Artist Research -- Rebecca Rijsdijk's "fluitenbergstraat 104"

(all from fluitenbergstraat 104, 2009)

As far as biography, there's not much that I can find about Rebecca Rijsdijk.  She seems to be a young, contemporary artist who works in many different veins.  I'm choosing to focus specifically on fluitenbergstraat 104.  Just from reading the images, the piece seems to be about looking back on something that was lost. One thing that Rijsdijk does that I want to perhaps experiment with in my presentation of my work is the utilization of mismatched imagery. This gives the impression that she is showing us a collection of events that have taken place over a span of time and have not been captured only recently.  In other works, she incorporates written pieces and scraps of paper which gives the work more body and soul.  These written pieces do not overpower the images but rather give them a bit of context as well as clues as to what we are viewing.

Rebecca's Website

Idea Post -- Idea for a Photo

While I'm not sure if I will be able to attempt this (it all depends on my model's availability before the end of the semester) I thought of something that I believe will really get across my point for the following series of images.  These are all of the incarnations this photo has seen:

 

three incarnations of a certain distaste, 2009

So I'm thinking that the framing would be similar to that in the second incarnation however his head would be tilted up and a fencing foil would be held to his throat while he has the fork or knife either right above or sticking into the dish laid out before him.  It would show the forcefulness without being too overpowering, I think.

Artist Research -- Brooke Shaden

From her website:
Founded by photographer and filmmaker Brooke Shaden, Shaden Productions explores the theme of surrealism in portriature and beyond. Brooke is a Temple University graduate with degrees in film and English, currently focused in photography while producing and directing a short film, Keep. 

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a play in three acts, 2009

an unyielding limb, 2009

hygiene, 2009

disjointed dream, 2008

Brooke Shaden's imagery is both haunting and quiet and is sure to creep into the thoughts as one is trying to get to sleep.  While sometimes I feel like it is slightly over produced, it is still beautiful and rife with historical references.  The posturing of her figures is classical and romantic, which is in stark contrast to the majority of the subject matter which is dark and anxious, which is always something I admire. She draws much of her inspiration for imagery from paintings which reminds me of Joel-Peter Witkin.  Shaden's lighting is also gorgeous, she has a clear understanding of it and photo manipulation, which some of her other works are reliant on.  The first image I've posted actually reminds me of one of Brittany Kaufman's images.

fetus, 2009

green street blues, 2009

a winter wind, 2009

coinhabitance, 2009

Brooke's Website

Idea Post -- Elco Color Printing and Mounting

So after my meeting with Tom we discussed size and presentation for my work.  While I think that 18"x12" is a nice size, I would like to see these images bigger and he mentioned the ongoing poster print sale at Elco Color.  Here is the price listing:

I'm thinking that the 30"x20" prints are looking like my best bet. Not because they're cheaper, but because they're more of the size I want -- just slightly bigger than what I originally presented.  Tom had also mentioned that another student, Zack Concepcion, had gotten his Elco prints mounted there as well. So, I looked into this:

While I don't have a problem with foamcore, and it would be nice to do a one stop shopping kind of thing, these prices are just way too high.  For the critique, I went to Main Art and got 5 prints mounted for I think $28, which is a really great deal especially considering the turn around time (I got them back same day).

I think my best bet is going to be to get my prints made at Elco and then have them mounted at Main Art. I just have to make sure I give myself enough time to get everything taken care of.

All images are screenshots from the Elco website.

Artist Research -- Jinyoung Yu

``My creations represent those who have chosen a life apart from others, as if they are invisible or non-existent beings.  Instead of adapting themselves to human society, they enter into their own personal space, avoiding others interruptions.``

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Jinyoung Yu is a 32 year old Korean artist who, at current, does the majority of her work in sculptural medium.  Her work struggles with a few key ideas including the isolation that occurs due to the break down of communication that we are experiencing within our culture as well as the actual state of being an invisible or transparent individual.  Both of these ideas are expressed poignantly in her work, especially in the faces of her sculptures which are created with a self-realized PVC recipe and clay.  Yu was actually featured in the same issue of Hi-Fructose as Michael Hussar and in her interview, I found this paragraph to be a good summation of her work:

So how does one make sense of it all? Is it better to shout and carry on or to hide in the corner, feigning weak smiles? Is wearing your heart on your sleeve any better than putting on a mask? As in any intellectual debate about identity, conformity or individualism, it's hard to make a shatter-proof argument one way or the other.  All I know is that when I look at one of Jinyoung Yu's invisible people, they look familiar to me. I understand. I understand because I know them as myself.  Jinyoung's work is for the loner in all of us, for those outside of the world; those who find their comfort inside their own private sphere yet long to show their true self; a self free of lies and fraudulent affectation.  As stunning as the work may be and as dedicated an artist as she is, the true aim of Jinyoung's invisible people lies in the instinctual pursuit to find and celebrate the sincere individual lurking inside each of us.

