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urban exploration

Urban exploration used to be one of my favorite, misunderstood hobbies. Illegally entering into the calm, beautiful underbelly of the city to explore and document forbidden spaces. It isn't about "breaking in"; it's about appreciating the architecture, the disconnected history, and the overlooked aspects of the urban environment. It's the best way to feel completely alone when you live in a city of 1+ million people. I haven't been exploring for quite a while as I lost my UE partner to love. I suppose love saves you from wanting to see lonely places.

So I recently bought this book to remind me why I love it and to inspire me to continuing to search for abandoned structures. Written by Toronto explorer "Ninjalicious" who ran UE website and zine Infiltration and recently died of cancer.

reunion tour

I spent the afternoon with Ruzz making photos after a 1 year, 2 month hiatus. And Leroy came over to watch.

Ruzz broke my house down to the ground. Like last time. Reunion tour '07.

Vandalized Vintage and Space

Today I bought some art from New Zealand artist trixie delicious. I've had an eye on her stuff since I first came into contact with it on flickr.

So Mike and I have been working on a collaborative art project together for a show in December at Art Central. We were super gung-ho about it at the beginning, loads of concepts and excited to start on it. However, Mike and are are the same personality type, we love creating ideas and starting projects, but as time wears on, we lose interest. Both of us are a little afraid, because in 4 weeks we have to have a body of work to present in a glass gallery. Yikes. Our concept revolves around the idea to create images completely without glass, the entire process. This presented a huge challenge to both of us, as we are hugely involved in digital photography, relying on glass to capture our images, and then relying on digital tools to heavily process them, making them as beautiful as we wanted and creating them exactly as seen in our heads. We decided to make the content of our photos about the dependant nature of space and objects. About withrawing attention from the objects in space and becoming aware of space itself. Today we climbed on the roof of ACAD and shot the open landscape of the dark sky setting over West Hillhurst.

Here's the camera we're using to shoot it and a gallery of the kind of images it creates: