Detail from a new 4x5 picture, featuring a very carefully balanced slab of selenite, my favorite measuring device, and linoleum tile samples
Thought it was about time for an update here !
It’s been a long time since I’ve written to you all—many months, in fact—but I wanted to pop in and say hello and show you some photographs that I’ve been doggedly making over the last semester here in Iowa City. Some of them are negative scans, some of them are darkroom prints, all of them are from some unknown new body of work that I’ve been affectionately referring to as Bootleg Prophet.
This research is stemming from my long-running interest in the aesthetics of occultism and doomsday prophecies, though I’m also increasingly interested in the pathology and personality profile required to claim Prophet Status, especially now. Do you have a family member that’s being a freak about somebody predicting the end times on TikTok? If so, would love to see the account(s) they’re looking at - let me know.
Toward the tail-end of my undergraduate degree at UNM, I started to make self portraits, both as stand-alone images and as documentation of durational performances (if you haven’t seen those yet, you likely won’t [unless you ask and have the patience to wait while I re-digitize them]). I’ve been doing that again and extensively, the self portrait thing, as a way of building an imagined (and prophetic) character to serve as the “protagonist” of this project.
I’ve also been making lots of still life’s, as seen in the header image, mostly of my rock collection/semi-precious stones, a vice brought to the children of Israel by the evil Nephilim before the flood and now traded globally as a New Age commodity (in case you don’t know this story from the Book of Enoch, the angel-human hybrids also introduced us to playing cards and eye shadow, Very Evil Things). That’s all to say that I’ve been in my apocryphal literature bag and these pictures are kinda pretty 🪨
Alright - that’s the skinny for now. Pictures are below, sculptures and other writing(s) will come some time in May or June, stay safe out there.
XOXO
D
P.S. You simply must check out the online walkthrough of Ian Byers-Gamber’s exhibition, I Come Creeping - I’ve been thinking about this work constantly (and Ian’s website is great)
P.P.S. If you see something you like, feel free to give me a shout
Snapshot of a corner in my studio featuring frozen cattails (x2), 2025, 12x18” (Individual print size), Silver gelatin prints on Ilford Warmtone
attempted ascension i, 2024, Silver gelatin prints and artist-made ash frames
Some selections from Oct-December, 2024
prophet in st. louis, 2025, 4x5 negative scan (still dusty at that)
Greetings from Iowa, which is much more humid than New Mexico.
I just wanted to pop in with a quick update now that I’ve been in the Midwest for a couple of months. Since arriving, I’ve been photographing in and around the many weird museums that the region has to offer while I start to figure out why the hell I actually want to lug my 30-40lb monorail camera into tighter and tighter spaces? So far, I’ve photographed at the Sawmill Museum, Trucking Museum (attached to The World’s Largest Truck Stop, which is 3 stories tall), Circus World Museum, Toy Train Barn Museum, Mississippi Spoon Gallery (AKA the world’s largest spoon museum), German American Heritage Museum, Pearl Button Museum, and a few others, with dozens more waiting on lists made in mapping apps.
These images (some of which are in an included gallery) have felt really fun and intuitive to make. I think that I’ve always internally postured museums as spaces for discovery and play, which is a spirit that I think can be easily explained (or intimidated) out of the viewer in larger Cultural Institutions, so uncovering new places that are aligned with a truly novel mission has felt refreshing. At the same time, I’ve been looking for scenes where this sense of novelty gives way to pointed ideology, keeping an eye out for moments where ideas about the mythology of the United States start to peek through elaborate displays.
Before getting to some new pictures, here’s a partial transcription of a recent interview with zac travis that serves as the backbone of a piece I wrote about him (!) that Southwest Contemporaryjust published (!!)
I’ve looked up to zac as an artist since first meeting them at UNM when I was an undergraduate student. When I heard that SWC was looking for artists to accompany their “Radical Futures” issue, I knew that zac’s ongoing work with artificial intelligence and machine learning was a perfect fit.
Here’s a sneak peek at our conversation alongside some links to zac’s website and the finished piece!
DH: There’s a boilerplate response from so many of us artists/art people that’s based in genuine fear around generative tech and A.I. I’m so curious - was that was a response that you found yourself fielding as you were learning about these things? What was your feeling about these models as you were learning to engage with them? Because in your practice, it seems like these algorithms act more like active collaborators than a tool that you’re using to get a finished product, because you don’t necessarily know what that finished project is going to be. There’s this technological entanglement, an enmeshment that I think is really interesting and pushes back on that fear.
