OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

Untitled, from the series Spawn
2007
Colour photograph
24 x 32

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your Spawn series spans three years from 2007-10 and depicts both a pregnancy and the subsequent infant and toddler in striking domestic settings and landscapes. I assume the subjects of each photograph to be you and your own child—how much of this work is performative and how much of this work incorporates restaged moments of your own motherhood?

Lindsay Page: Spawn was an examination of the contradictions I felt transitioning into motherhood. There was simultaneous exhilaration and intense anxiety, gain interlaced with an overwhelming sense of loss. It was a messy time that seemed continuously at odds with the societal narrative of birth and motherhood as exclusively celebratory. In addition to being beautiful and transformative, to me there was something somewhat monstrous about pregnancy, where the body acts with a will of it’s own creating this unknown presence. When my daughter was born I felt overwhelmed by a sense of disappearance, that my self identity (and my identity as an artist) was being eclipsed by this generic label of “Mother." So I started to create these images as sort of a defense against invisibility. There is this inescapable proximity that accompanies early motherhood so it seemed essential that she be included in many of the images, though doing so felt somewhat exploitative. This is probably the series I am most conflicted about making. Motherhood is a difficult terrain to navigate in art, as there are so many clichés and stereotypes that one can fall into while making, or that viewers can’t escape when looking. It is difficult for me to know how the images read, but for me both the making of and the resulting images are problematic, awkward and discomfiting, which seems appropriate to the discussion. 

Old lady
2010
Color Photograph
30 inches x 40 inches

OPP: Tell me about your recent photograph Old lady.

LP: My mother is sick and I guess in response to that I have started to project images of mortality and aging onto myself and those around me. As I get older I see glimpses of myself as an elderly woman, see how my physical self will shift in the years ahead.  I think anyone with kids is acutely aware of their physical vulnerability, as soon as they are born you start to worry about them dying. I began to think about my kids gradually growing old and the impossibility of my witnessing them in the last stages of life. 

LP: I am also interested in the complexities of play, how children’s games can seem simultaneously innocuous and sophisticated depending on the viewer’s perspective.  

OPP: Adult human forms wrapped in white fabric appear in your photographic series Basement Performances. Your recent photograph, Octopus features another human form entirely encased in white. In this image, the form is that of a child and the white fabric appears to be a hooded sweatshirt worn backward, a pair of tights worn on the legs, and two more pair of tights tucked into the sweatshirt and held by the hands to give the playful yet eerie appearance of the figure having eight appendages. Tell me about the connection between the two photographs. What served as your inspiration for Octopus?

LP: There is not much of a connection conceptually between the two images. Basement Performances were much more about the ways in which we reinvent ourselves in our private spaces, often as a more empowered figure than we actually are. I was also interested in picturing longing and in engaging a discussion about substitution. Octopus is more ambiguous and somewhat exploratory. Again I am thinking about the complexities and contradictions embedded in childrens’ play and the ways in which an image can unnerve a viewer without it being clear exactly why. Photographs of children pose questions about power relationships (photographer/subject, adult/child), as well as exploitation and I am interested in building on the tension that this creates both for maker and viewer.

Octopus
2011
Color Photograph
30 inches x 40 inches

OPP: In your three channel video installation, I'm building you an army anonymous hands create twelve paper soldiers who, as completed, salute to the camera and join each other in a large grid. Who is the “you” in the title for whom the army is built? Can you speak about the conceptual concerns for this video installation?

LP: There is a specific “you” the piece refers to, but it is never revealed. The piece is about power and powerlessness and the interplay between aggression and passivity.  It stems from a desire to transform the individual into a group, to multiply the self in order to enact change that the individual alone cannot. The impossibility and futility of this act of sharing the self becomes more and more evident as the group accumulates and begins to dissemble and fall apart. It is the repeated gesture of the attempt at this, despite the impossibility of it, that most interests me. There is this repetition of and insistence upon an action that can never extend beyond itself. The effort far outweighs the result, and the piece sort of sits as this doomed heroic gesture.

OPP: A life-sized form resembling the paper soldiers in I'm building you an army appears in your photographic series Basement Performances. Tell me about the Basement series and the significance of both the paper soldier and human forms cut from paper more generally, in your body of work as a whole.

