Edgewater Art Festival with Fellow Local Brand, Evol Chicago!!!

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Edgewater Art Festival with Fellow Local Brand, Evol Chicago!!!

Join me in revisiting THE last festival of the season, Edgewater Art Festival! This was my very first festival a couple of years ago, and now I revisit it three years later. This year I'm mixing it up, and working with a good entrepreneur friend of mine who has an awesome clothing and accessory line based on Chicago House Music: EVOL Chicago, (LOVE spelled backwards, and also referring to the EVOLution of love through culture and music).

I have partnered with the company's founder Misha in the past for collaborations of our brands. Below you will see some captures from us working together. This time, though, we're both bringing our individual best, together to YOU! Be sure to stop by to find some of the most unique Chicago merchandise out there! From Chicago shirts, hats, pins, and scarves to art printed on anything and everything you can imagine! Introducing multiple products  before summer is over, don't miss it!

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West Loop Art Festival

WEST LOOP ART FESTIVAL IS THIS WEEKEND!

IT'S ONE OF THE FINAL STREET FESTIVALS OF THIS SEASON, AND IT'S HAPPENING IN ONE OF CHICAGO'S FASTEST BOOMING NEIGHBORHOODS. 

The festival starts on Washington Boulevard between Aberdeen and Halsted this Saturday+Sunday, and I'm super excited to exhibit my work in this rapidly evolving neighborhood! The West Loop Art Festival will showcase the work of more than 150-juried artists from across the country in a variety of mediums, including photography, mixed media, painting, glass, ceramics, jewelry, shit for your dogs etc...  This will be my first year exhibiting in the West Loop neighborhood, and I'm stoked to get  this new demographic's feedback! I have a plethora of new pieces- both wall art as well as for the first time, functional art.  And of course my cologne and perfume line Facci and Faccette will be making their return as well, but in a grander way. Not going to spoil the surprise of what that means... You just have to come to experience it ;) 

Although I featured the following product at my last festival, it's still a new material I've been working with, and I'm very pleased with all the new designs as I've been printing in preparation for the festival for the last several weeks! I can't get enough of these guys, they're dual coated metallic finished aluminum panels that allow them to be extremely vibrant, yet also extremely reflective against any source of light, especially the sun. The video below is under some ceiling lights mind you! In direct sunlight it's some of the most interesting stuff I've seen so far. Check them out!

 

Also, just for nostalgia's sake, Here is of my first  pictures of the West Side once I came back to Chicago after college and having taken up a greater interest in photography.  The Western perspective of the skyline is possibly my favorite, yet I shoot there almost the least... so I really hope I can  find high buildings to get that allow me to capture the seemingly endless wave of steel, concrete, and brick that is the Chicago skyline.

Cheers to West Loop, hope to see some familiar faces there! 

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West Fest Recap

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West Fest Recap

West Fest 2016, Chicago 

The three-day festival was filled with people from all walks of life, as West Town sits in the middle of the West Side, drawing people from Logan Square, to Humbolt Park, Wicker Park,  Bucktown, River West, University City / Little Italy and beyond! Despite the occasional heat wave on Friday, the weather was perfect for the weekend to be filled with an eclectic mix music, vendors, and people... (and dogs... and pigs!). One of my favorite aspects of West Fest was the diversity, not only of the people and DJ's, but also the mini-areas within the fest itself. The kid zone was complete with blow up castles, mini trains and donkey rides, but even better yet, A PET ZONE that featured a charity dog wash for all the hot pooches (see pictures below!) and a great food truck circle area! My favorite was Jerk Grill (their jerk rubbed chicken in particular). No, not "you're a jerk" type of jerk, mouthwatering Jamaican spices kind of Jerk!  Also a special thank you to Andrea from Little Shoe Films for the recap video!

 

Enough talk, See West fest in action!

 

 

 

 

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Festival Season 2016!

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Festival Season 2016!

So far so good

in the world of summertime festivals in Chicago! Midsommar Fest was a great success! Besides a little bit of intense heat, and spurts of some strong wind, MIdsommar fest was as beautiful and eccentric as ever! I have to give great thanks to my team which included Trung Lu, Will Anderson,  Patrick Fenko, Gabriel Sutton, Jeff Levitan, and some of my family members. See some pictures of the event below!

But before you do...

