HEY LOVELIES!
Sorry about the brief hiatus, a lot of exciting things have been happening! Want to hear about one of them? The amazing Jon Paciohas been working with Project Survive to create some amazing art!
In honor of Jon’s amazing work, we asked him to tell us a little bit about himself and his work to feature here on this blog! Here’s what he had to say about his background:
I’m originally from Virginia Beach, VA and went to Virginia Tech for Industrial Design. Currently, I’m an in-house Sr. Graphic Designer for a product design firm in Brooklyn called Crye Precision. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for about three and a half years now.
My experience as a photographer: It’s always been a passion of mine. I’m surrounded by a lot of peers that are also passionate about photography, and we all try to shoot as much as possible. I also do a good amount of product photography at my current job, but my favorite things to capture are cityscapes/landscapes, textures, and people. There is something inherently visceral about freeze-framing a moment in time. Sometimes you capture things to remember and reflect, other times to understand or learn. But whichever you do, you’re visually creating something that tells a story or evokes an emotion, and I love that sensation, and I think anybody that has ever taken a picture has had that feeling at one point or another.
And when asked how he got involved with 2x12 and Project Survive, he tells us:
I met Emily through a 2x12 fundraiser in Williamsburg and offered my services as a web designer and photographer for Project Survive, which is something I’m very honored to be a part of as I personally have survivors in my family. I think it’s a wonderful project that tells a strong story and it deserves a lot of attention.
Jon also has a really incredible blog that he calls Taken/Given. He tells us:
I wanted to convey that sensation [of creating something that tells a story or evokes an emotion] in a mutual sense by creating compositions of combined photographs taken separately by two people in different areas. I then asked Rachel Kim, who is a freelance graphic designer in Los Angeles, to collaborate with me and curate the blog. Our concept is simple: “Taken/Given is a collaborative art project … that observes the dichotomy and harmony between individual perspectives through the strange order in chaos of paired photography.”
The project name “Taken/Given” is derived from our artistic process. A series of photographs are captured (taken) by one person and then submitted (given) to the other. The latter person then creates a diptych composition after capturing their own set of photographs, either before or after viewing the original submissions. The format can be both flexible and strict – some compositions are created out of complete randomness whereas others are created out of a more intentional, calculated, or matched perspective. It challenges the viewer to think: Which one is which?
I think the project is especially intriguing because Rachel and I share a very similar aesthetic and appreciation for both photography and design. We’ll go off on our own to capture these moments in our everyday lives within things we do, places we go, people we see, and then share our photos with each other – discovering these amazing instances where there’s a very strange sense of synchronicity in our sets, even though we’re thousands of miles apart (although sometimes we shoot together in the same city). We even post compositions made using images we shoot on our mobile phones. It’s amazing how things just click sometimes. The entire process is explorative, entertaining, and overall very fulfilling… And I think what we post as our final product conveys our mutual desire for creating a narrative – and it’s in the meshing of our photographs that we turn separately captured moments into a canvas of shared experiences.