LP: I have always been interested in the ways in which objects can be activated through art. Puppetry and animation transform objects into something beyond their materials and there is then this potential for a viewer to be affected in an unexpected way.  No matter which media I am working in, I need to include this kind of tactile building element. I am interested in apparatuses / constructions that are obvious and flawed as a way to insert my presence into the work and connect myself as a maker with the audience.

Untitled, from the series Basement Performances
2005
Color photograph
30 inches x 40 inches

OPP: What are you working on now? What is next for you?

LP: I am currently working on a large installation piece called, Erasing Machine. The piece, employs kinetic sculpture to facilitate the erasure of knitted photographic portraits. The public is asked to submit photographic images of individuals they desire erased from their memory. They are not asked to identify themselves or disclose their reasons for the desired erasure. These photographic images, once converted into “photo blankets” are slowly and publicly erased throughout the duration of an exhibition. I hope with this piece to engage discussion about the relationship between photography and memory and raise questions about ownership of images, representation as well as power and violence. 

To view more of Lindsay Pageʼs work visit lindsaypage.com.

The Love Renegade # 4: If I Said It
2010
archival ink jet print

OtherPeoplesPixels: Tell me about The Love Renegade and what inspired the shift in the perspective from which you are working.
 
Elizabeth Axtman: The Love Renegade came to be while sitting in a restaurant. I was trying to understand my own heartache, heartbreak. I was reeling from being betrayed by the person I was closest to (and please believe it was on some Dynasty, Melrose Place, Gossip Girl level of betrayal… I have regretfully discovered the shit they write on these shows really happens to people in real life) and I was trying to figure out how was I going to get past it. I was surprised that within the pain I was feeling I could also reach feelings of compassion for this person. I was beginning to understand that people who harm others are in far deeper pain than the people they offend. This gave me mild comfort and any amount of comfort then was worth investigating.  I wanted to know everything about love, forgiveness and compassion; how people were able to find it and how people were able to implement it. I started reading and watching everything on the subject. It began invading me from every angle, so much so it was finding its way into my work. Suddenly, I wanted the art I made to be more than calling racist assholes, racist assholes. There are enough artists of color doing that shit already (I wouldn’t be missed) with plenty of rich white art collectors/curators financing it (a very dysfunctional cycle). So The Love Renegade came from where so many other art works come from: heartbreak and the journey out of it. The difference now is that the journey is one of love, forgiveness and compassion.

OPP: Humor is still present in your Love Renegade work but is differently approached. Your video Dark Meat from “before” is disturbingly funny; splicing a Stone Phillips interview with famed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Phillips asking Dahmer “Did race matter?” in regard to his victims and Dahmer answering it did not by citing the various races of three of the men and boys he killed) intercut with the man-eating plant, Audrey II, from the cult-film The Little Shop of Horrors asking to be fed (“Feed me... must be fresh... must be black”).

Your piece, The Love Renegade #2: Forgive Me which features a newspaper headline and picture of actress Sandra Bullock’s ex-husband Jesse James after news of his infidelity was publicized. The headline quoting James reads ‘I am the most hated man in the world.’ In a thought bubble pointing to James’s head drawn on top of the clipping, you (as The Love Renegade) have written, “You didn't deserve that, your were so good to me. I am so Sorry.” Part of the humor in the Jesse James forgiveness piece functions with our knowledge that collective forgiveness is unusual in our society. Can you speak about how humor plays out in these two pieces and more generally in your work “before” and “now,” as The Love Renegade.
 
EA: Regardless of the shift in my art practice… humor remains a constant because it’s such a big part of who I am (but I’m learning not everything I make has to involve a joke). I worship comedy and everything about it. My interest (obsession) with comedy has always made me feel like a bit of an outsider in the art world, because so many of my artist friends worship everything about art: theory, history, current events aka art gossip…. and I don’t. I mean seriously, the only time you might catch an art theory book in my hand is if my friend asked me to hold it for them while they tied their shoe. Nothing about MAKING art bores me—in fact it thrills me but getting trapped in a conversation about art theory makes me wanna blow my fucking brains out.
 
