Maybe I'm Crazy, But...

For a while now, I have had something on my mind... and it's about time to release it to you guys for discussion. It has almost been a year since we had a post here but it is time to rekindle the blog.


Am I completely nuts for bringing up the idea of trekking up one of the Himalayan peaks? I heard of this one called Everest...

What I was thinking was that I'd want at least 2 years to train and get in shape before attempting Everest. I'm not totally convinced that I want to do it, but a training schedule of several years would allow me (us?) to just get in great shape and hike some of the local peaks (Whitney for me) and experience a new type of adventuring. I guess for you Ian, the local mountaineering may be old-hat but I have been chomping at the bit myself to get up into some of the mountains down here in SoCal and the Sierras. After maybe a year or so of hard training and getting into the mountaineering world, then maybe I'd have enough information to make a better decision about whether a trek to Nepal would be feasible or not.

So I put it to you all: give me a reality check, how crazy is this?

-B

its been too long

since we have had anyone posting on this blog. i find it hard to stay in touch if we dont communicate but i guess someone needs to get it started again. so i made this new camera that shoots two rolls of 120 film at the same time. its just a pinhole so no to complicated but it does have a few modifications that differ from a normal pinhole or camera. first the back is rounded so that everything in the images a in focus. it also has about a 130 degree viewing field which is about an 8mm lens, hence the fisheye look and the most obvious, it shoots two rolls of 120. i plan to keep shooting landscapes with the horizon line missing, forcing the view to look deeper into the image as there is no defined focal point. its going to be part of a book project that will be published by blurb.com and will have over thirty images in it. let me know what you think. hope all is well with the rest of you and i hope to see you all very soon.

Fall Quarter at Cal Poly

Its been a while since I talked with all of you so i figured i'd say hi on the blogspot. Ian i have been looking at some of those pictures on facebook from Italy and they look awesome, i cant figure out whether its a climbing trip or just a general vacation but either way it looks fun! I am actually planning a trip with some friends to Europe for this summer. I think we will start and end in Portugal and go around in a general circle. There is this teacher I have now that lives in Munich and when I visit he is taking me up in a sailplane to fly around Germany for free! pretty excited about that.

Lets see, i guess the big news for me these days is that i just got a new snowboard/bindings/boots. i think you would all agree its about time, what with the 8 year old clip in setup i was using. I actually ended up getting the skate banana you were telling me about last season Ian, and got the 09 model at like 20% off so that makes me happy. now i am just waiting for the white stuff.

Also, during the summer i went on a houseboating trip that I dont know if i told any of you about or not. that was so much fun, it was at lake shasta and man did i enjoy it. I don't know how i never wakeboarded before this summer but damn is it fun.

I suppose the last big thing is that I am teaching an aerospace class right now. it is pretty weird giving lectures/HW/tests but overall its pretty easy money.

Oh ya i forgot, that plane we designed last year won the national design competition so thats cool. we get a cash prize that im basically using on lift tickets this year! It was a cropduster that we named the Spraying Mantis.






Sorry I dont have new pretty pictures, haha boring engineer? oh well, i will try to get something interesting next time.

Anyone going to Boise for Thanksgiving/Christmas? Also i am doing a trip to Tahoe probably around New Years and possibly earlier in Dec. also, let me know if anyone is interested!

Interning

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So here are some drawings of the project I am working on now. I am interning at Erstad Architects here in the Boise which is one of the better firms around. I am designing a natural history museum to go out in Albertsons College of Idaho. Its pretty sweet, I am sole designer and get to give presentations and crazy stuff like that to big wigs and such.

The building is all underground and the entrance pops up out of the ground like a beacon drawing people in. There are also a series of sky lights to bring in light to the underground as well as define the public space above for people to hang out and stuff.

What is really sweet about all this is that Im getting paid to doodle with markers and play around. Also hope all is well in good ol montana and i will hope to be there soon.

