It's been a really challenging couple of months with a lot of emotions and a lot of personal ups and downs. I feel as if some weight lifted this week however, when both the Ontario provincial lockdown that's been in effect since Boxing Day expired, and the sun finally decided to start coming out more regularly. Even though I've been isolating in my apartment, just having the sun stream in has been making a huge difference in getting through the days.
There are lot of projects on the go at the moment. I was hoping to meet some submission deadlines this month to galleries for exhibitions in the 2022 calendar year, but they zoomed by without me being anywhere near close to ready for submission. The SPAO A+ deadline is the end of this month, so hopefully I am at least able to scrounge up five images to submit to that. In 2018 I won the People's Choice Award at A+ with my image "That Empty Feeling", and last year I had another image accepted for the 2020 edition of the exhibition as well.
I've begun the process of prototyping out two different photobook concepts. One has an environmental slant, while the other is similar to my MUTED project in that it explores the theme of perception, and again in an extremely personal way, though unrelated to my colorblindness this time around.
I'm about a third of the way through scanning thousands of film negatives that I've shot over the past few years. It's a long and tedious process, but it's been really exciting and rewarding because I haven't seen any of these images before now. I'd had to hold off with digitizing them due to the prohibitive cost to have them done by the processing lab, and I only purchased my own scanner last spring.
Finally, I'm thinking of doing a mini-exhibit of a few images from my MUTED series. They'll be printed and framed as large as I can possibly have them be made. It will be pricey, but it's time to let these images shine in the large format they're meant to be in. I'm not sure where the location would be yet, but am brainstorming some ideas.
I'm going to start off with my personal favorite image from the series. My favorite image holds special meaning to me because it's of the first flower I ever smelled as a kid. When I was three weeks old, the lilacs were blooming in my parents flower gardens at our old farmhouse in Hartland, NB. My mother would take cuttings and place them next to my bassinet where I slept. I didn't even know this backstory until I was attending university, but I've always loved lilacs. Nothing reminds me so vividly of our old farm than their smell. Well ok, there are a couple of other smells, but they're certainly much less pretty. In addition to being an image of my favorite flower, this image also just coincidentally happens to be the first one I made using scanography, and would lead to the birth of my MUTED project. The flower for the image was picked by me on my birthday in May of 2020 in Franktown, Ontario. Franktown is known as the lilac capital of Ontario.
