Columbus, Ohio #1: Median Home Value

34″ x 34″
2018
$300

This is the first in a series of maps of Columbus, Ohio that I am making by sewing photographs together.  Each map will incorporate some set of data related to the city.  This map features the median home value for each zip code from 2015 US census data.

Within each zip code, I have taken a picture of a house for sale at or near the median home value.  The photo of the home with the highest value ($310,000) is tinted green while the photo of the home with the lowest value ($55,000) is not.  I have then tinted each photo green proportionally to the values in between.

photo squares for columbus map 1Keeping 576 squares organized.

Through color, a map of the city is formed.  The northwest quadrant, much of which is not technically Columbus, includes suburbs (Upper Arlington, Dublin, Hilliard) with very high home values.  This green area stretches down past the Ohio State campus (blank, because there are not homes for sale within the 43210 zip code) into downtown and German Village.  Another suburb within the city, Bexley, is the green rectangle just southeast of center.  Although I have left roads off the map, several are still easy to find.  The most obvious to me is I-71, which runs north-south through the top of the map.  To the west, median home values are quite high, while to the east they are much lower.

This map, and the data it depicts, is the result of several societal trends and civic decisions over the history of the city.  This piece is also a reflection on my ability to create an objective record of that history.  This map is a neutral artifact in the sense that it is a set of data that has been put through a algorithmic process.  This is the result.  On the other hand, it is impossible to design an algorithm without some cultural and personal bias.  In this way, this photoquilt cannot be completely free of bias, much like the very map it depicts.

The process of converting the map to a grid was an interesting challenge.  The short video below summarizes my process.  Look for more data-driven photoquilt maps soon.

 

Handmade Chinese Coins

72″ x 48″
2017
$960

There is a growing “gig economy” though which I can have an Uber driver pick me up, a TaskRabbit organize my closet, and a pay someone a Fiverr to create a customized happy birthday message for my closest friend.  But I can’t help but wonder whether the people doing this work feel like they are being treated fairly by their customers and whether this work pays their bills.  This photoquilt is a result of my wrestling with this question.

For this piece, I hired workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where workers can be hired to perform Human Intelligence Tasks or “HITs.”  Amazon suggests that workers, or “Turkers,” be paid at a rate of $6 per hour, though many tasks fail to approach this rate.  I hired 95 people and paid them a living wage ($20 per hour in Columbus, Ohio) to take one picture each. The Turkers were asked to take a picture of the front or back of their right or left hand against a plain background with a minimum 600 by 900 pixel resolution and then provide these photos for me to use under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) meaning that the photos belong to the photographer, but I am able to use them commercially.  My goal was to treat my workers fairly and from the feedback I received, I met this goal.

The quilt pattern is a variation of a traditional pattern called Chinese Coins. The strips were created by feeding the copies of the hand photos through a paper shredder and sewing them into stacks of “coins” which effectively blends the block of coins into an anonymous average of all of the hands at once. The photos were sewn together by hand using a sewing machine, which, in itself, is a statement on the meaning of terms like “work” and “handmade.”

Thanks to all of the workers who provided photographs for this work (most of whom chose to remain anonymous): A.F., Adan, byesaw, frogman31680, J Dawson, Jamillah, Jessica, JMG, Joshua Johaneman, kenneth, M. M. Brown, Matt, me, Melty, MemeHandsRubberBands, nirmala, Palani, Ron Tropics, shiv, XIX.

This photoquilt was accepted to the Fine Arts Exhibition at the 2017 Ohio State Fair where it was displayed next to Ohio Star: Columbus Museum of Art.

 

Ohio State Fair 2017Two of my photoquilts on display at the 2017 Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibit.

Motor Mandalas

motor mandalas 01-12

12″ x 12″
2017
$150

I have wanted to make mandalas for a long time.  I’ve watched the Dali Lama’s monks make a mandala out of colored sand — an exacting, days-long process that was only complete when the sand was swept up and tossed into a local river.  I’ve also had a copy of Paula Nadelstern’s Kaleidoscope Quilts – The Workbook for years, and, even though she walks the reader through several of her kaleidoscopes step-by-step, I have never fully wrapped my head around her process.  I’ve even made a photoquilt of snowflakes formed from images of tree tops.  But only recently did I finally resolve to  take the first step on my journey towards making a mandala; I sat down with some photos and started cutting them into different shapes.

As I began cutting and sewing, I noticed that it was the mechanical images that seemed to work best in the mandalas.  There was something about the details of the wires and tubes, bolts and chrome, metal and paint that creating compelling shapes from a distance but also held interesting details close up.