In the piece Dark Meat the humor I used is a way of softening my screams of “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” I was pissed at how little Jeffrey Dahmer was taken to task on the subject of race as well as by how little a black man’s life is worth in our country. Had the roles been such that it was a black man killing, raping, dismembering and eating blond haired white women……this country would go buckyballzbananas and reinstate lynching. In the video I used an interview with Stone Phillips and Dahmer because it was the first time I actually saw anyone ask him about race. In the interview he lists the race of all of his victims except for the black men (which were the majority of all of his victims).  His inability to mention them spoke volumes to me.  I mix in the man eating plant, Audrey II from the Little Shop of Horrors to fill in the gaps of Dahmer’s lapse in memory of the 11 black men he assailed. To me the man-eating plant is what lurked behind Dahmer’s blond hair and blue eyes, which helped him stay out of jail 18 victims too long. Dahmer’s desire and repulsion in regards to race and sexuality were off the fucking charts. I’m not done with him yet.

I like that you mentioned “collective forgiveness is unusual in our society,” in regards to my Jesse James piece. I’ve had a few people tell me how soft my work is now that it’s focused on love and forgiveness. I never get my back all up about it but I laugh to myself and think “this muthafucka has no idea how hard it is to be loving to someone who acts so ugly and hateful.”  I still have those knee-jerk ego reactions where I want to tell people about themselves (harshly) but I check myself, because now I’m more interested in starting conversations then ending them. I am all too aware that we live in revenge culture and how that is far too often people’s line of defense. The entire series is about getting people to hopefully see that they too have been untoward to someone at some point or another and have desired to be forgiven and loved anyway. It’s about how often we forget those times and withhold the very thing we desire when the roles are reversed. It’s about squandering an amazing opportunity to be compassionate just to appease our egos.The unconscious hypocrisy is rife with humor to me  Every person in The Love Renegade series are just stand-in’s for us. Ha! and Got Ya!

The Love Renegade #6-307:Love Letters (Make It Rain)
2011
Mixed Media

OPP: You recently exhibited Love Letters (Make it Rain) at The Kitchen in NYC. Viewers had the choice of sending a letter to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Westboro Baptist Church, and Glenn Beck. How did you select each public figure?

EA: I chose them because I think they have on several occasions acted a hot ugly mess in front of a camera that broadcasts to millions of homes all over the world. They have encouraged and condoned: greed, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and revenge... your basic asshole behavior. We are all guilty of these things in our lives (varying degrees of course) and if you say you aren’t, you’re a liar and not ready for this work or conversation. I’m just posing the question: what can change in your life if you show love to someone who is acting in its opposition?
 
OPP: As I understand, a great number of letters were mailed over the course of the exhibition—have you received feedback on the project from participants or other viewers? Have the letters worked?

EA: I was thrilled when The Kitchen told me that over three hundred letters had been sent during the course of the exhibition. I received beautiful letters sent to me by people telling me how my work has touched them. The response was really great from participants and folks who just happened on to my website. I’ve had an art space in New Zealand show interest in having the Love Letters come all the way across the world. Folks have been in to it. Have the letters worked? I know Glenn Beck is no longer on the air and Fox News has been trying to tone it down. I also heard some state was trying to ban Westboro Baptist Church from attending funerals… it was kind of eerie how it was happening all around the same time. It isn’t so much what I want to see happen in these figures’ lives as what I want to see happen in everyone’s life. I desire to see people take responsibility for the energy they bring into the world and make far less decisions on behalf of their egos. Take my word for it: I am a recovering egomaniac and as such I know I’m responsible for the emotions I choose to experience and the behavior I choose to express… I no longer put the blame for these things in another’s hands.

OPP: You exhibit widely, how does working toward a deadline for a show influence your process? In fact, your first solo exhibition with the San Francisco Arts Commission is currently up—what are you working on for the show?

EA: Well I like to call “deadlines”, “time frames” it has a better ring to it. They definitely influence me to throw things across the room, bang my fist on the table, hurl expletives at my computer that would make a Boston Bruins fan blush, then apologize to my computer with the following: Mommy didn’t mean it, I’m just under a lot of pressure with these “time frames,” and no sleep. Time frames motivate me to get the shit done, it’s a part of the creative birthing process. There will be pain and there will be joy.

