCH) on the University of Hawai’i, Manoa campus. The program runs a small farm plot and has extensive gardens around the energy efficient house where the program is headquartered. I asked Nick what he might have available for the Culture Gallery, and he kindly offered to donate ulu, or breadfruit. This got the ball rolling. Ulu is a large, tree-born fruit roughly the size of a large cantaloupe. It’s very starchy, and was the traditional staple of most of Polynesia. Ulu was brought to Hawai’i by Polynesian colonizers somewhere around 1600 years ago. The tree grows well here, just outside of the tropics, but in Hawai’i it fruits seasonally as opposed to year round in the rest of Polynesia (which explains the development of taro as the staple in Hawai’i).

I began looking at ulu recipes from around the world, and eventually settled on a caribbean concept of boiling the fruit, skinning it, then mashing it with onions, nutmeg, eggs and milk to produce a crude “dough”. I rolled the dough with flour and breadcrumbs into quarter inch sheets and used a cookie cutter to cut out two inch circles, then fried the concoction in coconut oil. The result was a crispy wafer that had little flavor. It needed something on top. My lady recently returned from Belize where she had a couple of opportunities to work in a kitchen with a local chef. She’d been raving about the black been puree’s, and I thought the idea would be a good mix. I cooked the beans down and blended them with garlic, onion, ginger, and orange juice, in the caribbean style. With a little salt and pepper, the puree was perfect for the basic flavor of the ulu. But I wanted more… I wanted spice.

Growing up in San Diego, I grew into a healthy respect for salsa’s and hot sauces. Most of my meals aren’t finished without some kind of chili sauce, and I wanted to create a compliment to the savory ulu crisps and black been puree. Again focusing on incorporating local ingredients, I went with a base of Pineapple and Papaya, and brought the heat with a couple seranos and a pair of habeneros. The resulting sauce was both spicy and fruity, and provided a counterpoint to the savory ulu and puree. I topped the mixture with a sprig of cilantro and a small square of avocado with a sliver of red bell pepper for color. Delicious!

This was the first time I’d ever cooked with ulu, and it won’t be the last. It’s a great staple that is both light and filling, and a single fruit provides enough food for 4-8 people.  Check out the recipes for the ulu crisps, the black been puree, and the pineapple-papaya-chili sauce below.

Ulu Crisps:

1/2 breadfruit
1 tablespoon grated onion
1 tablespoon butter

1 pinch nutmeg
1 dash hot sauce
1/4 cup milk
1 egg
Breadcrumbs, for coating
salt and pepper, to taste

In a large pot, bring water to a boil.  Add breadfruit and cook until fork tender, about 30 minutes. Once it is fork tender, peel and remove the skin and core the breadfruit. Mash it. Combine breadfruit with onions, butter, nutmeg and hot sauce. Whisk egg and milk. Add to breadfruit mix and stir to combine. Use a rolling pin, and a mixture of flour and breadcrumbs to make a 1/4 inch thick sheet. Cut into small shapes with a cookie cutter. Fry the ulu in a frying pan on medium heat with coconut oil.

Black Bean Puree

1 1/2 medium sweet onions, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped fine
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh grated gingerroot
1 teaspoon fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
4 1/2 cups drained cooked black beans or 3 (16 ounce) cans black beans
3/4 cup orange juice
salt & freshly ground black pepper

1 Sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil until barely soft.
2 Add the spices and sauté until very soft.
3 Stir in the beans and orange juice and sauté for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning.
4 Place entire mixture in a blender and blend at high speed until consistency is smooth.

Pineapple Papaya Chili Sauce

2 habanero chili peppers

2 serano peppers

1/4 pineapple, cored

3/4  papaya, seeded

1/2 large sweet onion

1/4 cup white vinegar

1/4 cups filtered water

1 teaspoon Hawaiian salt

1 full garlic heads

1 heaping tablspoon Hawaiian honey (or Honey Bee, what’s available)

Cooking: Remove the stems and place habaneros to the side in a separate bowl. Prepare all of the other ingredients placing them in a large stainless steel or glass cooking pot. Cook on medium heat (“5”) for about 15-30 minutes (stirring occasionally) until mixture looks almost cooked. Add the habaneros, and continue cooking on low to medium heat trying to not have the habaneros change color too much (about 5 to 10 minutes). Allow to cool on stovetop. Blend at high speed until consistency is smooth.

What is It?

My graduate project in College was comprised of abstracts. I was enthralled with the female form, and I began shooting nudes. There’s a great history of shooting nudes, and I never felt creepy about making nude images. It’s the reactions that creeped me out. First, there was the dark room. I began working at night, alone, when I could lock the door so that guys wouldn’t stare at my prints in the chemical baths. I began taking my prints home to dry them so that guys wouldn’t steal them from the print dryer. I got disgusted with the feedback during critiques. I wasn’t trying to make a sexual statement.      