ZT: That's a good question, because I feel like I have a very interesting position. I don't have any formal education in computer vision or coding or machine learning or artificial intelligence, but somehow I found myself working fairly closely with understanding every single particular aspect of it all. Because I started when I did[, around 2017/2018], I saw very basic text-to-text models (and how easy those were to use) moving to these insane text-to-image and text-to-video models that are operating with billions and billions of parameters. Working closely with understanding what machine learning and artificial intelligence is, I came to understand that it’s a tool with limitations. It can only be programmed to do so much, and I feel like the fear around it is really a response to the unknown. I think as soon as you start understanding something and look at it in a particular position, then it doesn't become fearful anymore. Algorithms are just like any other technological tool, its impact is dependent on who uses it and how they use it, like every [other technological tool] in history.
DH: Including the camera!
ZT: Yeah! What was the movie that came out with Cillian Murphy about the atomic bomb?
DH: Oh, yeah. Oppenheimer. I didn’t see it.
ZT: You should see it and think about technology the entire time you're watching it, because the story of the atom bomb has a lot of overlaps with the development of artificial intelligence and neural networks. They were both developed on college campuses with university funding before, all of a sudden, either the government or military or capitalism took a hold of the technology and used it in a different way than it was originally intended. I think that artificial intelligence is almost like a combination of the atom bomb and the Internet in a weird way. I don’t think that [AI] was originally developed to be a part of war technology, I think that people can use it in a lot of good ways and in a lot of bad ways, just like anything else. We’ve already seen compelling potential good use cases. I think that [approaching AI technology] can be really complicated, especially just starting from scratch and understanding what it is, but I think that that's also why it's so important to have a literacy around it in all educational aspects… What we’re missing is an AI literacy, a different image-based kind of visual literacy around generated images and how a lot of them can be entirely fake if you don’t do your research properly.
DH: That makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of that fear also comes from this idea that art has to be original and solely from the mind of the artist, and the delusional goal of not making anything that has been made before; but you had confronted a lot of those fears by the time you were out of undergrad, right? Through working in photography and getting into the mimetic qualities of text and image, which are so intertwined and inescapable, it makes sense that your practice focuses on harnessing these things as tools without being so wary of them.
ZT: Yeah, I think where the fear comes about for me, and what I'm trying to be completely aware of in my use of these tools, are environmental implications in utilizing large artificial intelligence models owned by Open AI and now Microsoft and Google instead of building your own [piece of code]. Now, if you're going to build something like a text-to-video model, I can't imagine what that actually entails in terms of the power and energy use. I think that’s where the fear should actually be, because [the health of the environment] is so entangled in the use of these different applications.
(top) view of the dinosaur farm at the toy train barn museum, argyle, wisconsin, 4x5 scan/11x14 silver gelatin print, plus (bottom) detail of the same scene
grid of clams from the mississippi river, pearl button museum, muscatine, iowa, 4x5 scan/16x20 silver gelatin print
a display honoring Happy the Clown at the circus world museum in baraboo, wisconsin, 4x5 film scan/11x14 silver gelatin print
detail of a 4x5 scan of gabi at the rio grande pool
It’s been really ******* hot.
The heat has made it hard to pack, I usually just end up sitting right under my swamp cooler, telling myself that I’ll get around to finishing the next box after the sun goes down. Some days, when the monsoons are going, there isn’t even a point to sitting under the swamp cooler and I give up even earlier.
I’ve been listening to Miranda July read her new novel after a long stretch of listening to Raymond Carver stories narrated by Norman Dietz. Writing has recently begun to feel approachable to me again after a long stretch of grief, which has been a welcome change. That being said, I’m really excited to share an excerpt from the essay I wrote to accompany Ritual Relationships of Liquidity, an exhibition opening at CCA in Santa Fe this Friday, July 12th. Catch that + some recent jpg’s below and (as always) thank you for reading.
One of the profound blessings of being a contemporary artist is the wide and deep pool of images made by those who came before you; the decades start to stick as the maker wades, suddenly enabling the artist to pull on the threads of history to begin the braid of a new artwork. The images reclaimed by Abigail Smith were originally mass-produced with the intent of making money, whether by introducing a shiny, new gadget or by preying on existing insecurities pressed upon mainstream America by corporate marketing genius. As the artist engages in the continuing gesture of pictorial dismemberment, Smith accesses the potential of chronological distance and the layered contexts that can be both added and peeled away by contemporary re-visitings.
