I will think of him often as I enter into the next phase of this project.
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I found the name of this artist while investigating how religious (or sacrilegious) imagery gets used in contemporary art (especially contemporary art that incorporates text). In this search I found the name of Prophet Royal Robertson. Royal Robison covered the entirety of his Louisiana home and yard with hand-made signs and apocalyptic paintings. The painting and posters included imagery of “future cities, space autos, couples engaged in sex, and detailed calendars chronicling his daily woes.” (Relatable content). The work makes use of the Bible, pornagraphic magizines, classic science fiction novels and religious sermons. Bizarre but also relevant to what I'm doing.
I will think of him often as I enter into the next phase of this project.
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I went on one of those blue link hypertext adventures through the net looking at shrine inspired work and found Yves Tessier. Yvess is a Canadian artist who creates bright, flat illustrations---often depicting the female figure. Here is his artist statement: “I use drawing and painting to bring out the salient features of what I've seen, to describe the essential qualities of human life, articulated in a formal language drawn as much from Archaic periods of art history as from the aesthetic of comic books. I propose to delineate, in as candid a vision as humanly possible, the spirit of humanity in our time." I love the idea of work that is consciously drawing stylistic cues from “archaic” art history and juxtaposing it with images from pop culture/ mass media. I love his treatment of the female figure, the sort of sensual simpleness of a form made up a few bold contour lines. I also dig the color! (And of course the way he plays with size! I love some of his very small, sometimes even postcard sized pieces! Until recently, with my digital work I though that the size of the presentation was kind of arbitrary but of course I was so very mistaken! I am learning.) Though I have not visited a gallery recently, I have helped build and edit a gallery piece comprised of George Ferrandi's work in VCU's online magazine Blackbird.I've always been a huge fan of George Ferrandi's work, but doing this build gave me the opportunity to see and work with the majority of her published/presented pieces all in one place ( i.e. Super Silver Monkey) and fall in love with a few I hadn't seen before (Wherever There Is Water---- if you have a chance to look at any of the build, please look at this piece. I find it particularly affecting. I also think it has connections to the Social Practice art we've been reflecting on, i.e. that element of com.munity involvement and "narritive" creation ) http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v15n2/gallery/ferrandi-g/artist-talk-page.shtml I am still in the midst of creating and assembling bits, and will continue to possibly take pictures and draw when I get back from the funeral tomorrow. Afterwards, I will start to assemble the work digitally. Not sure what the final product is (would be lying if I said I was) but I will know it when I see it (or I'll know what I could have done at least). Here are some of the bits. Similarly to the last project not all my process is easily document-able because sometimes I'll spend an hour struggling with software. (I did even more on the car ride up: I'll ad those sketches/ text when I get access to my grandmother's scanner tommorow) Last week I had a very helpful critique with Coach, which has got me thinking more and more about the role that display has the potential to play in my work. Projection, particularly. In my pieces so far I've tried to include a drawn/painted/ "physical?" (I know I've been warned about using this word when talking about digital vs non digital art) piece; normally it's an element that's scanned in and then manipulated. Researching artists who use projection creatively in their work, in addition to the critique conversation, has got me thinking about projecting onto that "physical" element instead of scanning it in, i.e., what are the possibilities for that kinda of interaction outside of combination in software/ in Photoshop.
Speaking of... Painter Albert Oehlen has used projection since the period of his “computer paintings” of the mid-1990s. In the particular 1955 piece I saw, Untitled (9 ½ Weeks) (and the one most referenced in articles relating to projections), Olmsted projected an erotic film directly over one of his abstract canvasses, saying “you want to see the movie and you forget about the painting but actually you stare at my painting for an hour and a half and it is burned into your eyes.” Interesting to think about the role focus plays in work with movement. Not advocating for streaming erotica over my own work (on the threat of MIRS, probably, or an art department shut down). But again, I'm interested in Artists like Olmsted who explore this interaction between moving projection and a stationary "traditional art" piece. Lot of in and out of class work, beyond the actual watercolor itself (and some charcoal elements I didn't even end up incorporating like I originally intended) was spent learning how to use Adobe Audition and AfterEffects. Cool stuff! But also cool stuff with a higher learning curve than I'm accustomed. Included a screenshot or two from within the programs to be sort of "representative"/ symbolic of that process work.
The Visual Art's center has an new exhibit entitled Conjurers: Artists Imbue the Ordinary .
As someone who loves materiality and is a keeper of lots and lots of bits and trinkets and pieces of discarded things, I really loved the content of this work and the way the artist explores his own relationship with objects. For my junior year personal anthology I've been thinking a lot about work with intersections between text and visuals. A lot of that time researching was spent looking at the fairly new genre of the video essay, as well as multimodal writing. My Dad talks about about Poems that Go, which sort of pioneered all this. Here's an excerpt from their website that sums up some of the complexities in defining this sort of mulitmodal work (i.e. is it art? where do we draw the line in calling stuff like this creative writing? (most of the poems are broken, now. I think a lot about our discussions on the difficulties in preserving digital wor.) : What makes a poem a poem? If a text is sung, does it become a song? When motion graphics are involved, does that make it animation? If the images are photographic, is it cinema?In the age of "Post-media aesthetics," as Lev Manovitch has pointed out, the blurring of traditional media genres makes it difficult, if not impossible, to rigidly define media territories. Instead of struggling to draw these separations, we freely let the arts mingle in a space we still dare to draw a circle around and label "poetry." None of this is especially coherent but it's something I've been thinking a lot about, where are there opportunities to being art and text together, who's doing it, and is it being done digitally.... All this thinking made me jump to a slightly unrelated video that I think I'd like to include in this post which falls into a different sort of category... not a multi-modal poem but a poem written by a well known poet (and coinecendatly a family friend) which a group of animators used as the basis for an animation. I think there are instances where in doing something like this, artists just become illustrators for a piece of text---but this feels beyond illustration a piece of its own that works with and draws from the poem. I find it particularly affecting. If I could do something even remotely similar in my own work (not this sort of full scale animation, obviously) I'd love to work with T.R. Hummer's "Where She Goes When She Sleeps." This may be a later in life thing. I'm thinking about it, though. Below is the video I was talking about; an animation that works with the Steve Scafidi poem The Junebugs, part of a series of poems about Abraham Lincoln that blend history and myth... |
Author.Jordan Keller Archives
May 2017
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