Motor Mandala 11
Motor Mandala 11

I worked with automotive images previously in my Wheels photoquilt, but this was from a different perspective.  Whether you know your engines (“Hey, is that a flathead?”) or you find everything under the hood to be a bit mysterious (“What do you call that doohickey?”) there is something for your eye to explore and reflect on.  Once I realized motors were my ticket, I made some prints from pictures I took at various car show this summer and got to work.

motor montage
Some of the source images for the Motor Mandalas

For about a week straight, I made a mandala a day, which was it’s own sort of meditative process.  Some of the mandalas contain two or three different engines mashed together, others contrast a swath of paint from a fender or two with the concrete that the cars were parked on when I photographed them.  Sometimes you can pick out valve covers and spark plug wires, other times there are just lines and shapes formed from assorted metalwork.  In all of them, I noticed that when angular, robotic faces started to emerge from the shapes I knew the mandala was revealing itself to me.

Motor Mandala 10
Motor Mandala 10

I wouldn’t say I found inner peace in this work, at least not yet.  But I have learned a lot about how to make mandalas.  For me, creating art is about the process; I develop rules for what works and what does not, I iterate, I ameliorate.  To make a mandala, I had to just start somewhere and just start making something.  I had to take that first step.

Self Portrait: Facebook

photoquilt - self portrait - facebook

72″ x 48″
2016
$1200

I have a love / hate relationship with Facebook.  I use it almost every day to keep in touch with distant friends and family, to keep up with the news of the day, and to share the various highlights and high points of my day.  I love that I can do this.

But the fact that I only share the highlights (and that you only share your highlights) makes Facebook an interesting lens through which to view each other.  Further, the experience is curated by an algorithm that makes sure I see more of the things that I like to see from the people I like to see them from, which can distort my view of the world.  I hate this distortion.

So who I am, on Facebook at least, is largely formed by my network — the people I have “friended” and what that tells Facebook about me.  This self portrait grew out of the idea of how my network of friends defines my “self”.

detail of single block - self portrait photoquilt

I took the profile photos of the first 144 friends who gave me permission to do so and fed them into a free downloadable program called AndreaMosaic.  The software created a composite photomosaic based on my profile picture, which I also provided.  The resolution was not great, so I added an additional 144 photos that these same friends had previously used as profile pictures.  This provided much better resolution.  I configured the software to use everyone’s profile photo at least once and to not repeat any single image too frequently.  After several iterations, I finally had a composite that I was happy with.

I printed out the photomosaic and counted up how many of each image I needed.  The quilt is 34 squares across and 51 tall, for a total of 1734 squares.  Many of the images were included just once or twice, but others appeared scores of times.  I assembled the images into 4 x 6 prints and ordered the prints that I needed.  I then divided the composite image into 6 x 6 blocks, cut out the images for each block, and sewed them together.  A video of this process is below.

Once I had all of the blocks completed, I laid them all out to make sure I had them all oriented correctly.  Then I sewed the blocks together into the final photoquilt self portrait.

The finished photoquilt is clearly inspired by Chuck Close’s portraits, of which I’ve always been a fan.  And like Close’s work, the experience of this portrait is very different when you are 18 inches away and when you are 18 feet away.  The further away from the work you get, the more your eye merges the collection of images into pixels that form the larger whole.  But up close, each individual is clearly visible.

chris with self portrait

Florida Historical Quarterly

mobile to settler, 1959 to 1978from top to bottom: mobile, herald, ocala, write, land, territorial, ship, john, cotton, fernandina, expedition, settler and from left to right: 1959 to 1978

This piece is still a work in progress, but it’s been in progress for long enough that it’s time to share it.  I’ll continue to update this post until it is completed.

It all started with a conversation I had with David Staley, a futurist history prof who teaches design and thinks about things like digital humanities.  He had worked with colleague Matt Lewis on a dataset they gleaned from the Florida Historical Quarterly, an academic journal.  The set contained the one hundred most frequent keywords across the 86-year history of the journal.  On paper, the dataset looks like a table with the years 1924 through 2009 across the top, keywords like john, tallahassee, and cotton down the side, and numbers creeping into the low teens scattered throughout.  It’s a very rich dataset, but it ain’t much to look at.  So, they 3D printed it.

staley 3D print3D printed data

Once it was printed out, new patterns started to emerge — for example, the decline of the term negro and the increase of the term black to refer to African Americans.  Sure, these patterns were there when the data was encoded in numbers, but the virtual absence of the keyword black — it occurs just three times from 1924-1967 — was more obvious as a physical trough within the dataset.

I started to think how I would interpret the same data through a photoquilt.  I decided to look at the highest ranked photo on a Google image search of every combination of keywords and years.  For example: cotton 1924cotton 1925, … cotton 2008cotton 2009, etc.  To form the quilt, I digitally cropped every image, printed them out onto standard 4″ x 6″ prints, physically cropped them into one-inch squares, and started sewing them together.

