Idea Post #8: Fantasy

image from: http://www.filmcritic.com/features/assets_c/2010/04/Potter_Magic_560x330-thumb-560xauto-28612.jpg (sorry I had to do it!)
Fantasy

I've never labeled my work before as fantasy seeing as I was taking things from real life and just moving them around but the more I research fantasy, the more I am covering the same situations that fantasy artist cover. "...the Arthurian legend and medieval romance to the epic poetryof the Divine Comedy, fantastical adventures featuring brave heroes and heroines, deadly monsters, and secret arcane realms..." are how story telling uses fantasy. And this is how I am using fantasy. I am starting to create my own stories within each frame of photographs and a narrative through a series of photographs. I'm creating villains and protagonist. There is a setting for these photographs that isn't exactly real but a made up situation.

Fantasy is a crucial part of growing up and child development. "Affective and cognitive processes both contribute to creativity and fantasy responses and play behavior." (pg. 142) This means that children need fantasy and creativity to help their mind grow. It allows their play activity to expand in many ways and therefore their minds will grow from playing. In my work, I feel that I am playing, using fantasy and dealing with children. I am trying to think like a child to create this work. I try to think about what I was afraid of when I was little. I am creating scenes from childhood and show how they are distorted. Fantasy and play are prevalent through my work. I feel like sometimes acting childish is creating something I didn't know I could make.

Butcher, James Neal, and Charles Donald Spielberger. "Assessment of Cognitive Affective Interaction In Children: Creativity, Fantasy, and Play Research." Advances in Personality Assessment. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1987. Print.

"Fantasy." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 27 Oct. 2010. Web. 28 Oct. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy.

Artist Post #8: Seung Woo Back

RW01-046, 2006, 127x169cm, Digital print
RW01-044, 2006, 127x169 cm, Digital print
RW01-042, 2006, 127x169cm, Digital print
RW01-001, 2004, 127x169 cm, Digital print

Seung Woo Back

"Seung Woo Back’s series about miniature architectural models in the city of Seoul comment upon the superficiality of modern society"

- Portofilo Catalouge

"Seung Woo Back received M.F.A. in Photography in Korea and studied Research Fine Art and Theory (PhD, M.A.) in England"

-wordpress.com artist biography

Seung Woo Back's series Real World I is a series of photographs taken at Aiins World, a Korean tourist attraction. The monuments at Aiins World are made 1/25 scale replica of the actual buildings and sites from around the world.The sites are built so that they are photographed to look like they are life sized. Seung Woo Back took photographs there to combine the created monuments with the Korean skyline behind it. This mixing of the two creates a visual pull as you try to figure out what is real and what is a monument. I was a little disappointed after I figured out that these photographs were taken at an amusement park. I felt fooled by the creation of it all and loved how the images fit into the landscape. This is something that I think about very much in my own work. How can the veiwers be fooled? There are only a few successful images that make you think there is something else going on and then you realize that there are created pieces of the image and real pieces.

links:

Galleries: http://www.rosegallery.net/index.php#mi=13&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=0&a=2&at=2

http://english.ganaart.com/artists/back-seung-woo/

Website:http://seungwooback.com/index.html

"백승우 Seung Woo Back « 39조2항 전시 블로그 39(2)." 39조2항 전시 블로그 39(2). 25 Nov. 2008. Web. 25 Oct. 2010. http://a39c2.wordpress.com/category/2-참여작가-artists/백승우-seung-woo-back/.

"Issue 41." Portfolio Catalogue. Web. 25 Oct. 2010. http://www.portfoliocatalogue.com/41/index.php.

Idea Post #7: Scale

Julia Fullerton-Batten, Girl Under Motorway
Scale Model

Since I am making different sets and using cutout characters in place of real people I think I should consider models and scale models.

Scale Model: A three-dimensional representation of an object or structure having all parts in the same proportion of their true size.

