bonniegrrl | Apr. 24th, 2006

Apr. 24th, 2006

FYI:
I got this in my inbox from my favorite San Francisco gallery curator at Shooting Gallery.
Check it out!

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The Shooting Gallery is hosting a lecture this Monday, April 24, 2006.

Wayne Bolger will be talking this Monday at The Shooting Gallery from 5pm-7pm about his amazing cameras that he makes himself from scratch. All of Wayne's cameras are 4x5 cameras that he fabricates in his wherehouse in Arizona. Wayne showed with Joel Peter Witken last year and with Billy shire Fine Art this year. An example of Wayne's work is a camera he made out of a 12-year-old girl's human skull that works perfectly. He also made a camera out of a 500 year old human skull that was a monk in Tibet. Wayne also made an underwater 4x5 camera out of a hunk of found glass and milled aluminium. The Camera can withstand a depth of 200 feet under sea water. He photographs ship wrecks and underwater shrines and alters with it that are amazing. When someone buys one of wayne's cameras they sign an agreement with him that he can use the camera when he wants to do more photos with it and in doing so you the owner of the camera get the #2 print in the edition of every photo taken with your camera for life.

All of his photos are editions of 10-20. So by buying a camera you will also be buying many photographs to go with it. He also made camera that has 2 pumps on either side of the lens that contain HIV Positive blood in them. The pumps push the HIV Positive blood back in forth across the lens to cause a natural red filter and Wayne uses the camera to shoot portraits of people who are HIV positive. The cameras are amazing, the photos are amazing. He has also made a roadside alter camera made out of wood and human bones that he only shoots roadside alters along the Mexican border.

There is even more to describe but you really do have to experience it for yourself. Please come down to The Shooting Gallery Monday night 5pm-7pm and sit in on wayne's lecture. He truly is an amazing and wonderful artist. If you like photography you will love this. Please don't miss this. It is open to the public & free of charge. You will be blown away, I promise.

Justin

The Shooting Gallery
839 Larkin St
SF CA 94109
415-931-8035
http://www.shootinggallerysf.com

I'm a sucker for robots and rockets, so I knew I HAD to head over to the Maker Faire on Sunday in San Mateo with my geek pals. I witnessed everything from a gigantic electronic giraffe to the fiery fun of The Crucible. As I ate corn dogs and popcorn, I watched kids battle each other with robots. I saw hippies wiz by on their Segways (I still think there should be Segway jousting). And I had fun running into old pals like Grant Imahara (from "Mythbusters"). I got to show off my LED throwies skillz at the Graffiti Research Lab: Geek Mural. Plus I couldn't help but stand in complete awe at the expansive LEGO train exhibit from the Bay Area LEGO Users' Group and Train Club.

It reminded me a lot of how I wish those county fairs in my homestate of Kansas were. I was a 4-H crafting geek. I wasn't into raising cattle or training dogs for the blind, I was all about making bead dolls and tissue box cozies. Of course, if there had been ANY robotics course I would have dropped everything to take that! After all, the two best pals I could ever want would have been R2-D2 and K-9. But alas, there weren't any robots for me in the dusty midwest.

Thanks to Maker Faire, I could at least pretend I was a kid again. As I snapped photos of little kids dissecting mechanical frogs, standing in front of rockets 10 times their size and giggling as they crashed battle bots into each other via remote control, I couldn't help but smile. It's obvious that a fair like this helps ignite the imaginations of the next generation of geeks. And that's pretty cool in my book.

Be sure to check out this video of the highlights from my geek pal