Chance Exhibition

I put in a piece for the Chance show that I made last year.  It was a photogram and although it has everything to do with the theme of chance I'm not too thrilled with it.  I felt a little rushed and pressured and I didn't know what to put in so I chose that piece.  I really would have preferred to put in a black photo of mine (done on luster paper) but I figured the glare from the lights would just make it reflective and you wouldn't be able to really see the image.  The photo I put in is kind of small, 13 1/4 x 11 inches, but it was done by dipping the paper in developer, moving the liquid around so it dripped off of the paper and then exposing it to light and then putting it through the regular developing process.  So you can see it's 100% chance based but it's a so-so image.  I wasn't looking to gain an award from this show, I know that sounds terrible, but I am really caught up in what I want to do for thesis, I'm still quite lost, so this show was just a nice pause, not something I really intended on shinning in. 

On a lighter note, I took my professor's advice and I put my thesis ideas on flash cards.  As I was going through all of them and writing them down I did some editing and it felt great!  I have a few ideas I am really gravitating towards, however I'll leave them hush hush for the time being as I feel that if I mention them too much I will grow bored of them, which has happened with a lot of my ideas so far.  However I will say that I want color to be a part of it, particularly orange, Larry Poons/Imi Knoebel orange :)

OH!  And one more thing, I loved my group's curating job!  Our two rooms are going to look incredible and fresh!  We worked so well together and our ideas meshed perfectly!  I can't wait for Friday! 

Charles Bukowski & Other stuff

For the beginning of this blog I want to go way off topic and mention the greatness that is Charles Bukowski (author extraordinaire).  A new life goal of mine is to read every single one of his books!  If you have never heard of him or read anything of his I suggest starting with Factotum and move on from there.  I don't even know where to begin in describing his utter amazingness.  However, I do think he would have liked my legs.
As for Thesis talk, I think I may put most of my experiments on hold.  Do them on my own time and therefore giving me more time to brainstorm.  A former professor of mine suggested putting my ideas on flash cards, which isn't half bad.  It's a great way of organizing too, which I am a HUGE fan of!  Some ideas that I keep coming back to include: dying paper using oil & water based dyes/paints; photo transferring; snapshot (Tom Wood, Nan Goldin); and a new issue is privacy.  I mentioned in critique that I want to make my own paper and transfer the photo(s) onto it.  I like this idea because it's an added feature of the artist's hand in the work and I want to be a librarian one day and I LOVE books and paper.  Books are kind of a dying breed and I wish they weren't.  There's something so (I'm at a loss for words) so pleasing about holding a book, flipping through pages, carrying it, folding pages, rolling it, actual book marks!, knowing what a page looks like as a way of remembering it, the smell of it.  I think that if I made my own paper it would be reminiscent of a book in the way that you would want to feel it and smell it, it would be visually stimulating your sense of touch.  It would be more familiar and welcoming rather then the harsh crispness/gallery-suitable photo paper.  As for my subject matter, that is what I am struggling with.  I would love to do something different and use a landscape or objects as my main focus however I feel like it's too new of a subject to me and so I would need more time with it.  I want to go back to the figure.  I love it too much to ignore.  It's familiar and always always captivating and interesting and evokes so much more then I feel a landscape would.  However it is only mid October, so for now I will keep my options as open as I can. 

Oil Negatives

Before I start talking about how the 3rd liquid roll came out I just want to say Catherine Murphy.....WOOOOOOOOOOOOW. I want her to call me everyday and I want to hug her for the rest of my life! Incredible INCREDIBLE human being!  I LOVE how simple her explanations were for such intense paintings/drawings!  Literally everyone should hear her talk.

OK.  So about the oil roll.  I developed them using the black and white process, although it is a color film roll, and I printed them today.  Well I tried out a contact sheet.  I had to use extremely long exposures (25 seconds to 2 minutes-usually exposures range from .2 to .12 seconds).  The "designs" left by the oil are much more pleasing on the negatives then as a print.  They are way too cutesy as a print.  However! You can see the actual images, slightly, in some of the negs!!!!!!!  No one was in the photo area so I will have to wait to print them as individual prints (I need the proper equipment) but they look great!  I think they are photos of the marina my boyfriend used to work at and because of the damage done by the oil it has aged the images properly and not in a cheesy way, or at least that's what the contact sheet is leading me to believe.  Next week, probably after crit, I will print them individually.  If not then, perhaps earlier in the week like Wednesday morning.  I might go in for work that day, I am not sure yet, so we'll see.

Overall the liquid roll experiments weren't a total loss, as I did learn something new by doing them, but it is definitely not something I would consider to become a part of my final thesis idea.  I do still very much like the idea of destroying the film/image with elements (dirt, hot coffee, salt water, etc.) but I think I will do that on my own time.  I miss my black photos, but I am having a lot of fun moving forward and I feel a sort of freedom with these experiments, less constrained.  It's going to be good.

Snapshot Aesthetic

I just came back from Walgreen's where I sent my first roll of black and white to be developed and printed.  I thought it would add to the snapshot aesthetic if I had my roll printed at a store where anyone else would get theirs printed.  They came out a bit green, which is a downside but sort of adds to the accidentalness of the snapshot.  I am not pleased with any of them haha but that was expected since I tried extremely hard not to think of composition.  I think most of them would have been better if they were in color.  I started doing another black and white roll for this project, I'm not done with it but I think that for the rest of the photos I am going to let my OCD get some input.  For the roll I developed I used Auto on my camera and I didn't know how to turn off the flash so all of the photos were taken with a it.  I am relearning this camera so it's yet another addition to the spontaneity of this assignment.  I think that for the black and white roll I am working on now I will develop them myself, I like doing that.  I won't give up on this snapshot idea though, I really enjoyed the freedom of it.  I want to somehow relate this to my thesis.  In the next few weeks I hope to have tried everything on my experiment list so I get a more clear cut idea on what I want to accomplish with my thesis.  I am also doing a report on Tom Wood (photo below) for my Photo 3A class, hopefully learning more about his work will help me out with this snapshot idea.



New Addition to List of Experiments

So in my Photo 3A class our first assignment deals with the snapshot aesthetic.  I am LOVING this!  It is forcing me to look at literally everything different.  In our last class, as well as today's class, as a question to sort of describe this task Annie asked us to think "How do we unlearn what we have been taught about proper photo taking?"  I have been following this as literally as I can, I have been taking cheesey/cliche photographs and shooting from the view of my hip/stomach.  I am shooting cliche images because, for one reason, we are taught that this is absolutely wrong! and the other reason is because I want to explore cliche photos and also I am keeping the viewer in my mind as I take them because artists are not the only people who will ever view my work so why am I ignoring those who have no art background as non worthy of viewing them?  This notion of thinking of the viewer is new to me as well since I make most of my photos for me and me alone.  I know just about everyone at school is aiming to get a show eventually or be in a show one day but that is not a concern of mine, it never really was, I just want to know I have a great body of work and that I have grown artistically.  I am going to try and shoot 3 rolls of this; two black and white (I miss it!) and one color.  This is going to be great!  Human error and natural beauty at its best :) 

Welcome Back Show

Last Friday (September 23rd) we went into the gallery to see the "Welcome Back Show".  Some works that I really connected to were Dustin Metz piece "Seer".  It was oil on wood and 63" X 48" (see below).  I liked this because of how active, worked, and vibrant it was, in both color and mood.  I love going close up to works and this was particularly great, you could really see the artist's hand and aggravation through the scratches, sharp penciled drawings and lumpiness of the paint.  It was incredibly active as was the rest of the room.  This area (Yellow Gallery #1) was greatly thought out and executed.  

  

Another gallery/room that was presented effectively was the Clifford Owens room.  I really really appreciated the way the 3 photos (on your left when you walk in) were positioned in a non conventional way.  It was really striking and my attention kept going back to them.  It was a beautiful way to present 3 horizontal photographs (see image below).  I also liked how small the images on the facing wall were.  They made them extremely intimate and demandingly invaded your personal space in order to view them properly which was similar to what was going on in the photos themselves; they were kind of uncomfortable situations that invaded others personal space (see 2nd image below).

 

Close up of one of the small images

The one major issue I had with the show was in the Red Gallery on the wall to your left when you walk in from the entrance.  It started with a piece from Gary Schneider entitled "Young Man" 1908/2008 (see below), followed by a Tom Nozkowski work, a Miranda Lichtenstein photograph and ended with Hanneline Rogeberg's piece "Big Hide" (see 2nd image below).  I thought this group was too literal next to one another.  The Schneider piece was a photograph of a man riddled with bites or chicken pox, which simplified would be separate circles.  The piece next to his, Nozkowski, was an abstract painting of separated circle-like shapes.  Then came another photograph of a person covered in an animal hide and the last piece was a painting of an animal hide.  So not only did it go photo, painting, photo, painting, but it went dots, dots, hide, hide.  The works themselves were visually stimulating, however as a group I really thought it was way to literal to have them next to one another. 





Gary Schneider

Hanneline Rogeberg

Experiment 1: Arturo Herrera Technique (Part A)

I have 3 color film cartridges.  I put one in water, one in diluted soda, and the last in car oil.  Yesterday I picked up the 2 cartridges (water & diluted soda) from Walgreens and today I printed the diluted soda roll.  I couldn't print the water one because non of the photos on that roll came out.  I shot inside for that roll, but I forgot to use the flash.  I don't think that it was such a great idea for my first time EVER printing color to print a roll that I had manipulated.  It was quiet fustrating due to the fact that only bits and pieces of the images were their true color and the majority of the image was purple.  So for Part A of this experiment I'm going to say it was a flop.  I wasn't too impressed with how the diluted soda effected the film. 

For the car oil roll I will be developing that myself using the black & white process.  I don't want to bring it to Walgreens or any other place only because the film might still be heavily coated in oil.  Tony from the photo department said that if I use the black & white process that the images might not come out since color uses different chemicals to develop, but I figure I would give it a try since I am not very concerned with the image as much as what the oil did to the film.  I cannot develop it this week so hopefully next week I will get a chance.  I'm really enjoying these new techniques, I just hope I have better luck with the car oil roll then I did with the other two.