 

Check out this year's West Fest! From Friday until Sunday I will be displaying my artwork in West Town on Chicago Ave. between Damen and Wood! West fest is one of my favorite festivals, so do yourself favor and check out this amazing collection of artists, DJs, chefs and performers!


Midsommar Festival, Andersonville

See you at West Fest!


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Summer Chicago Rooftops

It's all about perspective...

Thanks to my friend who has an in at a bunch of residential buildings, I got to explore and shoot all the way from the 20th floor in South Loop to the 40th floor in Uptown, Chicago.

One of the key things I took away from the experience was how dramatically different everyone and everything's perspective can be. During our 6-hour long escapade up and down Lakeshore Drive, we stopped at 6 buildings and the differences in lifestyle and populous were vast. Some of the buildings were historic buildings with units owned solely by the super rich. Others were section 8 housing buildings that were solely owned by the government. Seeing the city on all these different levels was a strong reminder to me the kind of division that exists in Chicago, and in the world as a whole...

Another way I noticed perspective was by the various engineers that took us to the tops of these buildings. Getting to see the buildings from the inside out, and the people that work behind the scenes in them was a truly unique experience. Many of the engineers were quite fascinated with my story and why I wanted to take pictures, to the photo gear itself. I showed those that took interest in me the different lenses I was equipped with, which included dramatically different lenses such as a wide angle lens vs. a zoom lens. It was like watching a kid experiencing something for the first time. Each time these 40 years old+ men would look through the zoom lens and see how insanely far the camera is able to see, their demeanor changed to a happy, curious, and fascinated one. I would then swap to my wide lens (which helps you see almost as much as you would with the naked eye) and they would be even more bedazzled, admittedly by how vastly different the perspective was from the zoom lens. Some of them also even took the time to thank me for enabling them to take back in the beauty of the surroundings; they were so used to the same view by being up on the roof decks everyday working, that they forgot how truly magnificent the views are.

And so it led me to realize. Life is like a camera. You are given your first lens through which you see life, which I say is like your original frame of reference comprised of personality traits, languages you know, family, past experiences, etc. And with your lens, you choose how to interact with the world around you. You let a certain amount of light in (aperture)  whether that light is something good or bad in your life. You (should) control your sensitivity to your reactions of the world and situations around you, ISO is representative of this sensitivity to light / life (ISO is how sensitive the camera is to the light when taking a picture).  Being open minded, someone with big ideas and big picture people who remain open to the vastness of potential can be related to taking a long exposure. Vs an extremely fast exposure, which can representative of short term, taking action, awareness, capturing / doing something in its best moment, fast reactions, etc. We all are given what we are given, our bodies (camera bodies), a persona / soul (the photographer), and everything from our past experience and neurological development that allows us to see and perceive the world around us (the lens). What we are NOT necessarily given, are all of the settings. All of the fine details of our future lives. All of the answers on what's the best way to do (or capture) something. All of the ways that we should react to situations. How we cope with adversity , how we choose to allow or deny people or things into our lives. It is up to us to figure out our own interworkings and evolve past our self-imagined limits. 

Can we change lenses, can we change our perspective even after all we've been through? Sure. That's called metamorphosis. Breakthroughs. "A-hah" moments. Life Transitions. Midlife crisis. Enlightenment. The more lenses we have, the broader our ability to perceive the world. But even more importantly, the more we understand our own "settings", what makes us truly happy, how we should react to situations, who and what we let in, how sensitive or empathetic we should be, how open minded or judgmental we should be, then the more successful and conscious we will be. Learning to work what we have, in the state that us and the world are in, will help unlock the the routes to our destinies. 

If you're ever having a day where you look down on yourself, nothing is going right, you failed, you got broken up with, you fucked up, whatever the case may be, IN THOSE MOMENTS TRY TO SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE. Go outside yourself and consider the grand variety of existence on this Earth, and how we are only aware of what's in front of us, however far our lens can see. Shifting your perspective by considering other's lives and other's situations which on some level, somewhere in the world, are much more difficult. Building perspective takes time though, so we should be patient in overcoming life's obsticals and in our own personal growth. 

I'm not trying to tell anyone how to live their life, I'm simply stating how life can be related to a camera and how we can use the metaphor to think about our own perspective and potential. But on a last light note, I'd like to give you the behind the scenes of the day that gave me this insight.

Here's the snap story to give you a quick preview of what I experienced that day!


Add me on Snapchat to get a behind the scenes view of my shoots in progress as well as to follow my never-ending adventures!

@formato102

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