All the photo sets for LODE are available for viewing on the site. Below are great shots my friend Will captured of the installation and people interacting with the work. More photos of us installing  in the Silverland Gallery and our journey to Virginia City can be found in  new work/LODE or the Latest Updates section of the website.

Thank you again to everyone one who came out to the opening. This was a wonderfully unique experience.

Sorry for the lack of communication. I am recovering from a week of chaos. Tons of amazing pictures were taken documenting LODE, the Art Center and Virginia City. I am wading through these images right now and should start posting pictures tonight on the website.  Additional images will be available on a  flickr page.

This was a very ambitious project that could not have been completed without help from the following people:

Jesse Eisenhower who was my collaborator on conceptualizing LODE and  its engineering. He also designed and constructed the lanterns.

Meilani Long and Riain Hager who worked tirelessly for four days straight, up until the very last hour, installing LODE in the Silverland Gallery.

Will Law and Eva Wang who were the master photographers and chefs on our adventure in Nevada.

Leah Ruby, who runs the Silverland Gallery,  for her continuous support and encouragement throughout the evolution of this project.

And the Saint Mary’s Art Center staff for their hospitality.

Thank you all!!

Less then a week till the installation opens in Nevada.

The last two layers are now complete. I have added images of both to the LODE Prep. photo set below.

This is an example of how the transparent panes will float below solid panes in the LODE installation. The iconography on the transparent panes represents a human presence in the landscape: transient or temporary communities that fueled a mining economy.

I will be posting pictures of the third layer tomorrow!

update: 3rd layer added to LODE  Prep. photo set.

Just finished printing the post card for Veronica’s LODE show. It took 3 colors and 4 pulls (including the text on the back).

There’s this phantom green square sitting inside the black square that I’m pretty happy about, but you can’t see it on a computer screen (not even in the blow up I added to the “LODE Prep” photo set below).

But when it gets to your house through the post you will see it. Hopefully we’ll send them out tomorrow, after they’re all dried out and cut up.

This is the Basin layer. It will hang six inches below the Sea and Lakes plane.

I put myself in the picture for scale. I had originally intended to photograph Jasper the cat with the work, but she was in the middle of a nap that lasted the better part of the day.

Above is an example of a pane with a 2 inch boarder around it. The horse pattern is printed on clear acetate.

The first layer for the LODE installation is now complete. This section represents a surrounding sea and large lakes. It will be closest to the ceiling for its reference to a distant time when much of the Great Basin was covered in water. The other three layers hang below concealing most of it except from the sides or through areas that are transparent.

The poster was finished a week ago. I added it as a picture in the “LODE Prep” image set below. It’s an 11X17 3 color silk screen. White, Black and Yam on Beige 80lb paper (pictures are photographs of the actual print).

As luck would have it the date for Veronica’s show was misprinted. I corrected it in GIMP, so the pictures of it here have the right date. But there are over 100 posters somewhere in Nevada with the wrong date on them. For some reason this poster has pulled the wool over my eyes again and again during every phase of its development, necessitating countless revisions and touchups. And I guess it wanted to do it one last time, like some sort of posthumous prankster, just to make absolutely irrevocable the thorough subjugation of my spirit animal. The flier is next.

It has been difficult assembling a frame structure that will work as a grid for the LODE installation.  After a week of trial and error this is the result.

The graphical layout of the patterns had to be completely redesigned to allow for a border surrounding the images in each frame. Exceptions were made for the Sea and Lake panes (seen above) and the section representing the silver deposit. All this rearranging came out of an awareness that the frames containing an acetate filter were unpolished and not integrating with the larger format. They now resemble giant photographic slides.  A nice coincidence.

I have been working hard on an upcoming installation called LODE at Silverland Gallery in Virginia City, NV. It is the site of the Comstock Lode, a large silver deposit that resulted in the first major mining excavation in the US. Today the town is a national historic landmark with several preserved buildings from the bonanza days.

My vision for LODE is a planetarium/ magic lantern. The art work will drop down from the ceiling in a scaffold of cubes containing transparencies, light filter, and paper. On the multiple planes will be a tiling of patterns representing the landscape and mining settlements. Jesse is designing a device for visitors to project light on and through the structure.

There are images below documenting my current progress, more will be added in the coming months. The show opens on June 13th 2009, check here and the Silverland Gallery for future updates.