I went to Cape Alawa with my friend Alan, who is visiting from Thailand. It’s a long drive out there, to the very end of the Olympic Peninsula, not too far from Forks. I kept thinking about the recent good fortune the little town of Forks has had in the Twilight series of teen vampire novels. Of all the things to save the town from disappearing after the end of logging…

But walking along the beach on a cloudy, misty day, one can see the appeal of the landscape has to the gothic mind. With that in mind, I snapped a bunch of photos with my iPhone and the Shake-It photo app, that creates fake polaroids. I love the way all the colors turn out oversaturated and the images are all vignetted. They make every moment seem nostalgic, pregnant with import that is just beyond fathoming.

Click here for the full slideshow.

A haunting and beautiful film by Matthew Gordon Long, shot in British Columbia. Worth watching the whole thing. The official website is here.

The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo.

Just so you know– I was steampunk before steampunk had a name. Below is an old sculpture of mine, from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific:

Eugene Parnell, artifact from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific, 1997

Eugene Parnell, artifact from Lost Naturalists of the Pacific (detail), 1997

Part of my new show at Gallery 4Culture involves a simple, Myth-Busters type experiment: is it possible to replicate Bigfoot footprints with those giant wooden strap-on feet made famous by Ray Wallace in the 1970’s?

As the video shows, results are mixed. The average step reported in Bigfoot trackways is 48 - 60″. My target trackway was about 57″. For most ordinary individuals, taking steps large enough to replicate this spacing, with wooden feet strapped to your shoes, is simply not possible, at least not for any distance. My friend Jay Bryant, however, at 6 foot 6, is the exception that proves the rule.

In the video you can also see people interacting with the taxidermied bigfoot whose construction I have been chronicling here over the past few months. This is the effect I have wanted: to put you in a dark room with Bigfoot and a flashlight. It changes the experience completely from the open, well-lit group show in Kirkland. There is something pulse-quickening about carrying a flashlight into the dark, to see what you might find there, especially the big lantern type with the huge square batteries and over-arching handles, that bring memories of childhood campouts and thunderstorm-induced power failures. It’s simply primal.

Eugene Parnell: Bigfoot is probably real.

December 3 - 31, 2009

First Thursday reception: December 3, 2009 6 - 8 PM

Gallery 4Culture

101 Prefontaine Place South, Seattle

www.4culture.org/gallery

How do we know what we know about the natural world? Is it possible to deduce the existence of an animal without an identifiable carcass, neatly tagged, stuffed, and taxonomically labeled? If genuine Bigfoot remains were presented to the public, would they even be accepted as such?

Bigfoot is Probably Real is an interactive exhibit where visitors can use large wooden strap-on feet to  recreate the hoax bigfoot tracks which apparently explain the phenomenon; they can read just a small sampling of the thousands of eyewitness reports of Bigfoot sightings, and hear the audio from a genuine 911 emergency call made by an eyewitness.

Bigfoot is Probably Real also allows visitors to experience an actual Bigfoot encounter, as the artist presents the first actual taxidermied Bigfoot specimen available in the United States.

It is estimated that ten thousand first-hand sightings of Bigfoot have occurred since the 1950’s, when the phenomenon first attracted media attention. The most interesting, and some  would say convincing, aspect of these sightings is the consistent visual description of the creature. Is this due to the accuracy of the eyewitnesses’ memories, or is it due to the fact that so many media representations of the creature already exist? In other words, do we remember what we have actually seen, or what we think we should have seen? Is there a large, unclassified primate living in the forests of the Northwest? Many, many people have seen such an animal. Can their stories and descriptions be believed? What exactly is the relationship between the world of real animals in our environment and the animals of our dreams, our memories, our nightmares?

Taxidermied Bigfoot (detail), 2009. Urethane foam, steel, epoxy resin, glass, bigfoot hide, pigment. Photo: Eugene Parnell

This is the final installment of this series, you can find part one here. At the opening, a lot of people asked me what kind of hair or fur is covering this piece. It is actually musk ox, and it comes from a musk ox rug that I bought on eBay for $550.00 (which is actually a bargain compared to some others I had seen). I was originally planning on using an old bear skin rug  I had obtained, but I didn’t like the thinness of the hair; this one certainly remedies that. The hair is over a foot long in some places, and incredibly thick– too thick, in fact, to be believable, and has had to be thinned out quite a lot to look right.

Musk ox hair

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False Proof

September 11 - October 3 , 2009
Curated by Cable Griffith

Nola Avienne, Zack Bent, Jana Brevick, Drew Christie, Jonathan Gitelson, Eugene Parnell, and Samantha Scherer.

Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 6 - 8:30 PM

False Proof

It is human nature to linger on the threshold between rational thought and total fantasy, fact and fiction, known and unknown, natural and supernatural, regardless of religious or spiritual persuasion. A great many things in the universe defy explanation, and in some ways, we prefer it that way. Answers can sometimes be cold and decisive, shutting the door to the fundamental question at the root of creativity, “What if?” The artists in False Proof address several of these time-tested phenomena by creating work that exploits the bubbles we preserve between knowing and not knowing.

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This is part 4 of this series, you can see part three here. In the last installment, we saw the process for casting a body part as a hollow fiberglass and resin shell. In this post, we’ll look at the other casting method I use, solid casting with urethane plastic.

The left hand of Bigfoot, modeled in clay

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This is the third post in this series: for part one, go here. In part two, we saw how the body of the piece is cast and then carved from expandable urethane foam, and now let’s have a look at the finished mannequin:

Front view of the finished mannequin

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This is the second installment of this series– the first is here. The final piece, like most of my large pieces lately, will be constucted largely of urethane foam, like a commercial taxidermy mannequin, with recycled animal skin rugs glued over it. With a piece this large, it is necessary to have some kind of hard armature inside the foam to give it greater structural strength.

Commercial taxidermy mannequins above a certain size have threaded steel rods in their legs to help strengthen them. This is easy to accomplish at the commercial level because the entire mannequin is cast as one or two pieces in large silicone-and-fiberglass molds, and the rods can be affixed in place inside the molds before the foam material is injected.

That’s not an option for me, because I will not be casting foam into a mold; this would require sculpting a life-sized sasquatch in several hundreds of pounds of clay, then using gallons and gallons of expensive silicone and fiberglass resin (can you imagine the smell?) to produce a mold that would also weigh hundreds of pounds. If I were making a thousand copies (an army of sasquatches?) that might be feasible but not for a one-off piece.

So instead I will be building the foam structure up over the armature directly, and cutting and rasping the final shape from a life-sized foam blob.

All of which doesn’t preclude me from using threaded steel rod for the armature, but considering I don’t have a welding kit in my studio, I have opted for plywood instead, it’s just easier to work and strong enough for the job.

Maquette of the finished piece alongside maquette of plywood armature

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Every time I produce a new piece, I try to document the process– perhaps it’s just vanity, or perhaps I am worried I will forget how something is done, or, most probably, I just want people to know how time consuming and complicated the process is.

When I was in school I had no interest at all in representative or figurative work– I was a hard-core postmodern conceptualist, and I really rolled my eyes a lot when we had to do things like make armatures and scale maquettes. So I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, and have had to re-learn a lot of things on my own. But the process is not so different now than it was a hundred years ago. We start with a maquette (which is an impressive French word for a model).

Armature for maquette with Owen's 19th Century study of gorilla and human skeletons

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