So this is the last day in which I will be 50 years old. Tomorrow I will be 60. Two statements, resting side by side, not having a lot in common except the math of commonality. For me it is the end of one place I never expected to visit, into the other that I realy do not think I shall see the end of. Droll, benign, not so vary insightful when one reads the surface. Below, beyond, ever there? Time will tell all of that.

Perhaps it is time to some how introduce the chafe that is a cover for that wheat. The stories that are the outer covering, to a fruit that is the art we sense as all too important. Stories are the social relevant that can contextualize the work. Does it informs the art? The discourse inflicts itself upon the narrative of events, it breathes, inflating the art, gifting meaning to the work.

It is the artist story regarding the art, not as process but as soul. Historians, critics, the person on the street will see the work and tell you the story that is speaking to them the viewer. As it should be if the work is public. Works go public now in an internet that is filled with the me and now. If you wish to hide something put it out in plain sight were everyone can see it and yet no one will notice the thing. The internet has now become the excellent place to hide the story while being able to tell the story.

Bound to please: VADA chained.
So some simple statements about the work will help to understand what is here to feel.
Perceptions may mislead your understanding.
Is it more about the viewer or the viewed.
So many loose tract of what is important.
Is it a dungeon or just a simple entrance? Entrance to the studio is what it is. Looks like a dungeon and it is not. Dungeons are were ‘things’ happen. So unimaginative. I get the giggles when I see these sorts of things. We are lost in the clean fantasy of the marquee De’ Sada, the spelling is intentional…billboards and all. This is so much more in a sense of what find in the realms of the senses, the realms of the sensual the realms of that which is erotic and mostly modern. You see it is about real estate. Real estate, why that is the old joke, “What are the three most important things when considering real estate? Location, location and last location”. Ask any real estate agent. Is it true? Only if you understand the perception behind the stated joke. Location is only about the perception of the person who holds in their mind ‘location’. The location is the bases of that joke because it is important because the person perceives that location to be important. This is the bases of my statement in saying that instead of a dungeon which is implicit in the representation of this location and yet it is some how oddly confronted by the bright red cloth that is so much a part of this image.

So what then is the location, the real estate of the image? Why of course it is the front of the studio. The lighting studio is a fine place just on the back of the photographer, comfy setting, foods, music and all that gear that goes to make for the grand illusion that is the great images made in studio. This poor location is the run down dark entrance to the studio.

The studio is of course my studio. It is on Mission Road in San Antonio Texas. It is surrounded by history. Roosevelt park to one side, named for Teddy who formed the Rough Riders in the studios area. Hell he had his tent where the rear gardens are now. National Historic site across the side street, the street is Yellowstone and not named for a rocket either.

But it is the name of the street that has given the name to the studio one fine afternoon by a friend who modeled often with me. She named it Mission Road Photography Studio. I often leave such things to the Damon to speak truths to me through the mouths of others. In this case the sound fell upon me like a soft chilling snow that held a wallop like the hammer of great truth. It took me a while to grasp the meaning of what my ears had herd, perhaps more than a year; still it did talk to me all the same.

The wispier came by increments, and it spoke through several different photo sessions with various models. One must learn to have ears for the whispering of the Damon, it must wispier so as to be herd more plainly. Then there is rumination. The thinking and re-thinking of events, the meanings, the purpose to which one is fired in the crucible of life experience. Experience is lost unless it is observed, to see it as the infermince of life in death. It must be scraped up from stone and the wood of existence and sealed with the ritual of half waking dreams of sensations. To dream and think, to do this as an interdimensional thinking, to see with ones senses beyond the eyes. The ritual of sealing the thing into ones heart with the fire of the life that is lived and not dragged through like a cheap date to the ritual of an alter of the nothing that staves back another day.

The opening is a cage to keep out the public but can not bar that gaze. There are more doors just up the dirty concrete stairs. The world and he swirls of the roads life infiltrate the grated opening. The large heavy doors shut out the view from and of the street. Then beyond another door with glass and slender side spaces filled with more glass act as a dust barrier to the road allowing the glimpse inward. These are a trinity of doors. They act to defy and negate, allowing entry and then to deny other the access that is sought. Like modern life, the opening between the place of high magic, photography, and that of a real world of illusions, are set in opposition. These are then confused and contorted interdictions of he trinity of orifices, the tubularity of space that ushers one into the holies of holies. People pass through this passage on their way, seeing not ever, no sense nor senses of the acts of passage.

