MIKEL CUMISKEY-- In 2012 I took a class called Nothing in the graduate program at the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida with Jack Stenner and others. At the time I was enrolled in the photography program MFA level and had intentions to continue being a "photographer" ...after and during that class those intentions started to unravel completely and by the end of the next term I withdrew from college for good. During nothing we discussed various and what I think a lot of us considered to be "related" topics: mystical anarchism, object orientated ontography, alien pheneomenology et cettra and I realized I didn't really care to talk about photography that much any more. Like I said I dropped the photography MFA - it was just not going to work with my head spinning round this new planet. I moved back to the west coast with my wife and stopped making "work" for the better part of two years. I mainly engaged my interests in reading theory. I didn’t see any point in submissions or looking at art photography anymore. I moved with my wife to Hawaii (for the 3rd time)
In 2014 I started surfing everyday again as I had off and on my whole life (I grew up near Cape Canaveral in Central Florida). This work made with cameras and film is born out of this period of time where I gave up photography and basically in a convoluted way began "using" cameras as tools to start praxis as an ontographer - which is what I consider myself now. As I see it an ontographer catalogs being and my attempt to focus on seemingly limited subject matter (surf and surfing) is perfectly in line with my rye sense of being in life in general. If it looks like surf photography its meant to. I've never had any problem throwing people a curve ball or putting people off. My whole schtick is if I can intentionally turn 9 out of 10 people off then I’m doing something right. In these ontographs made with 35mm and 4x5 format cameras you might see surfing, beach lifestyle, Hawaii life "pictures" but I intend to display objects on a wall or floor that illustrate representations of things that are/were: floor dusts, water on top and next to water, human flesh, bodies, sun lights, fiberglass and sea foam. In his seeing things thinker Ian Bogost relates that artist G. Winogrand wasn't documenting life, he was randomly snapping pictures of things to capture them as they existed and that that was what made him such a wonderfully accomplished "anything" photographer. My work extends that wonderfully shoeworn territory of photographers Winogrand and Eggleston into the appropriately weird world of 21st century contemporary "art" which might be simply rebranded 21st century "thought" or communication. It is about going deeper into the nature of things, really looking at them in all their complexity - from your fingernail to the clouds overhead, really digging into everything.
