Austin
4×5 Color Negative, Fujicolor Crystal Archive Lightjet Print
42″ x 50″ x 0″
$7500
In the summer of 2019, I was invited to attend the artist-in-residence program at The Varda Artist Residency aboard the S.S. Vallejo, a historical houseboat in Sausalito, California. The Vallejo was originally built in 1897 as a passenger ferry in Portland, Oregon, known as the O&CRR Ferry No. 2. After falling into disuse in Portland, it was transported to the San Francisco Bay in California, where it was used as a ferry between Vallejo and Mare Island until the end of World War II.
It was later purchased and repurposed as a houseboat by a group of artists led by Jean Varda and quickly became a social hub for the leading figures in the San Francisco area counterculture scene of the 1950’s and 1960s including Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gordon Onslow Ford, Alan Watts, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Agnes Varda, Maya Angelou, and Phillip K Dick. After the sudden death of Jean Varda in 1971, the boat began to change hands and deteriorate but was later bought and restored as a private residence in the early 2000’s and has been home to The Varda Artist Residency since 2014.
The S.S. Vallejo, incidentally, is also fully haunted. One evening during the first week of living on the ship, a female spirit paid me a visit outside the window beside my bed. Her visit made it clear to me that I, like her, was just another entity passing through. So in honor of the past, present and future spirits aboard the Vallejo, I began to make large format photographs of myself and my fellow artists-in-residence as ghostly figures in particularly charged locations of this extraordinary vessel.