onesee work sums

work sum twelve  | March 2011

It has taken four days of April to believe that this is finished. I spent a whole week in weepy denial before it was done and then gleefully accepted the truth. Month 12 of onesee was, in all honesty, a labour of love. I am attached to a lot of the images I produced in March, but right here and now, these are the ones I appreciate the most. 

Project summary coming soon…

onesee stitches | favourite five | March 2011

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work sum eleven  | February 2011

Something funny happened in February. In December and January it felt like the end was a long way off. In February I realized that it wasn’t and it suddenly seemed like this had all gone way too fast. 

A disproportionate number of good images were made in February; maybe because I was buoyed by the shortness of time remaining to make them in this little project. February is like that here though; there are all of these signs of young, new life. We’re not quite out of the winter woods yet, but we can see newness around the bend.

On a rainy morning in March, these are my favourites for onesee’s month of February.

onesee stitches | favourite five | February 2011

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work sum ten  | January 2011

As I write this I have less than 2 months left of this little project. It feels simultaneously as though I just started and that I have been doing this for as long as I have been living. In January, doing this, I felt tired. That comes though in some of the work. My grade 12 art teacher, in one of the few occasions when he was in the classroom and not on smoke breaks, told me that the most crucial time to make work is when you don’t feel like it. I confess that a lot of days in January I did not feel like it.

Here’s to February.

onesee stitches | favourite five | January 2011

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work sums eight + nine | November 2010 + December 2010

Man, oh man, I am behind schedule. Here are my favourites for November and December in tandem.

onesee stitches | favourite five | December 2010

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onesee stitches | favourite five | November 2010

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(Aside: I am writing this on January 11, 2011. It would be interesting to know which I would have chosen for my November favourites if I had picked them immediately after November concluded. Some of these have grown on me with time.)

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work sum seven | October 2010

October is my favourite month. And these are my favourite stitches.

onesee stitches | favourite five | October 2010

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work sum six | September 2010

I have been waiting for three weeks to know what to write for this summary. I am, after all, at the halfway point of onesee project. I was mulling and waiting for a big revelation, but all I’ve got is this: I’m still doing it. And these are my favourites for September.

onesee stitches | favourite five | September 2010

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work sum five | August 2010

I think I just realized that August is over.

When I started onesee one of my motivations was that time was going really quickly and I was looking for ways to slow it down. The thought was that, in marking it and making note of it that it would cease to whip by to quickly. It worked at first; making the images every day really did seem to make each day longer; there were points to latch onto in each one. I could associate days and groups of days by the memory of the stitches I had attached to them. 

Five and a half months later and I feel a little like I have lost my ‘latching on’ point. For reasons that are likely multitude, August disappeared in a snap. I’m sure it was one part being very happily busy in the studio, one part spending every spare moment putting together my new site and one part spending a good deal of time on vacation which, cruelly, always seems to progress quickly. But I also think that there may be a point at which every action, if repeated in enough frequency, becomes habit. When a task becomes habit, do you feel it less? Do you remember as much that you have done it? 

Here’s to approaching the halfway mark, but hopefully not too quickly. 

onesee stitches | favourite five | August 2010

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work sum four | July 2010

Lately I have been getting a lot of questions about onesee so for the July work sum I will answer some of the most popular ones.

Q: Are you really doing this every day?

A: Yes. I have made at minimum, one image and one post on onesee each day since I began the project on April 1, 2010. It is the thing in my life I have done with most consistent daily frequency, apart from waking up, in the past four months.

Q: Do you ever use an image from a different day in your stitch?

A: No. Each post consists of a collage of two images that are produced and posted on that day. There have been no exceptions and no cheating. 

Q: Are you using Photoshop to manipulate the images at all?

A: Nope.  I have yet to ‘Photoshop’ any images in any way. The only manipulation I have made to images once they have made it into my laptop is, on occasion, rotating them when the image lends itself to it and doesn’t compromise any of my initial intent in taking the photograph. Images have not been touched up, resized, or cropped. I have, however, used ‘overlapping’ to my advantage on several occasions when dropping both images onto the predetermined canvas. 

Q Are you shooting on any special mode with your camera?

A: No again. Each and every image that has been apart of onesee so far has been shot on automatic mode with my Canon G11 and its probably going to stay that way. My thought is to process information quite instantaneously, the way my eyes do and shooting on automatic seems to me to be the closest in intent to that.

Q: Do you bring your camera everywhere?

A: Almost. When I’m not carrying my camera now I have that sensation of it still being around my neck, like what I imagine phantom limb syndrome might be like. 