IMG_1714ship to settler, 1994-2009; cropped

Viewing the original data through the lens of the Google search algorithm provided me with an interesting dataset of my own.  It is a way to view a visual culture (in the cotton examples above, the meaning shifts from the agricultural product to the annual college football game) but it is also tailored to the time and place that I did the searching.  Anyone else doing identical searches would get different results based on all of the factors considered by Google’s search algorithm.  In fact, some of the search results have changed since I did my first round of searches.  Other photos would not have been included in the search results had I performed the searches earlier in time.

Within the collection of images, several interesting patterns and trends emerged.  For example, John Lennon was the highest ranked john in 1940, his birth year, and he dominates most of the 1960s, along with a couple of John F. Kennedys, before being briefly supplanted by Elton John in the 1970s.  Lennon returns around the time of his death in 1982, however.  This set provides an interesting interpretation of the most popular “John” for each year (according to Google’s algorithm).  Other terms reflect similar cultural transitions: mobile evolves from a city in Alabama to the art of Alexander Calder to the telephone, expedition from polar explorers to a popular SUV.

The term negro is another interesting case.  The first half of the twentieth century provides a lot of what you might expect — lots of Negro League Baseball team photos with occasional caricatures and stereotypical portrayals of African Americans.  But in the later years, the use of negro as the Spanish word for black dominates, mostly in the form of black cars for sale in each model year.  (For example, cars are the top 14 search results I get for negro 2006.  Your results may vary depending on your computer’s settings.)

I found cars to be among the most common search results along with real estate for sale, movie posters, portraits, and maps.  I had assumed that when I searched for one of the many cities that were keywords I would see an image of that city from that year.  But often I would get an image of a house for sale at that address in that city.  For example, fenandina 1957 returns several images of a house on Amelia Oaks Drive.  (Again, your results may vary.)  In fact, I had been lulled into a bit of complacency about searching for these towns when I came upon augustine 1964, which depicts a man dumping acid in a pool in response to a civil rights protest by black and white swimmers in a whites-only pool.  I didn’t know anything about this incident, which made the image even more shocking to me.

IMG_1715ship to settler, 1994-2009; sewn into blocks

When finished the quilt will measure 86″ by 100″, which works out to 7’2″ by 8’4″.  I have encoded the peaks and valleys of the original dataset by fading out the images that represent the combination with fewer keywords.  From a distance, the viewer should be able to make the patterns in the data, but up close the patterns of the individual images will be visible.  So far, I’ve completed blocks for 12 out of the 100 rows of 1″ squares.  Stay tuned for updates as I make more progress.

Spaghetti

spaghetti full

24″ x 24″
2016
$200

This photoquilt was inspired by a box that my wife and I brought back from our honeymoon in Italy.  The box is about six inches wide and is made of strips of semi-precious stones which were likely leftover from the other pieces for sale in the shop.  When we asked what the pattern was called, we were told they call it “spaghetti.”  We both loved the “use the whole buffalo” approach to the creation of the box as well as the overall effect of the random mix of stones, so we splurged and bought the box.

Last year, we finally had the chance to travel back to Europe where I was struck by the unique and colorful doors throughout the oldest part of Montpellier, France.  I took pictures of hundreds of them for Les Portes de Montpellier.  When that photoquilt was finished, I still had scores of prints left over.  What to do?  Cut them into strips and sew them back together, obviously.

The similar palettes first gave me the idea that this could work.  The jewel tones in the doors of Montpellier are what first drew me to photograph them and the link to the colors in the box was obvious.  The European connection and the approach to making use of otherwise discarded materials also tied the two together.  There is also a sort of re-imagining of the image here.  Unlike most of my other quilts, the subjects of the photos are almost completely obliterated.  This results in a focus on the almost painterly  surface instead of the details of each individual photo.

The spaghetti box and the Spaghetti photoquilt are two of my favorite souvenirs of our rare European adventures.

Les Portes De Montpellier photoquilt
Les Portes de Montpellier photoquilt
spaghetti box
The spaghetti box that inspired this photoquilt
spaghetti detail 1
Spaghetti – detail #1
spaghetti detail 2
Spaghetti – detail #2
spaghetti detail 3
Spaghetti – detail #3

Blanket

blanket full

30″ x 48″
2016
$150

Coming up for a name for this photoquilt was actually a bit of a challenge. Originally, I was thinking about something clever like Give Me 300, a nod to the number of high fives in all of the photos. But in the end, I settled on Blanket because the quilt looks so much like a woven blanket from the American Southwest, Mexico, and many other places. In fact, the blanketness was so compelling that I used multicolored cotton thread and added some decorative stitches in addition to those that sew the photos together. So, in a way, Blanket has more quilting than most of my other photoquilts.