Lantern Installation

For my May Term class I did Special Projects for Art which essentially means I got to make up a class and get 3 credits for doing whatever I wanted. I've been on a paper kick for a while now, and doing it with recycled paper always seemed important in terms of being able to be mindful of the sustainability factor that is involved with paper production. I did a presentation on handmade paper in my Senior Seminar class and then started thinking that it would be neat to do more with the topic. Once I started brainstorming the idea of lanterns as a visual display of what's possible with recycled paper came to mind, so I began the process of conceptualizing just how this could work.




In the end I decided that I would make handmade paper from recycled paper around campus and use the paper to make lanterns with the project ultimately culminating in an installation somewhere around campus so that people could see what I had been working on and what you can do with recycled paper. As I reflect on this now that it's over, making paper and lanterns might have been a bit of an ambitious task. I think just focusing on paper would have been a bit more practical, considering this is the first experience I really have working with handmade paper, but as it is things turned out alright. I struggled to figure out what the structures for the lanterns would be, experimenting with wire and wood from the sculpture lab, but found myself frustrated with the inorganic shapes I was coming up with. Eventually it hit me that working with sticks and branches and using the forms that they naturally created made much more sense with the feel of the entire project than anything else I was trying. So I began gathering sticks and branches, tying them together in cube and teepee-like shapes and then tried to figure out how the paper element would come into play.




I worked with various methods, sometimes molding the wet paper around the structures and sometimes working with dry paper, often sewing it to the frames. I ended up with about 12 lanterns, 3 fairly large (anywhere from 4 feet to 7 feet tall) and the rest smaller (about a foot each). The installation was held last night in a small courtyard that is sheltered in one of the buildings on campus. While it threatened to rain all night, and sprinkled and various times, it was a huge success, with the lanterns as well as other candles providing a perfect atmosphere for people to take a moment to just be together as we all pack up to leave.

MY PROJECT

After all of my traveling I realized that what usually takes all semester to design, I had to do in a week.  So I haven't slept in 3 days and won't for 2 more but things are coming together. 

 So here are two shots of my project for this semester.  The project is a hotel/museum on a really large site.  Lots of square feet and tons of space.

--CENSORED--

Well they've finally done it. After much discussion and unnecessary drama I've officially been censored by Goshen College via the art department. I can't say I didn't see it coming, but there was a small, small part of me that hoped they would pull through. Alas, graduation weekend and the infamous constituency ultimately posed too great of a problem when my nude silhouettes got involved.





Ironically enough, the underlying theme of my final project was the fact that women throughout history (especially biblical women, my chosen subject matter) have been silenced and have been unable to tell their own stories. I attempted to explain this in my meeting, and I think they understood it well enough, but apparently it still doesn't overshadow the fact that someone's grandmother walking through the Leaf Raker (where the show would have been) might be offended by a naked woman holding a sword (or what have you). I was initially frustrated mainly with the art department, with the people that were supposed to support my creative endeavors and help me grow, but my anger has since shifted to the general fact that this is even happening. After a long discussion with one of my profs, I'm not really holding it against the art department, because I think they would honestly like me to be able to do whatever I want. It's just another brilliant example of how far we still have to go (we=the Mennonite church, people in general, etc etc etc) before we reach a place where we are truly comfortable with ourselves and others.

My first impulse was to say fuck you and put up empty frames with quotes about censorship, but upon a bit more thought I decided this was more a creative speed bump, a beautiful illustration of what I'm trying to make a point about, and a good opportunity to further my message. So, I matted quotes about censorship and women and silence and any number of things that would get people thinking but that also still fit with the project in terms of display. They did so graciously allow me to put up the one image that is clothed, so the quotes are surrounding that piece, and there's a note alluding to the rest of the series in the art building (their alternative space option). I'm still fairly frustrated but I suppose this is a good lesson in picking your battles and being aware of who you're working with.

I guess this is just a good reminder that it's time to get out of here, that wasting my energy on conservative Mennonites is fairly unproductive, and that all of this is really neither here nor there because the first nude silhouette I did (gold background, crazy halo) got accepted into the juried student show that goes in the actual gallery, so really I win in the end.