Rob Viscardis

some old digs

2011-03-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

in Mexico, dogs are nomads.

and doors kind of half invite you in.

found some nice ones

2010-12-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

I was going through some old negatives that I never printed, and found these two that I took at the farm I lived at in Haliburton.

And I also found this one, which makes me a little nostalgic about winter up north. Going up there pretty soon....can't wait.

portrait of the only

2010-10-19T14:20:00.001-07:00

here's the photo I did of the Only last year. This one seems to be a favourite. Hope you like it. See the whole blog HERE

a year of spilling

2010-10-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

So, I'm sitting in the Spill Cafe right now. Not an uncommon thing for me. I'm taking full advantage of the internet here, which I haven't done in a while. Sitting here listening to a singer songwriter sing to a room full of her best friends, I'm feeling very wistful about the spill in general. I love this place.

My last post was a little snippet from the project I did for Artsweek 2010. Sitting here, feeling all wistful in the Spill right now, I thought it might be cool to post one of the photos I did for artsweek last year - a picture of the spill. Taken from almost the exact spot I'm sitting in right now. This isn't just an ordinary picture however.

This was part of a series of 4 photos, that included 3 other of my favourite places. I called it Light Painting or something....

It might look like I just scribbled on the image in photoshop, but everything in the photo was captured in one exposure believe it or not. Maybe I'll explain a little bit, cause these photos seemed to confuse quite a few people.

After hours, it was dark outside and everyone was gone, I set up the tripod, and held open the shutter on my camera (actually Steve Kerslake held down the shutter for me in this photo because the battery died in my remote). Then, over the course of about 30 seconds, I ran around the spill with a flashlight, lighting up all the things that are bright in the photo. I spelt out the Spill, and made the lights look like they're on, and a bunch of other stuff... The lights from outside appear to be very bright from a 30 second exposure, and slowly added some detail to the whole room to surround my paintings. You don't see me in the photo because it was dark in the room, and I never pointed the light at myself, therefore I didn't show up. However, a happy accident occurred - as I was running back to the camera after doing everything, I haphazardly left the flashlight on, but luckily it perfectly underlined the wording!

It turned out to be quite a surreal series of photos, displaying some familiar venues in a very unfamiliar light.

I thought about putting a watermark on this photo, but I remembered that I already put my initials in the bottom left on the cabinet. heh I think I did that for all the other photos too. I might just post the other ones soon too. Hey, why not? I did the Spill, the Only, the Ossia and Pappas Billiards. Prints are for sale too...just a reminder. Thanks for reading and looking at this.

slanted cityscape

2010-09-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

This is a teaser of the work I'll be showing in this years Artsweek Peterborough. I don't want to give too much away, but this is one frame from basically an entire roll of film that I'm going to show at THE SPILL. It'll be up for a week, starting September 18th. Hope you can check it out my friends.

look it in the eye....

2010-08-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

....and you'll see your future.

I made this one nice and big so you can see nature at work in great detail. ('open in new window') The hawk is the king of all birds! It's at least mightier than the pigeon, that's for sure. This was quite the mangling show. Looks tasty, no?

stormy weather

2010-08-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

I think everyone loves taking pictures when they're travelling. I always like to travel simply for the purpose of taking pictures. Lately however, I've been driving around a lot for different reasons, such as going out of town to play gigs. This one night in the spring, we were driving down the 401 to Toronto in my van, and suddenly traffic came to a standstill. It was wierd because it wasn't rush hour, it wasn't raining or anything and there were no sirens around. A few minutes went by, and I noticed that the sky in the distance was flickering with sheet lightning. Maybe the traffic was messed up because people were slowing down to watch the sky. I managed to grab my camera and catch this photo when I probably should have been watching the road. It was probably the most interesting time I've had in a traffic jam.

2010-01-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

This photo is one of my favourites. It was a very somber day when I took this. It was cloudy out, and it had just rained, and it was in Haliburton, so obviously there wasn't really anyone around. It was during work hours. This is shot on a path right beside a school playing field. I don't really know what I was intending to shoot in the first place, just walking around an empty field, but I ended up seeing these ducks, and they were walking through this puddle...and it just looked kind of neat. The fact that I had a lomo supersampler toy camera added to the effect, giving it a sense of motion. Normally I shy away from shooting ducks, just cause they're so cliche, but you have to love those shots that are just unexpectedly magical. I think the sepia tone that I added to it really livens it up too.

2010-01-24T18:26:00.000-08:00

...speaking of calming experiences, there were many for me when I was travelling around BC. in this particular circumstance, we were travelling around, heading towards a music festival near Nelson, and we headed through this area that was known for having hot springs. we found some stupid resort that had hot springs in the title, but discovered they didn't actually have any. then we looked in local brochures and found no hot springs that wouldn't cost us a bunch of money to experience. eventually we got word of some hot springs along the highway somewhere, that people had just recently discovered. i forget exactly how we got the information, and how we found the place, but we found it, and this is what it looked like:

there was a forest, that was inclined, that led down to this river, or stream. as you can see in the one photo, there was an awesome waterfall. there were these neat cave-like things that the moving water had created, and since the water level was low, you could get inside them, and some had no water. one of the friends i was with had a digereedoo, and he was playing it inside one of these caves. it made a very cool sound.
the water was freezing! i was wading through it quite a bit to get some photos. this place was very picturesque. however, as cold as the water was, it was awesome, because at the sides of the river, if you dug down deep into the pebbles, and sand that was on the edge, hot water would start to fill the hole that you dug. when we arrived there, there was already some little hot-tubs made, and so we took advantage of them, and also made some of our own. it was really fun to go from the extremely cold water, to the hot water.
There were some people there when we got there, but they eventually left, so we had this spot to ourselves, and camped in the woods overnight. up the river a while, apparently there was a more populated hot spring, where people had created some sort of pump to bring up the hot water at a faster rate, and they had made tubs out of wood and stuff. we didn't really feel like going there though. we had found our little utopia in the woods.

ogopogo

2010-01-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

So, I think I will shift into a different gear with this post. This is a photo taken a couple years ago when I was in Kelowna BC, staying on the Okanagan lake.