Yes, I’m working on a year-long (hopefully just a year) project entitled The Love Renegade #308: I Love You Keith Bardwell (Phase I & II). Keith Bardwell is the latest person to catch the attention of The Love Renegade, because he refused to marry an interracial couple in 2009… you heard that right, 2009. Bardwell (an elected official) explained his refusal to marry the couple was, because he “had seen countless interracial couples where the children were rejected by family members, and he didn’t want to see that happen again.” The piece consists of interviews of biracial people from adulthood to infancy, kindly letting Bardwell know that they are doing well and his concern for them isn’t necessary. Alongside, interviews of interracial married couples telling the viewer why they wanted to marry their partner. In this lens love (not race) can become the forefront of how these partnerships began and biracial people are given back their voice in order to speak on their own behalf. Upon, hearing from the source any viewer who has shared in these sentiments will be left to address what’s truly resting behind their concern for the children. It’s a long work in progress.

The Love Renegade #308: I Love You Keith Bardwell (Phase I)

OPP: Does The Love Renegade have advice for emerging artists?

EA: Yes I do.
1.    Don’t listen to anyone who encourages you to live Plan B.
2.    Tell your ego to fuck off on a regular basis.
3.    Know your self worth as person and an artist.
4.    Be kind.
5.    Be relentless.
6.    Don’t be afraid to go by yourself.
7.    Tell your ego to fuck off on a regular basis.

To view more of Elizabeth Axtman (The Love Renegade’s work, visit elizabethaxtman.com.

2010 Was A Rough Year
Installation Image, Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago)
Stained glass window and video documentation of stand-up comedy performances

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your artist statement you discuss your attempt to give the cliché new and personal meaning. Those ideas apply especially to your series I Throw Myself At Men, as well as your projects, Lilly invites you to come watch the sunset with her, and 2009 was a rough year. Let’s talk about how your shifting media throughout and within each these three projects effects your viewers’ interpretation of the clichés you’ve addressed. Do you yourself gain further insight from exploring the clichés from the multiple “angles” of photography, participatory websites, performances, labor-intensive constructions, and installations?

LillyMcElroy: One of the main reasons that I make art is that I want to be able to communicate ideas. The advantage of having a multi-disciplinary practice is that I try and figure out what kind of media best conveys the concepts that I am interested in.  Also, no singular project has really provided me with complete answers or explanations to the things that I am curious about. Using a combination of media allows me to keep hacking away at an idea.

OPP: What comes first in your art making process—an idea about a cliché or an idea for installation or performance, or do they occur to you simultaneously?

LM: I would say that my ideas mostly come in the form of whims; a moment when I want to see what will happen if I perform an action or ask a question. My projects all begin very simply and I wind up using a lot of cliché’s because they are an effective way to communicate ideas or maybe that is just the way by brain works. I think very literally and a lot of those thoughts are clichéd. However, that thought process allows me to introduce a lot of humor to the projects. Ideas generally come first, cliché’s are just another interesting tool to work with.
Truck Stop
2004
C-Print

OPP: How do you negotiate trust and vulnerability in your work—or do you think about the interactions involved in your performances as vulnerable or requiring trust?  Are you nervous about potential outcomes before lying down in a nightgown in public as you did in Locations, leaping at strangers in bars as you did in I Throw Myself At Men, or performing other people’s jokes on stage as you did in 2009 was a rough year—or are you generally faithful in your attempts at connecting?

LM: For my projects, I often approach strangers or am in situations where I do not have complete control. I make myself, at some level, vulnerable to other people’s responses, but I suppose that may be one of the reasons that they choose to participate in my projects.  The fact that I am vulnerable or at least making an earnest request makes it possible for them to trust me enough to participate. Hugging a stranger on the street or allowing some woman you just met at a bar to leap at you takes a little bit of bravery or trust. To be honest, I am often surprised that people are willing to participate.

Ideas about vulnerability are most interesting, for me, in the Locations series. By lying down in public spaces, I was making myself physically vulnerable, but that action became aggressive simply because it was an interruption. I am interested in actions that can signify more than one thing, behaviors that are simultaneously loving and cruel.

However, I am always nervous during my performances. That is part of the reason they are interesting to me and possibly part of the reason that they are successful. I am genuinely trying to connect with people and therefore the possibility of failure exists. I know to stop working on a project or performing an action when I am no longer nervous.