Q. Do you set out to make a certain image on a certain day?

A: Generally, not really. There has been the odd day when I have woken up and seen something to begin with that feels so integral to that day that I am determined to use it. A good example of this would be the post I made on July 26. I work up and saw the ever-familiar outline of the North Shore and thought that I couldn’t go any further in the day without making that day that day that I mentioned it. On other days I will make one image early on and, subconsciously or not, be looking for something to link it to. Most days I have no idea what I am going to end up with until I am at home and put everything into my computer and see them on the screen. I am consistently surprised at the unifying potential of the things I record during the day.

Q Are you enjoying yourself?

A: Immensely. There has been the odd day when I wake up not wanting to do anything at all, including this but I am consistently satisfied that I do. I also seem to be following an ebb and flow of (what I perceive as) quality in the images. Sometimes it feels like there are a string of images in a row that are mediocre and I start to get frustrated. And bored. But then inevitably there will be one that turns the tide and the possibilities seem endless again. 

Q Are you going to keep doing this after the year is up?

A: Sure…maybe….we’ll see.

In the meantime, here are my favourite five for July, which proved a bigger challenge than previous months.  I had to narrow them down from an initial whopping list of fifteen. 

onesee stitches | favourite five | July 2010

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work sum three | June 2010

Here’s what’s wrong with doing onesee: its making me notice things. I know what you’re saying; I mean, isn’t that the point? Drawing attention to the periphery, bringing to the forefront subjects that recess from view? Yes, this project does that, but its not this enlightening that I am lamenting. Read on.

Case in point: in the month of June, I am disheartened to see just how many of my posts/comments were related to the weather. Weather. Almost two weeks of imagery about weather.

Canadians are obsessed with weather. I say this as a Canadian, but as a Canadian who as always referred to ‘other Canadians’ in an observatory way on the subject. What is the point of commenting on the weather? Its so obvious, that its ‘sunny’ or ‘raining’ or ‘hot’ or ‘unusual’. Everyone knows it. Everyone is conscious of it, its so visceral. And there is absolutely nothing we can do to alter it. 

Of all Canadians who lament the weather, Vancouverites are the worst. I have lived in several different Canadian cities apart from Vancouver, all of who suffer far greater weather traumas than those endured here in Vancouver, but no one can talk about it like people who live in Vancouver. Deviation from the ‘norm’, if there is such a thing, is taken as a personal offense, discussed with distasteful shaking of the head and talk of seat sales to places like Maui where you know if will be ‘nice’. I am kind of annoyed just thinking about it because truly, in the scale of cataclysmic climate occurrences, Vancouverites, and Canadians, have very little to talk about.

Then I look at onesee for the month of June and realize with disdain that at least half of images for the month are about what the sky looks like, or what the sun did or could not do. Even in the posts where the atmospheric effects are not at the forefront, I know what was happening behind the scenes.

The odd part is that, in the moment, I could not have made different posts if I had tried to.

Obviously, even with awareness, there are some ways in which we cannot be other than we are. 

onesee stitches | favourite five | June 2010

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work sum two | May 2010

May has been a pendulum swinging. 

Climate-wise it was first drought and hot, clear sun—and then it was a blanket of cloud dripping relentless water. My relationship with the stitches that I make for onesee have swung back and forth too. I have alternated regularly between loving one and then hating another. Its a hard thing to post something I don’t like. In my mind the only thing that would be worse is posting nothing at all; that would be a failure in my commitment to making one work a day. Missing this would be like leaving the house without brushing my teeth. The thought of it gives me a fuzzy feeling in my stomach and that has kept me putting something out there, even when I am very conscious of the fact that it is not a perfect something.

A few adequate somethings have the habit of occasionally birthing a spectacular something that makes me glow from the inside out. These are my picks for top stitches for the month of May, 2010. I’m not telling which ones I hate.

onesee stitches | favourite five | May 2010

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work sum one | April 2010

Sometime toward the end of April, Ian said to me while we we walking home along w. 7th with the dog, ‘We’re going to have to increase our walking radius if you are going to keep doing this for a year, won’t we?’

This has been the question I have been lobbing back and forth in my brain since I started this whole thing. Some days I think to myself, that certainly this is the day where I have run out of thoughts, where I have seen everything in my daily travels that there is to see and certainly that there is to note. In spite of these days where my brain is a doubter, I don’t think Ian is right. The fact that there is enough to engage in the ordinary for each day, well, that’s the point of this whole project. I’m am what you would call a homebody; 90% of my life exists within a 5 km radius, within which I walk and ride and take the electric/aquabus about. Is the 5 km radius sufficient for a year of material? I think it is.

But it is only May. 

I have been asked pretty regularly since starting this which onesee stitches are my favourites. This is hard. I like different ones for different reasons, so I will give you my favourite five of the month by date, and if you want to know why, you can ask me. If you ask me again in a month, I will probably say something different because this is just how these things tend to go. Try not to hold it against me.

onesee stitches | favourite five | April 2010

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