While Abigail Smith’s status as a new kind of photographic surveyor grants her perspective in the context of surprising, non-sequential connections, Emily Mason accesses this potential through extreme closeness as she folds the vista back in on itself. In This Morning, the first tumbling lines of pink, orange and blue swirl over stretched canvas, calling to mind not only the indelible sunsets (and sunrises) named as being fundamental to touristic perceptions of the desert, but also traditional techniques of displaying painting as an object made on a flat plane. It is a cogent illusion, seemingly stable but surreptitious in its embrace of material masquerading as well as its ontological jabs at art history’s idea of a photograph. However, upon closer examination, a black shadow emerges from the center like a cleaver, severing the soft, surreal sensibility of Emily Mason’s invented world with the reality of reflection’s ability to deceive.
In a similar way that water’s perfect surface beckons us to break it, a magic trick’s illusory joy is partially drawn from its ability to be revealed. The act(s) of revelation that take place in the works of Abigail Smith and Emily Mason allow them to function in a similar way that an effective poem might, where the audience feels the artwork’s resolution as physically as the resonance of a cutting line of verse.
Way to make it to the pictures ❤️🔥
I’ve mainly been making 4x5 pictures lately. I have some scans from the Rattlesnake Museum and pictures from the pool to share, but the full film holders with latent images waiting to be developed somehow keep stacking up in my kitchen…
share with your friends that were really into snakes in elementary school
I always feel strange making announcements about “big life changes,” but after seven years of living in Albuquerque, I’m heading to Iowa City at the end of July to pursue an M.F.A in Photography/Sculpture at the University of Iowa. For the next three years, I’ll be teaching photography classes, helping undergrads to coordinate their thesis shows, and (most importantly) making tons and tons of work. If you spoke to me at the beginning of the year, I would have told you that graduate school was “a 2025 thing,” but when you’re offered a funded spot with fantastic faculty, you take the funded spot. Funny how things change, isn’t it.
I’m unbelievably excited to push my practice further as I explore all of the weird museums and industrial landscapes that the Midwest has to offer! Iowa City is within a half day’s drive of Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and many more places that I’ve never had the opportunity to visit, so feel free to send any and all recommendations that you may have.
New Mexico has my heart forever, and I am so grateful for every lesson that I’ve learned here as I’ve grown up over the last few years. I’ll be back sooner than later, but here are the last few times you’ll be able to catch me until 2027:
Listen to my radio show on Sunday, 6/2, 9-11pm on 89.9FM KUNM
Listen to my radio show on Sunday, 7/7, 9-11pm on 89.9FM KUNM
Show up to the Center for Contemporary Art Cinema on 7/12 for the opening of an incredible show of works by Emily Margarit Mason and Abigail Smith, curated by Justin Clifford Rhody, to say hello and read the essay I wrote for the catalog <3
thanks for reading! share with your Iowan friends or fellow public radio enthusiasts
Top half of Study for Swallowtail Wind Chime/Drop-Forged/Yellow Butterflies Mean Good Fortune, 2023, Paracord, walnut, basswood, found hardware, tumbled quartz, framing wire, 34 x 12 x 12 in, Ed. 1 of 1, $900
Howdy howdy,
Last year my buddy Ben Ortega got in touch to see if I’d be interested in participating in a group show in praise of hardware, to which my answer was an immediate and emphatic Yes. I spent the next months whittling bolts out of basswood and relishing the practice of active aestheticization as I made 1:1 replicas of machined parts found at my local army surplus store. These metal pieces (imaged above) and their softwood counterparts are suspended from laminated walnut swallowtail butterflies while tumbled quartz anchors the peripheral points to catch the light.
This wind chime is rendered almost entirely useless by the weight of its components. In considering the cultural weight(s) of luck and money, both are almost always used to sidestep views of labor. Sometimes, that looks like a sleek suburban street where the work trucks are always cleared out in advance of dinnertime, other times this evasiveness manifests in the pristine white doors that hide the exhibitions departments of museums from wandering visitors. We rarely want to confront the component parts of what physically and ideologically holds the middle class together, though I’d argue that this recognition is fundamental for political and spiritual liberation (that’s another newsletter).
Exhibition details below; make it out if you can - my buddy Matthan Cowart has one of the craziest paintings I’ve ever seen in here alongside some truly bonkers (in a good way) work; this’ll be one for the books:
