It was right after Tami and I had started dating: we met Lacus and E. at their place … newly their place after he had returned from San Paulo, Brazil a few months before. And, of course, they got back together, after one crazy night where Lacus, E. and I went around town with a few miniDV cameras party-hopping, and just generally racing around the city.

The night Tami, E., Lacus and I got together at their apartment to celebrate Mardi Gras is the night I took the footage used in the piece “Mardi Gras” We walked down to Pioneer Square from their apartment in First Hill. Lacus had purchased a couple 40oz Old English 800 bottles for the walk down.

Lacus has a very certain style.

On the way we all drank from the bottles which we kept in their brown-paper wrappers. It’s one second of this footage of E. taking a drink that creates the piece.

I imported the video into my Mac and rendered “filmstrip” versions of the video, as well as stills. From there I imported the images into Photoshop and went to town. While working at Avenue A | Razorfish in 2006, we went on a big kick using the large-format printer (which I totally wish I still had access to, damnit. Those things are expensive to print well.) I printed out the image on acid-free archival paper and adhered it to a 20 x 24 x 2 clayboard box and used acrylic medium to create surface, texture, and depth.

The night we walked down there we stayed for only a short while. The crowd was absolutley mad. As we walked back up the hill to a little local taqueria for some beers and burritos, we saw a stream of police cruisers fly down James street, heading to from where we had just come.