The street is Mission Road, the street that links the passage of the traveler, the pilgrims the tourists on their way from the first, the downtown the seat of myth the Alamo. They travel passed the studio on their many mannered ways to the mission known a Capistrano. It is not far from the entrance of a photo studio that looks out onto a busy street. Commerce and tourists, many with two wheels beneath their peddling exercises, school children from the high school just up the street. The long processional of racing humanity that is moving day and night. It flows past the studio’s entrance façade a few feet from the side walk, a mail box in front, attached to an old steel pipe that had a business sign attached for some departed indices.

The sun light illuminates the blood red drape. Soft and silky the crushed red drape made from an old table cover hacked into two shorter lengths, still plenty enough to cover the entry opening. Joined together along its seam by staples from an old US Government gray office stapler; then again, was it the chipped black one, the mind allows the loss of some details. The detail that is not lost to my mind is the fact that the cloth served at Christmas dinner each year at the local university, the state university to which I had attended. This was the sumptuous red velvet cover on cheap tables to allow the participants the illusion that what they were about was a celebration of some dinning in which they were to travel back into time, Elizabethan England, or was it Edwardian times? Illusion, all ways illusions; this was their sense of naughty, with bawdy jokes and the play of playing at bawdy.

Objects become imbued with the magical. The object can absorb the sense of what was a foot among the human kind who were in intact with these objects. The thing takes on the sense of the thoughts as well as the acts of those who are about and in direct contact. You can wash away the surface contact but the water will not take away the ort of mind and magic that acts weave into the fibers that are a covering of the illusion of support.

So it is with this same covering, hanging between the world of illusion and the place of high magic. It can divide, acting as a foil between the two; yet it can be like the flag fluttering in the breeze to stand as witness to events that are separating two human worlds, two perceptions. I of course fancy the latter to the former, it is ever so much more to my liking and is of course at the core of what I am enamored with. You see I am quite delighted to be deep in the womb that is the studio, the place of high magic.

The blood red cover that slices through the infermince of reality. Resting as both the here and the there. The sun pressing down upon the redness of it. Pushing passed the spaces between what is there and the larger that are openings between. Of course there are holes, openings that allow the sun to flow like a tidal wave into the interior. There it tattoos its mark most urgently upon the spaces that stand on the floor before the entangled subject. Where it must be diffused the waves fill the space with washes of soft red. The space is as though the space has become a womb filed with the warm blood and tissue of a huge body that engulfs the space.

As the sunlight presses past, the sun allows the entrance of the murmurs from the street. The sun is the conduit for the other senses to absorb the many wonders that flow and ebb along in continuous processionals for the warm quiet of the fading afternoon. What is the notion of pedestrians be they upon two or four legs. What of the persons upon bikes? The sound of a ball being bounced on the side walks as the passer slows to pear to the wide red cloth hung like some banner over the front of the bland building. The though is passing and gone as the bouncing says the spacing is returned to a focused indifference.

What effects of sensations pass from the subject back into the blood of the red cloth that the sun still tries to bleach out but to no avail as the magic of the moments impression passes into the weave of the fabric. A murmur from the bound and retort from the magician to emphasis that the they who have passed will loose this in memory quickly and how this has moved deeply and impressed with the moment, the quicken of engaged rememory. This is performance and the work must move past the smallness of record to that of real magic. The act is as important as the memory. A part of memory is internal for the two while the memory of the photo is one that calls to the viewer to have a new memory. We do this as a type of memory. It is private to each and yet the memory is and hold as persistence. In rememory is found persistence. The making of the image is high magic because it brings back to us the persistence of perception. Viewing is voyeuristic, it is a form of knowing by others memory, it but told in a different way of speaking. These are the memories that we leave behind for our future humans to discover. What they do with these is upon them to have and to hold but they must reanimate by action no matter how passive.