For the past few years, I've slowly been working on a project called The Weather. The conceptual center of the project is the Weather Man and his hands. As the be-suited white Weather Man (a proxy for the white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy and the havoc it has wreaked on the planet), he IS the weather — no longer just reporting a science-based guess culled from historic data, but embodying the storms and disasters of our own making. The Weather, Vol. 1 was a proof of concept: working in a green screen studio, I reenacted some of the Weather Man's classic gestures, alongside two CMYK screen prints relating cartoon imagery, 3D modeling, climate disaster, and televised reportage. The Weather, Vol. 2 is a focused study of one component of the Weather Man's movement: his hands — considering the hands of art, entertainment, communication, technology, religion, and politics, in the execution of one animation.
Who helped
- Emily Corazon Nelson Lawrence
- Elizabeth Stoner
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A scan of frame 73 within the "dream/drug sequence" in The Weather, Vol. 2. A pink cartoon hand, absent a body, appears mid-spin in this drawing. It pivots on its index finger. Its thumb and pinky, like arms, extend out from the palm, offering balance. The hand gives us its backside, which very much resembles a butt. This pose and about 30 others in this sequence are borrowed from Disney's Aladdin (1992). The background is green construction paper.
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This is a section of the "dream/drug sequence" within The Weather, Vol. 2. In this short loop, a pink hand performs a quick shuffle step, pirouettes, then walks along the edges of the frame. During that first portion, the background is green. As its walk continues, more disembodied hands join the hand and the animation switches to light blue contour lines on a white background. As the hands fill the screen, they run out of room and blob into each other. The section ends with a nearly-full screen and abruptly loops back to the pink, dancing hand.
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A photograph of a 4-color screen print called Lightning Striking Again from 2018. A 4-color print, also called a process or CMYK print, splits the four color channels of an image into four unique images, enabling full-color images. In this image, two rubbery pink arms reach in from the right. A photographic image of lightning striking at night over the Washington D.C. skyline, which appears to be printed on fabric, drapes over the bottom arm. At the bottom of the image, a cartoon lightning bolt smiles. The arms and fabric were modeled and rendered in a 3D modeling software called Blender.
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This image shows one stage in the screen-printing process of Lightning Striking Again. The prints on paper are arranged in a two-by-two grid on a metal drying rack. The yellow, magenta, and black color channels have been printed on three of the four paper sheets. The last paper has only the yellow and magenta channels. Registration marks are visible in the bottom right of each print.
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A photograph of a 4-color screen print called Sundowning from 2018. Two rubbery pink arms reach in from the right. A pillow printed with a sunset image droops over the bottom arm. The hand on the top arm, situated in front of the pillow, holds a pose of presentation. On the left, a cartoon rain cloud spills large, cyan raindrops. The cloud smiles. The arms and fabric were modeled and rendered in a 3D modeling software called Blender.
image description
This image shows one stage in the screen-printing process of Sundowning. The prints on paper are arranged in a two-by-two grid on a metal drying rack. The yellow, cyan, and black color channels have been printed on one of the four paper sheets. The other papers have only the cyan and black channels printed. Registration marks are visible in the bottom right of each print.