stacy oborn

Sometimes obvious things are the most amusing. And the most telling.

My favorite directions in the world are the ones to be found on cheap, road-side bought Chinese fireworks:

Light Fuse and Get Away.

Not that I’m a particularly volatile person, or one for whom things explode around her. Rather that I am often the one who prefers the pointed phrase and ambiguous context.

Things that went bang! often had gentle or ethereal names:
Friendship pagoda. Happy lantern. Starball contribution.
(I never understood the last one.)

My point, if there is one: if labels are to be applied, then I prefer the ones that are willfully contradictory, full of spark and fire, and burn fast and bright in their short time here.

I am a photographer and a writer. I write to wrestle things out in the open from a place from within, and also to keep myself honest (when I get “blocked” it’s only ever because I’m not ready to see something difficult and true flatly stated). I photograph because I can’t stop staring at the world or at some of the people in it, because other people’s eyes for things knock me out and I’d like to be able to answer them in kind (I’ll see your bird in mid-flight and raise you one reclined nude with a terrific braid of hair), and for all the loaded phrasing, I still believe in beauty.

I read and listen and look widely. As much as my means afford me, I will always travel to see great art. I thrive most when carried away by lofty obsessions. My current obsessions include contemporary Japanese photography; Eastern aesthetics; the divide between Eastern methodologies of visual investigation versus Western ones and images of birds.

This space is the pre-verbal second draft of my interior monologue. I often wonder about specific things and concerns for long periods of time, let them percolate, and then figure out what problems or questions they are presenting me. Oftentimes questions lead only to more questions, seldom ever any concrete realizations. I find that I am more at ease with a bagful of questions than with a bagful of answers.

My name is Stacy Oborn and welcome to the space in between.

"My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking; that is to say: heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity."

(John Barth)