Spooky South Van (with Sloan)

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On today’s episode of Attempting to Fall Back in Love with the Place I Was Born and Raised but Have Spent Too Long in and Am Now Desperate to Move Away from but Can’t as I Am in University: documenting my favourite hideous architectural style, ft. snow.

For the uninitiated, ‘Vancouver Special’ is a term used to refer to the houses photographed in this series, built mostly in the 1970s, which were relatively cheap to build and offered massive floorspace for the price. Entire neighbourhoods of them sprung up seemingly all at once, especially in South Van, and they’re pretty iconically Metro Vancouver, which makes them a good thing to document if you’re a lifelong Vancity local who’s really fallen out of love with this city but are currently unable to move out of it and are desperately trying to force yourself to love it again like you did in high school.

…By ‘you,’ what I mean is me. I am talking about myself.

I don’t typically shoot architecture, but man something about Vancouver Specials at night with a little bit of snow was just begging to be shot and JPEG’D to shit to fit my a e s t h e t i c. I was trying to come up with a legitimate title for this series, but… I think “Spooky South Van (with Sloan), 2019″ is funny, so.

This last one is, I’ll admit, not a Vancouver Special, but it is hideous and I love it, so I’m including it anyway:

Some Recent Portraits

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One downside to being a multidisciplinary artist rather than being more single-minded is that my focus for each kind of art I make waxes and wanes– this means, given that this blog is a primarily text-based platform, I neglect it a little when I get caught up in photography for a while. And when I neglect this website, I feel like I’m not actually accomplishing anything artistically. This is… wrong. But I know every artist struggles with imposter syndrome– or every artist I like does, anyway.

My point is: hey, look, I’ve been doing photography stuff! I’m not actually wasting my time on earth, and there’s proof below!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BrB1ZNnHrG_/
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PEAK sloan aesthetic

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In conclusion: if you need an album cover shot, hit me up.

Stigmata Series

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About a year and a half ago, while deep in the throes of a long and unrelenting episode of depression, I shot this self-portrait:

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Stigmata (Depression/Anxiety)

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It’s called Stigmata (Depression/Anxiety), and it’s one of my favourite photographs I’ve ever shot. Juxtaposing mental illness with religious iconography is interesting to me, positioning myself as a martyr is interesting to me– so much so that I revisited this concept recently:

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Stigmata Revisited (PTSD/Insomnia)

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Only this time, my stigmata are PTSD and insomnia. I’m currently experiencing the worst episode of insomnia I’ve ever had, and this is after a lifetime of sleep disorder. Suffering continues but manifests in new ways. And I can still choose to place myself in the role of a martyr if I so choose.

I won’t analyze the pieces too much as they’re mostly just intended to be visually provocative, just wanted to solidify them by posting them on my website rather than solely my Instagram.

Toronto, 2018

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I watched live jazz and drank wine at the top floor bar in the Royal Ontario Museum? Wtf? Amazing???

After spending three weeks in Montréal in June, I carried on to Toronto for three weeks in July. I arrived on an overnight Megabus totally exhausted from A) the deadly heatwave that began during my last few days in MTL, and B) finishing up reading My Friend Leonard on the bus and CRYING. I was out of it and missing home and not sure how up for Toronto I really was, even though I knew from my last trip that I loved it there.

Well, I looked up from my book as the bus pulled into downtown, and the excitement and love came rushing back to me. I fucking love Toronto. I don’t even know what it is about it. I just fucking love this city so much. And I had a STELLAR month pretending I actually live there, getting to know the place like the back of my hand, treating my damn self, and making new friends. This trip really solidified my goal of moving there in a few years. AHHHHHH.

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Montréal, 2018

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In June I spent three weeks living in Montréal, Québec, in the Plâteau apartment of my good friend Charles (where I stayed the last time I visited the city, actually).

While I can’t honestly say that it’s my favourite Canadian city (I love the hustle of Toronto too much, sue me), there really is no place quite like Montréal. Caught between Francophone Québecois culture and the predominantly Anglophone culture of the rest of Canada, the city has developed a very singular identity, and it has a lot to say for itself, which it does through a huge arts and culture scene. I’m glad to have spent a month essentially just living there, really getting to know the city properly, pretending to be a local.

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Big Brights

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A couple years ago I made some nihlist lock screens for phones, because despite not being a graphic designer, I’m a visually-thinking writer who had an idea and decided to roll with it. Today, I’m doing some more of that. Semi-inspired by the works of Jenny Holzer (who I’ve loved for years and years) and Adrian Piper (whose work I was more recently introduced to via a huge exhibition at MoMA when I was in New York), I took some words and tried to give them some visual impact. Some are just words/terms I like, some are whole thoughts, some are titles of poems I’ve written… All of them are ~conceptual.~ Wow. Look at me. Am I a real artist yet?

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

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New York City, 2018

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This summer, before returning to the hellscape of post-secondary education, I’m spending a month in Montréal and a month in Toronto. While I’m living in Montréal, I thought it might be nice to dip away for a couple days to New York– a city that feels very far from my hometown of Vancouver, but only a hop, skip, and a throw (or an 8 hour bus ride, such as it was) away from Montréal. My longtime friend (and current roommate, shouts out to him for hooking me up with a spare room in he and his friends’ place) Charles was down to join me, so we set about planning our lil weekend away.

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