Doing stand-up was a whole other type of experience, though. There was a lot of adrenaline and the moments when I actually got people to laugh at the jokes were intoxicating.
I throw myself at men - #12
2008
Digital Print
30 by 40

OPP: Did any of the men in your series I Throw Myself At Men not attempt catch you?

LM: Yes and I just bounced off of their chests.

OPP: Were there any contributed jokes that you were uncomfortable performing at comedy clubs in 2009 was a rough year?

LM: I didn’t tell any of the racist jokes and I partially feel like that was a cop-out.  I was supposed to be telling all the jokes that people sent in, but I couldn’t.  

OPP: How does the idea of failure factor in your bodywork as a whole?

LM: Failure is key or at least the possibility of failure is key. Without that possibility there would be nothing to root for. It would be like watching a sports movie without the underdogs.

OPP: You’ve written about the gestures that you enact in your performances as simultaneously loving and cruel. Can you give me an example of how that duality plays out in a particular piece?

LM: Hugs is the first piece that comes to mind. For this video I hugged strangers without asking their permission.  A hug, a loving and tender gesture, became aggressive and selfish. My behavior was a demand that people engage with me and there is something very mean about that. That said, there were a few moments of legitimate tenderness in the video, moments when my gesture actually felt wanted. That is what I mean by loving and cruel.

OPP: Your drawing and paper mache installation, I kicked a dog implicates you as either having kicked what appears to be a friendly non-threatening dog, or wanting to. How does your Dog series factor into a body of work concerned with implicating yourself and others? Was this an attempt at making it clear that you are aware of your complicated position in your work—or did you just want to be sure and eliminate the possibility of ever being able to adopt a pet?

LM: That project had a lot to do with frustration, with wanting to destroy or reject something lovely because of desperation.
  
OPP: What are you working on now?

LM: A bullmastiff named Buttons saved my dad when he was 11. Right now I am working on a sculpture of that dog.
To view more of Lilly McElroy’s work work visit lillymcelroy.com

Cocktail umbrella and bic lighter
2009

OtherPeoplesPixels: Many of your incredible range of photographs from the past five years have everything to do with presence and absence—and perhaps more accurately with the presence within absence. What inspires your investigations surrounding these ideas?

Adam Ekberg: This working methodology comes, pretty specifically, out of my failure to represent ideas with “straight photography.” Prior to graduate school I was a caretaker at a six-bed facility for people living with HIV and AIDS. I was really interested in the disparity between the systems surrounding death and the organic death. I was with people when they died and in awe of how amazing and unique each patient was. Comparatively, after these patients died, they got pushed through this final bureaucracy. As a direct result, I made formal pictures of funeral homes that, while formally beautiful, represented a way of making that fundamentally did not work for me.

These failed pictures led me to turn my way of making photographs inside out so that instead of concentrating on systems that the individual occupies, I make unique actions in empty spaces–apartments and landscapes. This transition from the universal to the personal helped to define what I do now. I have realized that the simple things done to amuse myself are worth capturing with my camera. I remember an amazing afternoon in the late 1990’s when several friends and I raced an empty Kool Whip container against an orange Tupperware container down a New Mexico stream. We came increasingly invested in the outcome of these races and watching the colorful containers race through the desert was absolutely hilarious and beautiful.

These days, I think more and more that a good photograph is the result of a memory coming out sideways. My best example is my first memory: watching the barn next to my childhood home burn down after being set on fire by an arsonist. I recall being held by neighbors while my father sprayed down our house with a garden hose to prevent it from burning. I was wearing spaceship pajamas and holding a glow-stick that a neighbor of my parents had given me. At its peak, people could feel the heat and see the fire from miles away. Holding that small glow-stick while watching the giant flames take over the barn and rise into the sky was a pretty good introduction to one person’s smallness within the universe.

From the inside looking out
2010

OPP: I love From the inside looking out—your photograph of ovals drawn into the steam on a windowpane. The ovals outline light sources as seen (as the title implies) from the inside looking out, but there is something intimate about your ovals beyond their obvious hand-drawn quality. I know you create all of the constructions that appear in your photographs to exist in the world (as opposed to digitally manipulating them). I’m curious if you create each with someone in particular in mind? There is something romantic about many.