This definition works better for architectural scales and models for homes or buildings. There is some overlap for my project as well. Dollhouses and other toys like toy cars can also fit under the realm of scale models. I am not using any of these objects physically in my work but I think I am referencing them in a way. I am definitely using scale and trying to play with scale to create works that trick your mind. By using scale and the camera as a tool I am trying to trick the viewer into thinking that they are looking at real scenarios. In my work I've brought my characters into the real world and that plays with scale in a different way because they most definitely do not fit in our world. I think of work by Julia Fullerton Batton's work Teenage Stories and how she uses models/created scenes and real people interacting with the models. I haven't really considered using live people in my work but I wonder what doors that would open for my work.

Artist Post #7: Jeff Wall

A WOMAN WITH A COVERED TRAY, 2003
TRANSPARENCY IN LIGHT BOX
72 X 89 5/8 X 10 1/4 IN. ( 182.88 X 227.65 X 26.04 CM )

OVERPASS, 2001
CIBACHROME TRANSPARENCY, ALUMINUM LIGHTBOX, FLUORESCENT BULBS
90 1/2 X 118 1/8 X 10 1/4 IN. ( 229.87 X 300.04 X 26.04 CM )

The Giant, 1992, transparency, light box

Dead Troops Talk, 1992, transparency, light box

Jeff Wall

"Jeff Wall studied art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and at the Courtauld Institute, London. His work has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions, including a touring solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, in 2007. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including The Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography (2001); Ontario Arts Council, Canada; Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2002); and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize for the Visual Arts (2003).”

-Marian Goodman Gallery

Jeff Wall for many decades now has worked with tableaux photography. He creates and sets and sets up situations with actors and photographs them. This relation to what is real and what is not is something that I think about everyday when I think about photography. To me it is interesting is the shift from what really happened and what Wall creates from his memory of what happened. Wall also deals with being a “painter of modern life” and considers himself as a painter. He sees being a painter as a maker of art. I read being a painter of modern life is more using modern technology to create art as painters of earlier age would use painting to depict the same situations. Photography is a medium that can be used to paint ideas together. Instead of putting paintbrush to canvas, Wall and other photographers, take pieces of photographs and stitch them together. Wall also takes memories and literary sets them up as a painter would start a painting of their memory. I see no difference in what painters do and what photographers since the 70's do. I think of work that I do as sketching or finally painting to create the image. There is an act of making that art is concerned about.

"There’s no one way to come into this relationship with reportage. I think that’s what people in the 70s and 80s really worked on: not to deny the validity of documentary photography, but to investigate potentials that were blocked before, blocked by a kind of orthodoxy about what photography really was.”

-Jeff Wall via interview with Museo Magazine

"Wall encourages us to accept and enjoy the illusion of his realism”

-Sheena Wagstaff

LINKS:

Gallery: http://www.mariangoodman.com/ (they have a lot of good artists... I should make a trip!)

Interview: http://www.museomagazine.com/issue-0/jeff-wall

Website: http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/jeff-wall/

"Jeff Wall | Museo Magazine." Interview by David Shapiro.Issues | Museo Magazine. Museo Publications, LLC. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. http://www.museomagazine.com/issue-0/jeff-wall.

"Jeff Wall - November 16, 2002 - January 4, 2003." Marian Goodman Gallery. Web. 18 Oct. 2010. http://www.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2002-11-16_jeff-wall/.

Wagstaff, Sheena. Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004. London: Tate Enterprises, 2005. Print.

Idea Post #6: Surrealism

Salvidor Dali, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

Surrealism

Surrealism was created out of Dadaism. Poet, Andre Breton wrote many texts on defining Surrealism. From his first manifesto: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Breton is explaining that Surrealism isn't just expressed by poems but by many other art forms and just life in general. Where Dadaism was totally against most everything, like reason, surrealism was also against everything except dreams. Surrealist were very interested in Sigmund Freud and his theories on free association and dream analysis. Dadaist didn't see any point to having a real story to their work. It was just meant to provoke the viewer in some way. Surrealists knew that their dreams were important and tried to recreate them in art. Salvador Dali, one of the most famous surrealists, would get up and paint furiously what he just had been dreaming. There were two forms of Surrealism: one based on practiced improvised art where the artist would distance himself from the artwork and create works that were more from the subconscious. The other form was the one that Dali and Rene Magritte " used scrupulously realistic techniques to present hallucinatory scenes that defy commonsense." The first Surrealist Manifesto ends along the terms that surrealists follow no conventions or set pattern. They are led by their dreams and their unconcious mind.

