Richard Dawson and the 70s

I've been drawing very crude drawings as a way to get ready and think lately. It becomes a meditation, letters combined with doodling, clearing my mind and thinking about how these booths will function.
I find it amusing how many memories these doodles bring up - like loving tv gameshows such as The Price is Right or Family Feud when I was a child...the x's that struck when Richard Dawson would exclaim, "SURVEY SAYS!"

A Fox, A Cabbage and a Rabbit

You know that logic puzzle...A man has a fox, a rabbit and a cabbage, and he wants to get across the river but his boat can only carry two items at a time. The man being one item and a fox, rabbit or cabbage being the second. If left along the fox will kill the rabbit, and the rabbit will eat the cabbage. How can the man get all three items across the river without losing any of them?

Well, that sums up what I've been planning the past few weeks to get ready for this show. I will preface this by saying that no, I don't own a car, leading me to rent...but you cannot fit a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in a subcompact car...you get the idea. There is so much coordination between people who've offered to help me and the materials that I need to transport up there.

That said, I thought I would share some sketches of the booths that I will be building, both in very raw drawn and examples of the 3 D models that Tunde put together for me including: the telephone booths, the kissing booth and the photobooth.

On Portraits

The postmodernist eye scrutinizes the gaze of the portrait with its double claims to originality "the meeting of two subjectivities"--that of the portrayed and portrayer--the genre embodies the notion of uniqueness that has been challenged in the 20th century"

--Melissa Feldman from Face Off: The Portrait in Recent Art

A portrait of a person is not a fact, but an opinion. By removing the camera from the photobooth and replacing it with human eyes and hands--this sentiment or perspective can be even more distinct.

This was immediately apparent when I created the first model of the photobooth in March of 2007 at an exhibition at Space 1026. This booth was "staffed" by a variety of artists who all observed and drew in different styles - or opinions.

I built this booth without a notion of what would happen inside - I created the object, yet the experience of being allowed this luxury to observe with impunity and to share an intimate moment with a complete stranger, without introduction or fanfare was an amazing experience which I hope to recreate at Bucks County Community College.

"Portraits are always of a person at a specific instant. They are never about the future."

Jan Grover in Portrait Theory by David Attie

Read about the photobooth (scroll down text in review) on the artblog site, in a writeup by Andrea Kirsch here

Photobooths

http://www.photobooth.net/locations/a comprehensive list of photobooths around the world