There's a bit of a personal story to this. we were visiting some good friends who were living and working at the okanagan lake resort. we had a tent in their backyard. we partied pretty hard while we were there. one night, the 'beer olympics' were held. needless to say, we had a great time partying there for a week. near the end of the week however, i was getting exhausted, and was feeling reclusive about the whole situation for some reason. i thought that i needed to spend some time alone. so very impulsively, near sun-down, i decided to walk out into the woods that we had previously explored that were close to the resort grounds. i took my camera, a tent, and a pillow and that was about it. i didn't bring any food, because i didn't want to attract animals. the paths at the entrance of the woods boasted the existence of coyotes and bears and other animals of the sort. just as the sun was setting, and after about an hours walk into the woods, i found a cool little spot on a hill right above a cove of the lake. i pitched my sketchy tent, and relaxed for a while, watched the stars come out, and luckily i was tired enough to be able to get so sleep pretty quickly on the rocky slope i was camped out on. I definitely heard animals in the night, which kept things interesting. I woke up before sunrise, and went down to the lakeside to watch with my camera. it was incredibly calm, and it was exactly what i needed at the time. so this picture was taken at that moment. I only wish that I could escape to places like this more often. after hanging around down by the lake for a while, i headed back to the resort and had breakfast with my friends. definitely a good memory.

window shopping

2010-01-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

Since I'm on the topic of abandons, I thought I would post this photo of this abandoned room, or building or something that I came accross when I was in Manzanillo Mexico a couple summers ago. I was wandering around the resort I was staying at, which was super high-class, and went a little outside of the limits, and I started to notice that it was very quiet, and kind of creepy. There were all these really nice places that were just empty. I started looking inside windows, and trying to see what everything used to be, and upon looking inside one window, saw this scene:

It was pretty weird, because I couldn't tell what kind of place it was. I think there was a whole section of this resort that was in the process of being renovated or something. We were there during the off season, so it made sense. Later on in my adventures, I found an open door, which led to this big open area which was in the process of being demolished...although there was no one there. It was really creepy. I will post these pictures a little later on. I found some really interesting imagery in there, while bats were flying overhead. I'll also post some photos from other areas of Mexico that I explored.

no fixed address

2010-01-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

I captured these images on a sunny afternoon in Peterborough near GE, while I was waiting for my van to get a new muffler. I went for a walk with my camera, and stumbled upon this whole complex of buildings that had a fence around them, and there had obviously been a big fire in the building. I found my way through the fence and went investigating. It seemed that a fire had somehow started in the attic of one of the units, and it spread to all of them. I went inside several of the places and I could see daylight when I looked up. There had been quite a bit of damage, and I could tell it had been there for a while, since it was wet all over the inside of the units. Obviously rain had gotten in. The floors were really soggy, and I felt skeptical about walking inside, and once I did, I almost fell through, but managed to walk on the floor joists. Much of the former residents belongings were still inside... and there was mould everywhere. It was quite disturbing. I felt really weird vibes being in there. I took a lot of pictures, with black and white film, as well as digital colour shots. There were some rooms that had insulation from the ceiling all over the floor. The rain had obviously weighed it down, and caused it to fall to the floor. It was a huge mess. Again...I felt really weird being in there. I knew that this place wouldn't be around for long though, and I found some sort of justification in documenting the whole situation. I hope the people who lived there wouldn't freak out if they found out I was intruding in their former home. They seemed to have left it all behind though.... I captured some really powerful images in there...these are only a couple. Maybe I'll post some more at some point.

excess

2010-01-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

I think it was a nice day in the fall a while ago, and i was driving around in my van with a lady friend checking out the fall colours and attempting to capture them with my camera.We ended up pulling over for some reason or another, maybe so I could relieve myself...(my memory isn't the greatest) and i noticed this marshy looking area that's in the photo. I liked the bright green colour of it, so I moved closer, and noticed these two monitors nestled into the scenery. It kind of upset me, because we were in the middle of a pretty remote area, and obviously someone had just decided to dump their unwanted crap here. This image, although kind of gross looking, kind of makes a statement of how things have become these days.

ottonabee

2010-01-23T08:09:00.000-08:00

I thought I may as well make my first photo posting an older photo, so I can sort of work up to the new ones.

One day, a couple summers ago, a friend and I were adventuring around the river that runs through Peterborough called the Ottonabee, and we noticed a crane flying around, so we were kind of chasing it around, and I was trying to get photos of it. I eventually succeeded...after quite a struggle. It was a decent photo, but I'm not overly sentimental about it... generally all the wildlife photos I've gotten don't give me much of a rise for some reason. Anyway, while we were in the area, I noticed this old bike just sitting in the water rusting away, and it intrigued me. It looked like some little girls bike, and kind of made me think about how it got there...and whether or not the little girls angry father threw her bike over the edge of the bridge or something. It was right in the middle of the water...

2010-01-22T15:22:00.000-08:00