Jams
(1981-Current)
DinoNite!
(2023) Scott Hammond
Late night double feature of dinosaur themed b-movies in honor of the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park. Reminiscent of Bad Movie Nite!, I put together a prehistoric clip package followed by condensed versions of shlocky horror flicks Carnosaur and Dinosaur Island.
I Doo!
(2019) Officiant: Scott Hammond,
Bride: Morgan Figley, Groom,: Jamie Figley, Photographer: Elizabeth Nihiser Sound: Jeff Scofield, Press: Mitch Hooper Wedding Party: Krista Faist, Jodi Frisby, Bob Hite, Dave Kellough, Leeta King, Jamie Morse, Scott Smith, and Christopher Volpe
I became ordained online the previous year to officiate my friend’s wedding. I was ready to take my divine powers of matrimony out for a spin when I had the idea of performing a wedding at the Doo Dah Parade, a local anything goes event held every July 4th.
The idea evolved into a transformative experience taking place not at the parade, but in it: A walking wedding where a couple (Morgan & Jamie) start the parade engaged and end as a married couple. Several couples have married at the parade, but this couple was the first to be married in the parade.
My friends wore costumes, made signs, provided sound equipment, and kept in communication (TO BE CONTINUED)
Clintonville Kangaroo
(2018) Scott Hammond, Jeremy Felder, Jared Laughbaum, Shannon Winnubst
My neighborhood of Clintonville has a lot of charm. If you live here, you probably love the so-square-it’s-hip mentality. Qurkiness thrives in the neighborhood with no home owners association to stamp out individuality or creativity; a perfect ecample being the Kangaroo Crossing sign.
ShannonWinnubt had been contacting the city for nearly eighteen months requesting that they remove the road construction sign left in front of her home long after work had been completed. Shannon’s neighbor Jared Laughmanswapped out the road work sign for a kangaroo crossing sign he happened to have. The sign stayed there for almost four years until a curious neighbor contacted the local news inquring about the history of the sign. A reporter contacted the city and days later a crew came by to take it down citing safety concerns. That did not sit well with the neighborhood. I was one of the more vocal critics of the removal. The kangaroo sign was a beloved. Kids attending the elementary school down the street adopted the kangaroo as their unoffical mascot; the Clintonville Kangaroo.
In an effort to get the sign reinstalled (and to embarrass the city for their burrecratic overreach) we started the Save The Roo campagn. Local grphic designer Jeremy Felder made hundreds of yard signs that popped up all over Clintonville. The story made national news. We almost started a movement. But did we embarrass the city? Eh.. We were able to get the sign back, We installed it at the playground entrance of the school down the road. And we raised a few bucks for actual kangaroos at the local zoo. Five years later Save The Roo signs are still a common sight around Clintonville.
A Night of Unsolved Mysteries
(2015)
For years after the TV series Unsolved Mysteries went off the air, the only way to watch it was via bootleg tapes sold online.. During this period I hosted watch parties that proved so popular, I organized an event at my local independent theater showcasing my favorite episodes along with period appropriate bumpers and commercial breaks. [MORE]
Nic Cage-A-Thon
(2015)
I was asked to develop an event focused around a specific actor in the same style of my midnight movie show Bad Movie Nite! whereas I heavily edit a low budget 80s movie to include clips from other movies, shorts, ephemeral films that all comment upon one another.
I couldn’t think of a better actor than Nicolas Cage. A genre upon himself his acting style is somehow ludicrous and awards-worthy at the same time. A true artist. The show centered around 1989’s is-he-a-vampire-or-is-he-losing-his-mind horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss. I inserted clips from dozens of Cage’s other performances and appearances; the end result being a Nicolas Cage film being commented on by other Nicolas Cage films.
Collage
(2006-2009)
During a two year period Leeta and I really became involved in collaging; possibly because that was the art we could afford make at the time and possibly because it gave a purpose to all the magazines, flyers, and other paper ephemera I had amassed up that point. While I would say my collaging was heavily influenced by the great Ray Johnson and his mail art / NOTHINGS, many of my collages resembled abstract advertisements, not surprising given my affinity for signage. [MORE]
Broadcast
(2005)
Like many I was raised by televsion, spending innumerable hours bathed in analog and digital light. I have always enjoyed watching late night television by myself, in darkness. Yes it’s in part the type of programming one sees at night (for me b-movies and late night horror hosts), but also the tehtered solitude watching television alone provides. I’m by myself in a pitch black room. Everything else is outside this space except for this box that transmits the world to me; and that connection only goes one way.
Animal Masks
(2004)
This project is my first departure from documentary photography while conditioning my interests in instant Polaroid film. Shot with a homemade pinhole camera, the subjects appear in dreamlike settings while they are obviously humans wearing plastic animal masks. I've always been interested in photos that are imperfect in nature rather it be the film stock (instant film) or the subjects and setting.
Looking back, I can see a sliver of influence on my future project All The People.
Shoes
(2004)
My early photography is heavily influenced by the documentary work of Walker Evans. Like Evans, I am an obsessive collector of paper ephemera (notes, flyers, business cards, etc). This involves a lot of scanning the ground below me. This project recreates the feeling of me, looking down, scanning for interesting tidbits, while documenting myself through portraits of my red Converse All-Stars which I exclusively wore for many years. [MORE]
Postcards
(2003)
An early collision of my collecting (in this case vintage chrome postcards) and increasing need to document myself, Postcards is a series of scans of myself inserted into a collection of postcards inherited from my grandparents to which I was very close. None of these postcards were used and I’m unclear on how my grandparents came to possess them. To my knowledge there were no trips on World Airways to Topeka or Niagara Falls. Were these destinations on their wish list? Did I insert myself in these images in an effort to travel on their behalf?
As a child my grandparents would take me on weekend day trips to small towns around Ohio. With a cooler of sandwiches, chips, and soda, we would drive down the road with no destination in particular.
These trips heavily inspired my project The Lovely Road.
D.B. Cooper:
Where Are You?
(2000) Scott Hammond, Todd LaPlace
For our high school senior thesis my friend, Todd LaPlace, and I wrote a 40 page screenplay on Dan “D.B.” Cooper, perpetrator of the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history. We read in a Time Life book on unsolved crimes about the hijacker who escaped with $200,000 in ransom money by parachuting out of a plane midflight over the Pacific Northwest over Thanksgiving 1971, never to be seen again. Presumably Cooper died during the jump, but what our screenplay presupposes is…
maybe he didn’t?
Partly inspired by the narrative and visual structure of the 1968 thriller The Boston Strangler. DBCWAY? is essentially two separate stories; that of D.B'.’s escape and that of real life detective Ralph Himmelsbach’s dogged pursuit. Our script never has the two share a screen, having D.B. getting away, or so Himmelsbach thinks. We got an A if you’re curious. [MORE]
Early Work
(1980s-1990s)
Like most kids I was a prolific drawer. I filled up many notebooks with doodles, a vast majority of which were of Spider-Man and his many exploits. I learned to read from Spider-Man comics. I related to him in many ways; such as our shared feeling of being an outsider, having older caregivers (his aunt and my grandparents), and using humor to combat awkwardness.
Other subjects included He-Man, Jason Vorhees, the Titanic, and the Kennedy Assassination. I was oddly transfixed by my grandparent’s ample material on the subject. I turned in a “report” on J.F.K. in first grade (pictured). It contained drawings of Kennedy giving speeches, frames from the Zapruder film, Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, and John John saluting during his father’s funeral. [MORE]