Some photo art and photography from the last few weeks or so.
Mimi in Motion
Category: Photo Art
When I was child, I remember having a great deal of freedom. I don’t mean that just in the sense of being able to spend a lot of time reading or wandering through the woods across the road from our house. I also mean it in the sense that being a girl was only one minor aspect of my existence and experience rather than being the thing that defined me as an individual.
Here is a selection of photo art pieces that all feature some level of abstraction. Some of these are slightly abstract and others are very abstract. I’ve always enjoyed abstract art and sometimes like to play that way with my own art. Enjoy!
If you’d like to see more, please visit my Flickr photostream.
A Fishy Federation
When I was talking with my sister about this self-portrait series and what I hoped to accomplish with it, she jokingly suggested that I pose nude. Um, no. Nude was out of the question but it got me thinking. One of my primary goals with this project is to explore aspects of myself that I have not completely revealed in the past or that make me feel uncomfortable. So I thought maybe I should push myself a bit and pose in a way that, for me, is more scantily clad because I’ve always had a poor body image. I knew I’d have to psych myself up for it.
In my post yesterday, I mentioned that I’ve been experiencing a bit of a writer’s block lately. So this morning I decided to start a new project as a way of unclogging the creative pathways. A week or so ago, I came up with the idea of doing a series of self-portraits with something written to go along with each one. The goal was (and is) to give tangible form to parts of myself that tend to remain at least partly veiled. My queer self, for example, is given free expression within the fictional and poetic realms but not so much outside of those. My masculine and feminine selves are often at least somewhat obscured by a layer of what is socially expected. And so on. By creating the self-portraits, I hope to push myself beyond those boundaries.
I’ve been in a bit of a writing funk lately, not getting anything to come together the way I want it to. I’m a slow writer under the best of circumstances. But it still seems like sometimes writing is a fight and sometimes it flows. Hopefully the flow will be back soon. In the meantime, here are a few photo art pieces with a surreal aspect. Perhaps one of these will tell me a new story.
7-Eleven
Here is one old favorite and five recent photos, all with some cropping and processing in B&W. The last four were taken at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, FL.
Happy Couple – seen in a fountain in Winter Park, FL
This is a feel good post because I needed one. And maybe you do, too! Enjoy!
Belgian Brew
When I woke up this morning and first saw the news about the mass shooting here in Orlando, I was both shocked and disheartened. I’ve spent most of the day following the story on-line. And finding myself more and more disheartened. It’s bad enough that so many people lost their lives leaving behind so many grieving family members and friends. It’s tragic enough.
But adding to a situation that is already tragic enough, there is a constant hum of rhetoric telling me that we may still not find the sense to deal with the hate and gun violence in this country. What I’m hearing today is that we don’t need to talk about the hate routinely directed toward the LGBTQ community by many of our fellow citizens because “ISIS”. We don’t need to talk about our ridiculous gun laws that make purchasing an assault rifle legal because “ISIS”. What I’m hearing today is that the whole tragedy could have been avoided if everyone else in the bar had been armed and prepared to shoot. So unless we see some major, unexpected change among those who create and maintain our laws, it seems that we will continue to arm more citizens with fewer regulations and that we will continue to promote legislation that aims to discriminate against and validate the hate displayed toward the LGBTQ community.
All of this has led me to conclude once again that human beings, as a species, are too often very bad at developing the qualities of compassion and tolerance that we so badly need if we want a good future for the generations that come after us, if we want a future for our species at all.
So I decided to go ahead and post these images of trees, many of which have been alive longer than many of us. I tend to believe that trees are wise beyond human understanding. Perhaps if we spend more time contemplating them, we can learn something new about wisdom and peace.
I love squirrels. I find them charming. Silly little buggers! So I not only spend time photographing them but I’ll confess that I talk to them. Sometimes they even chitter back. Squirrels will most likely inherit the earth — along with rats, roaches and ants. 😉
Are You Still Here, Human?
Karen Lee Kleis 