That led me to question why people perceive the same subject in different ways. It led me to an understanding that all observation is essentially subjective, and I began to explore that. I played with the tension of letting the audience know that there was a nude female form in my images, but after that, I took the image to a place of abstraction, where meaning can be created, but not inferred by the available information, and I built a thesis around the idea that what we bring to the act of observation can be more important than the information we are receiving from the subject.

After college, after the darkroom, I didn’t deal with abstraction. I moved into shooting concerts and performers, flirted with portraiture, then found landscape and allowed the skills I developed in that field to inform everything else I shot, including weddings, family shoots, portraits… everything. Recently, a prospective client asked me to develop some more abstracts, and the idea just tickled me, so I delved in.

My creative process is always kinesthetic… the process itself is informative for me. I just need the inkling of an idea, then I shoot. My thought process and experiences during the shooting and the editing generate new ideas that lead to a new shoot, which leads to new thought processes and experiences, which leads to new ideas, which leads to a new shoot, etc. I knew from the get go that I wanted to shoot nature, and that I wanted to flirt with the macro world. And so I set out to shoot these things.

Water has become very important in my landscape images. When you slow it down, you infer a sense of time, and because that sense of time is perverted from our typical, steady perception of time, it lends a sense of the mystical in the image, and this excites me. I want to create images that spark the imagination. And so I set out to shoot macro images of nature that incorporated water. This narrowed it down for me enough that I wasn’t overwhelmed with potential subject matter when I went out to shoot. As I began shooting in a stream near my house, a few thoughts began to coalesce into my current working understanding of these new abstract images.

When we go about our daily lives, our physical senses are delivering what is literally an overwhelming amount of information to our brain. Through our choices, we tune our attention into information that we think is meaningful and we let the rest slide by. Some people consider intuition to be a kind of residual impression from the information we do not process. This idea intrigues me, and when I’m shooting these abstracts, I seek to open up my senses… take nothing for granted, and see the things that my every day attention would dismiss as trivial. Moving with the idea that my perception does not validate the truth of an object or an event, I began pushing to use the camera in a way that my eye cannot perceive. I began elongating the shutter speed and narrowing the focal length. These tactics produce images that my eye simply cannot see, and it led me to a refined understanding of Truth.

I often take the nature of Truth for granted, when in fact, my relationship to the truth of an object or an event is based on my relationship with that thing. In pushing the camera to see an event and an object in a way that my eye cannot, I feel that I am revealing an alternate truth of what the subject matter is. I am intrigued by the idea that Truth is a many-fold path to understanding any given thing in our lives… that is to say, that Truth is only fixed by the relationship and the ability to perceive of disparate awarenesses.     

Whimsy in the Dragon, Upstairs.

I had a lot of fun photographing Nathan Emmans, aka The Art of Whimsy last week at O’Tooles. So this week I decided to photograph him at The Dragon Upstairs, a funky jazzy sultry little place with a huge stage just topside of Hank’s in Chinatown. With it’s chinese lanterns and eery green neon signs, the venue provided enough light that I went without a flash for much of the shoot. Editing became a retro-affair, largely cause I think it fits Whimsy’s style, and largely cause the high-iso, soft focus lends itself to aesthetics pioneered in the development of film from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Check these out and check out Whimsy’s blog to see where he’s playing next.

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Time-Lapsed Whimsy

As promised, here’s a link to the time-lapse of The Art of Whimsy I shot On April 1st. I’ve begun using Photoshop’s animation window function to compile and export the time-lapse video’s. With a combination of Lightroom’s editing functionality and Photoshop’s adjustment layers, I was able to stylize these quite a bit.

http://CCookPhoto.zenfolio.com/p319584486/e4668e96

 

 

Whimsical Images

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to photograph Nathan Emmans, who tickles sweet sounds out of his guitar and sings under the pseudonym, “The Art of Whimsy”. If you haven’t seen one of Whimsy’s sets yet, it’s a bit of a treat. I’m a huge fan of small crowds and venues with character, which makes my taste in musicians by definition unsustainable. But in Whimsy there’s something more endearing than making money as a musician… there is a true passion for his art form, and you don’t have to strum your own guitar, or sing karaoke to feel the passion he puts into his music. He’s got so much passion for music that at each of his (sometimes 3 a week) shows, he invites a handful of friends and friendly bands to play a brief set. Hearing different musical styles makes the night eclectic, and always somehow makes me feel like I’ve gotten more out of the experience. And as I reflect all this appreciation back upon Whimsy, I am struck by how truly unselfish his concept of music is. As it should be. Check out his blog and his website. Here’s some stills and a couple of time-lapses I got last Sunday:

Revisionist Theory

Image

Every aspect of photography is interpretive. We hold photography to a different standard than any other creative media in that we ascribe it a certain amount of documentary fidelity. And it can serve this purpose. But with photography we tend to get increasingly upset as the finished product drifts further away from the “truth” of what the photographer saw. In it’s ability to be both representational and creative, photography is more similar to writing than any other medium. Writing can be rigorously descriptive, as in legal writing or traditional objective journalism; or it can explore the limits of meaning, as in poetry.

In my photography I strive for a balance. I want the viewer to believe they are seeing something truthful, yet, like the poet, I want the viewer to be left on the ledge of interpretation. I want her imagination to be tickled, tempted to engage in some creative interpretation of the very real place and time that I have photographed. Every step of my process, from composition to production in my digital darkroom, is informed by this goal: to engage the viewers creative potential. This process typically incorporates several dozen steps, and varies from image to image. To make an image like “Along the Ridge” (at left) comprised of 6 different individual photographs, some of them toned for effect and then blended together for dynamic range and toned and refined again, I may go through a process of 50 or 60 steps. Each of these steps contributes to the overall feel and success of the image.

Occasionally my schedule permits me time to go back and review work I’ve done in the past. Because so much of my process is done in the digital darkroom, it is eternally possible to re-work the original images.

My specific process has its roots in the chemical darkroom I learned photography in at Humboldt State University. Here, in my digital darkroom, the process is much faster and allows me a greater variety of control (though there will always be potentials in the chemical darkroom that are not possible in the digital work environment). This week I reworked these two images shot in Northern California in the fall of 2011. I had rushed through the first production process because my schedule was hectic. After reviewing the work several months later, there were aspects of each image that I felt created technical barriers to the instigation of the kind of effect I want the images to impart. My mentor in college, Don Anton, once told me that technique can betray you if it is recognizable in the image.

To that end, in the image on the left, “Along the Road”, I wanted to smooth out the gradients between different tonal areas in the image, and  to make the stitching part of the panoramic process smoother; thus reducing the harsh angle the road takes as it moves from the first set of images to the second. In the image on the right, “Painted Skyways”, I wanted to address the gradients again, and change to tonal range of the sky and middle ground, to create an image that is more believable. In both cases I have attempted to push the images, through these revisions, closer to “reality”. For me, “reality” is a platform from which the viewer can make the leap into the imagination. The more stable that platform, the more comfortable the leap.

Familiarity within the Foreign

Stepping into the Saipan air is walking into a mild sauna. The air isn’t so much air as it is warm water with an extreme distance between molecules. My body reacted to non-evaportaive properties by producing still more sweat; my physiology would not figure out the futility of that strategy during my 2 week stay in the most populated island of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

After the air, you begin to notice the familiar couched in the foreign. TSA is typically unsmiling, and the Department of Homeland Security runs the immigration and customs booths, but cars are parked… motionless, in front of the terminal, with impossible numbers of family pouring out of small Japanese SUV’s, smoking cheap cigarettes, and chewing betel nut while waiting for passengers. The tightly knit family unit in Saipan is comfortingly permeable… waiting for my partner to get the rental car, an uncle asked me, unsolicited, if I needed to use his cell phone. A fisherman we were photographing offered us fish, another took us home for akule (atulai in Saipan) poke; Amazing with tuba and bud light. Yet another Chamorro elder introduced me to the ruins of an ancient piece of architecture. The warmth you hear of when islander culture is discussed fails to meet the reality of the welcome you feel on their land.

The infrastructure is essentially American. You drive on the right side of the road in the rental car you reserve with your visa/master card. You can get Coke, Gatorade, and Marlboro’s at the Shell or Mobile station with American dollars. Everyone speaks English, some with thicker accents than others, but there’s plenty of Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Russian to boot, as the local businesses cater to evolving tourism trends. You can eat almost any kind of food from Korean BBQ to Sushi, to local Kelaguen or Tinala’ Katne.

It would be easy to remain in the enclave of tourism facilities on Saipan, but you’d miss out. It’s incredibly rewarding to move around and interact with the people who live on Saipan. There is a rare kind of cultural hospitality engrained in these people that is a striking contrast to the contrived subservience of the hospitality sector. They enjoy meeting you; they can talk story for hours, unbelievably eager to share their stories and their experiences, especially those that are rediscovering (and sometimes reinventing) the traditional cultures of the people who inhabited Saipan before empires convened on the Marianas Islands.

