Brrr...
I'm writing this a day after coming back from Canada (featured above) where it was around -30 degrees with wind chill on Friday night. I spent time with a friend driving around Nova Scotia, popping out of the car for a bit to see the view, then quickly hopping in the car to regain warmth, while seagulls fought the misty wind outside. It was so cold that we turned boiling water to snow, and the chant of the weekend was "Frostbite in minutes! Frostbite in minutes!"
After the cold northern nights I'm back home, and back to wrapping up projects and starting new ones. If you've seen me recently you've probably heard that a lot of my work (at my day job) has been anti-vaping and anti-smoking related campaign work for New England Health organizations. We gotta get those teens off the vapes! It's pretty tame compared to the anti-smoking ads and packaging we saw in Scotland last fall, which was images of horrible lungs covered in blood, with text "This is what well happen to yeh! Quet smoken!!"
I'm loving my new job even though I can't use graphic imagery in our ads, and it makes me happy to have taken a risk and also be taken care of by a nice company. Other updates: I'm still in Baltimore, running and reading and meandering through winter (MD winter not especially exciting, but I'm trying to savor the dark mornings) Hoping to take these last few weeks to do some more deep cleans and seek some snowy outings before spring.
"Bad luck to kill a seabird!" - Willem Dafoe in the Lighthouse
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Recent Work
Most of my freelance in the past year or so has been for Kingfisher, a THC infused syrup company.
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Latest Inspo
Lately I've been able to get to a couple museums, and saw the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit at Moma when in New York for a few days. The prints were huge! Many of them were photography of space or distorted textures, but many of them were faces of celebrities. They were framed so you couldn't really place the people as famous or noteworthy, just sweaty, or hairy, or naked, or distressed. It was great! I especially loved the man deep in conversation with a deer.
I also saw the Darrel Ellis exhibit at the BMA - Ellis died of AIDS in 1992 before much of his work was discovered, mostly manipulations and work from his late father's photography. Most of the photographs and drawings capture significant moments from black family life with a softness and turbulence - as if looking at photos while holding them underwater. Really beautiful, and I recommend going if you can get to it.
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Top: Wolfgang Tillmans, Frank Ocean's "Blonde" album cover.
Bottom: Darrel Ellis, “Untitled [Laure on Easter Sunday]”; Wolfgang Tillmans, "Deer Hirsch"
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More art, media, and books
I'm a bit late to the hype, but I'm a couple pages away from finishing How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell. It has been a huge relief to learn about how we might be able to process the world without reactivity, and navigate being present while needing to check out every once in a while.
I'm also re-watching How To With John Wilson and The Last of Us - both incredible! (the latter pretty violent).
What are you watching? Listening to? Reading? Let me know!
Bye for now!
MJ
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