new work: the dismemberment of a shoggoth (the once and future king)
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth (The Once and Future King)
I felt a bit like I was rushing this post, but it being Halloween, it seemed appropriate.
The Dismemberment of a Shoggoth is the first work I’ve executed in a larger series, at present titled The Once and Future King. I would have liked to have had the full artist-statement on the series completed when I posted this image, but it’s still in the works, but meanwhile, here’s a snippet:
Referencing T.H. White’s portrayal of Merlin as a being who experiences time backwards to normal reality, “The Once And Future King” serves as working-title for a large body of work documenting a series of strange, seemingly unconnected events whose causal mechanisms exist outside of normal time and space. While we are privileged to the ‘effects’ described by these events – the disappearance of a student from an abandoned Jeep, a garage where some monstrous Lovecraftian terror emerged and was summarily dispatched, a paradox of a time-travelling book – the ‘cause’ of these events seems entirely unknowable. The events themselves play across a fictional timeline, punctuated by a system of signifiers drawn from actual reality and historical reference.
Playing with the compression of time on a narrative scale, characters stand in the moment, posing, proud, as if in foreknowledge of the future-historical significance of their present context, a hypothetical “spark event” for a cataclysm yet to come. The prophetic mode here references, inversely, the truism “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; within these narratives, history has already predetermined a far-flung future disaster, and while the immediate causal mechanisms of these seemingly random events is unknowable, the certainty of their eventual impact becomes quite monstrous.
Ideally, when complete, the work will be printed around 60″x90″, and funds permitting, on big beautiful lightboxes. I have included some detail shots below to show the level of “readability” present when viewing the work in person, but I’m hesitant to post a full-resolution zoom.it version at present for a variety of reasons.
More props to the Propnomicon for being an essential resource in the creation of various bloods, goo and otherwise disgusting elements for the scene. Also thanks to my buddy Jer who made me a nice tub of gelatinous congealed grossness he whimsically referred to as “thickened water”. And, as always, my brother for posing for me, and my family for tolerating this level of insanity in their own garage.
Happy Halloween everyone!
making a kill room / in progress pt. 2
A weeks worth of messing about in the garage has produced some 30 gigs of component photos to fiddle with, but while that’s actually happening, I thought I’d post some of the in-progress shots I accumulated along the way. The primary function for these is actually to address problems in the composite-process “ahead of time”, plotting the depth of field, framing etc… but as a result they’re a nice little documentation of the whole procedure as it goes along.
The final piece has a fair bit of work left to it, so I don’t want to discuss it much until it’s complete, but I included a preview at the end. Also, there’s zoom.it links along the way if you’d like to see the full-resolution images in all their excessive detail.
Edit: I’ve now written this post six times over. Images keep vanishing or text starts inexplicably moving into the image ‘captions’. This is a bit frustrating, hopefully this will finally work.
The door has a lot of history (and claw marks), and the sawhorses usually support the soft-top for the jeep; I used three cheap halogen worklamps for lighting (two 500w and one clip-on 250w), and an old trouble light, which worked quite well.
Cheap lightweight painter’s plastic sheeting – not the heavyduty stuff, so it wasn’t exactly durable (or wind proof), but it was cheap and cheerful. Shockingly, duct tape doesn’t adhere very well to old, dusty wood, but it still functioned well as a liner for the plastic through which I drove many a nail. The arrangement was meant to be haphazard and minimal at best, but still afford for some easy cleanup (which it did, beautifully). This shoot was at night, I shot it all again to check the lighting during the day, and fix some focus issues the night shoot highlighted.
Apparently half the text of this post is now missing. Awesome. Here’s the above scene shot the next day, with day light:
The light from the window and entrance (behind the camera) provides some nice fill light, and I fixed a few of the focus/framing/depth of field issues that occurred in the night shots. Finally, adding some of the props and objects that would be in the final shoot:
Good clean fun. Here’s a preview of the not-so-clean-fun:
dismembering an eldritch horror
I have to credit The Propnomicon as an invaluable resource on all things fake-blood and goo related. I ended up using a simple recipe of green-coloured detergent mixed with india ink and charcoal powder for the majority of the ‘wet’ goo, the best part was it cleaned up real quick with just the hose and some occasional scrubbing. My buddy Jer provided some thicker, heavier material you can see on the axe head and elsewhere in the piece that he described as “basically thickened water” – I’ll see if I can coax the recipe out of him, but given he works at a specialty lab for custom rubbers and resins, I imagine the ingredients aren’t over-the-counter. It was delightfully thick and gross however.