How I think this works into my art: Its not all planned. Not everything in my work has to make sense. Not everything has to be real. In fact, most of my work is a trickery of the eye anyway. So very basically, I want there to be more room for nonsense in my work. I don't want to fall off into being cynical and to not believe in anything but some nonsense will help free my work.

Strickland, Carol, and John Boswell. The Annotated Mona Lisa a Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-modern. Kansas City, Kan.: Andrews and McMeel, 1992. Print.

"Surrealist Manifesto." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 14 Oct. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto.

Artist Post #6: Janine Antoni

"Saddle"
2000
Full rawhide (cow), 25 2/3 x 32 1/2 x 78 5/8 inches
"Moor"
2001
Dimensions variable
Installation views, "Free Port," at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthalle, Sweden
"Loving Care"
1993
Installation view at Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London
The artist soaked her hair in hair dye and mopped the floor with it.
"Lick and Lather," detail
1993
7 soap and 7 chocolate self-portrait busts, 24 x 16 x 13 inches each

I don't think I'll be able to make this lecture so I'll do a post on her instead.

"Janine Antoni, a 46-year-old native of the Bahamas, received her B.A. in 1986 from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She received the MacArthur Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Inc. Painting and Sculpture Grant in 1998, and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 1999."

I see a trend in many of the artists I am choosing. My interest in them are all very similar. I enjoy the act of making. Janine Antoni also expresses this same liking for using your hands. Antoni uses her hands, hair and body to create her art work. There are so many joys and acts that she captures in her art work. She learns how to do old feminine type work with her hands like spinning (not on a stationary bike) and loom weaving. I do not consider myself a feminist but with most works that deal with feminine processes and the way women used to act, I get a strong connection to the work. I am not sure where this feeling comes from. She also just uses her own body to create work. For Loving Care she uses her hair and hair dye to paint the floor of a gallery. She says that she likes to use her body in her work because then other people can feel her presence. It is also helpful that he body is there so and the viewer can empathize with what she has done to create the artwork. She also uses the theme of her family and her life in creating Moor. In this work she weaves together a large rope that she twists and combines herself. The pieces come from special things from all of her friends and family. They can be anything from dresses or electrical cords. She weaves and uses her hands and has her mother help weave with her too. The process is as much of the art as the final product is. She taught herself how to tight rope walk and she made a video where she is walking on the horizon of her childhood view of the beach. History and making things and use of different types of media are so interesting to me!

" I just believe in the power of art, what it can do for our lives. I think if you stay focused on what art can do and don’t get distracted, you discover it is limitless. "

- Janine Antoni via Bomb magazine

"And because "Moor" is made out of materials from my friends, I thought I could make a rope from materials of my life and walk it like a lifeline."

-Janine Antoni via Art 21

LINKS:

Website: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/antoni/index.html

Interview: http://bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2191

gallery: http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/janine-antoni/

"Art21 . Janine Antoni . Biography . Documentary Film." PBS. Web. 11 Oct. 2010. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/antoni/index.html.

Horodner, Stuart. "BOMB Magazine: Janine Antoni by Stuart Horodner." Editorial. BOMB Magazine Jan.-Feb. 1999. BOMB Magazine: Home Page. Jan.-Feb. 1999. Web. 11 Oct. 2010. http://bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2191.

