BUNDLANDIA

Winter Wren Day One: Wandering through La Grande

2012-01-16T22:46:00.000-08:00

For my first full day in La Grande, I decided to wonder around and see the city. Equipped with my 5D Mark II and my wide angle 20mm f/2.8 lens, I took a stroll around "The Big."

Winter Wren Day One: Goals and Intentions

2012-01-15T15:24:00.000-08:00

Some weird synchronicities are happening in La Grande, Oregon.

As I sit down, looking out my west facing windows, I'm listening to Laura Gibson's new album, La Grande, which one can listen to on NPR. Her cool, whispering words are rocking me into sublime silence, while I watch the snow fall outside my window. I occupy a nearly empty room, a room of my own, and I am looking into the week ahead of me, lingering on the edge of my consciousness.

Around me are boxes filled with projects and paper and paints and external hard drives that I have brought with me. They all represent loose commitments I've made to myself in the last weeks and months and years around making and yearning and wanting, but have somehow remanded as floating wisps lacking action, just desires in my head, and items on to-do lists.

This post is a chance for me to delineate my goals and intentions for the next week. Partially my desire to share it with you all, my faithful readers, and partially to vocalize what I want to do so that I actually do these things this next week. Some of my goals are very art-making orientated, and some are very personal me oriented

My goals
- build myself an artist website using dreamhost.com and wordpress
- plan out MIMESIS: FANTASY AND FRIENDS, a project for which I got RACC funding
- put all of my old Feyonce videos up on Vimeo and youtube
- clean up my desktop and photo archive
- hand make some books using monastery binding
- drive to an unknown place and photograph myself in the landscape in costume
- send art to people via snail mail
- make a painting
- go on a walk everyday
- mediate and do yoga everyday
- take a nap when my body feels tired
- get a good amount of normal, healthy sleep
- destroy my old laptop

In typical Wayne fashion, this all feels like a lot and is probably more than I can get done in a week.

I've gotten a lot of weird responses from friend when I have told them I was heading to La Grande for a residency: Why there? What's in La Grande? Why would you want to spend a week there?

If anything, this residency is a reset button.

What I love most about residencies like this (having gotten to spend two weeks at Caldera in October 2009), and very unlike vacations, is that I get to leave all of the confines of my usual daily living. No work (well, I have to do a little, cause I didn't get it all done before I left), no daily commute, no chores around the house, no friends' shows to go see, no performances to make., no boys to date. Just me, in a new and different place.

And me, alone, in a studio, which scares the hell out of me.

I am not always the best on being studious in the studio. As a photographer, the world is my studio. I edit my photos at my desk and then print them out at PNCA. As a performance artist, I use my living room as a rehearsal space, and my bedroom to choreograph. In my numerous years of art practice, I have never needed a dedicated studio space that is my own. And when I have sat in such place, I feel the onslaught of boredom starting inch its way into my life and I get restless and turn to other things. And thus this list of goals which I have laid out to the world, and everyone reading this missive.

I would not be here without the generosity of Signal Fire and their Winter Wren residency. Many thanks goes out to Ryan Pierce, Amy Harwood, and Daniela Molnar whose work has made Signal Fire a viable resource for artists. Thanks to Ryan for turning the upstairs of the house he's renting out and allowing it to be a residency space for artists. Also, some big thanks go out to numerous people who have directly supported me on the trip out here. Thanks to John Brennen for allowing me to use his car, enabling me to be my usual hoarder/pack rat self, and to Mikey Sexton for letting me borrow his Canon EOS 20mm f/2.8 lens, which captures landscape so well. Also, due is given to Regional Arts and Culture council, for funding my project MIMESIS: FANTASY AND FRIENDS.

And now onto to unpacking and getting things done.

The Bathers opens tonight

2011-11-05T08:14:00.001-07:00

I am currently exhibiting 13 photographs at the bar East End. The opening is tonight, from 6pm to 8pm.

THE BATHERS
A photographic exhibition by Wayne Bund
East End
203 SE Grand
November 5th - November 30th

THE BATHERS centers around the act of bathing, relaxing, and swimming in water. These images include men immersing themselves in three different bodies of water in the Pacific Northwest: the hot springs at Breitenbush Hot Springs, a private beach on the Sandy River, and the public nude beach on the Columbia River at Rooster Rock State Park. Heralding back to "The Swimming Hole" by Thomas Eakins, and "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, these images provide a context of leisure in the 21st century. This collection of images creates a direct engagement with the quality of light, landscape, and the male body.

