Thursday Post 2-26-08

Mixed Media

"In either case, the artist who uses sound archival practices to make mixed-media works will be able to create a lasting record of exploration and at the same time break from some of the limiting traditions that have, historically, narrowed the range of possibilities for using art materials."
- Sean Dye, mixed-media artist

Harrison, Holly. Mixed-Media Collage: An Exploration of Contemporary Artists, Methods, and Materials. Beverly: Quarry Books, 2007.

Most of this book was describing techniques and the artwork of other mixed media artists. I though thought of this theme because after I decided that perhaps my images won't get printed on canvas, and perhaps I don't want to paint on them, I had sort of thrown out the mixed media idea. Then, when I was working on a snow landscape made from some packaging material, I couldn't think of what to add into it. So far all my addition pictures have been truthful to what they are - if it looks like a fish, it really is a picture of a fish. I realized the chance of me obtaining a good picture for these snow landscapes was not very good, and I began to think about drawing a ski-lift in. But how could this fit into the scheme of things? Then I began to think about switching all the add-ins to drawings, and the interesting feel that would begin to have. Because the stigma of photography as representing the real, despite all of the Photoshop trickery that is known, is still very much out there, which is a bit of what gives my project it's drive. Even an incredibly realistic drawing doesn't quite have the same stigma - unless it's Chuck Close's photo-realism because then people often don't even REALIZE it's a drawing and therefore think of it in photographic terms. Anyway, what this all means is I think it would create an interesting duality to mix in drawings that reference real things but are not photographic with photographic images that reference things outside of what was actually photographed. If that makes sense. The most interesting thing I found in this book (other than some of the interesting art of course) was that the first and most important thing that any mixed media artist must do is choose a good adhesive. This defines how well the work will all hold together, and whether it will be archival or not. In my case my computer is the adhesive. I can scan the drawings in and manipulate them over the picture. I've never done this with color images before, but I'm becoming very excited to try. It probably will just mean even MORE masking, sigh....

Paul Shambroom

Woops, totally forgot to post this up.

At first I didn't like his images so much, because I'm often turned off by unsaturated colors. But the more of them I saw, the more I began to see the element of interest in them. I liked what he mentioned about power relationships, seeing the unseen. That definitely impacted the way I looked at his work. I began to understand the reason of the neutrality in the color schemes of his pieces, they served the purpose of not pushing emotions or thoughts on to the viewer. Much like how Chris Pittman wants his work to come across, more informative than persuasive. The more I saw of his images, the more I felt that the straight forward approach was in fact more intriguing than attempting to over-dramatize the images.

Monday Post 2-22-08

Mario Zampedroni

Born in Milan in 1945, Zampedroni was only 13 when he attended Castello Sforzesco's High School of ARt in Milan. He participated in painting competitions until the 70's. He then gained degrees in Graphics and Advertising, as well as studying at Polytechnic in Milan. Afterward, he began working as a designer and an executive in the furnishing industry. Now, he paints full time, though he also does photography. His abstract paintings hint at landscapes and floral arrangements, and are often named as such. I found his images helpful in helping perceive landscapes in a more abstract manner. The first step in my work is to find something in the real world to photograph. Sometimes I am intrigued by an abstract quality something has, which later resembles a landscape after manipulation. Other times I take a photograph because I think that what I'm looking at may resemble a particular landscape. When I began, I was mostly working in the first mode, but as I progress more and more I am focusing on that first type of quality, not only to shoot more efficiently, but to guarantee myself that I'll have something to work with when I come back that won't look like a landscape I've already shot. But often times, the pictures that end up looking like landscapes are surprising, especially when I use the invert tool. By looking at these abstract landscapes however, I feel I'm gaining a better idea of how to find the objects in the real world that will have the look I want.