It’s easy to get to Saipan, and I’m not talking about travel, though that is accommodated sufficiently thanks to the large number of tourists who frequent the island. It’s easy to get to the heart of Saipan’s beauty, what makes her unique. But you have to muster the effort to reach beyond the facade built to extract an economy out of visitors. I was fortunate beyond my ability to express gratitude that I was there for a purpose and had a reason to meet the people who live, work, and love Saipan. The island comes alive in the passion those people have for the islands, a passion that is greater than the turquoise water of the protected lagoons, more than the enthralling limestone caves and sinkholes and the fields of coral that stretch out over underwater hills beyond the limits of vision. Their passion rises above the superficial in metaphorical proportion to the monumental scale of the islands themselves rising out of the deepest ocean trench on earth. In their passion, the character of the island shines.

Fear-Mongering in the Mass Media

“2nd body identified in Ohio Craigslist ad scheme”
“Thanksgiving Plane Crash: New Details“
“Florida A&M band suspended after suspected hazing death”
These are three of the top fourteen headlines in the US section of Google News today, November 26, 2011. They indicate a pervasive use of negative stimulus to motivate readership… and something greater. Whether or not the corporate-owned mass media machine intends any affects other than increased readership, fear-mongering in the production of news has altered the way citizens participate in society.

Much is made of the use of fear-mongering in the mass media. Fear-mongering dominates the liberal understanding of corporate mass media. Michael Moore reiterated it in a recent forum moderated by The Nation magazine regarding the state and future of the Occupy movement.

As increasing technology moves us from the old mode of corporate dominated, vertically integrated information dissemination Goliaths and into the new mode of decentralized, individually driven social media in which the individual has greater potential for interaction in the media exchange than at any other point of history, a critical understanding of fear-mongering will become vitally important in the creating new media paradigms that require self-determination in the common person.

Mass media fear-mongering creates in the information consumer a teetering, fragile security coupled with a paralyzed willpower. When the viewer is presented with horrors happening to others, it creates a simultaneous sense of relief that she is currently safe, and an uncertainty of his ability to produce positive change through direct action. The unseen forces that create the dreadful situations described in the mass media are understood to be beyond understanding; the reader is left to attribute the causality to nebulous concepts such as evil, insanity, hatred, envy, or sociopathic behavior, among infinite others. In creating this ironic confusion in which interpretation defies understanding and relies on a perverse form of faith (in the sense that the horror’s source is unknowable, but certainly existent), the fear-mongers create a populace that wishes to avoid victimization but cannot understand the mechanism that leads to victimization.

The mass media use fear mongering as a cattleprod to attract readership, but there is a perhaps unintended side-effect that is not a typical fear based reactions; a populace that releases its self-determination to any authority that promises security, often in exchange for conformity. Fear is an impulse that initiates action in an individual. The fight or flight impulse is such a reaction; even paralysis can be a defensive mechanism incurred when an imminent threat is present. But these reactions are only effective in situations where the perceived threat is tangible and in close proximity. By contrast, fear-mongering in mass media presents us with threats that are both distant and unknowable. Absent the ability to directly engage the source of the fear, the information consumer is induced to release the obligation of response to an any authority presumed capable of handling the threat. The priest will pray for your well-being; the police will keep the streets safe form criminals, the Commander-In-Chief will wield the military to protect you from terrorists, etc.. In each scenario, the individual’s ability to determine her own fate is released to the authority of others.

The irony is that the individual’s response to the fear-mongering is not a fear response. It is not a fight or flight, nor a play dead until the threat passes response. Rather, it is a surrender of free will. It is an acquiescence to a set of conditions implied by a cultural authority in exchange for security. Further, the security is illusory. No authority can stop death or injury. It is the nature of the living to incur injury and death. The only control the living individual has is over how he chooses to live. And the acquiescence to those who would promise the undeliverable is a cowardice; a lame impotence to stand up, live by personal choice, and take responsibility for ourselves.

While the reality of that may sting like shame, the impotnet acquiescence is not where the fear-surrender equation does the most damage. The real damage comes with the understanding that when we deprive our ability to engage our personal mistakes we deprive our ability for personal growth; and we remain, emotionally and intellectually, in a juvenile state, unable to develop our potential.

In the new media paradigm, as disseminated information sources erode the prevalence of fear mongering media conglomerates, information consumers will be faced with a much greater challenge: to own our own behaviors and choices. To embrace our faults and create our own potential; to reclaim our self-determination and create our own standards of excellence. In the new media paradigm, our individual truth will resound with millions of co-valid truths, and the harmony of this resonance will inform the next phase of human culture.