artist rant? Erin Tyner

Yellow, 2008
Above, 2008
This post isn't so much about the photographer its about photography for everyone. This is an artist that I found about two years ago when I started thinking and using cutouts in my photography. Erin Tyner is a self taught photographer from Atlanta, Georgia. She has a series that she made in 2008 called Half Awake. She uses model people and other household objects to create a diorama and then photographs them. "In my Half Awake series I construct scenes by combining household items, natural objects, and train figures under one inch in height. By pairing figures and context I create characters that are engaged with an unfolding narrative." When I first found her on the internet I felt fooled. I felt like I had come up with a way to use photography the way that I want to. In a way that made sense to me. And this self-taught photographer had come up with the same idea as me. This led to questions like: Why am I paying so much money to study photography when I can just own a camera and make the same conclusions about art? Or what am I doing that is interesting in any way? I think with flickr and ffffound and other sites like this make me feel inadequate as an artist. What interests me is that "hipster" photography is so over used all over the internet. And then there are people that take amazingly perfect and dynamic images with their expensive cameras. As a photography student I feel like I am swimming upstream. I have a not top of the line digital camera and all the other film cameras I have are pre-owned. Its a pretty defeating feeling. Also, the fact that Erin Tyner shares and name with me is just the icing on the cake.

So I have since realized that it is not about the camera you have, or the art school education but how you put your tools into effect. Half Awake series isn't the best but its the best of her works. There are some images that are really beautiful but to me don't have that much behind them. Even with Tyner in a small part of the photo world I feel that there is room for me. I have skills that I have worked on for a while now and need to perfect. I use the tools I have to the ways that work best. Tyner isn't represented by a gallery but she has her own etsy site. I suppose you just need to be a great entrepreneur to be a great photographer.

Website:

http://www.erintyner.com/

interview:

http://blanketmagazine.com/ (their latest issue)

Center for Fine Art Photography Submission

submitted to the Blue show!

Idea Post #5: Repetition compulsion

Repetition compulsion is an inherent tendency in the unconscious that impels the individual to repeat certain actions, usually the traumatic ones. This is to master the traumatic event that the person could not master in the trauma itself. After reading this article it explains that not every repetitive compulsive act is out of trauma necessarily. That children that throw their favorite toy to the ground, is upset that it is gone, receives it from a parent, and repeats the cycle all over again. This too is a form of repetition compulsion.

I want repetition to fill my work. I want to repeat processes until they become subconscious. This is seen in the article that later repetition compulsion isn't just for people dealing with a trauma. It is also how people try to relate to others. Inside of your core, you want to be with other individuals. Your body and mind will act a certain way each time to try and gain friends. I am not trying to gain friends by making artwork but I want to do the same action over and over again until I have a new product. I want to cut out and create many characters and create new backgrounds to put them in. The repetition will keep the work changing and concepts will bend. I think it will be good.

"Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again"- Repetition Compulsion Info

compulsion /com·pul·sion/ (kom-pul´shun)

1. an overwhelming urge to perform an irrational act or ritual.

2. the repetitive or stereotyped action that is the object of such an urge.compul´sive

---

repetition compulsion in psychoanalytic theory, the impulse to reenact earlier emotional experiences or traumatic behavior.

-medical dictionary

"Compulsion - Definition of Compulsion in the Medical Dictionary - by the Free Online Medical Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia." Medical Dictionary. Web. 07 Oct. 2010. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/compulsion.

"Repetition Compulsion Information (Freud) @ IAmPicky.com." Anal Retentive and Obsessive-Compulsive (Annoyance) @ IAmPicky.com. 27 Sept. 2010. Web. 07 Oct. 2010. http://www.iampicky.com/Repetition_compulsion/encyclopedia.htm.

Julika Rudelius Response

"I highly question even the idea of seeing the actual self on film." This quote was the most interesting quote to me. Her concept that film is never an exact replication of reality is something that I've always felt. I think that it ultimately completes almost all of her work. The tangle of truths that weave in and out of each other amazes me. Using actors to play others and shooting them as it were really happening is a way that Rudelius twists the truth. Or creating a fake set in which real people are shot on is a twist of the truth. But for me using film and photo to twist the truth in the end is the best way of complicating it all. The fact that many people watch videos or films or look at pictures and think that they are getting a great representation of what really happened is something that Rudelius (and all photographers and filmmakers) does every time she makes a video. Thinking that what you are seeing is real is something that cannot be trusted. Images are not to be trusted and I think that Rudelius has this in mind when she makes all of her work. I love that she used to help make documentaries.

To me acting, social class, and truth is what Rudelius's work is all about. She either hires actors or has real people act a certain way. A lot of her work deals with the social stature of the people in her videos. There are different ranges from socialites to immigrants. Truth is what Rudelius's work is about or the twisting of it.