The whole shebang cleaned up like a proper Dexter-style kill room too, in about ten minutes, and that was just peachy.
Hopefully the final work will be ready in a week or two, right now all the finer adjustments and brain surgery are on the agenda.
projection / garage follow up
Lacking the funds and ability to alter the laws of physics and design some delightful Fringe-inspired device that projects darkness, I’ve been screwing around with an LED flashlight to make cheesy shadows on the garage wall.
(this is straight out of the camera, it was more a technical test than anything)
This was simply fingers and a little LED flashlight with … nine little LEDs in it I think. I have some … relatively old … enlargers in the basement, and I was thinking, what better to make a subtle projection than an enlarger head? well we’ll see. Ultimately what I’m aiming for is the effect of shadows-appearing-without-evident-origin on a surface that appears *naturally* lit – hence the subtle light. It’s not quite working just yet with the LED flashlight but maybe the enlarger will do a better job (it’s also got built-in colour filters!) And yes, overhead projectors, I know (thank you Shari Boyle and Daniel Barrows).
On a side note, increasingly it seems evident prop-construction is going to become part of my practice. Not that this is a bad thing, but I did get rather content just ‘collecting’ things as opposed to making them. Propnomicon has been a delightfully appropriate resource of late, there is some damn good (and fun) work out there based on the Lovecraft mythos.
Also, on the night photography note, Joe Reifer’s blog and website have earned themselves a permanent tab in Firefox of late, in particular check out his night photos of military ruins … will definitely have to make a roadtrip to the american south-west sometime.
Day 10 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu) (The Last Day)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 10)
There was a version with a somewhat telling nosebleed, but it was a little too strong of a mark. I might write more about this series when it has settled a bit, but generally I’m quite happy with the results. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!
Day 9 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 9)
And a detail, because these would definitely be printed a lot bigger than they’re appearing on screen:
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 9) (detail)
Day 8 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 8)
Day 7 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 7)
Day 6 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
Ran into some technical issues with this one that the few solutions I came up with just didn’t cut it visually. So there’s sorta two parts, the first, if I were to use a singular image, would be the one I’d select. The second could stand on its own as a separate work in the series, or perhaps as part of a diptych.
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 II)
And just to see how they work together:
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 Diptych)
Update: Managed a stitch-together of the two parts that’s remotely acceptable, but I’m undecided which I like better.
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 6 Merged)
Day 5 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 5)
…. aaaand the line is crossed, the shit hits the fan, and the borders start to fall apart.
Day 4 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 4)
Day 3 (The Ten Days of Cthulhu)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (Day 3)
The Ten Days of Cthulhu (ok… sorta eleven)
I have spent the last couple of weeks writing, submitting, and then recovering from a rather heavy job application, to which apparently over a hundred people have applied, so I can only pray I get an interview. I also got another rather large print finished, which I’ll post here shortly.
In other news – welcome to the Ten Days of Cthulhu, an unofficial holiday that might have been made up by someone else already, but I’m at least highlighting here and to some degree claiming it as my own.
In H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, the principle character encounters a young artist who, during the period of March 23rd to April 2nd, 1925, dreams endlessly of the sunken city of R’lyeh, where the ancient one, Cthulhu, slumbers in waiting. Many others at this time share the same nightmares, culminating when suddenly this artist takes to a feverish coma of sorts – and when, halfway around the globe, certain other dread happenings raise R’lyeh to the surface and awaken the elder god from his sleep.
So, to celebrate, apart from some other dorky revelry involving a Lovecraft-inspired board game and a good deal of reading, I do believe I will take it upon myself to engage in a ‘durational project’ involving a bizarre fusion of crossroads rituals and Cthulhu mythos. It could be wacky.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” (“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”)
And I have a couple other applications to get done. So who knows what will come out of this ten/eleven days of darkness! Enjoy!
