I Made-Up a Picture Hanging Technique! (and filmed some pretty adorable footage of Petra)

Petra is almost 3 months old. The collection of pictures meant to hang on her wall is almost 5 months old... I've been procrastinating putting them up because 1) I'm not very good at arranging things, and 2) I'm very good at procrastinating.

Matt's recent appendectomy made him a perfect candidate (as the resident-artist-with-more-than-a-few-spare-moments) to help me get the images on the wall. When I laid them out, I kept finding myself naturally putting them into a grid, which ruined the effect I was going for: I wanted the images to look crowded on the wall giving the room a fuller feel. I was also trying to pay homage to my dad's similar nautical theme the den he had in the house I grew up in - the crowded, global nicknacks leant to an air of travel that I wanted.

1) I measured the area on the wall I wanted to fill.

2) Then I laid out that area on the floor and arranged the pictures in it over and over until I got a configuration that pleased me.

Matt laid out an initial pattern for the images that gave each pictures an inch or two of breathing room. The arrangement looked nice, but again, I wanted to have a crowded feeling. After some rearranging and the addition of a few blank frames, we came up with this - "french gallery" he called it - layout; there is a diagonal sweep and the sizes are deliberately varied in their positions.

3) Next I flipped all the frames over exactly where they were laying.

4) I laid tissued paper over the frames and marked where the hanging holes were.

5) Then, I taped the tissue paper to the wall* and proceeded to place the nails, in the marked places.

6) After getting all the nails in place, I hung the pictures up to make sure the translation from floor wall worked.

(*I ended up moving two of the images around after the tissue paper draft on the wall. Even after putting the nails in the new configuration, I left an image off until after I put up all the pictures of the wall paper. Then, I redrew in darker marker where I thought the new placement of the picture should go, approved, and added the nail. Glad I double checked before adding unnecessary holes!)

7) Finally I removed the images, tore down the tissue paper - leaving the nails behind -and hung up all the images.

Viola!

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Who says you need to buy toys for baby?!

Petra had a grand time playing with the tissue paper, kicking and crumbling it awkwardly in her new grip; it was the first time I saw her stimulate herself without a cooing parent over her!

I filmed Kansas.

While most of my fun and not-so-moody videos can be seen here, on my minorheroine Vimeo account, pieces - like the one below - that I spend some time editing or conceiving can be viewed on my grown-up, professional Vimeo here, searchable under Danica Complex.

This is one of those pieces that serendipitously came together from the hodge-podge, thoughtless snippets of video I collected over the course a Christmas visitation to my parents who were on a vicarage in Kansas in 2008.

This first video was the product of listening to the piece Gymnopédie No.1 (featured in the piece). Whether or not I ever heard the music before didn't make it any less nostalgic and it conjured up images from my most recent adventure: a train ride across the country. On thinking on trains I remembered my habit of running out to watch the trains pass behind the school from my job as a clerk in college. One of the cinema professors caught me during one of my escapes and stopped to stare with me at the beast chugging by. Before trotting off he turned to me and said, "Wow... let's make a movie about trains!"

I think I am particularly fond of the "time" theme that accidentally presented itself throughout the film. We see young faces and old hands, old-fashioned words in the cards and new ones being scribbled down - all the while the train moves forward through landscapes, days, and nights.

I meant to create three video pieces to mirror a tradition style of composition that is the sum of three movements usually with a pattern of brisk, ballad, and ending long & lively. I just didn't have enough video to fulfill this pattern, so I satisfied myself with two contrasting paces in the different videos using the same piece of music. In addressing this limitation, other interesting contrasts arose - I found that the first piece which utilized the ballad was more tightly themed, but very loose in structure. This second piece has a distinct narrative that seems to follow the imagination of a protagonist into a whimsical world separated by images of fire. We also see a train again, tying it back to the first film.