Imperfection

who said all pearls were round..

I took Gabi's pearls into the studio one day that were gifted to her from her host during her time in Niau, French Polynesia. Her host, a copra farmer, had most likely collected them from Pearl Farms from his family on other islands. Somehow I was surprised to see pearls so uniquely shaped...but really, only the exceptional pearl is perfectly spherical.

Gabi's Pearls

eighty odd years in a box

"Welcome to my home" seemed a bit ironic for the day, a greeting inscribed in imitation stone which remained past its time. I volunteered my Saturday to help my grandmother and her family clean out her cousin Dorothy's trailer home. The cousin, in her mid-eighties, had been going senile and has recently been put in a nursing home. She had a maddening accumulation off stuff...I never knew so much could fit into a trailer home.

Dorothy never married and had three brothers, all of whom she outlived. Her cousins, peers, are the closest family she has and have become her legal caretakers. From lifting boxes to arranging tax forms, bank accounts and other paperwork it is an exhausting situation for them all.

 

...things that have been in the kitchen since before I was born...

 

An empty can of what used to be Boost forgotten on the back porch. 

In Pursuit of Ideas...

 

An abandoned silo is one of the few remnants from the historical farms which 

used to populate what is now the Grindstone Nature Area in Columbia, Missouri.  

What used to be a silage tower for the dairy farm of the Gordon family is now

 a trail marker for the city public.   

COLD

'nuff said.

A couple days of below zero degree weather in Middle America. Negative 5 degrees from my backyard.

A Tribute to Snow

Some shots from winter break outside Buffalo...a couple things I found in abundance were time and snow.

 

Snow or shine (rarely shine in a western new york winter).

Mountains of snow accumulated in parking lots; mainstreet in williamsville new york.

Buffalo hosts an impressive force of snowplows.  

locals and regional visitors enjoy cross country trails in Colden (the snow capital 

of Western New York); the area receives on average 180 inches of snowfall annually.

Ready to fight for birdseed.  

 

A creek testifies to Western New York's unique weather situation.  

Its location along Lake Erie causes the region to be more temperate than other Northern 

states while, at the same time, providing record amounts of snow (the notorious "lake effect").

Frost and, finally...sun.

Lighting up Cornfields

Afterthought and Light Pollution; a wintering corn field in Clarence New York.

I went out one evening with my good friend Sheider to try out some lighting techniques 

from this pst semester. With two flashes, a tripod, and a flashlight we spent a couple hours

 in rural clarence, driving down creepy roads and romping around muddy corn fields.