PNCA MFA Graduation Speech

2010-05-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

I delivered this speech on May 23rd, 2010, as part of the Pacific Northwest College of Art Graduation ceremony.

GRADUATION SPEECH

Thank you to everyone one, friends, family members, fellow students, for taking the time to be here today to witness this event. It is an honor of deepest kind to be speaking in front of all of you, representing my MFA class along side my fellow speaker, Mindy McGovern. And it’s kinda cool to be back here at the Tiffany Center, where I had my high school prom 11 years ago.

Today marks an important day. It signals the end of a journey for a specific group of individual. This day will be remembered forever as the day for the last episode of Lost. After six years on, the TV show LOST ends tonight. But I’ll get back to that later.

First I want to tell you a story, which I have called “The Allegory of Facebook.”

It is morning, and I am awoken, by the light on my face. I open my eyes to see the shadows of my curtains playing on my bedroom wall. The first few glimpses of day are shining through the blue cloth in my windows, bringing me out of my dreams in into the world that is my bedroom.

Then I do what I do every morning.

I open my computer and get on facebook.

After strolling through pics from Tom Manley’s rocking kegger, and Greg Ware’s post about his amazing buttered toast he had for breakfast. I noticed Tanner Dobson posted a link to an article on Yahoo.com entitled “Worst Paying College Degrees.” It was a list of what Yahoo deemed as the lowest paying jobs as defined by your bachelors degree. Number one on the list was Social Work, and number two was Elementary Education. Now as someone who was a kindergarten teacher for four years of my life, I tried to not take offense to that. It was a greater relief to know that a degree in Fine Arts was only number nine on this list, right behind careers in Theology, Horticulture, and Hospitality and Tourism. Good to know an art degree has some clout.

Then I look at someone’s status update about the horrible state of the economy. I can’t help but remember my first few weeks at PNCA in the fall of 2008, as the market started to crumble. Everyday on the drive to work I heard on NPR about a different bank falling apart.

Then I look at someone’s link to the huffington post, about how some BP exec called the oil spill in the gulf small compared to the size of the ocean.

I am discouraged, and it is only morning. I realize I am stuck in a room of shadows and forms that is not fully reality. I can see that outside of my room there exists a world, outside of my status updates, and my party pics, outside of my grad studios, my critique class, and the PNCA campus, There is a world that awaits for me.

I log of facebook, close my laptop, and I leave my room. End of story.

When I look at the dire state of the world outside my room, I can’t help by be discouraged. The United States is still recovering from the great economic turmoil since the Great Depression. We are still embattled in a war in the Middle East. The oil spill in the Gulf Coast threatens to be the greatest environmental disaster of the decade.

Yet amidst all of this, I can’t help but ask, what is the purpose of an art degree? Then I am reminded of the role of the artist. I believe it is the responsibility of the artist to affirm that which is beautiful.

Now, if I have learned anything in grad school, it is that beauty is as subjective from one person to the next. I create beauty in my photographs by representing the natural landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. My fellow MFA colleagues do this quite differently. Nashoba Temperly depicts and presents police brutality, for the viewer to re-experience in the public sphere. Laura Hughes plays with the luminance of light, and how it glows, and distorts the viewers perceptions. Allison Halter dances and moves her body with the greatest of grace. Some of us seek to subvert, some represent, others looks to name that which exists right in front of our eyes. Despite that our visions of what is beautiful differs from one person to the next, I believe that this is our common thread. That we seek to name and affirm our individual visions from shapes and shadows in our minds into the actual in the world.

Let me tell you another story:
I entered grad school somewhat broken. My mother had passed away only 5 months previously, and I felt so lost in those first few months of making. What I found was an amazing collection of 15 people who would become my dearest friends. I am not sure I can appropriately describe the growth and change that has occurred in the last 21 months, but I am so thankful for being a part of this graduating class. And thanks to MK Guth and Arnold J Kemp for leading us through this challenge and growth.

Now back to Lost. For those of you that don’t know, LOST is about a group of people stuck on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.

To tell you a little secret, I’ve never seen an episode of Lost, but I know enough about the world to tell that this day, May 23rd, 2010 will live on in infamy, not as the day that 15 graduate students received their Masters Degrees, but as the end of a television era. LOST is this decade’s Twin Peaks and lives freshly in the collective consciousness of my generation. . It is so important that my cousin Dawny decided to stay in Seattle to go to a LOST party rather than attend this graduation ceremony.

