Texas Finally Got Cold

• December 1st, 2004 • 0 Comments • photography, texas •

Brrr! The cold weather has finally hit Texas, so now my little garage studio is officially cold. Michael helped me to do one screen print. I noticed that when doing mulitples on fabric, I need more than ONE setup for the fabric to dry on! Oh well; after the cold, I wasn’t so interested in doing more than one print anyway. Rinsing my screen out was literally a chilling experience. Before I may have mentioned that there is a designated “car wash hose” near my garage that the complex provides. Handy, considering my kitchen sink lacks the power to properly rinse out screens. Unfortunately the nozzle was broken (it seems to be cheap) and the hose had somehow lost its gasket. So the screen had to be rinsed out in the kitchen sink -grr- and my pants were subsequently soaked by the leaky hose full of fridgid water -double grr-.

I am definitely going to purchase my own nozzle for the hose, but I am considering what to do about increasing pressure for the kitchen sink. Getting soaked with cold water when it’s 35 degrees out is not my idea of a good art experience.

The archival project is going well, despite a few initial problems. Some of the photos have a bizarre sheen which causes them to be scanned incorrectly by the scanner. Their images can only be viewed at an angle, thus the head-on light from the scanner distorts them. Strange! I am considering photographing them with light that can accomodate their needs.

The first item I am working with is different from all of the other photographs as it is an old album with the photos glued in. Delicate notations of what year it is and how much baby weighs are next to some of the pictures. However, I am faced with the age-old problem of conservation. The paper is old and acidic, not to mention the spine is falling apart. Should I attempt to remove the photos to save them? Should they remain in their album-state while I attempt to repair the actual book spine? I have already scanned the book as a whole: there is a digital account of the book recording it’s original state, including the front cover. A decision must be made, and I’m frankly leaning toward repairing the book, and adding an insert for a mini-cd on the back cover. That way when discovered: the original album may be viewed in its changing/transient state; the physicality of the cd leaves record of a new family member preserving documentation of visual material; and the cd itself may be viewed and enjoyed when the album “dies.”