I find that much of this is what I'm trying to achieve in my own work, a communication, a deep seeded understanding of self that lies in another person or figure.  My struggle, though, is going to be this: How do I achieve this intimacy without the use of an entire face? I'm noticing in my reshoots and that most of the imagery that I'm creating anew that the face is becoming smaller and smaller in the frame, if it is even in the frame at all.  This is interesting to me because generally the face is a large part of my image and it always has been I think. It is the hub of emotion, but I think in studying body language, I can get the same kind of raw energy that is shown in these faces made of lifeless clay.

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All of these pieces are either from Abundant Emptiness or A Family in Disguise. Because she is a foreign artist and many of her pieces bear similar qualities, it was difficult to decipher which pieces belonged to which series because of the language barrier and her general state of unknown in the US.

Jinyoung's Website

Idea Post -- Display Ideas part Deux

Here is a beautiful diagram of how I would like to present my final piece:

The hanging red/white things in the middle are my images. I want to have a light shining in the middle space. There will be curtains sectioning off the area from the rest of the room, however it won't be small like it was at mid-term, it will only serve to define a space so that the room that I present in (I anticipate room 305 ) will not distract from my work.  I actually got this idea from Ashleigh.  We were talking about how I feel there is no beginning or end to this particular work. She mentioned it being cyclical and what if I hang my images in a circle where there is no defined start or end and when the person enters the space they just go around and around. I like this idea of entrapment to go along with my work and having my audience being stuck in the endless cycle that I find myself stuck in on the day to day.  I think it would be a very effective way of showing my piece for this reason.

Artist Lecture -- Shimon Attie

Still from The Attraction of Onlookers 

Joachim-Ecke Auguststrasse: Slide projection of former Jewish resident, 1931, Berlin, 1992

Judging by the image that was chosen for Shimon Attie's lecture poster, I was not excited at all to come today, but I've got to say I was very pleasantly surprised. While I thoroughly enjoyed the entire lecture despite the embarrassing technical difficulties, I'm mainly going to focus on Attie's The Attraction of Onlookers -- Aberfan: An Anatomy of a Welsch Village. In 1966 there was a tragic disaster in the Welsch  village of Aberfan.  A man-made avalanche slid down a mountain and completely covered the village's only elementary school.  This disaster brought all kinds of attention to the small village and hasn't truly allowed them to move on and really recover from the disaster.  It has also spawned a kind of disaster tourism that brings swells of bottle-neckers to see the site of the disaster.  Like Attie said, "We freeze in response to trauma, but the trauma is never complete."  He was approached many times to make a piece commemorating the incident and turned it down many times before he actually accepted.  He made two promises to the village, that he would not use any of the archival imagery of the accident and he would show them in a way that they'd never been shown before.
Thus he created The Attraction of Onlookers.  In this five channel installation, he had images of archetypes that could be found in any given Welsch village: the dancer, the hardcore singer, the mayor, the men's choir, the conductor, the family.  Each person/group of people were depicted on slowly moving black platform which was seamless against a black background.  They were holding various poses that were indicative of their particular "label".  In the background, there was a slow, tinkling music that was very quite and contemplative.  The music coupled with the movements reminded me of a music box, and it was really quite touching.  He chose to show the people with expressionless faces in order to extract any sentimentality that could be attached to each person.  The use of these iconic types was to rectify the loss of privacy and anonymity.  I wish I would've been able to experience this piece in person. I believe it would be truly moving to be encompassed by all of the imagery and sound of this work.

Artist Lecture -- James Siera

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I wasn't quite sure what to expect going into this lecture, but I got a real treat.  I'd only found out about the lecture the night before and didn't think to look up the artist.  On top of that, he was speaking on behalf of the painting and printmaking department. He was very charming man and the lecture was very conversational, which I appreciated especially with the arsenal of imagery he'd brought along with him. Siena had very specific titles for most of his work, but he also has allowed for friends and his son to name his images as well. I like this playful approach to naming. At first he said that didn't name his work because it could point a person in the wrong direction, but stopped caring because if the work was strong enough it could overcome any misdirection that a title may present.  I took this to heart especially since I have so much trouble naming my images.

It was also interesting how he takes an original concept and twists and manipulates it in on itself. For example with his lattice series (one version seen in image 3) he started in one direction and completely turned the idea on its head via rules he creates for himself for each project whether it be only using acute angles, not allowing lines to touch, or continuously dividing up the image.  These are rules he creates for himself. To me, it seems like they are little challenges or prompts for him to follow and explore. He even said that sometimes these twists and turns can be arbitrary.  These simple rules are very much the foundation of his work, but I think because we are so trained to find complexities and reasons for every  little thing, it can be difficult to grasp that there were no reasons for some of his rules except to simply exist as guidelines for a painting. Sometimes there are "phantoms" or tricks of the eye that appear in his images and while he didn't necessarily plan for them,  he left them in the images simply because he likes them.  He thinks of them as paintings within the paintings that are generated when the eye moves over the image, which I think is a very smart way to look at it. My favorite thing that he said, however, was something that I don't know that I would've given a second thought to, but Ashleigh had me write it down for her own memory and afterwards I found myself thinking about it:

"I thought about doing it, so I better not, not do it. So I did it."