Website:
http://www.zampedroni.com/

Gallery:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Mario+Zampedroni/10851.html

Interview:
http://www.artquotes.net/artists/zampedroni/artist-interview.htm

Thursday Post 2-19-08

Titles

"The importance of Titles in Art is immense, as it gives a meaning and a purpose to the artwork. In fact, the Title of an artwork is one of its most artistic and important things. The meaning of the Title usually is interwoven throughout a piece of art and is often times hard to understand."
-Annette Labedzki Abstract Painter

"Titling Photographs". Photo.net. 01 Aug. 2001. 18 Feb. 2009. http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?topic_id=23&msg_id=001LCt

Though this is a forum more than an actual article, I found it very interesting to see the opinions voiced about the process and necessity of titling photographs. It all started when Ted Kostek posted

"I saw a photographer peddling his wares at a show a while back. His photos were nice, but didn't grab me particularly. Not until I noticed that every image had an arresting title.

For example, there was a photo of two large leaves together on a pond and one small leaf a bit farther off. The title was "How Parents Feel." By itself, the photo seemed nice, but nothing special. The title added a whole new level and made it striking and emotionally evocative. I have come to understand that every good photo has a definite idea. Presumably, this photographer put his/her idea in the title, and that's why it was effective. What does anyone think about this?

On the one hand, it clearly helped to communicate with me, and I assume it helped to communicate with others.

On the other hand, this practice could be construed as too heavy handed and limiting: "This is the way to look at this image; no other is acceptable."

Thoughts?"

After this, as with most forums, there were some very good responses and some relatively ignorant responses, and the conversation began to slowly deteriorate until the original idea was lost and one person was merely caught up in arguing their point of view over and over. However, before this happened, a few posters mentioned titles serving as "a mockery". This intrigued me the most, as I am aiming for something close to this affect in my work, and so far my only idea has been to use titles, as I said on my last critique response. At first I felt a little like this was a shortcut, since so much work in the fine art world remains untitled, and there seems to be a constant debate about the use of titles. When Malaika was presenting her work and talked about wanting to use titles, it began to occur to me that it was in fact a completely legitimate way to influence the meaning of the image. Plus, I have always wanted to incorporate words with my art, and have generally been steered away from it because of the difficulty of combining text and image. But with titles, my words can exist outside of the visual framework of the image while retaining a powerful influence over the image. I've had a few ideas about titles for my work that would essentially twist phrases that we might already know in order to slyly reveal the true elements in the picture. So far I have "Barking up the Wrong Cliff", and I'm trying to think of a version of "Slide into Space" that would better reference a known phrase. I like these titles because they seem to reference what the viewer sees, but they actually begin with the real object depicted in the picture. I don't know if I'll necessarily stick to this pattern, because for my coral reef picture that is made from an image of lichen on a rock I've been thinking of something like "Lichen the Reef" or "Fish lichen good" (I'm adding a fish that I photographed at the aquarium in VA Beach). I'm also working on a piece that appears to be waves but is actually a rock, and I'm trying to photoshop in a turtle that I have photographed, and I'm thinking of the title "Trapped Between a Rock and a Turtle Shell" or something like that. However, I'm not sure if the turtle is going to work, and I might have to switch it to a shark or something.


"I Have This Friend"

Monday Post 2-15-08

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti is actually the nickname of Elisabeth Charlotte, a Swiss native born in Grabs in 1962. She earned the nickname, which refers to Pippi Longstocking, as a child. She has studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna and The School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. Her work was first featured in the Venice Biennial in 1997 and she won the Premio 2000 Prize. I am interested in Pipilotti because of her use of color and the abstract effects she uses which tie into hallucinogenic culture. She usually deals with gender, the human body, and sexuality, and her work has been regarded as feminist by some critics. Though these aspects interest me, I do not wish to pursue these ideas in my own art. The more I work, the less I want to add anything to my images. It feels too much like slapping a bumper sticker on a painting. I am beginning to experiment with using real images as masks to change light and color values to induce the illusion that I had added the picture to the abstract background. I often wish my work could be simply about color and line - but I guess that would just be too easy.

Website:
www.pipilottirist.net

Gallery:
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=9760

Interview:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_59/ai_69294352

Thursday Post 2-12-08

Sarcasm

"What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite, requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social relations: figuring out what others are thinking."
"The Science of Sarcasm" from The New York Times.

Small, Meredith F. "Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill". Live Science. 20 June 2008. 12 Feb. 2008.

