Creative Use of Film Negatives

On the theme of "green living" and do-it-yourself projects, one way to recycle old negatives is to make a lamp. Go to Ikea, buy a cheap rectangular or curved lamp for about $7 and use a clear type of adhesive, such as Mod Podge or rubber cement to attach your negatives. This is a super easy and creative project. The lamp you make will absolutely be one of a kind and it's a great way to use some old negatives that you have collecting dust. The light from the lamp will shine through and they look really great.

Turn Photo Negatives Into Artsy, Personalized Lamps

Beer Can Butterflies

While I was sitting in a doctor's office, I was skimming through a home decor magazine and came across these beautiful wall sculptures. They were sculpted butterflies in the pattern of a flock. I wrote down the name of the artist so that I could look him up when I got home.

Paul Villinski is an artist who works with found objects and after finding crushed beer cans, decided to create a butterfly installation using them.

“These pieces explore themes of transformation and recovery through the metamorphosis of crushed beer cans from the streets of New York into flocks of realistically crafted butterflies.” 

Beer Can Butterflies

I used to be an art history major and remember learning about 'found objects' in contemporary art. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg are known for incorporating random objects, 'readymades' into their artworks.

I think that using found objects in art is a really important subject especially today because recycling and re-using are the ways of the world now. Plus, I believe that anything can be used in art. The simple design of a beer can or the way it looks crushed can be considered art by someone out there. Paul Villanski just took the idea and ran with it, morphing his found objects into resembling beautiful things found in nature.

Artist's Website

This one time...I met a musician

Being a photography major, I typically generate lots of different ideas and projects that I want to focus on. Recently for a documentary class I decided that I wanted to go out and find a musician of some sort and use them as a subject. My journey began and after finally and randomly meeting a musician in a bar in New York City, we both decided to work together.

Jason Soffer is an acoustic singer-songwriter from England. He grew up outside of London and moved to Brooklyn about a year and a half ago. He's in his late twenties and although going to university for business, decided that he truly wanted to try his hand at the music business.  He had always loved music and is greatly influenced by The Beatles and James Taylor. He told me that he picked up a guitar one day and just decided that he wanted to learn to play, never thinking that it could end up being a priority in his life. He wrote a lot as a child as well. He writes all of his own music and we spoke about how he goes about writing songs. He said he always heard the music first and the words came second. After performing at a couple of open mic nights in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he met a producer. During the day, he works near Times Square with his brother selling commercial spaces, but by night he works with a music producer in Brooklyn.

Jason and I decided to meet at the Brooklyn Lyceum theater in Park Slope. In exchange for some free prints, he played his music for me and we spent a few hours in the abandoned part of the historic building (which actually used to be a bath house over a hundred years ago). In my opinion he sounds like a mix of James Blunt and maybe a little bit of Thom Yorke of Radiohead.

I'm really glad that I got to meet Jason. As a photographer who wants to focus on being apart of the music business, he gave me some really great material to work with (himself) and some experience at it as well. The best advice he gave me is that you have to do what you really love otherwise you'll constantly be changing your mind in life. I admire his courage and the fact that he's putting himself out there and that inspires me to do the same. I hope he makes it.

The Art of Pour Painting

Holton Rower's Website

I'm fascinated by the painting style of Holton Rower, a New York artist. He calls his completed works "Pour" paintings. The way in which he creates is by constructing a 3-dimensional shape, usually square or multiple squares and attaching it directly on top of a canvas or plywood. Then he continuously pours many different colors onto the box in the exact same spot. This creates waves of different colored patterns. They usually come out looking psychedelic and textured and are hung upright on the wall. Fun fact, Rower's grandfather was Alexander Calder, a famous artist known for mobiles and abstract sculptures.

When I watched a video of the process, I was so mesmerized that I decided to try it myself. I assembled a small rounded coffee can to a canvas and began the pour process. I love the freedom of it. You let the paint flow where it wants to go and there's no thought involved. I've been painting for over 10 years and my biggest challenge was always that I put too much thought into what I wanted my result to be. It became frustrating and therefore I began to paint less often. This process really inspires me to start again.

My own pour painting:

Video of the Pour Process

Birds in Flight -- a light installation

"Fly Light," a light installation by Design Drift of Amsterdam is something I've never seen before. It was designed with the lives and movement of birds in mind.


"Fly Light is a collection of 160 light infused glass tubes hung at various heights in a swirled configuration. The arrangement is scenic enough when dark, but when someone approaches, the individual bulbs flicker and dash in a pattern that resembles the waxing and waning of birds in flight."


When I find something considered art, what draws me in is the visual alone. What keeps me is the idea behind it. I think that "Fly Light" is extremely intriguing visually. It reminds me of a trip to a museum called Mass Moca in Massachusetts, where I saw an installation using clear discs of different sizes hung in patterns throughout an entire room. As a photographer all I wanted to do was photograph it, and I did. I would love to photograph "Fly Light."


my photograph at Mass Moca:

"The 160 lights are programmed with a bird’s “digital DNA” and equipped with ultrasonic sensors, which means they illuminate in random sequences depending on the “intruder’s” proximity. The result is a spontaneous display of phosphorescent evasion and approach as, like birds, the individual lights must stray from the threat without falling off the back. The most alluring aspect of the installation is its unpredictability. The lights alight in a non-repetitive way, taking their cues from the density of the approaching mass (meaning a more dramatic response for more visitors, or an especially frantic reaction when flanked on multiple sides)."


Fly Light

"What Happens When - A Temporary Restaurant Installation"

In Soho, New York City a restaurant called What Happens When will be open for 9 months. This temporary restaurant serves as an artistic installation, in which every month, the entire restaurant's decor and theme will be dramatically changed in order to create a new dining experience. You would think that this type of venture would be extremely expensive, but it's actually the opposite. Kickstarter, "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, etc..."helped out the creative group behind the restaurant.


Because the space in SoHo is a flexible one, it is easy to re-create with the exception of time. "Transition time between the themes is tight, the team has from midnight when the restaurant closes to 3pm the next day to finish each movement—sounds like being back in design school!"I think this idea is a very interesting one. Other than to the food, people pay a lot of attention to the decor and atmosphere of a restaurant. To re-create a restaurants atmosphere and keep the quality of the menu, that's a huge advantage to making a dining experience that much more memorable for customers.


What Happens When...

"Anxiety on the Fault Line"

A lot of the time, when people think of modern art in Japan, "Hello Kitty" comes to mind, especially because of its enormous commercial quality that has impacted the world starting in the 1970's. They also think of Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls. There is so much more to Japan than just the feel good commercialized and colorful brands. Japan is a nation of uncertainty. It lies on fault lines and has gone through its share of historical turmoil.

Nowadays one can find art that goes against the popular images. There is more feminism and politically charged art as well. In the Japan Society show, "Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art", all of these types of works are being shown. Especially with what just happened with the earthquake in Japan, "no one, of course, could have known that the show’s images of material fragility and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster."

Anxiety on the Fault Line article

Photographs of artwork