AE: That picture was made while boiling water for pasta on a winter night in Chicago. A friend was over for dinner and drew circles on the condensation in the window. If you looked through one eye from this specific place in my kitchen, the circles lined up with the lights in the parking lot. I thought that was really wonderful because it made me think about the space in between yourself and the world around you, as if the windows functioned as eyes. I attempted to take a picture of it but my camera’s lens kept fogging up so I recreated the situation on the following evening. Looking back on it, I am struck by how wonderful it is, not just as an image but also as a gesture.

OPP: Can you speak about how lighting and illumination play into your body of work as a whole?

AE: Even though it is obviously one of the elements of any photograph, I don’t think about lighting that much on a conscious level. When I use light as an overt ingredient—such as refracting a shaft of light with the camera lens or capturing the physicality of light in a smoked out room—I am interested first and foremost in making its presence known. I think a good metaphor would be having a neighbor over for dinner that you have lived next-door to for years, but never spoken to.

Untitled (levitating pink umbrella)
2010

OPP: You’ve written about repositioning celebratory iconography to create minor spectacles: balloons, cocktail umbrellas, disco balls, soap bubbles, and lens-based refractions. The result is always magical and usually surprisingly so. Over time, has it become more difficult for you to maintain a sense of magic in what you do?

AE: In many ways, I am the luckiest artist in the world, because my work investigates the commonplace. There seems to be no end to human beings’ ability to generate the mundane. I marvel at these moments of toenail cutting, tax doing, shoelace tying, and paperwork filing. It is of course a completely different exercise in taking these things and making art from them.

I feel best about my practice when I am simultaneously creating pictures that seem like what I am known for doing and starting to make images that deviate from that. I recently made a picture of a shadow falling on a wall. There is a knothole in the wall and a human eye exists in the place of where the shadow’s eye would be (if shadows had eyes). So the resulting photograph is a kind of visual pun. This image is both grounded in what I have done and provides fertile ground in which to grow.

Shadow and eye
2010

OPP: What does a day in the studio look like for you? Do you “sketch” with your camera or does your process perhaps include writing, drawing, or pursuing the materials you ultimately photograph?

AE: I have a notebook and I make a lot of sketches of my ideas. I should “sketch” with my camera a lot more than I do, but I mostly make drawings. I like to sit and let my mind wander. I like to ride my bike because it gives my body something to do to keep it busy—my conscious mind pays attention to not running into trees but my unconscious is allowed to drift. Since a lot of my photographs come out of experiences—or an effort to reconstruct an experience or a memory or perhaps to mythologize a previous experience—I tinker a lot while I am thinking about things.

The photograph Cocktail umbrella and Bic lighter is a good example of that. I was sitting in my apartment waiting for someone. Bored, I wedged a cocktail umbrella in the lighter making the gas stay on. When I later restaged that moment to photograph the lighter on my coffee table, the light from the flame was refracted by the lens making a warm circle of light in the picture. I love this picture because its origin is firmly grounded in playing with commonplace objects, but at the same time the result is this mundane sculpture with a halo around it that is reminiscent of painted depictions of Christ and Saints.

OPP: You are an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media, School of Art and Art History at University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. How does teaching influence your art practice?

AE: I love teaching and am really lucky to have joined an amazing faculty at University of South Florida. I teach two classes and work with five graduate students each semester. A day of doing studio visits is my favorite—when I get to walk into grad studios and spend an hour talking to people about their work. Being surrounded by people who are working through ideas and constantly improving their ability to articulate these ideas is truly inspiring and motivating for me to do the same.

OPP: What is next for you? Tell me about your upcoming solo show at Thomas Robertello Gallery.

AE: Having just had solo-exhibitions at Platform Gallery in Seattle and Fotografiska in Stockholm last spring, I am now preparing for an exhibition at Thomas Robertello Gallery this October. I have a good part of the late summer free to make images and am looking forward to driving to New England to do so. Several friends of mine live on large, beautiful pieces of land in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont, so they give me pseudo-residencies. My notebook is full of sketches for photographs I want to create. I can’t wait to wake up in the woods where the only thing on my ‘to do list' is to make pictures.

To view more of Adam Ekberg’s work visit adamekberg.com