Reflections on 2020
A Year in Hindsight through Images
In a year that started fairly normally for me personally, I found a time of change, growth, and reflection to be building up in a series of snapshots to a bigger change, for myself. New jobs, collective experiences, and time to reflect can help anyone settle themselves. Perhaps its a more contextual understanding of how my patterns and thinking can lead down new paths, that which i have gained.
What follows is not meant to have any real cohesion beyond a series of experiential layers. Its purpose is neither political nor intellectual, but perhaps aesthetic, and therefore exactly those things. A year in images (and by no means comprehensive).
I’m sure there’s a circle of architectural critics somewhere having a field day with the ‘box on box’ aesthetic, but the fact is that the (recently) completed Cambria Hotel downtown hits a home run by having no parking whatsoever, a fairly revolutionary feat in a very car-centric city. Existing right across the street from my house, I was mostly glad to see the construction finish up, and things get a little quieter…
In March I left my 3 year long stint at WorksBureau to pursue another opportunity in design build. I’ll remember my time there as one of great learning and absorption, as at no other time since perhaps my experience in school. I was blessed to grow personally and professionally as a creative person, deeply involved in beautiful and complex work. It
was an honor to work there and I dare say I benefited from my experience in more ways than i can currently think to describe.
Empty shelves, 2020
The collective experience of the pandemic left us in a combination of limbo… and well, home, as we struggled to socially distance and maintain some degree of normalcy through digital mediums. At first I think normalcy went out the window — perhaps it was first to go.
The pure bliss in flicking off the hand that fails to feed you.
I built my first computer, an experience in the assembly of systems. In my case, for what I call Dynamic Pixel Modification. Namely, exploring space with electrons. Maybe that’s my funny way of adding language when unnecessary, but i persist.
A moment of reprieve…
Somehow it never occurred to the City of Phoenix to paint crosswalks in our city, so i kindly reminded them by email, and 3 months later we had a new glistening crosswalk which cars constantly fail to stop for pedestrians using.
I was lucky enough to tour the downtown offices of Jack DeBartolo and familiarize myself with his process and thinking, which contains some wonderful results in thoughtful material detail.
We were confronted mid year with a new reality. Namely the broad awakening of racial bias still evident in our policing and culture after the killing of George Floyd in May, a day after my birthday. I participated where it felt productive to do so, and donated where I could.
In my new design build role at Local Studio I began discovering the challenges of building, the parties involved and what motives people to excellence. I have a new respect for those who actually execute our drawings, and a newfound realization of the importance of clarity and organization in the process of design.
In reading Sontag for the fist time I’ve come to appreciate the extent to which images have a power unto themselves, and agency unlike anything else. To wield them (the image) should not cause us to shed our responsibilities to making experience legible for others. Any number of individuals can interpret the same image in a million different ways, and perhaps that’s the most generative part. Mine is a combination of aesthetic reality I call 74% non-fiction.
I journeyed to Aravaipa on my own over the summer, a couple months after which I was joined by two friends. The time was cathartic. I walked through the river listening to Jack Kerouac and thinking about how some activities just match.
Just as summer started to become unbearable it started to loosen its fiery grip on our brains and bodies. Water is the only solution.
Several trips to Flagstaff eased the burden of the heat. But oh dear, were there deer…
Finding solace online by live broadcasting deep modular synthesizer music and typing out some thoughts… am I the only weird human?
I was fortunate to adopt a new family member from a local Phoenix Artist who fosters them.
It was my trip to Rick Joy’s studio in early October which led me to a new appreciation for the relationship between MASS and LIGHT, or lightness. A methodology that raises the ephemeral to the tangible.