Rudelius's work manipulates the viewer mostly into believing in what they are seeing is real. I like the amount of control from her work. It was inspiring. But also I would have liked to see her be a bit more loose with how she treated everything. Just to see what would happen. And I think in Your Blood is As Red As Mine she let a lot of things go. but there was still an air of scriptedness from it as well. That might just come from all of her other work and now I am just questioning all of the truths and realities in every different work. However, her control does allow the viewer to follow her and get exactly what she wants you to get from her work. This is something I need to adopt.

Julika Rudelius Q's

picture from artist's website.

All of your work has to do with social status in some way. Does this overall theme for most of work create a bond that makes your work a structured whole? Does your all of your work grow into a network that can be descriptive of the whole world?

with many of your videos you make it clear what is "real" and what is acted. Is it more natural to try and film people that are acting or to just film people? When you direct people to do certain things there is a way of manipulating the outcome. Do you want to manipulate your work further? Besides, editing and directing, could you introduce a type of manipulation that doesn't simulate reality?

Artist Post #5: Cristiana Palandri

Oddity. 2008

Bones, human hair, gauzes, feathers, wood, polyurethane, iron

18 inches (diameter) x 9 4/5 inches

Island. 2009

Human hair, plasticine, pins, bones, feathers, iron, wood, glass

40 cm (diameter) x 50 cm

Untitled (dopo la morte). 2007

ballpoint pen, paster, vellum paper

50 x 70 cm

Eat Hair. 2006

Lamda Print . 30 X 42 cm

all pictures from her gallery's website http://www.scaramoucheart.com/HOME.html

Cristiana Palandri

“Cristiana Palandri was born in 1977 in Florence, where she lives and works. She pursued her study of art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna.”

• http://www.strozzina.org/open_studios/artista_en.php?id=04

Cristiana Palandri is a working Italian artist that lives in Florence. She creates art based on her hair. She started drawing since she was very little but didn't take a lot of interest in it until 2005. She would create large drawings of thin lines that looked like strands of hair. They would come together and then tangle and sometimes spell words. She then started to add real strands of her own hair and pasting them on her drawings. The process for Palandri from drawing to adding a new element allowed her to grow even more and she started creating sculptures. She makes sculptures using the same materials. She still used her hair, or collected hair from barber shops and friends, and wax, glass and bone. Many of the materials she uses have certain weaknesses to them yet can be controlled to create strength. One strand of hair removed from the head is weak and likely to break, but when braided and controlled it becomes strong. Many of her sculptures resonate that idea. There is strength created in the control used to make the piece. Yet the elements are still seen as delicate and quiet pieces. This push and pull of weak to strong is what makes Palandri's work so intriguing.

Palandri relates to my work in using similar themes throughout her work. She weaves hair into a lot of the work she creates. I weave my family into different works that I create. What is also very similar, is the way that we both move from two dimensions to three dimensions. She started by drawing and drawing her hair. Then she moved to encaustic works and finally she created many sculptural works. It is a natural progression for her. For me, I am a photographer that every day takes three dimensional objects and forces them to be two dimensions. However, in this process, I found myself making small sculptures. I found myself creating works in three dimensions to photograph them. And my sculptures only exists as photographs really. They are disassembled after I am done. So there is a fragility in my work that is also in Palandri's. A peacefulness.

“Ever since she produced her first works in 2005, drawing was the medium with which she began to experiment in the genesis of form through a kind of "controlled automatism", resorting to the specific plastic features of such organic materials as wax, bone and hair.”

• http://www.strozzina.org/open_studios/artista_en.php?id=04

“ Accordance does exist at times, tied to the use of or interest in the same materials, hair for example, but my fixation for this material, notwithstanding that it is more resistant than death and capable of going beyond ourselves”

• Palandri in and interview

Links:

Gallery: http://www.scaramoucheart.com/HOME.html

interview: http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp/IDCategoria/206/IDNotizia/20694

website: http://www.scaramoucheart.com/PALANDRI.html

NOT Cristiana Palandri:

http://www.cristinapalandri.it/biografie.html