Beemouse Laboratories

I decided that I wanted to give some background on the photos that I’m offering in my pay-what-you-want print sale.

So, today:

Sad breakfast, 2007

I was sitting outside last summer, playing with seed pods from my Chilean glory vine (Eccremocarpus scaber). That vine grows like a mad thing in Seattle and produces the most beautiful brilliant red-orange tubular flowers, which hummingbirds love. The seed pods are produced copiously at the end of summer. I decided to take some photos of the pods with a few props that were laying around.

Here’s some of the pods on my vine:

And here is the vine in bloom:

Anyway, I have a bunch of these plastic figurines I got out of vending machines during a trip to Tokyo. Some of them are quite lewd. You put about 500¥ (roughly $5 USD) into a vending machine (non-lewd figurines cost much less) and out comes a random, meticulously manufactured misogynistic toy! They come unassembled in a little plastic bubble with a pamphlet showing all the other mostly-naked figurines in that line, and it’s quite fun popping their arms and heads etc. onto their torsos, or fitting their little accessories into the right slots. I’m pretty sure the figurine in Sad Breakfast is a girl wearing a bra and panties, sitting on the floor drying herself with a towel (her accessory), but if you take her towel away– oh no! she is revealed in all her indecency!– which explains her pained expression and why she’s holding one arm protectively across her chest.

So in “Sad breakfast,” we see the doll without her hair, one arm detached, holding a fork from a different vending machine toy. The breakfast is half of an unripe Chilean glory vine pod, arranged on a clump of moss pulled from a damp stone wall. The background is a green piece of paper with bits of natural material in it, which I was keeping around for wrapping paper.

I used a small Daylight Compact Lamp for overhead lighting, in addition to strong sunlight coming through the windows. I shot this with my Canon EF 50mm prime lens and the Canon EF 12 extension tube. (It’s a poor man’s way to shoot decent macro photos.)

If you’re wondering exactly how big the items in the photo are, here’s a photo that shows how the clump of moss and some of the seeds compare to the size of my hand.

Honestly, it’s hard to separate myself enough my this image to even imagine what other people see when they look at it. My first emotion is laughter, because WTF is happening in this photo? I mean look, her arm isn’t even attached. She won’t even get to eat this breakfast unless someone comes along to help her out. Even if she could eat it, she would be eating unripe Chilean glory vine seeds. No wonder she looks forlorn. What does it all mean?!

In truth, the little Japanese toy girls always make me feel kind of morose; they are demeaning in a so-bizarre-it’s-(maybe)-funny-(sometimes) sort of way. I guess this photo might be a way of lightening up something I find frightening, or gaining control over something I don’t understand. In general, the act of conjuring up anything surreal, whether it’s through photography or illustration, is pretty complicated and cathartic for me. So much of my childhood was surreal that when I create surreal things myself, I think it soothes my brain a bit– my brain says, “Yes, this is familiar; we know this.”