26 ---fill in the blank---

jeff brouws - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)

jeff brouws

eric tabuci - twentysix abandoned gasoline stations (after ed ruscha)

I Touched it...

Recently while making a routine trip to the UK Fine Arts Library I decided to check info-cat (the uk online catalog) again to see if UK housed a copy of one of my current inspirations... and to my surprise they did.  Lucky for me as a Graduate Student/ Instructor i have access to the closed stacks.  I can't believe they plastered this thing with stickers.  It makes me want to punch them.

Here is the title page... for those of you unfamiliar with Ed Ruscha's books, if this is a first edition, which i doubt, it has a value of a few K,  although some Kentucky douche thought it appropriate to place an ellipsis after the title on this page, and the library plastered it with their logo and stickers so it's likely not worth anything.  Of course that would make Ruscha proud as he made so many as a means of keeping the books from becoming a commodity.

Just a view of the inside of the book, it consists of 31 offset press prints of images he commissioned to be photographed by an LA commercial photographer from a helicopter.  I am currently in the process of finishing my adaptation of this book which has a flexible title (currently 204 parking lots) it is a stack of 6 reproductions using screen captures from google maps of the same parking lots.

A Website... Finally ( www.travisshaffer.com )

fourty-one walmart supercenters # 31
8" x 8" silver gelatin print

After a visiting some friends in Lvl (louisville, ky) I have found a simple and clean means of managing my website that actually has resulted in it having content.....

My designer friend Ricky (www.dressedinvalue.com) led me to quite an awesome site builder of sorts... and set it up for me as i am web/code illiterate.

On it you can find my recent and not so recent Artwork and CV.

An-My Lê (Robert C. May Lecture Series)

An-My Lê
M-246 Semi Automatic Weapon, Khawr Al Amaya Oil Terminal, Iraq, 2007
archival pigment prints
Edition of 5
40 x 56 1/2 inches

At the University of Kentucky we are privileged with the funds to bring four contemporary photographers in each semester to present a lecture on their work and hang a small show in the University Museum.

An-My Lê was the first of the two spring semester lectures...
She recieved her MFA From Yale in the 90's and has shown everywere including the coveted MOMA!

As an artist, and not a critic... i'll spare you my opinion of the quality of her work and just say that the obvious Hiroshi Sugimoto reference was an interesting one to me, and conceptually this work and his seascapes are so very different. Check her work out via the g-OO-gle.