In this article, Anthropologist Meredith Small of Cornell University talks about how sarcasm could have developed as an evolutionary social tool. Sarcasm cements relationships which are the key to human survival. A shared sense of humor is often the key to a relationship, and so a shared understanding of sarcastic wit would help tighten the bonds of friendship. Also, social relationships can be based on a shared negativity toward someone or something else. I thought this related to my work because Tom thinks that my sarcasm should show up more in it, so my goal is to try and infuse my work with sarcasm. The idea that it is somehow evolutionarily important makes integrating it into my work seem all the more important and if not necessary.

Monday Post 2-8-08

Paul Noble

Born in 1963 in Dilston, Northumberland, he was one of the five founding members of the influential artist space City Racing in London. Along with some sculpture, he does large scale pencil drawings, often made up of several sheets of paper and large enough to cover an entire wall. These drawings are filled with intricate details, so the more you look the more you see. This is one of the qualities that I want to integrate into my work in some way, where you want to keep looking because you continue to see more and more details. I've begun to do this somewhat, but so far I've only reached the second level of detail, which creates a sort of Where's Waldo effect, and though I don't mind that on some level, I want there to be more than that.

Website:
Paul Noble does not seem to have a personal website

Interview:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A3009629

Gallery:
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/paul-noble/

Lecture 2-5-08

Mark Dion

So, because of the intense overcrowding, I had a seat on the floor very close to the tv screen, at an angle that put the glare from the window right through the middle of the images, so it was REALLY hard to see exactly what I was looking at. Luckily, I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely necessary to see the images clearly, because he seemed to emphasize the process much more than the result. However, seeing the image might have helped me understand what he was doing better, because for a while, I couldn't tell if he was actually doing an art project or simply documenting scientific specimens. The 3 Fictional bureaucracies to organize nature was where I started getting confused. When he began to break out of the natural history tract, I started to understand his concept. I thought it was a really interesting idea the way he was "compressing history" and integrating the viewer into that history. The Venetian project did make me wish I could see the images better, because I was very curious to see the mixture of artifacts. I also thought it was a fun idea to arrange the items by artistic standards such as color and form instead of historical standards such as usage and time frame, because it took him further from acting as a scientist, and put him more in artist's shoes.

Thursday Post 2-5-09

Disguising Reality

Control is merely a way of fabricating and disguising reality. And by manipulating reality in this way we create an ideal relationship stemming mainly from our own selfish vain imaginings. Literature gives us many examples of these sorts of ideals while at the same time showing us how reality eventually prevails these conceptions.

Hansel, Joelle. Levinas in Jerusalem: Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. New York: Springer, 2008.

"The 'magic of art' to which Levinas refers is the 'shadow' which is drawn over reality by art. Thus, the shadow is the ontological danger of art: by replacing the reality with an image, the work of art does not limit itself to hiding or disguising reality, but rather it modifies it in such a radical manner that a dimension of irreality within the reality is opened."

I've been making a series of images which are aesthetically pleasing to me, but yet seemingly unrelated in concept outside of their abstracted qualities. As I brainstormed possible directions to take my work in, I got down to two possibilities. One was to imitate abstract painting movements with my photographs, but I didn't want to have an entire series of artworks based on imitation. The other was to disguise reality. From this piece that I read, I feel I want to possibly open it up even further than that, and reach the "irreality" within reality. Basically, what I plan to do is to take my disguised reality further, instead of my photographs merely resembling something that they are not; a cliff, a starscape, a river; I will interject figures or drawings in some way that enhance that illusion, and reject further the original reality.




Look for the people.

Monday Post 2-1-09

Fred Tomaselli

A child of Anaheim, California, Tomaselli saw the world around him as an “artificial, immersive, theme park reality”. He graduated from CA State Fullerton and then became one of the first artists of the "Downtown L.A." art scene in the 1980s. His artwork, which consists of icons of the drug world and images cut from books, create an images that are not only recognizable subjects, but also act as mesmerizing and radiating patterns. He creates his images through a mix of collage and painting, using bright colors and referencing art history. “It is my ultimate aim”, he says, “to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.”

Gallery:
http://www.jamescohan.com/artists/fred-tomaselli/

Interview:
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/22791/fred-tomaselli/

Website:
He does not have his own website