You see, in Lost, the inhabitants of the island are stuck in their own version of Plato’s Cave. They are in a liminal place that is neither reality, nor any world they know of.

Fellow graduating students: We, too, are in a liminal place. For these brief two hours, we are neither PNCA student, nor an inhabitant of the world outside. Not yet at least. The ideas and concepts we have learned these past few years are still shadows and forms on the wall for us to look at. We have the chance to leave behind the hermetically sealed cave of art school, and walk into the bright light of day. This ritual of graduation gives each one of us a chance to enter into the world a new being.

As we leave this room today, as the Faculty stands at the threshold between this place and the next, we are offered the ability for transformation. We can leave behind the shackles of school and enter in the day as citizens of the world, naming and affirming beauty in the world

Thank you.

New work: Caldera Residency

2009-12-10T08:21:00.001-08:00

These following photos are a product of a residency I had at Caldera. For the last two weeks of October, I was able to spend two weeks in eastern Oregon at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Alex Pearlstein, Kate Gilmore, and Stephen Slappe were the guest artists on the trip, and I was very lucky to get to work with them. The residency was in part a collaboration between the MFA program I am enrolled in at PNCA and Caldera.

I am currently investigating myth and fantasy through the realms of photography and performance. I am using the hero's journey as a lens to insert myself into mythic narratives with the intention to create stories that speak about play, process, and transformation. My goal is to subvert conventions of storytelling, such as plot, character, and setting, to invoke in the viewer feelings of wonder and confusion.

The Stag King

The Captive Unicorn

The Princess Transforms

FEYONCE: A Star is Born

2009-11-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

First Beyonce, then Farah Fawcett, and then Tina Turner.

What began as a little tribute to Beyonce at a Radical Faerie gathering turned into the birth of a star: Feyonce Then there was her first offical visit to Portland complete with signing a limited edition poster, and then the tribute to Miss Tina at Kick/Ball/Change. In the last year, Feyonce has managed to attract a fan base far and wide.

This last weekend weekend Feyonce marked a new chapter in drag history, the life of Jessie Spano. At a recent Homomentum, Feyonce took on the fictional character from Saved by the Bell, played by Elizabeth Berkley. To anyone raised in the 80's and 90's, the episode where Jessie breaks down from an addiction to caffeine pills is a cultural milestone, to say the least.

Here is Feyonce's third offical tribute (I'll post the Proud Mary video when I get a copy of it):
Feyonce does Jessie Spano

"I'm so excited... I'm so scared"

" I want to love you, feel you, wrap myself around you"

"Tonight's the night we're going to make it happen"

(photos thanks to qpdx.com)

Performance info: Feyonce and Tragedy reunite on stage to pay tribute to their favorite "Saved by the Bell" moment: the epic and disastrous breakdown of Jessie Spano due to caffeine pills. This performance is from the November 14th Homomentum at the Egyptian Club."

New work

2009-09-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

I am experimenting by using a combination of photography, video, and collage, to explore themes of myth and fantasy. I am using sequential narrative similar to the language of 1980's video games such as Super Mario Bros and Final Fantasy. Through this self-referential short story format, I animate myself within a constructed landscape to explore identity, memory, and dreams.

I showed some new work in critique yesterday. This is a new step in my art making, seriously departing from my previous line of work (still big images, feyonce, etc.). The interesting thing personally is that a lot of the themes I've previous explored (performance, theatre, story telling) is combining with this new format. What really excited me about this work is that I get to make art about my own experience with video games.

Salvation opens tonight

2009-09-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

Salvation
Video work by Wayne Bund

Exhibition Opening:
September 3rd, 6pm-8pm

Exhibition Runs:
September 3rd - September 25th

Gallery Hours
9am-5pm

LODGE GALLERY
Allied Work Architecture
1532 SW Morrison St
Portland OR 97205

Taking the role of the passive viewer, these seemingly ordinary videos depict the view from a New York City subway window. These videos seek to provide vestibules of reverie in playing out the tensions between the varying forms of landscape: the inner metallic guts of the underground, the small glimpses of bodies of water, entourages of ambient strangers.

Wayne Bund is an MFA candidate in PNCA's Visual Studies program. He straddles the line between performance and photography, using persona and images to question notions of identity and authorship. He has exhibited at PNCA, Disjecta, and the Mark Wooley Gallery, and is performing as part of PICA's TBA Festival 09.

