The following images, along with all the images of this inaugural issue of The Blackstone Review, were taken using an iPhone 4S during a period of two months stretching from December 2014 through January 2015. The images, taken from the darkest of night to the whitest of snowy, bright afternoons, are of condensation in various stages of melting and freezing on the east facing windows of a second story apartment looking out on a park (seen in the first image). Using the camera's built-in zoom, I took close-up photos of the icy windows in order to reveal a different nature within the prison-house of the quotidian, as Walter Benjamin explains in his "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The images intend to reveal the abstraction lurking inside of the representable everyday, the hope-filled radicality, otherness and difference literally at the window.
At the level of process, I have always been interested in creating art using technology that is ready-to-hand as a way of considering the artistic possibilities inherent to mass-produced commodities (see The Spirit of Space's "This is a Permanent Book," which was made using Garageband and audio clips from YouTube). In keeping with this sentiment, none of the images were edited beyond the moment they were taken.