I know I've heard a couple times this semester, "If you know what it's going to look like, why do you need to make it?" Sometimes you have to make something to get it out of your head because it plagues and haunts and pecks at you until you actually do it.  In some cases, you may think you know what it's going to look like, but it comes out completely different.  I think it is very important to get out any kind of idea that you have, especially if you have a gut feeling about it.

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Titles: 1) Heliopolis 2) Non-Slice 3) Yellow Ocean Lattice 4) V-Module 5) untitled yellow-black 6) upside down devil 7) the narrows
8) battery 9) enter the face 10) eight line way (pink) 11) Recursive Boustrophedonic Combs with Random Prong 12) Recursively Puckered Non-Slice

Artist Research -- Michael Hussar

 

    Pope Innocent XXX, 2006               Morphine, 2001

 

                                                                           Spoonfed, 2001

This week, my artist is painter Michael Hussar.  My friend Alanna told me about him over the summer and I just rediscovered him in an issue of Hi-Fructose that I'd purchased a couple of months ago and just now got around to reading.  While his imagery is certainly darker than mine, his imagery is unique and not "easy" in the way that it unnerves the audience.  This is something that I spoke with Tom about early in the week.  Specifically, in regard to this image:

a certain distaste, 2009

We spoke about how I wanted to communicate that this "meal" is something being forced upon him and that although he may not want to partake in it, he has no other choice.  How am I conveying this restraint? Physical restraints were discussed and I mentioned not wanting to make the symbolism too easy, which was something Tom appreciated.  I feel like Hussar is a perfect mix between the realism of Witkin's photographs and the horrific imagery of Bacon.  It's a perfect marriage, really.  The article in Hi-Fructose opens with this sentiment:

In most forms of art, a grotesque figure is meant to symbolize the enemy--a lothesome creature, foreign, despicable and the antithesis of beauty. 

In Michael Hussar's paintings, the grotesque is often invoked to portray the self.  This reversal is not mere artistic self flagellation or overly dramatic theatrical posturing, but rather a meditation of the nature of the psyche of moments in time where the direction of one's  life pivots in an instant, sometimes in the wake of a tragedy.

I feel that this is important because it seems as though such dark imagery is frowned upon quite often if it is not performed in a certain, scaled back way.  And in Hussar's case, the grotesque is horrifying and in your face, but it also has a sad beauty about it-- the latter being something that I want to inject into my own work. I also found this passage interesting:

"A lot of dark, gothic painters, (not all off course), paint things because it's cool. I never set out to be a dark artist but have just tapped into painting how I feel and that is what you see. It's just an underlying thing in my life.  My life turned at a particular point, and that's just the way it is. I don't fight it or try to justify it. It is really honest."

This is definitely something that I find hope in, especially in addition to something else that was mentioned.  Hussar very rarely sells his work because he feels a presence about it and he doesn't want it to be just another thing that someone buys.  I feel the same way about my work. Although I am a photographer, and he is a painter and the way our final products work is definitely different, there is something that I feel from my work that resonates with me.  It also made me feel a little less weird about making dark imagery, especially when I feel like I'm surrounded by work that is decidedly not so dark.  It's something that I don't aim to make, it just comes out that way and I'm glad that I can find a relationship in that in another artist who is working today.

       Vasoline, 2002                                                  

 

                                                                      Hans Memling, 2006

Michael's Website

Idea Post -- Word Association? pt 2

Last time I did one of these, it was things that I was considering putting in my images.  This time, I'm going to put down words that I want my work to embody and communicate. Or rather, these are words that I want to be associated with my work as a whole, not necessarily only in this piece.  Some of these words may not even be expressed in my work thus far.


cold
despondent
numb
feigning
pressure
loneliness
fear
anxiety
reluctance
distress
chill
weight
hopeless
trembling
exquisite
somnambulation
solitary
confined
aching
hesitation
separation
fading
falling
distress
lost
discarnate
dissolving
silence
reflection
restlessness
disassociation
haunting
isolation
futility
fey (as explained in this definition: Magical or fairylike; Strange or otherworldly; Spellbound; Doomed to die)
creeping
decay
fallen
sickness
gnawing
fright
exhausted
worn
drowning
unashamed
resolute
clarity
rebirth
calm
freezing
blue
grey
black
bleak
icy
surreal
shattered
jagged
lucidity
dreaming
erased
frail
freezing
frozen
stripped
pale
abject
hidden
weeping
crying
seeping
rotting
choking
fragmented
sorrow
pain
seclusion
flawed
discontent
binding
desperation
displacement (from this definition: In psychology, displacement is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects effects from an object felt to be dangerous or unacceptable to an object felt to be safe or acceptable.)
abandoned
echoing
cutting
isolation
somber
hollow
longing
pleading
tainted
impure
crawling


Sorry for any repeats, they were just flowing out like water.