The original photo that I used for this photoquilt was taken by my friend Mark Koenig at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture, a location that has previously been the subject of one of my Ohio Star photoquilts. When I was talking to Mark about making an Ohio Star photoquilt using one of his photos, I chose two images as possible subjects. This is the one I didn’t use. I love the colors and the composition, but in the end I didn’t think the lines would work well in an Ohio Star. After deciding it wouldn’t make a good Ohio Star, I laid the prints out in neat rows, which brought out a repetitive, woven quality. The repetition is similar to several of my other non-Ohio Star photoquilts. But in those quilts, each image varies very slightly (or fully, completely), whereas in Blanket there is simply a single photo and its mirror image.

What started as a stack of rejected prints has become a bridge between my different series of photoquilts and a chance to try new quilterly techniques. The result has a certain comfortableness that wears the name Blanket well.

See more of Mark Koenig’s work on Instagram.

Blanket - original image
Blanket – original image, courtesy of Mark Koenig
Blanket - detail
Blanket – detail

Ohio Star: State Fair

Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt

24″ x 24″
2016
$200

The Ohio State Fair attracts almost a million visitors to Columbus each summer.  Whether you go for the animals, the butter cow, the deep-fried foods, the games, or the rides, as the cliche goes, there is something for everyone.  This photoquilt came out of a series of panoramas I took at the fair in 2015.  In this photo, both the straight and the curved lines of the ferris wheel reflect and refract against the cloudy blue sky as fairgoers stream past or line up for a ride.  The wheel never fully resolves into a circle, instead merging into its neighbors, each of which is held in place by red steel girders which sometimes float in the sky.  The overall effect is like that of a zipper, stitching the fair to the sky.

I usually choose more austere subjects for my quilts because I tend to be drawn to clean lines and shapes, like in the Columbus Museum of Art.  But there are times, like in Ohio Stadium, when I can’t avoid a crowd, which usually sprials off into a tunnel of heads and feet.  When I use pictures with cleaner shapes, I feel like I have more control.  But, sometimes, I need to step outside of my comfort zone to see what happens when I start with a photo that is a bit messier and less organized.  Sometimes art, like life, and like the state fair, can be a bit messy and hard to control.

This quilt was displayed with You’re Not Going to Wear That, Are You? at the 2016 Ohio State Fair, where it received a Juror’s Choice Award and was called one of the most impressive works in its category by Nancy Gilson in the Columbus Dispatch.

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Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt - original image
Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt – original image
Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt block
Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt block ($100)
Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt close up
Ohio Star: State Fair photoquilt close up

Ohio Star: Mark Koenig

Ohio Star: Mark Koenig photoquilt

24″ x 24″
2016
$200

This is the first piece I’ve done in collaboration with another artist and, therefore, the first time I’ve based a photoquilt on a photo that I didn’t take.  I’ve always liked my friend Mark Koenig’s photos because of his eye for dramatic color and line.  I recently gathered enough courage to pay him my ultimate compliment, “I like your photos so much that I’d like to cut them up and sew them back together.”  I admit that this is an odd compliment to pay someone, but Mark knew what I meant and agreed to lend me a photo for a photoquilt.  I first met Mark here in Columbus, and he took this picture in Ohio, so an Ohio Star photoquilt seemed appropriate.

After talking with Mark about a few of his photos, we decided on this image because of the jewel-toned color palette, the interesting angles, and the shape of the lights and the shadows they cast.  It was taken at Knowlton Hall at Ohio State, which I’ve photographed for a photoquilt before, but working with someone else’s photo put an interesting spin on the process.  For example, I usually don’t include people in my photos, but Mark’s friend Tiffany appeared in this one.  I was leaning towards cropping the photo in a way that excluded her, a slight that he assured me she would forgive, but her boots and their shadows still managed to sneak into the corner of the image.

In the end, some of the shapes and patterns that are seen in my other Ohio Star photoquilts appear again in this piece, but, at the same time, Mark’s work shines through and the result is a unique combination of both of us.

See more of Mark’s work on Instagram.

Ohio Star: Mark Koenig - original image
Ohio Star: Mark Koenig – original image
Ohio Star: Mark Koenig - block
Ohio Star: Mark Koenig – block
Ohio Star: Mark Koenig - detail
Ohio Star: Mark Koenig – detail

Ohio Star: COSI

Photoquilt: COSI

24″ x 24″
2015
$200

If you’ve ever been to the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in Columbus, Ohio, then you know the wonderfully kinetic sculpture just outside the main doors.  Science Spectrum, by William Wainwright is a tree-like windmill that sparkles in the sunlight and spins in the breeze.  The first time I photographed this sculpture, it was cloudy.  But I’m glad I returned on a sunny, cloudless day because the iridescent rainbow reflections of the sculpture shine even brighter against a deep blue sky.

Ohio Star: COSI - original
Ohio Star: COSI – original image
Ohio Star: COSI - block
Ohio Star: COSI – block ($100)
Photoquilt: COSI - detail
Ohio Star: COSI – detail