View part of the video on Youtube

QUEER SHOW: my first time curating.

2009-07-01T13:30:00.001-07:00

A show that I helped curate open tomorrow at First Thursday. I co-curated the show with my friends and fellow PNCA students Finn Grey and Sarai Black. This is my first adventure into curating, so I am excited to hear feedback around it. I enjoyed the task of making a theme, putting out a call, getting the word out, and then choosing the entered work around a theme. I also put one of my own photos in the show (does that break the rules of curating?).

The Woods

2009-02-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

This morning I took a trip to the family farm in Boring. Equipped only with a backpack consisting of my new 5D Mark II, some costumes, and a towel, I trekked into the wild forest near the Sandy River. This is a forest in which I spent my childhood wandering and playing.

This series is my attempt at just getting in front of the camera and playing with no one looking. I wanted to invoke notions of myth, character, and performance using gender and landscape.

The Princess is lost.

The Princess searches for home.

The Princess curtsies.

The Princess submits.

Pan arrives.

Proud Pan.

Pan's mischief.

A messenger arrives.

In a Nook of the Coffee Hosue

2009-02-01T14:46:00.000-08:00

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough
-IN A STATION OF THE METRO, Ezra Pound

This image is a compilation of various photos I took of Faerie Coffee yesterday. I wanted to try to capture the sense of my community around, and felt that a single image couldn't quite get the sense of everyone together. This images reminds me of Pound's simple modernist poem, the way the faces of these different men activate the space with life and vivacity. Not quite the ghostly way Pound was looking at the modernism of the people in public transportation, but maybe the post-modern fashion in which these men are forming community and family new ways.

I've been wanting to create a panorama photo for a while. There are lots of places where the images don't exactly fit together (like with David Banyon's coat/ear, or Padme's shoulder), but I think the effect of the social gathering is captured in the casting of faces in a crowd into a single ensemble.

Many of these men have become a sort of new family for me. In fact I wrote an essay for the Pride Foundation about how I have found a family of choice with gay men in Portland. Perhaps I'll post that essay later....

To see the image larger, go to here

I believe in Sam Adams

2009-01-22T01:07:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday afternoon, and much to my surprise, JUST OUT, called for Mayor Sam Adams to resign. I thought it strange and out of proportion for them to follow in the shadow of fallacy being cast by the Oregonian by demanding Sam to resign. Though I must say, it has generated a storm response on the facebook/blogosphere/comment section, and I always like seeing a community in dialogue, even if it is merely messages being thrown back and forth. Here is my response which I posted in the comment section:

As a sometimes freelance writer for this publication, I am surprised at Just Out’s speed and choice with which to denigrate Mayor Sam Adams in this current heated dilemma. Outside of political endorsements and choosing individuals as “person-of-the-year” what other announcements does the editorial board at Just Out make? Just Out publishes a plethora of columns that are the expressions of individual writers: Marty Davis writes her page 3 commentary every week, and both Jim Radosta and Stephen Marc Beaudoin have regular columns. Yet, withholding previously mentioned endorsements and awards, when has the editorial board come together to publish an opinion in its 25 years of journalistic reporting? That a newspaper like the Oregonian publishes editorials on a daily basis is a healthy, vital, and needed part of journalistic expression. The timing for Just Out to make this political statement at this moment feels lop-sided, and appears like a child wanting to play in the big league.

As far as I know, Sam Adams has broken no crime. There was a sexual relationship between two consensual adults. I will admit I am let down and disappointed in being lied to, and wonder how Sam can be trusted, but am willing to let Sam's experience and commitment to leadership and change continue guiding our city. That he lied to the public during a campaign puts him to the moral scrutiny of every citizen of Portland. What type of person would want to withstand and live under such intense scrutiny? Only a person dedicated to service and leadership. Until evidence comes out otherwise (and apparently the Attorney General is planning an investigation), I am in full support of Mayor Sam Adams.

We've only just begun....

2009-01-22T00:59:00.001-08:00

I've been wanting to start a blog for a while now. In the midst of Obama entering office as our president, Sam Adam's admitting to having lied earlier, starting my second semester of my MFA program at PNCA, and putting up a show, a confluence of my creative juices and a desire to express myself have been boiling in the tea pot.

It is my intent that this blog will be a place to proclaim my opinions, post my art, and be on the web in a new, non-facebook way.