04-04-2012
Contemporary Ghosts
20 portraits on 35mm film by Jaret Ferratusco
“They're only dreams,” you say. Though the pills and the alcohol and the short sweetnesses of phrase from people you're close too (if there are any) are here to remind you it'll be better tomorrow, each day is actually longer than the next, until fairly soon it's just one long day, one long year you've been living since you were a kid. Touching upon life-draining themes of the long-term effects related to emotional abuse, CONTEMPORARY GHOSTS explores a corner of the day-to-day struggle to appear normal while standing alone looking at your own reflection in a mirror, as a person attempts weakly or with great strength, to trace the origins of the terror that despondence and depression can bring down upon a simple existence in a simple place, surrounded by hundreds of other people you feel you can't relate to. Who else went through what you went through? And then, if you don't care, who will? Sometimes deception and lost innocence won't just follow you to the grave, it will chase you there. And what persists in lingering in the mind will in this way become much stronger than the will to forget. Avoidance sometimes just brings you closer. .
Opens First Thursday, May 3rd | 7-10pm.
May 2012
The Space
1030 NW 12th Avenue, TH1
Portland, OR 97209
10-04-2011
Black Portraits
36 Photographs By Jaret Ferratusco
You may experience in your repetitive days, boldly recurring times of overly personal interior doubt that tends to weigh ungraciously heavy. It can be kept well hidden, in these times, hovering behind unvoiced doubts that shiver within you like a vague chill you barely notice. But when you do notice, when you can't let it go, it starts a spiral downward, when these occasional times begin not to separate themselves but to take over seemingly everything. Emotionally antagonistic great weights will sit on your shoulders, the burdens and daily crosses to bear will follow you around, tugging at you from behind, holding you back. Your private, locked eye-to-eye contact in a bathroom mirror will bark out the personal impressions of yourself as you perceive all purpose in you degrading. The constant worry and wonderment over fragile contact will seem too much to handle; the incalculable mystery of your friends and family will frustrate you; your trust, those who trust you or those who don't, those who can't and those who won't. When your mood has shifted for the worse, when you are paranoid yet unmoved, the field of dreams scatters as if exploded, raining down again in a mess; commonly it's unvoiced, unattended to. It burrows and grows silently. In such cases where it may be examined, it's merely voiced-off and considered part of the human condition. That's just life. Depression, overwhelming sadness and discouragement, it's “just life.” You'll say this because they'll say it, and outside everyone agrees. But what of it on the inside. What if it's not a commonality after all. What if it's really just you.
Opens First Thursday, Nov. 3rd | 6pm-10pm.
November 2011
Sequential Art Gallery
328 NW Broadway #113
Portland, OR 97209
07-01-2011
Good afternoon everybody. In a few days I will be headed out to join UNWED SAILOR and OWL CITY on the last leg of their North American summer tour. This will be a pretty lovely tour, I imagine, though because I am joining late in the schedule, I'm not entirely sure if I will get any stage time, but I will definitely have both of my books available at the merchandise booth, including the newly released 2011 revision of PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME. If you have the where-with-all, it will be nice to see familiar faces as well as to get acquainted with new ones. Help this little boy feel positive about a bleak summer? Come out and see my friends play and share some drinks with us! Let's take portraits!
Your friend,
JARET.
7.17 Portland, OR @ The Roseland Theatre
7.19 San Francisco, CA @ Warfield Theatre
7.23 Pomona, CA @ The Fox Theatre
7.25 Houston, TX @ Verizon Wireless Theatre
7.26 Grand Prairie, TX @ Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie
7.27 Austin, TX @ Austin City Limits Live at Moody Theatre
7.28 Memphis, TN @ Hi Tone
7.29 Chicago, IL @ Aragon Ballroom
7.30 Saint Paul, MN @ Roy Wilkins Auditorium
05-15-2011
Corpse On Pumpkin, in Foo Fighters video.
Now streaming at FooFighters.com - I Should Have Known
A few months ago I played a small role in a production for a Foo Fighters video. It was for a Fuse TV project to promote the new record Wasting Light, where one video was made for each song on the album, assigned to various independent directors. 'I Should Have Known' was produced by Two Penguins out of Portland (OR), directed by Daniel Fickle, and it debuted on a Fuse TV special called This Video Sucks, hosted by Dave Grohl. The parts I am in are sprinkled across the first minute of the video; I play the nervous guy in the limousine and after that, with the camera outside City Hall.
04-14-2011
Our Breath In The Whale
19 Portraits by Jaret Ferratusco
The road less traveled brought us onto the beach and out past the safe area where you can still feel the sandy floor of the sea. So far out into the water that land was impossible to make out anymore. We would drown or be saved. From below in the limitless darkness of a world closer to the center of the earth, came a vast creature that swallowed us up for good. Over time, moments of introspection became less and less frequent, our few memories of what it was like above the water turned otherworldly, and our time spent inside the belly of the whale brought us to the gradual decision not to do what had been asked of us from above. We did not get down on our knees, asking to be saved, or for others to be saved. Instead, we held onto the idea that things could be different for ourselves. Wearing the same noncommittal blankness over our faces and the same salt-eroded skin around our skeletons, we became unified and self-same, trapped safely inside along with the ghosts of everyone else who may have done the same before us. Inevitably at our last moments, we might see our words made physical in clouds of frost within the convulsing velvet walls closing in on us. And after we say good-bye, it will be easier to get on with the rest of it. Passing out in the belly of a whale.
Showing May 2011
Opening Reception | Wed. May 4 | 6-9pm.
Eastbank Commerce Center
1001 SE Water Ave. #120
Portland, OR 97214
01-01-2011
Tour Pictorial / April 2010
Unwed Sailor & Jaret Ferratusco
Tour, April 2010 - A new presentation of photographs from my second book tour behind 'I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill' with good friends Unwed Sailor, posted on the Corpse On Pumpkin Facebook page.
12-22-2010
I am thankful for grave things. Recently I've made grave discoveries. I just, I know, I just, I appreciate the occult, and where it's taken me. And the deaths and the seances and the funerals and the wild parties. It's just, a different world. I like the underworld. I thank you for accepting me.
12-06-2010
Sanctuaries will have sharper teeth and darker hearts.
Soft Spoken Narthex - A new presentation of photographs, posted on the Corpse On Pumpkin Facebook page.
09-11-2010
Wherever the Devil may know you in whole:
Corpse On Pumpkin Photography
P.O. Box 18237
Portland, OR 97213
08-11-2010
Dead Relatives
14 Portraits by Jaret Ferratusco
The ten former bridesmaids of Pauline Amanda Kelly for her Chicago wedding in 2005 (a ceremony documented by the same photographer) are here reunited for the first time as a whole, in remembrance of her brother Jamie Pastorio, at his 2009 funeral in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Photographed before and after the memorial service at Mill-Home Funeral Chapel, by Jaret Ferratusco.
Opening Reception Wednesday, Sept. 8 | 6pm-10pm.
Showing September 2010
Eastbank Commerce Center
1001 SE Water Ave.
Portland, OR 97214
07-30-2010
A few Portland gallery openings coming up in a few months. Please stay tuned for details.
| Etsy CorpseOnPumpkin |
